Baroque Fictions: Revisioning the Classical in Marguerite Yourcenar (Faux Titre 271) (Faux Titre)

Baroque Fictions Revisioning the Classical in Marguerite Yourcenar

FAUX TITRE 271

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Baroque Fictions Revisioning the Classical in Marguerite Yourcenar

Margaret Elizabeth Colvin

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2005

Cover design: Pier Post Cover illustration: Marguerite Yourcenar, “Pierrot Pendu”. By permission of Editions Gallimard. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 90-420-1838-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

To Cynthia and Neil, with love and gratitude

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Dr. Lucy McNeece for her constructive comments on this book and for her unflagging encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr. Joan Howard, the administrator of Petite Plaisance, for her assistance and support and for welcoming me for two consecutive summers to the Petite Plaisance “family” as a bilingual docent. That experience provided me with the ideal environment for exploring Marguerite Yourcenar’s life, passions, and interests first-hand. My warmest thanks also go to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department at the Homer Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

LIST OF ABBREVIATED TITLES

Key to abbreviations of titles in French: OR: Œuvres romanesques MCA: La Mort conduit l’attelage CEC: Comme l’eau qui coule

Key to abbreviations of titles in English: A: The Abyss AS: Anna, Soror... TLD: Two Lives and a Dream OM: An Obscure Man

References to Marguerite Yourcenar’s nonfictional works and metatexts such as interviews are not abbreviated and can be found in the footnotes to each section or chapter.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. A Frontispiece

11

II. Introduction

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Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative III. Chapter 1

51

Anna, Soror...: Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject IV. Chapter 2

77

Denier du rêve: Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices V. Chapter 3

105

Neobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss” in L’Œuvre au Noir VI. Chapter 4

143

Neobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words VII. Conclusion

157

An Author for the New Millennium VIII. Selected Works Cited and Consulted

165

IX. Index of Proper Names

175

A Frontispiece

At Petite Plaisance, Marguerite Yourcenar’s home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, are two sketches, each protected in a simple, somewhat worn frame and laid rather nonchalantly across the top of a row of books on a shelf. We may assume Yourcenar sketched them herself while staying in hotels, for they are on hotel letterhead: the Hotel Continental in Marseilles and the Grand Hotel d’Angleterre et Belle Venise in Corfu, Greece. Each bears a partial date: “Corfou le _______ 193_” and “Marseille le ________ 193_.” The drawings are similar: both depict Pierrot of French pantomime, limp and dangling from a noose rigged on an elevated gibbet, steps leading up to it. In the larger sketch, books are stacked pellmell on each other, some open, on the floor of the gibbet; next to them are an inkwell and quills. Pierrot wears a disconsolate expression. In the smaller drawing, beneath the gibbet, Yourcenar has printed the following poem in capital letters, mixing Latin and French: ASPICE PIERROT PENDU / QUI LIBRUM N’A PAS RENDU / SI LIBRUM REDIDISSET / PIERROT PENDU NON FUISSET (“LOOK AT PIERROT HANGED / WHO DID NOT DELIVER THE BOOK / IF HE HAD DELIVERED THE BOOK / PIERROT WOULD NOT BE HANGED”).1

The sketches are intriguing: clearly they were important to the author, as their very existence attests. By perusing the “Chronologie” that precedes the Pléiade edition of her Œuvres romanesques, we may conclude that the sketches were made sometime between 1934 and 1938, when Marguerite Yourcenar made frequent trips to Greece. During those years she developed her talents writing essays and short prose works: poems in prose, short stories, and short novels. She had already published three short novels and a trilogy of novellas. Had the author promised herself or a publisher to finish a draft by a certain date? Perhaps the publisher had even made inquiries, via poste

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By permission of Editions Gallimard. Translation mine.

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restante. More interesting for the purposes of this study, however, is to suppose that the author’s (in)capacity to write was truly a matter of life or death, figuratively if not literally. The Parisian mime artist Jean Gaspard Deburau created the character we know today in the 1820s. Wearing a white mask and a loose-fitting white outfit, Pierrot became the dreamy, lovelorn clown of French pantomime, an offshoot of the commedia dell’arte. Nineteenthcentury authors, among them Baudelaire, Théophile Gauthier, and Heinrich Heine, subsequently used the figure of Pierrot in their works, transforming him into a character of “almost mythic proportions,”1 more akin to the poète maudit than the disappointed lover of pantomime: in short, he became a romantic figure, longing for an unattainable absolute and dreaming of blissful fusion... Surely this later incarnation, the Pierrot of the poets, is what most attracted Yourcenar, whose complete sacrifice and dedication to Art these drawings proclaim. This Pierrot punishes himself for failing to create, to write, to shape life’s prodigious viscous matter into form. Suspended from the noose above the instruments of his art, he is not grounded in an identifiable base of knowledge or reality, of thought or perception. His dejection is absolute, like an actor deprived of the capacity to per-form, condemned to impotent desire, unable to transform him/herself into Art, an act which alone could heal the wound of mortality by becoming an object of sublime, eternal beauty. Artistic creation for the author would thus seem to constitute the only means of self-affirmation and protection from the void; to fail means danger and annihilation. The ideal of Art always threatens to become for Yourcenar a gibbet of self-destruction, elevated above normal, daily life. How then, we may ask, close to fifty years later, was this poète maudit, this extravagant and passionate “Pierrot pendu,” esteemed as worthy of joining the classical canon of French letters, selected as the first woman member of the French Academy? How, furthermore, did she establish herself as an icon of the French canon, a writer whose most celebrated fictional works are widely reputed to reflect neoclassical traits such as mastery, certitude, and universal values?

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“Deburau, Jean Gaspard” and “Pantomime” (Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2002); and Annette Lust, “The Origins and Development of the Art of Mime” (http://www.mime.info/library.html).

A Frontispiece

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The year 2003 was Marguerite Yourcenar’s centenary (b. June 8, 1903), an occasion marked by a fresh collection of radio and press interviews, a travelogue with photographs of her last foreign trip before her death in 1987, and an assortment of new essays on her work composed by some of France’s best-known writers and critics. None of these unduly disturbed her shrine in the literary fields of the Immortals. Furthermore, while in recent years there has been a steady output of excellent critical studies, recordings from numerous colloquiums, and so on, all attesting to the interest her works continue to evoke, most of these critics’ themes tend to reinforce her classicism: ethics, history, and universality, to cite only three. Yet strikingly few studies in recent years have extensively or deeply questioned cultural biases or probed other premises upon which her reputation rests.1 For example, to what ends does she use a so-called classical style (Gide’s “art of the litote”)? Might her “universalism” signal not the inherently restrictive “unity” of human experience, but rather its infinite plurality? Is it possible that the seemingly traditional use of “history” in her fictions is a way of assuring mastery and displaying erudition and serves simultaneously to expose “history” as chaos and contingency? And, finally, while she made strenuous efforts to banish aspects of her personal life in her writings (in the tradition of nineteenth-century novelists such as Flaubert), biographical data nonetheless figure in complex, unexpected ways in her fictional writings and sometimes belie the persona she wanted to project to the literary establishment and the public. In short, Marguerite Yourcenar is more paradoxical and enigmatic than generally assumed. In her commemorative essay in Le Monde, Josyane Savigneau, a friend of the author toward the end of her

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A few works in recent years have successfully attempted to breach the literary legacy, a fortress in whose construction Yourcenar had taken part. Two recent psychoanalytical studies in particular attest to this trend. Pascale Doré broke new ground in 1999 when she published a psychoanalytic study that dared to put the author’s painful denial of her mother under the loupe. See Yourcenar ou le féminin insoutenable, Genève: Droz, 1999. Likewise, Carole Allamand’s recent study, Marguerite Yourcenar ou l’écriture en mal de mere (Paris: Imago, 2004), undertakes a psychoanalytical reading of the author’s work in light of the traumatic death of her mother in giving birth to her daughter. Other studies challenging the integrity of Yourcenar’s persona include Erin Carlston’s essay (1998) exploring “fascist modernism” in works by Yourcenar, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes; and Laura Brignoli’s essay (1997), which concludes that the author’s frequent use of analogisms in her fictional works of the 1930s is a means of skirting psychological depths that Yourcenar preferred not to confront.

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life as well as her first biographer, is well aware of the dilemma that Yourcenar’s writings still present, notably in France itself: “la difficulté des Français à saisir ce que l’œuvre a de virtuellement subversif, tant le regard est étroitement borné par un panthéon national qui ne coïncide pas avec l’horizon d’attente du corpus yourcenarien” (“the difficulty the French have in understanding the virtual subversiveness of the work, so restricted is their gaze by a national pantheon that does not coincide with the ensemble of expectations of the Yourcenarian corpus”).2 Savigneau alludes here both to metropolitan France’s blinders vis-à-vis the author and to the facets of Yourcenar’s work that in fact defy most familiar classifications. Savigneau’s “national pantheon” is certainly a reference to Yourcenar’s election to the exclusive, tradition-bound, and masculine domain of the French Academy. There is no doubt that the landmark event strengthened easy assumptions concerning her “classicism,” which revolve around her well-deserved reputation as an erudite classical scholar, linguist, and historian. Yourcenar early in her life embraced the humanist curriculum and on numerous occasions chose to write about the ancient Greek and Roman cultures and the Renaissance. Given the actual difficulty in matching Marguerite Yourcenar’s work with a particular literary school or trend, it is less burdensome, and certainly logical, to assume a fundamental classicism on the basis of her education, her passion for ancient and early modern European history and culture, and her literary influences. Yet it does not necessarily follow that a “classicist” is in all respects “classical.” The latter word evokes a constellation of utopian notions concerning the virtually subservient role of Art and form in the form/substance “equation” (form is the handmaid of substance—a familiar male/female dichotomy); moderation, mastery, proportion; clarity of purpose and clarity of execution; and arguably a belief in mankind’s innate superiority and centrality. Therefore, it remains for contemporary readers to examine how Marguerite Yourcenar transforms those notions for her own purposes; whether or not the ways she chooses to use them signal a commitment to the classical ideal, or instead the transformation of that ideal into something profoundly ambiguous and far less restrictive. Certainly, no one would dispute that several of Yourcenar’s early works exhibit wildly

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“Marguerite Yourcenar pour mémoire,” Le Monde, 6 June 2003: Littératures III. Translation mine.

A Frontispiece

15

anticlassical tendencies. But the common assumption is that the mature author put aside those youthful excesses and became, because of both her style and her themes, the consummate neoclassical author and moralist whom the French Academy welcomed. But did those tendencies truly disappear, or did the author merely modify and assimilate them even more completely? In any event, as “Pierrot pendu” advises us, we ignore such signals at the risk of re-embalming this author, who deserves to emerge, revitalized, from the tomb of the academic pantheon.

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Introduction Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative L’être fuit, le moi est poreux; s’en faire une image globale relève de la pure illusion.1

Marguerite Yourcenar’s literary production spans the modern and postmodern periods; this chronological bridge is symbolic. Yourcenar is undeniably a modernist in some respects: for example, in certain earlier works’ use of avant-garde expressionism, of myth, and of a “classical” style imitating the récit gidien. Yet, all of her fictional works—from the 1930s to the 1980s—reveal a sense of aesthetic play and display, of provocation and refusal of authority, of loss of referent and ambiguity, which raises questions about the validity of her assigned position (generally accepted by the public and literati alike) as a solid representative of the twentieth-century French canon. Nevertheless, we must reckon with the reality that in the decades after World War II, Yourcenar did indeed establish herself2 as one of French canonical literature’s new shining stars and as a practitioner if not an advocate of supposedly traditional, classical themes and style.

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“Individual life is short, the self is porous; to conjure up an image of the whole from such things smacks of pure illusion.” “Préface,” Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts. Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey (Paris: Le Centurion, 1980) 7; and With Open Eyes. Conversations with Matthieu Galey, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) xiii. 2 This is quite literally the case. As much as Marguerite Yourcenar enjoyed going against the grain, she also imposed upon the public consciousness a certain image of literary grandeur and aloofness. Josyane Savigneau also notes in the Monde article already cited in the Frontispiece the difficulty, even in a centennial year when efforts could and should be made to shatter idées reçues about Yourcenar, to obtain anything but “des analyses en vogue dès les années 1970 que l’élection à l’Académie aggrava encore, éteignant le regard mobile et ironique d’une statue que la dame avait ellemême sculptée” (“analyses in vogue beginning in the 1970s, which her election to the [French] Academy aggravated still more, extinguishing the mobile, ironic gaze of a statue that the lady herself had sculpted”). My emphasis and translation. Savigneau, “Marguerite Yourcenar pour mémoire,” Le Monde, 6 June 2003: Littératures III. Translation mine.

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As mentioned in the Frontispiece, studies of her work have often focused on the author’s classical formation. They frequently assume that her profound knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman history and culture implies absolute adherence to neoclassical themes and neoclassical poetics. Furthermore, it appears that Lyotardian “grand narratives”3 such as Myth and History served the author as repositories of tradition and “rootedness,” transcendental values, and universal ethical principles. No less importantly, Yourcenar’s presumed classicism rests on her association in the public’s mind with the historical novel, a popular sub-genre whose characteristics include linearity, objectivity, and transparency and which first gained wide popularity during the conservative bourgeoisie’s social, economic, and cultural ascendancy in the nineteenth century. The utility of the very notion of “history,” as postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon points out, was seriously tested by writers, scientists, and philosophers in both the experimental modernist and the more skeptical, “posthistorical,” postmodernist periods, as the ideals embodied by the “science” of history (linear progress and rationalism for example) began to erode.4 By choosing to use history as a frame for her most famous works, Yourcenar thus appeared to follow an almost reactionary trend in literature. In reality, however, the author was in the process of navigating her own unique, unsettling middle path between the emerging ahistorical, avant-garde literature (Barthes and Sarraute would enter the scene in the early 1950s, shortly followed by the nouveau roman) and the popular, conservative historical novel, using the latter as her vehicle of choice in order to revise the objective, rational science of history. By weaving a complex relationship between history, fiction, and (auto)biography, she loosened the historical novel from its solid, predictable foundations. The result of this new course, as we know, was Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951) set in the second century A.D., and much later L’Œuvre au Noir (The Abyss, 1968), set in sixteenth-

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Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979) 15, 31-37. 4 “[History] seems to be inevitably tied up with that set of challenged cultural and social assumptions that also condition our notions of both theory and art today: our beliefs in origins and ends, unity, and totalization, logic and reason, consciousness and human nature, progress and fate, representation and truth, not to mention the notions of causality and temporal homogeneity, linearity, and continuity.” Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 87.

Introduction

19

century northern Europe. The first novel earned her worldwide literary recognition as a classicist, historian, and classical author; the second novel cemented that reputation. Somewhat later in her career, Marguerite Yourcenar’s classical credentials were further reinforced by the notion of what is called écriture féminine, which emerged from the involvement of the French women’s movement in Freudian psychoanalytic theory in the 1970s. Proposed by Hélène Cixous, écriture féminine seeks to move beyond “patriarchal binary thought” and to celebrate writing whose sources and inspiration are found in the pre-Oedipal, prelogical, and prelingual—thus prebinary—stage. Cixous’s now famous argument is that women generally have more ready access to this androgynous, primordial state of blissful oneness and jouissance than do men, who are so busy defending themselves from libidinal forces that they lose this creative capacity.5 We shall see in the following chapters that Marguerite Yourcenar’s own defense mechanisms are exceptionally strong and that her writing is weighed down by an obsessive virtuosity that runs quite counter to the spontaneous, incantatory écriture féminine identified by Cixous. Furthermore, Yourcenar explicitly shunned identification with the women’s movement, although she identified with many of its practical aims such as financial equality, equal opportunity, and the right to birth control and abortion.6 And yet, and yet...how ironic that Yourcenar, whose own sexual identity was blurred by contradiction and who did her utmost to evade classification (binary or otherwise) her entire life, should come to be still more closely identified with “classical” patriarchy and authority as a result of this aesthetic by-product of the feminist movement. For as I shall endeavor to demonstrate in the following chapters, Marguerite Yourcenar escaped by other means the binary thinking decried by Cixous, refusing the authority of western rationalism and reserving for herself and her personae the right to remain indefinable and unclassifiable, to inhabit a space where referents flee and dissolve just beyond our reach.

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Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985) 102-21. 6 Les Yeux ouverts, 265-68; and With Open Eyes, 221.

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We detect already in Yourcenar’s unique revision of history and in her inherent ambiguity, sexual and otherwise, that she was an original, oblique thinker whom it would be wise to approach...obliquely. Yet, while she received high praise from critics for her historically accurate “re-creations” of history, neither they nor the public considered her two best-known fictional works as pushing the envelope of literary convention or departing from an authorial, “readerly” genre and neoclassical prose style. François Nourissier’s pithy assessment of Yourcenar’s work—”démodée, indémodable”7— reflects the two facets of the author’s presumed “classicism”: a traditional, conservative style (that is, the historical novels, her neoclassical récits) on the one hand; eternal and universal themes, on the other. But the word “indémodable” may likewise refer to another aspect of Yourcenar’s work: unclassifiable, troubling, and enigmatic. For as this introduction’s epigraph suggests, transparency, order, and stability did not inform Marguerite Yourcenar’s worldview nor, as will be analyzed in this essay, her texts. The author’s peripatetic upbringing and unconventional education are indispensable facets of the Yourcenar “story.”8 The author’s mother, of Belgian nationality, died of childbed fever in Brussels ten days after her birth, and she was reared both on her paternal grandmother’s country estate near Lille and at the family’s intown residence, by nursemaids and later her ageing father, Michel de Crayencour. His love of gambling and mistresses led to a vagabond existence and financial uncertainty (and, in the end, penury). The young Marguerite de Crayencour (Yourcenar is a nearly perfect anagram of Crayencour, which she and her father invented together when, as a teenager, she decided to become a “famous writer”) was tutored at home and never attended school, a circumstance that perhaps reinforced her strong sense of personal liberty and individualism later in life. As soon as she reached the “age of reason,” Michel de Crayencour became her closest companion: he shared his literary

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François Nourissier, “La Hors-la-loi,” Marguerite Yourcenar. Du Mont-Noir aux Monts-Déserts. Hommage pour un centenaire, ed. Anne-Yvonne Julien (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2003) 121. 8 Three excellent biographies of Marguerite Yourcenar are: Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990); Michèle Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, la passion et ses masques (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995); and Michèle Goslar, Yourcenar. Biographie. “Qu’il eût été fade d’être heureux” (Brussels: Editions Racine, 1998). Each biography has a somewhat different focus.

Introduction

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passions with her, and she in turn helped kindle his interest in and enthusiasm for more modern world literature and for art and history. Michel had introduced her to Latin when she was quite young, and she continued to study the language with tutors. She was about twelve when she began learning ancient Greek. By the time she had reached young adulthood, Marguerite de Crayencour’s knowledge of Greek and Roman classical history, culture, and letters was unusually extensive, even in an age when the classics were a standard part of a good education. That said, her profound connection with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, the foundations of Western civilization, did not prevent her, beginning in her adolescence, from taking an active interest in oriental philosophies. We have evidence of that interest in essays and short stories from her young adulthood (for example, “Comment Wang-Fu fut sauvé” and “Kali décapitée” of Nouvelles orientales, or the prose poem entitled “Suite d’estampes pour Kou-Kou Haï,” which she incorporated many decades later in a collection of essays), and it was to grow and evolve until the end of her life. Marguerite de Crayencour and her father lived in the suburbs of London for a year during World War I and continued to travel together in Western Europe, especially Italy, until his death in 1929. With the limited remains of her inheritance, the young writer spent the next ten years in a state of “precious freedom,” doing what she wanted to do most: traveling around Europe, especially Greece and Italy, having no fixed residence. She continued to broaden and deepen her knowledge of Mediterranean art, architecture, history, and culture, and, naturally, to write. She was, by her own choice it seems, on the periphery of the Parisian literary scene, only visiting Paris from time to time to see editors. During these rather veiled years of errance, the young woman also explored various facets of her identity, not the least her sexual identity, a theme that was to haunt all of her work, usually in the guise of a male protagonist’s bisexuality or homosexuality. In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, Marguerite Yourcenar, at the invitation of Grace Frick, an American woman she had met in Paris two years earlier, traveled to the United States for what she thought, according to her later statements, was to be for a period of six months. In fact, she never moved back to Europe, but instead lived with Grace Frick in the United States, first in Hartford, Connecticut, and then in Mount Desert Island, Maine (beginning in 1950), for the rest of her life. Yourcenar herself has called this permanent change of principal residence the result of “le hasard,” which in her view plays a much greater role in most people’s lives than

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they care to admit.9 Her biographers have made a number of suppositions in this regard. One such supposition is that she had no “close” family or friends left in Europe (her closest blood relative was a much older half-brother whom she had never liked, Michel de Crayencour’s son from his first marriage), having never been in much contact with the members of either of her parents’ families. It was only much later in life, after she had achieved fame and fortune, that she renewed contact, but very selectively, with relatives. The most notable of these are Georges de Crayencour, her half-brother’s son who helped her collect material from the paternal family’s archives for her family memoir Le labyrinthe du monde, and Louise de Borchgrave, sister-inlaw by marriage of her half-brother. Another supposition is that Grace Frick had demonstrated unflagging devotion to Marguerite Yourcenar and faith in her future “greatness”; such devotion, although arguably not reciprocated with the same fervor, may have swayed the author’s decision. Grace Frick, moreover, had proven an invaluable assistant to the author, capable of translating and proofreading her work and smoothing out the wrinkles of daily living in order to provide Yourcenar more creative space. It may well have been a combination of all these factors that persuaded Yourcenar in the end to make the United States her base, if not exactly a home. Regardless of the apparent or hidden reason(s), stay she did. While living in Hartford, economic necessity led her—much against her inclinations—to teach French and comparative literature on a part-time basis at Sarah Lawrence College, near New York City, for a number of years. She became a U.S. citizen in 1947, officially adopting her pen name of Marguerite Yourcenar, which appears in her passport. Yourcenar made frequent, lengthy trips to Europe starting in the 1950s and used Petite Plaisance, her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, as a base. Grace Frick, to whom Yourcenar only ever referred as her translator or the woman with whom she lived, was diagnosed with cancer in 1959 and spent the next twenty years battling the disease. When Grace Frick was too ill to take long trips, Marguerite Yourcenar, an inveterate traveler, willed herself to stay at Petite Plaisance, immersing herself in her work: the first two volumes of her monumental three-part memoir Le labyrinthe du monde were written during the dark decade of the 1970s. After Grace Frick’s death in 1979, Yourcenar began once more to travel extensively, taking with her as a

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Les Yeux ouverts, 130-31; and With Open Eyes, 105.

Introduction

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travel companion Jerry Wilson, a young American documentary filmmaker whom she had met a few months before Grace Frick’s death and who was himself to succumb to AIDS in 1985, to Marguerite Yourcenar’s deep sorrow. From 1980 until her death, Yourcenar traveled to India (twice), Egypt, North Africa (twice), Sub-Saharan Africa, Japan, and the Caribbean. She was planning a trip to Nepal when a cerebral hemorrhage ended her life. She died peacefully at the Bar Harbor, Maine hospital on December 17, 1987. One of the authors in whose work she was deeply engaged shortly before her death was Jorge Luis Borges,10 whose enigmatic, erudite, and ludic texts have been characterized as neobaroque. In view of her establishment as a twentieth-century traditional, if not conservative, neoclassical author, we might expect a wellmarked trajectory to have guided the author to her immortal status as the first female académicienne. The path to literary canonization turns out instead to be a rather meandering one, marked by a few truly exceptional milestones in the form of the two aforementioned internationally acclaimed postwar novels and her three-volume family memoir, which she did not finish before her death. But as already noted, the two “milestone” novels by which a large part of the public knows her work represent a reactionary, conservative genre to modernists and postmodernists alike and display the erudition of a classical humanist and historian. Those two factors encourage reductive assumptions not only about the two novels, but even about the author’s entire literary production. Such assumptions overpower other considerations that might throw into question such a facile classification. As a first step to questioning preconceived notions about Marguerite Yourcenar’s classicism, we could review her literary career to distinguish between evidence of continuity and evidence of shifts and changes. In at least two respects, her career is divisible into a preWorld War II and a post-World War II period. The latter period, which I shall discuss in more detail later in this introduction, is characterized by vertiginous rewritings and/or republications of earlier texts, coupled with exhaustive paratextual apologies that began in the 1950s and continued until the author’s death. The second justification for breaking down Yourcenar’s career into prewar and postwar periods

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See Yourcenar’s essay, dated 1987, “Borges ou le voyant,” En pèlerin et en étranger. Essais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989) 233-61.

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involves the sea change the author experienced during the relatively unproductive hiatus of the war years: to borrow an expression penned by the emperor in Mémoires d’Hadrien, the focus of her fictional writings evolved “du nageur à la vague” (“from the swimmer to the wave”).11 In short, shocked by the events of the war into a sharper realization of human beings’ monstrous fallibility and frailty,12 Yourcenar began to envisage her personae, also beginning in the 1950s, as inconsequential but indispensable participants in a cosmic drama. In a Pascalian paradox, these characters (Hadrien, Zénon, Nathanaël) are both “Nothing” and “All”: “Nothing” by their relative insignificance, “All” by their presence in the continuum of an infinite universe and eternity. The readjustment of priorities from the subjective to the universal and the concomitant relativization of the subject are also among the reasons why Marguerite Yourcenar is considered a “neoclassical” writer. I would first like to examine the prewar period of Marguerite Yourcenar’s life and “published” literary career, which roughly spans one decade, from 1929 to 1939. The first striking feature we notice is the effort of her biographers to deal with the many lacunae that make those years a still partially unsolved mystery. They do know enough of her life to characterize that period as a phase of passionate, painful growth and of a crisis of identity, particularly sexual identity. Contrary to what one might expect under those circumstances, not all of the works of that decade—with three clear exceptions, which are strikingly cathartic—reflect directly or transparently Yourcenar’s subjective experiences and inner turmoil. Rather, taken together they constitute pieces of a vast but fragmented aesthetic project, part of a broad cultural agenda the author avidly pursued in those years when she haunted countless archeological sites and museums. There is a sense, in short, that the disparate themes of the works serve Yourcenar as pretexts for exercising her Art, rather than a sense that writing serves the cause of cherished theme(s) or ideas. Marguerite Yourcenar’s first published work, Alexis (1929), is an epistolary confession of male homosexuality clearly influenced by

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Marguerite Yourcenar, “L’homme qui aimait les pierres,” En pèlerin et en étranger, 193. “je commençais à fréquenter . . . le monde non humain ou pré-humain des bêtes des bois et des eaux . . . de la mer non polluée et des forêts non encore jetées bas ou défoliées par nous” (“I started keeping company with . . . the nonhuman or prehuman world of animals of the forest and the waters, of the still unpolluted sea and the forests not yet cut down or defoliated by us”). Ibid.

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André Gide, who perfected the French neoclassical récit. She based the story on the life of someone her father had known well: the husband of Jeanne de Vietinghoff, a school friend of Marguerite Yourcenar’s deceased mother with whom Michel de Crayencour later fell in love. In the next decade Yourcenar produced a one-act play, Le Dialogue dans le marécage (1929-1931), based on a medieval story accorded a few veiled lines in Dante’s Purgatory. The situation of Pia, its heroine, resembles that of Anna and Miguel’s mother Valentine in the novella Anna, Soror..., which I shall examine in detail in Chapter 1. About this short play Yourcenar wrote many years later that she wanted to illustrate “l’incertitude [des choses humaines]” (“the uncertainty of [human things]”: is the protagonist sane or mad? happy or miserable?13 Yourcenar wrote poetry during this decade, today considered technically proficient but on the whole unremarkable. Often based on Greek myths, these poems were eventually collected and published in 1984 in a collection called Les Charités d’Alcippe. In 1931 she published a novel set in contemporary Europe, La nouvelle Eurydice. Too “literary” and “livresque” according to Yourcenar, she considered it a failure, and it was to be republished in 1982 only as the “Supplément” of the Pléiade edition of her collected fictional works. Shortly thereafter she published a biographical novel of the ancient Greek poet, Pindare (1932), borrowing a genre that André Maurois had popularized in the 1920s.14 1934 saw the publication of two fictional works which I shall examine in more depth in the four chapters that follow: a novel set in contemporary fascist Rome, Denier du rêve (published in English in 1982 as A Coin in Nine Hands); and a trilogy of historical novellas set in northern Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entitled La Mort conduit l’attelage (Death Is the Coachman). The latter trilogy is significant in the literary history of Marguerite Yourcenar inasmuch as the three novellas contain the seeds of three major postwar works: L’Œuvre au Noir, Anna, Soror..., and Un homme obscur. The heavily expressionistic prose poems Feux, published in 1936, are considered the most overtly “personal” of Yourcenar’s works and are the result of a “crise passionnelle”: they are recognized by Yourcenar’s biographers as an expression of her unrequited passion for one of her editors, the author André Fraigneau. A homosexual and later a sympathizer of French protofascist groups,

__________________ 13

“Note sur ‘Le Dialogue dans le marécage’,” Théâtre I (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971) 176. 14 Les Yeux ouverts, 62; and With Open Eyes, 43.

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Baroque Fictions

Fraigneau was also Yourcenar’s inspiration for the character Eric von Lhomond in Le Coup de grâce (1939),15 a dark, harsh novel about unrequited love and revenge set in the Baltic States during the antiBolshevik struggles (1918-1920). While traveling around the Black Sea in the summer of 1935 on the yacht of the psychiatrist and surrealist poet André Embiricos, to whom she had been introduced by Fraigneau,16 Yourcenar began composing a collection of folk tales, set in “eastern” countries ranging from Greece to China and published three years later, in 1938. According to her “Chronologie” in the Pléiade edition of Yourcenar’s complete fictional works, Nouvelles orientales examines “passion” in all of its forms, from carnal passion to passion of the absolute.17 Also in 1938, she published a rapportage of her dreams in a slim volume entitled Les Songes et les sorts. Likewise the product of her “crise passionnelle,” she completed these transcriptions in 1936, the same year in which Feux was published.18 Interestingly, Yourcenar calls them “une étude de l’esthétique du rêve” (“a study in the aesthetics of dreams”),19 in essence downplaying the influence of Freudian dream interpretation20 and surrealism on her work and shifting the main emphasis from dream symbolism to the “art” of dreaming, which she likens to musical motifs and objects or paintings in a museum.21 The transcriptions are easily as expressionistic as the prose poems that comprise Feux, however, and reveal the depth and violence of the author’s emotional torment. Finally, Yourcenar tried her hand at translation from English into French, principally for financial reasons:22 Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (Les Vagues, 1937) and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (Ce que savait Maisie, 1939). In translating The Waves, she had an opportunity to meet Virginia Woolf in London, an experience she later related in an essay.23

__________________ 15

Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990) 134-35. 16 Ibid., 111. 17 OR (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1982) xviv. 18 Donald Flanell Friedman, “Reflections on the Dreamed Life of Marguerite Yourcenar,” Dreams and Destinies, trans. Donald Flanell Friedman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) xviii. 19 Les Yeux ouverts, 99; and With Open Eyes, 77. 20 “Preface,” Dreams and Destinies, 8-9. 21 Ibid., 1 and 4. 22 Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 123. 23 “Une femme étincelante et timide,” En pèlerin et en étranger, 118-20.

Introduction

27

This virtual patchwork of literary production from 1929 to 1939 in fact attests to certain tendencies that might make us want to question Marguerite Yourcenar’s motives and focus. Some of the earliest works pay mimetic homage to a particular author or genre (Alexis, Pindare). Others enable her to display her vast classical, humanistic erudition (Feux, Pindare, La Mort conduit l’attelage). Finally, all of the genres, including the novels, tend to privilege short, dense compositions: several of them are highly subjective works of great passion, if not great violence; for example, Le Coup de grâce, Denier du rêve, Feux, Les Songes et les sorts, and Nouvelles orientales. Yourcenar made no secret of the fact that this last group of works is “baroque,” by which she refers not only to the passionate, violent, and suffering subject, but also to the ornate, hyperbolic, sometimes disjointed style she favored at the time.24 In this regard, she also claimed that beginning with Mémoires d’Hadrien she had “repartie plutôt sur ma voie” (“I more or less found my own voice”),25 a statement that relegates her baroquisme to the influences of a particular literary climate and a thwarted passion. But even as we recognize along with Yourcenar the seismic shift that permits the division of her career into a prewar and a postwar period, we must also affirm the lines of thematic and stylistic continuity present in her fiction: the author herself provided material evidence of that continuity precisely through her unceasing revisions, rewritings, and recycling of her prewar works, an activity about which she was rather defensive and which resulted in an abundance of explanatory and expiatory paratexts. In the process of acknowledging that such continuity exists, we must also ask ourselves if there are formative and spiritual aspects of her baroquisme, albeit resurfacing in subtler guises or masquerading as something “other,” which continue to inform her fiction. These are questions to ponder as we review Marguerite Yourcenar’s postwar literary production. During the hiatus of the war years, Yourcenar taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College and was depressed both because of the war and a seeming diminution of her creativity. She kept a journal and wrote three plays but produced little else until the end of the 1940s, when she began to work on the book

__________________ 24

Les Yeux ouverts, 47; and With Open Eyes, 29. Yourcenar mentions her “expressionisme baroque” in prefaces as well, as I shall discuss in the chapters that follow. 25 Ibid., 47 and 29.

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Baroque Fictions

that was to bring her world fame, Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951). The novel, an epistolary monologue, marks the beginning of the postwar period. In the 1950s and 1960s, Yourcenar continued to write plays and essays on widely divergent, “offbeat” themes. She also translated Negro spirituals into French (Fleuve profound, sombre rivière, 1964). In 1968, Yourcenar published L’Œuvre au Noir, this time reworking and greatly expanding one of the novellas of La Mort conduit l’attelage, D’après Dürer. She also worked on translations of ancient Greek poems, eventually published as the collection La couronne et la lyre (1979). Finally, in 1982 the author published a trilogy of novellas, the last fictional works published in her lifetime, Comme l’eau qui coule, in which she presented in their revised form two of the novellas from La Mort conduit l’attelage (1932). From 1969 up until her death in 1987, she worked on her three-part memoir Le labyrinthe du monde, which though biographical contains a good measure of fictionalization: Yourcenar completed lacunae in characterizations, chronicles, and so on with her own imagination. In this, the postwar phase of Marguerite Yourcenar’s career, we find displayed, as in her prewar writings, thematic heterogeneity and classical erudition. What is nonetheless strikingly different from her prewar production, to which I alluded above, is the rather significant portion of Yourcenar’s fictional works which consist of revisions, expansions, and re-editions of earlier works. Denier du rêve was rewritten and republished 1959; the author later wrote a play, Rendre à César, based on the definitive edition of the novel. Comme l’eau qui coule (1982) is in fact a trilogy based on two novellas revised and expanded from the trilogy, La Mort conduit l’attelage, published fifty years earlier. The most noteworthy example of such revision is, of course, L’Œuvre au Noir, which Yourcenar expanded significantly from the original novella D’après Dürer. All of these postwar fictional works, with the exception of Denier du rêve, have their earliest origins in Yourcenar’s adolescence: her “roman-océan,” abandoned six or seven decades earlier, and her idea of writing a novel about Antinoüs, Hadrien’s beloved. New editions, with only minor revisions, also appeared of her prose poems Feux (1957, preface 1967) and Nouvelles orientales (1963, with stylistic revisions; the author added one more tale and a “post-scriptum” in 1978). Finally, during this second half of her career, the author published several collections of essays; two of the collections contain essays dating from as early as the 1920s and the 1930s. In the collection Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, for example, the

Introduction

29

essays range from 1931 to 1982; in En pèlerin et en étranger, from 1927 to 1987. There is in my view something vertiginous and spiral-like in the continuous retracing, revisiting, revising, polishing, and expanding undertaken by the author during this last, lengthy phase of her literary career. While it is not rare for authors to republish updated editions of their works, Marguerite Yourcenar’s creative recycling is an extreme case, weighed down by a plethora of paratexts (“Carnets de Notes,” “Notes sur...,” “Postfaces,” “Histoire et examen...,” and so on) that accompany, valorize, and often exonerate each fictional work. It almost seems as though the author could confer on these works any sense of stability of purpose and meaning only retrospectively, once her notoriety was secured and, in a sense, almost beckoned her to do so. Moreover, if the solipsistic “subject” is hidden in many of the revised and republished fictions, these prefaces, postfaces, notebooks, and so on restore the performative and virtuosic artist to the very center of the stage, which is the text: defensive in tone, the airtight paratexts aspire without exception to be complete, meticulous, and scholarly explanations of the origins of her works, the scope of the author’s revisions, and her rationale. Furthermore, they might ensure complete, authorial power and mastery: by seeking to circumscribe readers’ personal reactions or interpretations, the author denies or passes over in silence notions of subconscious motivation on her part as well as the possibility of an independent reader-text relationship. The reader enters a museum of the Word whose precious artwork (the text) is guarded jealously at the entry or exit (the paratext) by these verbal sentinels of genesis and interpretation. Finally, the mere presence of paratexts might serve to lend critical mass and credibility, providing literary works more space and gravitas than they might otherwise possess. This presence would be important particularly if meaning and authorial purpose in reality remained perplexing and clouded, as perhaps in the case of a work whose unacknowledged motive was primarily aesthetic, or if the author were trying to mask from herself and others her own “superficiality.” Yourcenar’s extensive paratextual explanations, which seem on occasion almost to overshadow the sometimes slender fictional work they accompany, attempt to justify and reconnect her numerous revised, republished works with “the social and historical realities of real life”26 and of their composition, to defend both their

__________________ 26

Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 179.

30

Baroque Fictions

initial and their current relevance. It is as if the author sensed the prewar modernist and elitist credo of art as the appointed guardian of “high culture” (a credo fully reflective of the modernist era in which she participated as a young writer) might no longer stand without some reinforcement; she sought a unifying bridge by which to reintegrate her works safely in a more skeptical and demanding late twentieth century. The time had come in which literary critics did not assume, indeed sometimes denied, the place of the author as well as the transparency and totality of a text. By means of these paratexts, the author was, I believe, reasserting ascendancy and power, a privileged place where neither the artist nor her aesthetic project could or would be questioned. Yet as we would expect, despite Marguerite Yourcenar’s despotic or heroic efforts, depending on how we want to view them, both her paratextual exegeses and her mantle of erudition fail to account for her writings’ numerous contradictions: not simply that between their vital poetic energy and playfulness and their underlying tone of profound melancholy and irony, but rather the effect of their offering so little stable reference for interpretation itself, so that meanings in her texts, like personas, appear and disappear, seeming to proliferate and to transform themselves gratuitously. This instability obliges us to re-examine her work in the light of the rules governing the reception and canonization of modern writers, and to study the way in which modern societies “manage” their cultural productions. True, as already noted, Marguerite Yourcenar was partially responsible for constructing her image, even as with obvious pleasure she was just as apt to brouiller les pistes (confuse the issue), denying in interviews the validity of all labels attached to her, “classical” and others. True also, questions regarding her status as a modern, traditional, that is “classical,” writer would have been stifled under the enormous weight of her election to the Académie française as its first female academician. But the general tendency to make literary works fit models that reflect the ideology of the particular period and dominant class makes it even more imperative that we direct our close attention to the diverse materiality of the texts themselves, which can generate their own, often unexpected, principles of interpretation. Modern and postmodern cultures have a complex relation to traditions of all kinds. At the very least, we need to question, in relation to Marguerite Yourcenar, the use of concepts, such as what constitutes the “classical,” that are so deeply rooted in our cultural history.

Introduction

31

To use words such as “classicism” and “classical” poses inherent risks. Scholars and historians disagree not only on how to define them but in some cases even question whether the terms need to exist. Like it or not, as René Wellek points out, “the concept of classicism is likely to survive and is likely to be restored in the future. It is not merely a historical concept but a living idea.”27 While the classical paradigm has been continually re-evaluated by western thought and aesthetics, the term has generally implied not only excellence or superior quality, but also that which is standard or traditional. Beginning in the sixteenth century, “classical” in France came to be identified with the ancient Greeks and Romans but still stood for “superiority, authority, and even perfection.”28 “Classical” thus also came to be associated with innovation and new ideas and with a new form of erudition, humanism. Humanism initially referred to the rebirth of classical studies. But in the process of rediscovering ancient authors, humanists broke with medieval scholasticism, offering in its place a liberating faith in the individual’s capacity to comprehend the world, insisting on a personal, direct interpretation (“libre examen”) of all texts, whether the Bible, works of the Church fathers, or “pagan” texts of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus, while classicism in the Renaissance was associated with renewal and spiritual liberation in relation to humanism, it implied in equal measure control, rational thought, and order. Yet popular ideas of the Renaissance and “classical” notions have been repeatedly contested both by the very personalities who are supposed to have constituted the Renaissance as well as by “classical” historians and artists of the later centuries, including the twentieth century. In the first place, although social changes were occurring as medieval institutions (feudalism, the Church) declined and a new class, the bourgeoisie, continued the ascendancy it had begun in the Middle Ages, many historians see lines of continuity rather than an abrupt break between medieval times and the Renaissance: in religious thought, in representational art, in politics.29 In the second place, it is possible to detect in products of the era elements both of order and disorder, of boundaries and openendedness: Rabelais wrote the chaotic, carnivalesque Pantagruel and

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René Wellek, “Classicism in Literature,” Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1973) 455. 28 Ibid., 451. 29 Denys Hay, “Idea of Renaissance,” History of Ideas, vol. IV, 126-28.

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Gargantua, while the motto of his utopian abbey Thélème is Fay ce que vouldras; voyages of adventure in search of specific lands or sea routes led instead to the fortuitous discovery of entire continents; and the newly acquired notion of the “dignity of man” led at the same time to skepticism (Montaigne, for example) thanks to the parallel discovery of the human ego.30 Dante, who stands on the threshold of the Renaissance and may be considered one of its earliest representatives, expresses in the Divina Commedia doubts about reason as a guiding principle for human behavior or political organization.31 In the waning years of the Renaissance, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his “heretical” beliefs, including the idea of an infinite universe and infinite worlds.32 A little over a century later, the Italian historian Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova eroded still further the classical Renaissance’s notions of order, the authority of the ancients, and optimism in human progress, asserting that “it was the deficiency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry” and insisting on a plurality of cultures rather than on one, universal reality.33 In the same vein, the “classical” modernist James Joyce deformed the Homer’s epic poem in Ulysses to celebrate his own version of humanism, by whose definition it is possible multiply the finite, limited, “classical” self by repeated encounters with difference and heterogeneity.34 This is the subversive tradition—classicism’s hidden yet always present lining—to which Marguerite Yourcenar belongs, as I hope the following chapters will show. Working from within classicism’s assumptions and parameters, Yourcenar the classical academic and artist chips away at the frame she has chosen for her work: for surely the two “classical” protagonists of her most important fictional works, Hadrien and Zénon, embody each in his own way the antipodes of liberation and measure which work continuously to undermine each other. French classicism meanwhile had developed into something quite different by the second half of the seventeenth century and the absolutist reign of Louis XIV. To the attributes of Renaissance

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Tom Tashiro, “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle,” History of Ideas, vol. I, 54. Ibid. 32 C. A. Patrides, “Hierarchy and Order,” ibid. vol. II, 443. 33 A. Owen Aldridge, “Ancients and Moderns,” ibid., vol. I, 83; and Isaiah Berlin, “Counter-Enlightenment,” ibid., vol. II, 103. 34 Vicki Mahaffey, “Modernist Theory and Criticism,” in Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds., The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994) 512-14. 31

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classicism were added power, glory, and a rigid, confining aesthetic, political, and social code. It continued to espouse universal values, reason, moderation, and harmony, but these qualities were rigidly proscribed and policed by arbiters of aesthetics, especially with respect to the purification of the language (the French Academy, founded in 1637) and social custom (les bienséances, verisimilitude, le juste milieu, the notion of the honnête homme) in the service of the monarch. The notions of “nature” and of man’s finding his proper place comfortably within it were replaced by something more artificial and forced: there was a good deal of theater in the “natural” artlessness of the honnête homme. Because of the many social constraints imposed upon the classical ideal, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle aesthetic and ethical claims. They seem to reflect a symbiotic, selfjustifying reciprocity, obviously encouraged by French absolutism, for whose purposes individuality, freedom of self-expression, and departure from the juste milieu were dangerous tendencies. Henceforth, French classicism would serve the cause of power and authority, and this trend grew stronger as it became threatened by economic and social changes. In spite of classicism’s association with the Ancien Régime, revolutionary France revived it in a somewhat different form for political purposes. Artists such as David depicted idealized scenes of republican Rome to illustrate civic duty and patriotism in keeping with the ideological spirit of the age: this was classical clarity, order, and authority of a different sort, which gave the Republicans a claim to cultural continuity with the ruling class. Henceforth, classicism was coupled with ethical values and political and social objectives. Semiologist Omar Calabrese’s remark certainly rings true: “Each classicism is a new form of order, which rereads antique classicism in order to transform it into an idealized component of contemporary culture. . . .”35 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Romantic Movement served as society’s alienated, ex-centric “other,” classical values began to be conflated, even equated, with politically and socially conservative ideologies associated with the Restoration. Moreover, in 1829 Goethe made explicit the opposition between romanticism and classicism: “I call the Classic the healthy, the

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Omar Calabrese, Neobaroque. A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 184.

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Romantic the sickly.”36 On the side of authority and power as it had been since the seventeenth century, classicism by the mid-nineteenth century was allied with politically and economically conservative, “healthy” bourgeois ideologies and the “science” of positivism, which dominated the second half of the century in various forms (realism, naturalism, social Darwinism). It was also in the mid-nineteenth century, as Laurence Plazenet points out,37 that French seventeenthcentury classicism was “canonized” by the highly centralized, tightly controlled educational establishment, thereby institutionalizing the ideological opposition between it and other contemporary artistic and social trends. The binary opposition between classicism and its “other” was now formally established. Both Catholic monarchists and the secular, capitalist bourgeoisie used classicism, linked with notions of authority, social order, and power, to achieve their own ends, pitting reactionary notions of tradition and French nationalism against the century’s artistic and social revolts. As the century came to an end, classical “values” were perceived as a bulwark of stability, wholeness, and harmony against the uncontrollable forces of anarchy and terrorism (which peaked in the 1890s), dissolution, and physical or moral decadence, represented in literature by the Symbolists. In 1894 Charles Maurras, who would become head of the protofascist group Action Française in the 1930s, declared that classicism was part of an ideological concept which embraced monarchism, the Roman Catholic Church as an institution, and a nationalistic concept of France and its past.38 French conservatives in the early twentieth century continued to infuse classicism with their ideological bias, be it colonialism, antiSemitism, monarchism, protofascism, or Catholicism. In spite and perhaps also because of such dubious sociopolitical connections, neoclassicism thrived in post-World War I French literary circles, with André Gide as one its chief proponents. In the years following the devastation and trauma of the Great War, Gide and his followers echoed conservatives’ nationalism and pride in France’s unique cultural heritage. He characterized the understated, controlled classical style—”the art of the litote”—as uniquely French: “C’est aussi qu’en France, et dans la France seule, l’intelligence tend toujours à l’emporter sur le sentiment et l’instinct” (“Thus, in France and only in

__________________ 36

Wellek, “Classicism in Literature,” History of Ideas, vol. I, 453. La Littérature baroque (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000) 24. 38 Wellek, “Classicism in Literature,” History of Ideas, vol I, 454-55. 37

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France, intelligence always tends to conquer feeling and instinct”).39 This form of neoclassicism, which was escapist, idealistic, academic, and on occasion violently nationalistic,40 has also become synonymous for many critics41 with an important facet (along with its opposite, avant-garde experimentation) of the international modernist movement. French dramatists of the high modern period, that is the interwar years, also made frequent use of modernism’s mythical method, using Greek and Roman myth as their seventeenth-century predecessors had done. In the 1920s and 1930s Gide, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Valéry, and of course Marguerite Yourcenar found in myth a rich vein of dramatic themes and a source of inspiration and rootedness that French society could not provide, deeply divided by class struggles and disillusioned by republican, reason-based ideals. In France, the 1920s ushered in fascist ideas of order and unity to counter the perceived communist threat, while the 1930s saw a surge of interest and activity in the colonies, which served the interests of Empire. The Great Depression of the same decade and the ensuing economic and social crisis strengthened the psychological need for tradition and control as well as nostalgia for lost or disappearing humanistic values. All of these factors help explain the return to classical sobriety and themes in literature of the interwar period. (At the other end of the social and cultural spectrum, of course, were the Dada and Surrealist movements that sprang up in the post-World War I years. They represented namely

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André Gide, Essais critiques (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999) 282. These remarks are found in a letter written by Gide in 1921. Translation mine. Not surprisingly, Gide, a product of nineteenth-century French education, found that seventeenth-century French classical authors, who “intégraient en eux la totalité des préoccupations morales, intellectuelles et sentimentales de leur temps” (“integrated the totality of moral, intellectual, and emotional concerns of their times”) were superior to “la pauvreté” (“the poverty”) of twentieth-century neoclassical authors, who “prétendent . . . arriver au grand style par deni, refus d’admettre et ignorance” (“pretend . . . to achieve greatness of style by means of denial, refusal to include, and ignorance”). Ibid., 285. Gide’s preference for seventeenth-century classicism seems also to be symptomatic precisely of the mutation of classicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for ideological purposes. Nevertheless, he inspired many authors, including Marguerite Yourcenar, to imitate the genre and style he had created: the French neoclassical récit. But readers today would certainly question his judgment about seventeenth-century classical writers’ success in their totalizing endeavor. 40 Wellek, “Classicism in Literature,” History of Ideas, vol I, 455. 41 For example, T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme. See Mahaffey, “Modernist Theory and Criticism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, 512-15.

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an angry cultural backlash to the failed notions of reason, history, and progress.) It is important to situate Marguerite Yourcenar’s pre-World War II writings within this interwar legacy and to recognize the obvious ways in which she accommodates the modernist concept of “classicism”: by virtue of her use of classical motifs and her profound knowledge and appreciation of the ancient Greek and Roman aesthetic and cultures, as well as her admiration and/or imitation of leading proponents of French neoclassicism such as Gide, Cocteau, and Valéry.42 Lastly, Yourcenar may connect indirectly with some modernists on a more basic level: Chapter 2 of this dissertation, which explores the novel Denier du rêve set in Mussolini’s Rome in the early 1930s, exposes some fascist-like, aesthetic strategies employed by Yourcenar to maintain rigid, “author-itarian” control of the text, the personae, and the reader. Though no more than an unsettling echo of the “real” fascist dogma espoused by some modernist writers (Ezra Pound being the most notorious), these aesthetic strategies inevitably call to mind modernism’s at times uncomfortably close relationship with fascism. What did neoclassicism mean to those writers of the modern period? Returning to France after World War I, the critic Jacques Rivière predicted the classical revival as “not literal and purely imitative...but a deep, inner classicism.”43 For Paul Valéry, it entailed not only a rigid adherence to classicism’s rules, but also “discipline, purity, form, restraint.”44 But le naturel of the Golden Age of French classicism can appear quite brittle and Mannerist in a twentieth-century context: an aesthetic conceit rather than a revival of the seventeenth century’s belief in the Ancients’ embodiment of universal truths, authority, clarity, and so on. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, this yearning for the “simple” solutions of France’s Golden Age, which was also the apogee of French absolutism, coincided with the rise of fascism in France and elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Unity, social harmony, and claims to the Truth were fashioned into a caricatural humanism, as in fascist Italy. Classicism also served as a cultural cover for the hegemony of the wealthy industrial class, which

__________________ 42

Yourcenar is also a modernist owing to her “experimentation” in avant-garde styles such as expressionism. But here the focus is on Yourcenar the classicist and neoclassical writer. 43 Wellek, “Classicism in Literature,” History of Ideas, vol. I, 455. 44 Ibid.

Introduction

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was complicit with fascist aims of order, control, and manipulation of the popular will. Marguerite Yourcenar maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the term “classical” and not surprisingly disavowed her own qualification as a “classical” author.45 Yet she hardly could have remained immune to the influence of classicism’s progressive adaptation to political, cultural, and social circumstances throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only have we seen that some of her earlier fictional works are “classical” in the modernist sense. Her later “historical” novels, on which her international reputation rests, suggest both nineteenth-century classicism by virtue of the totalizing weight of her erudition, seamless virtuosity, and “author-ity,” as well as twentieth-century classicism by virtue of her unfashionable use of history and her reliance on timeless, universal themes. And spanning her career is a certain class consciousness that aligns her with the ruling, conservative European aristocracy of the nineteenth century from which she sprung: we see this especially in Alexis, Le Coup de grâce, and her memoirs. We may also want to ask ourselves what Yourcenar stood to gain from the classical mantle. Classicism’s power and authority certainly offered her glory and literary immunity, as her eventual election to the Académie française illustrates: there is no greater safe haven and guarantee of unassailability for a French author than that canonical institution, even though Yourcenar professed to be indifferent to her election. Marguerite Yourcenar the classicist embraces classical culture, history, and themes: these are after all the objects of her vast erudition with which she feels secure, comfortable, and in control. Yet, while

__________________ 45

Yourcenar’s distaste for all categorizations and efforts to try to analyze her works are evident in her paratexts. It is also evident in metatexts, that is, in interviews, as this sampling reveals: “Mais laissez-moi lutter de toutes mes forces contre l’épithète classique. . . . Le mot classique est du vocabulaire pour écolier” (“But let me fight with all my might against the epithet classical. . . . The word classical is schoolyard vocabulary”). Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987), ed. Maurice Delcroix (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 317. Translation mine. “Si par classique on entend un auteur qui n’écrit pas dans un style négligé, on peut utiliser cette expression. Toutefois, en disant « classique », on offre un enterrement de première classe à des écrivains de valeur que personne ne lit. . . . Cela relève de l’histoire littéraire, pas de la littérature” ) (“ If by classical we mean an author who does not write in a careless style, we can use this expression. However, in saying ‘classical’ we are giving a first-class burial to writers of quality whom no one reads”) Ibid., 347. Translation mine.

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Yourcenar’s classicism is real and tangible, something else is also taking place that disturbs the unity of her classical image. The purely classical text constitutes a non-discursive, closed system of values, principles, and rules. As Guy Debord has written, the late twentieth century’s interest in the baroque aesthetic stems from a recognition of the impossibility of an artistic classicism, and efforts to establish classicism in the past three centuries have resulted only in short, artificial constructs speaking either the exterior language of French absolutism or of the revolutionary, neo-Roman bourgeoisie.46 Yourcenar certainly seems to share Debord’s judgment, for even as she raises the classical standard, she is in the process of driving a wedge into its monolithic unity by establishing a discourse between classical values and traditions and classicism’s subversive “lining,” to which I alluded earlier (Rabelais, Bruno, Vico). Hers is not simply a binary, pro-and-contra dialogue between classicism and its antithesis, however. Instead, the discourse is continually shifting, appearing momentarily to follow classicism’s well-delineated course and then suddenly veering off into distinctly unclassical territory: abjection, an anti-essentialist ethic which eschews stereotypical sexual roles and sexuality, a reading of history as chaos and horror, and a rejection of all social, political, and metaphysical systems. The intertwining of these two discursive threads renders Marguerite Yourcenar’s classicism anything but transparent, simple, and conventional. Indeed, at every turn in her fictional works, we perceive distortions or contradictions. Yourcenar always recognized in herself a lover of “extrêmes frontières” (“extreme frontiers”); the center, in her view, was mobile, everywhere: “Le centre est où nous sommes” (“The center is wherever we are”). She also exposed the reality underlying historical “progress”: “Toute situation est inextricable et irrémédiable. Chaque fois nous héritons de ses déchets et de son désordre” (“All situations are inextricable and irremediable. We invariably inherit their dregs and their disorder”). She was profoundly affected by what she called “la mutilation du monde” (“the world’s mutilation”).47 If we were to reverse the baroque theorist Eugenio D’Ors’s observation that it is impossible for a coincidence of form not to correspond to a coincidence of mind,48 we might say that in

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Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1992 [1967]) 189. Portrait d’une voix, 195, 256, 222, and 223, respectively. Translations mine. 48 Eugenio D’Ors, Du Baroque, trans. Agathe Rouart-Valéry 1935 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, illustrated version, 1968) 105. 47

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the case of Marguerite Yourcenar a coincidence of mind—that is, her baroque worldview as exposed in these statements—must correspond to a coincidence of form in her writings. And in fact, Yourcenar’s fictions artfully adopt her heritage and milieu, but in a manner that ultimately subverts the harmoniously ordered poetic vision frequently associated with classicism. Once we begin to understand the “seriously” playful nature of her classicism, we are freer to take stock of other qualities in her writing. We might want first to examine one of the most obvious components of Yourcenar’s “classicism”: the classical myths and figures that Yourcenar employed in some of her fictional works. Like the modernist authors to whose era she belongs, she turned, we know, to Greek and Roman mythology, history, and culture for inspiration. The modernists who employed myths often rewrote them to achieve a certain effect, and Yourcenar was no exception, as her collection of Mannerist prose poems Feux (1936) demonstrates. She describes in her preface, written thirty-one years later, the incongruous, sometimes violent pairing of technological and cultural modernity and ancient myth. Yet, what is most striking about her use of myth in Feux— conceived during her “phase” of “expressionisme baroque” of the 1930s—is her marked preference for the anticlassical, the deformed and later decadent incarnations of these classical figures: Achilles as a transvestite; Mary Magdalene married to a homosexual, St. John, who abandons her for Christ. Obsessive passion, blind anger, and violent emotions color these distorted myths in which excess and extremes are willfully and defiantly displayed as the “produit d’une crise passionnelle” (“product of an emotional crisis”) which the author was suffering at the time.49 Yourcenar freely admits to these distortions and anachronisms of classical myth, even defending them in her preface to Feux, where she analyzes her technique in detail. Nevertheless, her conscious choice to employ classical myth in such a highly ironic manner—tearing it from its harmonious, rational moorings and subjecting it to violent distortions as well as ethical ambiguity—is more subversive than readers or even Yourcenar herself might have realized. For that same penchant for rewriting classical and humanist history and culture, questioning their role as a benchmark of Western civilization, was to resurface much later: first, in her most

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OR, 1075. Yourcenar is referring to her unrequited passion for a homosexual man, André Fraigneau.

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Baroque Fictions

famous fictional work Mémoires d’Hadrien, and in her other fictional milestone, L’Œuvre au Noir. In Mémoires d’Hadrien (like Feux, not analyzed in depth in this thesis for reasons of length), Yourcenar was to demonstrate her preference for the untrammeled fluidity of an “entre-deux,” a turning point in the Roman Empire’s history described by Flaubert in his correspondence and cited by Yourcenar in the “Carnet de Notes” at the end of the novel: “Les dieux n’étant plus, et le Christ n’étant pas encore, il y a eu, de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle, un moment unique où l’homme seul a été” (“The gods no longer existing, and Christ not yet existing, there was a unique moment between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when only man existed”).50 This moment of history chosen by Marguerite Yourcenar is pre-Judeo-Christian (the basis of the West’s ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions) yet postpagan, for those gods have also been dismissed. It is a moment suspended in time during which moral license, absolute freedom, and limitless creative potential briefly reign. Obviously at work here is Marguerite Yourcenar’s baroque vision: a precarious entre-deux upon which she can, paradoxically, impose the “structure” of her classicist and historical erudition. If the myths in Feux are destabilized by means of conscious anachronism and a predilection for “decadent” mythology, Mémoires d’Hadrien is destabilized by its “un”-classical situation in a fluid, unstructured moment in which all epistemologies are bracketed. This unstructured moment in time provides a vacuum of meaning, arguably, in which the author may insert her own virtuosic, scholarly re-creation of ancient history. In its effort to be a faithful “translation” of the classical Roman oratio togata as a Cicero or a Seneca might have written it, Mémoires d’Hadrien is a “make-believe” history: a ludic, “impossible” wager carried to extremes. The inherent amorality and superficiality of the rhetorical game cuts the text loose from ethical bonds, maintaining the openness of the moment in history it is supposed to re-create. In the words of the neobaroque poet and theorist Erminia Passananti, “the artist is asked to exercise the imagination to astonish and, in this way to convince.”51 For it was not only the reflections of the Roman emperor that dazzled readers of Mémoires d’Hadrien; it was the author’s perceived “mediumesque” capacity to

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OR, 519. Translation mine. Erminia Passannanti, “Neobaroque?” (Oxford: http://www.transference.org.uk/neobaroque.htm, 6/9/2001).

51

Introduction

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resurrect with historical authenticity and authority a voice that had been dead for almost two millennia. The second of Yourcenar’s fictional milestones, L’Œuvre au Noir (Chapter 3), destabilizes preconceptions of the European renaissance by the use of irony and ambiguity. The protagonist Zénon, a classical humanist, ends up abandoning in disillusionment his ethical and philosophical idealism as well as all systems of knowledge or perception. At the end of his life, Zénon is reduced to a materialistic, dispassionate examination of his own bodily reactions to death. There are echoes in the novel’s dénouement of postmodernism’s “contradictory enterprise: its art forms ... use and abuse, install and then destabilize convention....”52 In the case of L’Œuvre au Noir, the art form is the historical novel’s character type: the generally recognizable profile of a humanist culled from the lives of a half-dozen or more famous Renaissance humanists. While each of these models may have violated certain beliefs of his time, not one can be said to have attained Zénon’s nihilistic repudiation of everything beyond empirical, corporeal evidence. This repudiation in turn leads us to question the role in Marguerite Yourcenar’s works of “classical,” universal themes. Truth, Beauty, Justice, Good versus Evil, and History may serve as focal points, especially in Yourcenar’s postwar works, yet they offer no golden way to knowledge or understanding in a universe where everything is shown to be relative. In fact, these universal themes seem less an attempt at a systematic, metaphysical analysis than a means of fulfilling an essentially aesthetic project ordained by an emotionally wounded, angry subject. For as the frontispiece has already suggested and the subsequent analyses will clarify, in spite of the apparent disappearance of the author under the controlled mantle of classicism, it is always and only a question of the passionate subject: her passionate voice, her obsessive need for aesthetic expression, her revolt, her dominance. Academician François Nourissier even takes Yourcenar’s passionate, subjective “presence” and personal revolt a step further, writing of her “force charnelle qui annonce sa propre sensualité et lui insuffle la force de la subversion et du défi”) (“carnal

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“Postmodernism and Literature,” The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1999) 124. The quotation is from Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Post-modernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). Emphasis mine.

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force that announces her own sensuality and infuses her with the force of subversion and challenge”).53 That “force [charnelle] de la subversion et du défi” is evident in Yourcenar’s plastic and painterly use of language, an abundance of figurative and rhetorical language undermining the clarity, order, and logic that are hallmarks of the traditional “classical” text. For example, in Anna, Soror... we will see how the author plays with neoclassical conceits to subvert classical power and authority and to grant the Abject rights and immunities within the text. In Denier du rêve, a modernist novel, the author’s ironic deflation of fascist “classicism” serves as a pretext for foregrounding the grotesque, suffering body, while a dense cocoon of figurative language conceals from the reader’s view the empty space occupying the novel’s epicenter. L’Œuvre au Noir refuses authority, dismantling conventional ideals of western rationalism and history; the text itself toys with conventions of the historical novel and displays figurative and syntactical complexity, even ambiguity, ensuring that the act of reception plays a weak and subservient role to that of the author/virtuoso. In Un homme obscur finally, Yourcenar poses a radical challenge to all epistemologies and to the very validity of language before confessing to and absolving the aesthetic foundations of her œuvre...through the voice of a dying, Spinoza-like metaphysician who must describe his abstract theories in architectural terms. In the end, the materiality of the Yourcenarian text, the aesthetic project, finds a means of dominating the discourse, thereby destabilizing classicism’s form/substance equation. But the tension created by the discourse never disappears: as if attempting to redress the imbalance and retreat from the subversive openness she has created to the security of the classical text, Yourcenar continually “codes” her texts with such signals as humanistic erudition, myth, history, universal themes, or an excessively severe, neoclassical style. Given all of these indices, it is possible to conclude that Marguerite Yourcenar’s adaptation of classical ideals is unsettling and contradictory, her reputed classicism a simplistic explanation of a much more complex phenomenon. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the term neobaroque has gained ground as a way of explaining an aesthetic which defies logocentric, binary thinking and the cultural

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Nourissier, “La Hors-la-loi,” Marguerite Yourcenar. Du Mont-Noir aux MontsDéserts., 124. Emphasis and translation mine.

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hegemony that the West has preserved through classicism’s various manifestations from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century. I shall endeavor to show that Marguerite Yourcenar’s writings also reflect the neobaroque aesthetic in a number of telling ways. Because the neobaroque in effect eludes easy definition, it is useful to review briefly the origins of the term. It emerged in the United States in the 1960s, a decade of social and political unrest and global protest (Vietnam, May ‘68), and was applied to a literature and film based not on experimentation as modernism had been, but rather on “reelaboration, pastiche, and the deconstruction of the immediately preceding literary . . . heritage.”54 The neobaroque has been described as “life turned into a museum.”55 In other words, the neobaroque is a self-consciously posturing, theatrical, and sometimes shocking hybridization of preceding literary genres, themes, and tones. As the historical baroque’s descendant, the neobaroque simulates or parodies some though not all of the former’s characteristics. Originally a Portuguese word (barocco) that jewelers used to designate an irregular pearl, the term “baroque” was first applied by the nineteenth-century art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1888) to describe the art and architecture of the Counter Reformation (roughly 15351610).56 In the 1950s pioneering French literary theorists Jean Rousset and Marcel Raymond championed the literary value of “preclassical” French poetry of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by applying Wölfflin’s artistic categories to it. But the man who succeeded most completely in liberating the discourse on the baroque in the twentieth century is undoubtedly the Spanish literary historian Eugenio D’Ors. He conceived of the baroque not simply as a literary or an artistic term but as a seminal, eternal idea—a state of mind and a state of being: “Partout où nous trouvons réunies dans un seul geste plusieurs intentions contradictoires, le résultat stylistique appartient à la catégorie du Baroque. L’esprit baroque . . . ne sait pas ce qu’il veut” (“Wherever we find several contradictory intentions reunited in one single act, the stylistic result belongs to the category of the Baroque. The baroque mind . . . does not know what it wants”).57 The tension inherent in Marguerite Yourcenar’s paradoxical discourses as well as

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Calabrese, Neobaroque. A Sign of the Times, 12. Passananti, “Neobaroque?” 56 Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univesity Press, 1964). 57 D’Ors, Du Baroque, 29. Emphasis is the author’s. 55

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her strategies of revolt within a framework of traditional styles, genres, and humanist erudition seem to reflect D’Ors’s “contradictory discourses”: the Yourcenarian text maintains a fragile, anti-essentialist liberty precisely by choosing not to know what it knows and not to “know what it wants.” The rehabilitation of the baroque, shortly followed by creation of the neobaroque, was not a chance occurrence. It had much to do with the fact that the decrepitude of Western liberal humanism, evident even before the Great War, had accelerated to such an extent by the 1960s that the baroque’s return seemed quite appropriate. Even the sciences and mathematics—which had served the cause of the classical ideal (Euclid, Pascal, Descartes, Newton, later Rostand, Planck, and Einstein)—were by the latter half of the twentieth century proposing theories of chaos, catastrophe, and randomness that strangely hailed the baroque while also corroborating postmodernism’s exposure of no center, no eternal Truths, and no founding narrations. The inevitable re-evaluation of the classical canon under these circumstances assured the baroque’s robust return in the late twentieth century.58 The discovery of the neobaroque aesthetic therefore seems like a natural evolution, and it is not surprising that the two share common traits. For example, both the baroque and the neobaroque seek to create an effect by surprising the audience; both privilege disorder and fragmentation; both may take verbal virtuosity and playfulness to a hyperbolic level; and both reject social, political, and cultural systems in an often violent, melancholic fashion. At the same time, as the term implies, the neobaroque is a “new” baroque, resurfacing certainly less as a reflection of the pomp, glory, and rhetorical show of its predecessor (at the service of the Counter Reformation) and far more as one of ambiguity and constant destabilization, inherent in its conscious challenge to reason. Unlike the historical baroque, which is associated with a kind of pan-European Zeitgeist, the neobaroque is often identified with another geographically specific body of literature (although its roots are European): the Latin American novel, including the tradition of magic realism, which mixes realism and fantasy. A number of Caribbean and African writers have more recently also been labeled neobaroque. The chaos and fragmentation often expressed in their

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C.-G. Dubois, Le Baroque: Profondeurs de l’apparence (Paris: Larousse Université, 1973) 15-16.

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works reflect a revolt against the western cultural hegemony to which their countries were subject under the former European masters, a celebration of their own cultural and linguistic polydimensionality, their marginality in terms of the western concept of history, and recognition of ontological loss and absurdity. The neobaroque obviously then is among other things a challenge or even an outright revolt on the part of the marginalized “other” against the totalizing objective of modern, western logocentrism. By virtue of her erudition, her interests, her highly developed sense of western European culture, and her tradition-bound, aristocratic milieu, Marguerite Yourcenar is far removed from this line of neobaroque writers. In fact, one of the striking characteristics of the neobaroque as many understand the term today is precisely its appropriation by artists of the New World and Africa, marginalized by and defiant of western European cultural traditions. By contrast, Yourcenar’s element—the very air she breathes—is the European tradition, subtly shaded by her affinity with the oriental philosophies. Furthermore, she neither shares in the neobaroque’s “extreme artificialization” of language,59 which distorts and dislocates language in preposterous, flamboyant ways using techniques such as pastiche, repetition, parody, the carnivalesque, and ostentation; nor does she exhibit the magic realism and obtrusively decentered, chaotic qualities of the Latin American, Caribbean, or African neobaroque novels. She ignores popular, contemporary culture, unlike many neobaroque writers who, mistrustful of the future’s promise and the past’s legacy, are nothing if not immersed in contemporary culture of the most superficial, transient kind. Finally, and very much in the nineteenthcentury realist tradition, the author as subject or persona is seemingly absent from the Yourcenarian text: Yourcenar reiterated on many occasions her abhorrence of authors who found no better subject than the narcissistic “subject” and spilled their soul onto the page. For Yourcenar’s subjectivity, as I noted above, is carefully disguised although it is pervasive and powerful. The neobaroque author by contrast does little to hide the text’s self-reflexivity; it goes nowhere, for it has nowhere to go.

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Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” Latin America in Its Literature, ed. Ivan A. Schulman, trans. Mary G. Berg (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980) 116-17.

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If we are therefore to talk at all about the character of the neobaroque in Marguerite Yourcenar’s writings, we must first acknowledge that it differs fundamentally from the ostentatious, almost explosive style represented by the Latin American, Caribbean, and African neobaroque. True, she shares with baroque and neobaroque artists alike an obsessive desire to astound, evident in her unfaltering, masterful (re)creation of imaginary worlds and her manipulation of an encyclopedic erudition. But because of the apparent stylistic gulf between Yourcenar and those writers, it is easier to point in the first place to ways in which her works express the spirit of the neobaroque, and in the second place begin to identify some of her neobarque textual strategies which sustain that spirit, bearing in mind that they are far less flamboyant even in their most expressionistic phase than those of writers who wear the neobaroque label. The neobaroque represents a “loss of theoretical certainty”60: it is the moment when belief in reason, logocentric thought, and totalizing value systems is suspended. I mentioned earlier the discursive play within Marguerite Yourcenar’s texts, which opens them to revolt, relativism, and plurality of meaning61 not possible in the closed, totalizing system of the purely classical text. Yourcenar’s sexually ambivalent or frankly transgressive personae also suggest a challenge to reason and an uneasy distrust of fixity, a preference for the entre-deux, also characteristic of the neobaroque spirit. Virtually all of Yourcenar’s fictional works are suffused with a profound melancholy and a muffled violence which suggest a neobaroque sense of emptiness, human frailty, and revolt. As we shall examine in Chapters 1 and 2 especially, coupled with these is an obsessive, sometimes cruel fascination with representations of the imperfect, contingent human body—the suffering, dying, and even dead body—so very unlike the cold, fixed, and aesthetically perfect Greek and Roman statues or Michelangelo’s ignudi which so fascinated Marguerite Yourcenar. Turning now to evidence of the neobaroque in the text itself, Cuban neobaroque author and literary theorist Severo Sarduy stresses the neobaroque’s political incorrectness and attempt to

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Willem van Reijen, “Labyrinth and Ruin: The Return of the Baroque in Postmodernity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 9.4 (November 1992): 5. 61 Gilles Deleuze calls this last incompossibilités, irresolvable divergence that bars meaning from achieving completion and closure. See Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988) 111-12.

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menacer, juger et parodier l’économie bourgeoise . . . en son centre même et son fondement: l’espace des signes, le langage, support symbolique de la société et garantie de son fonctionnement par la communication. menace, judge, and parody the bourgeois economy . . . in its very center and foundation: the space of signs, language, symbolic support of society and guarantee of its functioning through communication.62 To “menace the bourgeois economy” is of course an attack on the very heart of classicism as it has been perceived in the last two hundred years. As even the cursory descriptions of Yourcenar’s strategies in this introduction already suggest, her judgment and rejection of normative beliefs and values are clear, as are her uncertainties about epistemological systems and, at the end of her life, about language itself. Unable obviously to repudiate this last, she instead manipulates it in order to invalidate various historical notions of classicism: language for Yourcenar thus becomes Sarduy’s subversive instrument rather than the weapon of Logos. As we might expect under these circumstances, the Yourcenarian text is not above deforming language to a considerable degree; however, because the analogisms, periphrases, and other rhetorical devices and figures of speech are so firmly embedded in a classical matrix of humanistic traditions and history, they do not “explode” and fragment the text like those of the Latin American neobaroque novel, where style and plot are equally absurd and nonsensical. It is not that Yourcenar herself and critics have not recognized the côté baroque et subversif of her œuvre. Yet as we have noted, she and they often have dismissed it as simply a chronologically or experientially isolated phenomenon rather than as a thread that one can discern from the beginning of her career until her death in 1987. The author professed in her preface to Feux, for example, that her “expressionisme baroque” belonged to a delimited phase of her writing

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Severo Sarduy, Barroco, trans. Jacques Henric and the author (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975) 155-56.

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that occurred in the early to mid-1930s,63 evident only in certain works of that period—including obviously Feux, Denier du rêve, and the chronicle of her highly expressionistic dreams, Les Songes et les sorts.64 The terms “baroque” and “subversive” surface now and again in critical studies, but often almost in passing. In her reader’s guide to Marguerite Yourcenar, for example, Georgia Hooks Shurr writes about an aspect of the author’s technique in L’Œuvre au Noir and Mémoires d’Hadrien: “In a baroque way as novelist she places successive layers of history, alchemy, medicine, philosophy and theology, to create a labyrinthine, multivalenced literary work.”65 While Shurr does not further develop that observation, elsewhere she does note Yourcenar’s affinity to the Italian artist Piranesi, whose baroque images of chasms, shadows, and impotence are strong currents in L’Œuvre au Noir, according to Shurr.66 Moreover, in the past year a few penetrating essays written to commemorate the author’s centennial have probed other fundamental aspects of Yourcenar’s works that seriously challenge the classical epithet. In his essay “Figures du sujet, images de l’idée,” Jean-Pierre Richard recalls the scene in L’Œuvre au Noir in which the protagonist Zénon, awakening after a nap on the grass, sees the reflection of his own eye in his magnifying glass, and focuses our attention on l’arrondi organique de sa forme: une rondeur qui ne renvoie pas ici au malaise d’une clôture mais à l’ouverture au contraire, à la liberté euphorique d’une courbe, ou comme le dit mieux, et plus abstraitement Yourcenar, d’une courbure. . . . Masses, courants,

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OR, 1079-81. Yourcenar would have certainly also included in this group the little-known and précieux Conte bleu, a tale written between 1927 and 1929 and only recently published (1993). 65 Marguerite Yourcenar. A Reader’s Guide (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987) 74. Shurr is in fact speaking here of the “classical” novels L’Œuvre au Noir and Mémoires d’Hadrien! 66 Georgia H. Shurr, “Yourcenar et Piranèse: une relation artistique,” Marguerite Yourcenar et l’art, l’art de Marguerite Yourcenar, Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Tours en novembre 1988 avec l’aide du groupe de recherche interuniversitaire “Littérature et Nation” (Tours: S.I.E.Y., 1990) 175-86. Yourcenar wrote an essay about Piranesi and purchased some original engravings by the artist in New York City sometime in the 1940s. They are in the parlor and the living room of her home, Petite Plaisance. 64

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stries, plis, poussées: ces notions font penser à la mécanique du désir réinventée par un Gilles Deleuze. the organic roundness of its form: a roundness that does not refer to the malaise of a closure but rather to an opening up, to the euphoric liberty of a curve, or, as Yourcenar says better and more abstractly, to a curvature. . . . Masses, currents, ridges, folds, bulges: these notions recall the mechanics of desire reinvented by a Gilles Deleuze.67 What could be more suggestive of a subterranean neobaroque aesthetic, one that subverts European traditions of order, closure, and hierarchy and finds ways of deferring meaning? The form alone of the Yourcenarian text, replete with detours (periphrasis) and endless folds (meaning suspended by a series of folding and unfolding analogisms and “painterly” descriptions), belies Yourcenar the classicist and historian. “Démodée et indémodable”:68 There is in my view a recognizable double edge to Marguerite Yourcenar’s work. It unsettles notions of Western rationalism and logic and defies philosophical idealism even as it relies on what appear at first glance to be traditional stylistic and generic formulas. By suggesting the impossibility of all understanding or of organizing the impenetrable chaos of existence, Yourcenar’s fictions inevitably condemn the classical forme/fond equation to failure. Emptiness and the absence of meaning are camouflaged in a variety of ways: analogisms tend to replace definitions; extraordinary aesthetic virtuosity compensates for loss of sense; detailed paratexts explain the genesis of certain works, thereby adding gravitas, yet do not necessarily clarify their meaning or authorial purpose. In the 1970s the architect and postmodern theorist Charles Jencks coined the term “double coding” to praise postmodern structures that combine “modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building).”69 Jencks eventually extended double

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Jean-Pierre Richard, “Figures du sujet, images de l’idée,” Marguerite Yourcenar. Du Mont-Noir aux Monts-Déserts. Hommage pour un centenaire, ed. Anne-Yvonne Julien (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2003) 114-15. Emphasis and translation mine 68 Cf. footnote 7, supra. 69 “Double Coding” and “Charles Jencks,” The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 233 and 290-91, respectively.

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coding to postmodern art and literature. Works by authors such as Umberto Eco and John Barth, he wrote, exhibit double coding, giving readers the “pleasure” of literary conventions such as plot and characterization while operating on other levels as well.70 Marguerite Yourcenar’s œuvre represents a much more complex contradiction, yet Jencks’s theory of double coding reminds us that she also adheres to expected literary conventions—in terms of her conventional use of plot and syntax, her flawless, flowing prose, the allusion to universal themes—meeting certain expectations, providing an illusion of classical depth. All the while these conventions coexist with “something else”: refusal of the classical center, of any attempt to make final logic or order of the chaos. Aesthetics must not merely replace that depth; to deflect the suspicion of “superficiality,” they must also mask depth’s absence, in the process becoming “les profondeurs de l’apparence,”71 the neobaroque. Thus, as I pay homage to the texts of a masterful artist, erudite classicist, and historian, I shall also endeavor to point out elements of Marguerite Yourcenar’s work that suggest, first, a neobaroque vision: her revolt, her attraction to the marginal and excluded, her antiessentialism, her camouflaged incapacity to plumb the depths of a disordered, incomprehensible cosmos; and second, the neobaroque features that are the outward, material manifestations of the vision: the “carnal” plasticity and superfluity of her language; the pleasure of performance and virtuosity; and a drive for power and control through language. In the four chapters that follow in more or less chronological order,72 I shall analyze the diverse mechanisms and strategies that free her texts from the constraints of “classicism” whose limitations cannot account for the paradoxes of her vision.

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“Double Coding” and “Charles Jencks,” The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 233 and 290-91. 71 The title of C.-G. Dubois’s study of the baroque. See footnote 58, supra. 72 Revisions and rewritings make it difficult to establish a chronology. Furthermore, Yourcenar “created” these key stories and characters when she was still an adolescent.

Chapter 1 Anna Soror...: Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject

to baffle all the real and unreal, belief and knowledge, world and theatre; to see the world from within.1

One of the more transgressive fictional texts in modern European literature, Marguerite Yourcenar’s novella Anna, Soror... recounts the consummation of physical passion between a brother and a sister living in Naples at the end of the sixteenth century. The antithesis between the subversive theme and the polished, “classical” virtuosity of the text may strike readers as intentional, artificial, and exaggerated—in short, as a mannerist exercise. But such intentional paradoxes can also alert us to strategies of exposure and concealment that signal greater complexity of meaning and purpose. In the following pages I shall examine the nexus between the narrative’s neoclassical style and its face-saving “baroque” theme, setting, and aesthetic, on the one hand, and the laying bare, on the other, of unspeakable ravages and desolation—of abjection, literally, of a “casting out.” According to the French psychoanalyst and literary critic Julia Kristeva, the abject consists of what is excluded from the symbolic order, which is the realm of social hierarchy and the unambiguous subject. To coexist within the symbolic order, the subject must repress everything reminiscent of her own materiality, that is, the abject. But because the rejection of the abject can only be partially successful, the subject’s seamless inclusion in the symbolic order is forever “problematic.”2 Whereas the classical aesthetic belongs to the symbolic order, it is the baroque aesthetic and worldview in Anna, Soror... which clear the way for the abject to emerge. Yet at the same time they attenuate its impact by means of various strategies. Nevertheless, the abject, in the

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Christine Buci-Glucksmann. Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller, intr. Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage Publications, 1994) 39. 2 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982) 1-17 ; and “Abjection,” The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 177.

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guise of the transgressed prohibition against incest, saturates this short text, breaching classical notions of “nature” and bienséances. For unlike classical authors of antiquity or of seventeenth-century France whose use of themes of transgression and horror resulted in harmonious resolution (for example, divine justice/retribution or ineluctable destiny), Yourcenar’s employment of those themes suggests ambiguity, a lack of closure and resolution. The contingency, the fragility of human existence are omnipresent but seem to suggest no larger purpose, no “grand narratives” of truth, justice, or even fatality. That sense of ambiguity may be part of a cautionary stratagem on Yourcenar’s part simultaneously to withhold and to transmit her personal vision to the reader. Such tension perhaps arises from the author’s own ambivalence toward the reading public. She could be both generous and tolerant toward her readers if she considered them thoughtful and well informed: many are the occasions when she took the time to respond to her readers, as her biographers attest. She could also be dictatorial (as we shall see in later chapters) and derogatory when she chose to group her readers with contemporary society as a whole, whose hierarchical structures and systems she generally mistrusted and to which she maintained an attitude of ironic hostility. How can we—or, rather, can we?—classify, in terms of its style, this novella, published at the beginning (1933) and again toward the end (1981) of Marguerite Yourcenar’s career? Anna, Soror... has been compared to La Princesse de Clèves, the assumption being that the former work is heavily influenced by the neoclassical récit à la française, a particular style and genre that André Gide perfected, and that the latter epitomizes French classicism. 3 Yet, scholars of seventeenth-century French literature today would agree that French classical literature, including La Princesse de Clèves, was never completely free of baroque elements.4 Many would note, moreover, that Madame de Lafayette’s masterpiece remains in some respects an

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Didier Course, “Le Temps ou la mort en mouvement: Etude d’une obsession baroque dans Anna, Soror...,” Les Visages de la mort dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque international tenu à l’Université de Minnesota, Morris, 7-10 juillet 1992 (Morris: University of Minnesota, The Division of the Humanities, 1993): 120. 4 See Helen Karen Kaps, “Baroque or Classic?” ed. John D. Lyons, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves. Contemporary Reactions Criticism, Norton Critical Edition Series (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 16478. This article was reprinted by permission from Helen Karen Kaps, Moral Perspective in La Princesse de Clèves (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Books, 1968) 65-88.

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enigma—belying the classical “transparency” it is supposed to represent. We should approach Anna, Soror... in the same manner, less to question its “neoclassical” qualification than to liberate it from a label that is perhaps too constraining. Indeed, Anna, Soror... defies easy classification. By the author’s own account in her “Postface,” the text “showed signs” of different styles: “l’école stricte du récit à la française” (“the strict school of the French récit”) and “techniques poétiques dissimulées dans la prose” (OR 938) (“embedding poetic techniques in prose”) (TLD 240). Thus, by the author’s own admission, Anna, Soror... is a mélange of styles. In spite of the author’s comment, it is not, in my view, the responsibility of the “average” reader to realize that the sober, often elliptical prose and rather conventional, linear narrative style (because these are after all powerful classical signposts, together or separately) are not simply a neoclassical text “embellished” by baroque tropes and themes in the interest of stylistically mannerist “effect.” Having examined, meanwhile, this curious novella from several perspectives, I shall endeavor to demonstrate how and why such stylistic hybridism takes this novella to a far deeper, more complex level than we may have initially assumed. In doing so, we shall discover the roles that the alternating neobaroque and neoclassical textual elements play in this process. First, we should examine the novella’s theme, which captures our attention because of its bold violation of conventional morality and literary subject matter. The author offers an explanation in her “Postface” as to why she chose the theme of incest. It is, essentially, she tells us, the only act left in modern society that is still capable of affecting our deepest emotions: Que l’inceste existe à l’état de possibilité omniprésente dans la sensibilité humaine, attirante pour les uns, révoltante pour les autres, le mythe, la légende, l’obscur cheminement des songes, les statistiques des sociologies et les faits divers en font preuve. Peut-être pourrait-on dire qu’il est vite devenu pour les poètes le symbole de toutes les passions sexuelles d’autant plus violentes qu’elles sont plus contraintes, plus punies et plus cachées. En effet, l’appartenance à deux clans ennemis, comme Roméo et Juliette, est rarement sentie dans nos civilisations comme un obstacle insurmontable; l’adultère banalisé a, de plus, perdu beaucoup de ses prestiges par la facilité du divorce;

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Baroque Fictions l’amour entre deux personnes du même sexe est en partie sorti de la clandestinité. L’inceste seul demeure inavouable, et presque impossible à prouver là même où nous la soupçonnons d’exister. C’est contre les falaises les plus abruptes que se lance le plus violemment la vague. (OR 937-38) Myth, legend, the dark byways of dreams, sociological statistics, and various facts prove that incest exists as an omnipresent potentiality in human emotions, attractive to some, revolting to others. Perhaps one could even say that for poets it quickly became the symbol of all sexual passions, which become more violent the more they are restrained, punished, and concealed. The fact is, belonging to two enemy clans, as Romeo and Juliet do, is rarely felt to be an obstacle in our culture; in addition, the commonplace of adultery has lost much of its glamour as the result of the ease of divorce; the love between two people of the same sex has at least partly emerged from secrecy. Only incest remains inadmissible and practically impossible to prove even when we strongly suspect it. It is against the steepest cliffs that the wave breaks with the greatest crash. (“Postface,” TLD)

It seems from this passage, then, that the author merely sought to exploit aesthetically the drama and intensity inherent in the theme of incest. Placing herself in a long literary “tradition,” she further supports her choice of theme by citing other authors—from Elizabethan to modernist (Thomas Mann, Roger Martin du Gard)— who have made use of the same theme.5 Hence she certainly aims to set us right, lest we think there were any latent, subconscious motives involved in this thematic choice. Yourcenar’s rational disclaimers and “aestheticization” of the subject notwithstanding, the central theme of incest and the overwhelming presence throughout the text of “the

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OR, 931-41. Interestingly, Yourcenar does not mention the author of the Spanish Golden Age, Calderón, who wrote a play based on the Biblical incident of Amnon and his sister Thamar. This is precisely the Biblical story to which Miguel refers in his desperate attempt to make his sister understand his feelings. See Didier Souiller, La littérature baroque en Europe (Paris: PUF, 1988) 142.

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[baroque] glorified and mutilated body”6—the body, that is, either in exaltation or in decay7—suggest something either unspeakable, unnamable, or both. Simultaneously, antithetical forces are at work in the novella that prevent us from being altogether repulsed or offended by these themes, as we might have expected. What are the two poles of this tension? And is it possible that Marguerite Yourcenar was attracted by these quintessentially baroque themes as part of an ambitious project to position her text beyond the conventional, modernist subject, as a means of unsettling—albeit, paradoxically, within the “safe” confines of an apparently traditional narrative form—certain established hierarchies? The story of Anna, Soror... is as follows. It is toward the end of the sixteenth century (1595), the height of the Counter Reformation. Miguel and his sister Anna live in Naples, a city ruled by Spain and sharing close dynastic ties with it. The mother of Anna and Miguel, Valentine, is the last representative of a line of erudite Tuscan nobility; their father is Don Alvare, the Spanish governor of Naples. When the story begins, Anna is twenty, Miguel nineteen. The two children are very close to their mother and to each other. Valentine, steeped in Florentine neo-platonism, is quiet and kind, an ethereal embodiment of the late Italian Renaissance’s highest achievements; Don Alvare is by contrast a harsh, dark figure, an almost stereotypical persona of the Spanish Counter Reformation. Shortly after the story opens, while the two children and their mother spend late summer at Don Alvare’s country estate south of Naples, Miguel encounters on a solitary ride in the countryside a strange gypsy girl among ancient Greek ruins; it is she whose sybilline remarks strongly hint at his unnatural love for Anna. Anna, we shall soon learn, has the same feelings for her brother, although they are more repressed. During a sojourn at their country estate, Valentine succumbs to malaria and dies. In a hellish journey, Anna and Miguel accompany her corpse back to Naples for burial even as it decomposes in the stifling summer heat. The tension and anguish both children feel, in each other’s company or alone, mount as the

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Saúl Yurkievich, “Baroque Fusions and Effusions (The Tumultuous Perception of the Emotions),” trans. Pedro Cuperman and Irene Vilare, Point of Contact 3.3 (April 1993): 110-13. 7 For a pertinent analysis of death’s baroque face in Anna, Soror…, see Course, “Le temps ou la mort en mouvement: Etude d’une obsession baroque dans Anna, Soror...,” Les Visages de la mort dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque, 114-22.

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weeks and months pass. They consummate their passion on Good Friday.8 Miguel, seeking to end his life as quickly as possible to atone for his sin, joins the crew of a ship of mercenaries hired to fight pirates. A few months later he dies in a skirmish, and his body is returned to Naples for burial. Before having his remains interred under a tombstone in a Neapolitan church dedicated by Anna to Miguel’s memory, she has his coffin opened and views her brother’s decaying corpse. Shortly thereafter, she and her disgraced and exiled father depart Naples for the Spanish court in Flanders. There, she is given a choice by the Infanta of making a loveless, political marriage to an impoverished, unremarkable French nobleman or of living out the rest of her life in a convent. She chooses the former, apparently to keep her passion for her brother untainted by her only other emotional attachment: Christ. After becoming a widow, she spends her final years quietly in a convent, presumably taking her undiminished passion for Miguel to the grave intact. Don Alvare, we are told, renounces all worldly goods and ambition after Anna’s marriage and returns surreptitiously to Naples, where he enters a monastery to atone for his sins. The novella’s spatio-temporal setting lends itself quite naturally to themes of death and even incest, as well as the entire attendant, disturbing echoes of the abject and transgression which they evoke. The baroque was an age of excess, extremes, and hypertrophic awareness of death, decay, and the passage of time. Brother-sister incest was a theme that the Spanish Golden Age author Calderón explored, as did Elizabethan playwright John Ford.9 Incest was for the baroque subject a tragic “dédoublement de la personalité, lorsque le désir s’impose, au mépris de toute autre consideration. . . .” (“splitting of the personality, when desire takes over and scorns any other consideration”).10 In an age, furthermore, when Prometheus, Don Juan, and Faust were emblematic literary figures—representing impossible revolt and scorn of social conventions—incest seems almost an inevitable expression of a certain Zeitgeist, as much as do death and decay (life’s brevity). Marguerite Yourcenar was thus able to treat highly transgressive themes by situating them within a historicized,

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Neither the parallel between the passion of Christ and their passion nor the Latin root of passion (patior, to suffer) can be ignored. 9 For Caldéron, see Souiller, La Littérature baroque en Europe, 142. Yourcenar mentions John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in her postface to Anna, Soror.... See OR, 932; and TLD, 230. 10 Souiller, La Littérature baroque en Europe, 142. My translation.

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spatio-temporal sanctuary that could deter closer examination of her motives—by critics, by readers, and, arguably, by herself. Yet in examining the author’s life, we must believe that Marguerite Yourcenar had a close emotional and intellectual affinity with the baroque, which she could feel free to express within the safe confines of her texts. As mentioned in the Introduction to this essay, she was from adolescence a lover of frontiers, of change, certainly an “ex-centric” (someone literally outside of the circle, whatever it might be) who never felt the compulsion to join any movements or causes, whether political or artistic. She lived for more than a decade, roughly spanning the 1930s, a vagabond existence, willingly if not willfully exploring the margins and the extraneous, experimenting with excess (according to the information biographers have gleaned from this somewhat mysterious phase of her life) while never completely relinquishing the privileges and the conventions of her class or losing control—to which her “classical” or “humanist” literary reputation and training bear witness. Thus, she inhabited a precarious, imperiously undefined entre-deux that in fact gives the body of her work—from the earliest pre-World War II texts to her last essays in the late 1980s—its heterogeneous character. That entre-deux doubtless influenced the tension we sense in Anna, Soror... The baroque, as mentioned, connotes excess and revolt as well loss of control, chaos, and “excentricity”—characteristics which, if acted upon, spell social ostracism and personal tragedy. Yet, these qualities can be replicated and fantasized safely in literature. And Anna, Soror..., dating back to Yourcenar’s earliest ideas and fantasies, supposes precisely by its themes of incest and its obsession with death a strong impulse to fantasize about social revolt, extravagant passion, and complete autonomy which would be in keeping both with the baroque’s and the author’s worldview. The brother-sister incest around which the narrative revolves is additionally an immensely strong signifier whose referents reach deep into psychoanalytic and socio- anthropological theories, as well as into theories on the archetype, of the twentieth century. Freud, of course, reminds us in his famous essay Totem and Taboo that the taboo against incest is one of the strongest and earliest prohibitions exhibited in primitive cultures.11 The repression of infantile incestuous longings for

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“The Horror of Incest,” in the essay Totem and Taboo in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans./ed. James Strachey in

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the mother and the sister—although the latter prohibition is not as privileged in Freud’s writings as the former—would of course become the keystone of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex. In Totem and Taboo, Freud pays homage to Otto Rank, one of his disciples whose study on the theme of incest purported to demonstrate the overwhelming presence of (and victory over) the Oedipal complex in art and literature: Otto Rank [has] brought more and more evidence to show the extent to which the interest of creative writers centers round the theme of incest and how the same theme, in countless variations and distortions, provides the subject-matter of poetry. We are driven to believe that this rejection is principally a product of the distaste which human beings feel for their early incestuous wishes, now overtaken by repression. It is therefore of no small importance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes, which are later destined to become unconscious, are still regarded by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe measures of defence must be enforced.12 Regardless of what she thought or knew about Freud, Rank, and early anthropologists when she first conceived of and wrote Anna, Soror..., the Marguerite Yourcenar of the late 1920s and early 1930s, steeped in classical literature and myth, must have been aware, as was the much older Yourcenar of 1982 (cf. the quotation supra), of the polysemous and transgressive power of her theme. She was clearly drawn to the story: it was one of the few episodes she conserved from Remous, her youthful and ambitious “roman-océan,” as she wryly called it later. At the same time, it was daring, and risked exposing the young author to the public gaze/imagination and perhaps to herself, in dark, frightening ways. To better try to grasp Yourcenar’s strategy and intentions, let us first turn to the conception and evolution of Anna, Soror... Written in draft form as early as 1925, when Marguerite Yourcenar was still a novice author in her early twenties, and

__________________ collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. XIII (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953) 1-17. 12 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 17.

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conceived even a few years prior to that date,13 Anna, Soror... was published for the first time in 193314 under the title of D’après Gréco as part of a collection of three novellas entitled La Mort conduit l’attelage hereafter simply La Mort). In her preface to La Mort, the thirty-year-old Yourcenar expresses somewhat obliquely a certain discontent with the times in which she lives: “Il est des siècles de fièvre, des époques où l’homme a rêvé davantage, cherché plus loin, et davantage tenté . . . où la passion . . . dispose de plus d’occasions d’oser” (“There are feverish centuries, eras when man dreamed, reached for more, tried more...when passion had more chances to be daring”) (“Préface,” MCA). As if in confirmation of this judgment, she published only one year later Denier du rêve, a novel set in contemporary fascist Rome (1933), whose ironic gaze excoriates not only Mussolini and his political machinery, but also the banality of human beings whose capacity for mediocrity and self-deception seems enormous.15 Unlike the characters of Denier du rêve—Yourcenar’s contemporaries—the protagonists of La Mort’s three novellas either critique or rebel malgré eux against the times in which they live (that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.) In short, they transgress in thought and deed.16 The title of the trilogy deserves our attention. As readers learn only on the last page of La Mort conduit l’attelage, the singularly macabre title—one is reminded of the fourteenth-century Totentanz— refers to a scene in the last novella, D’après Rembrandt. A troupe of actors in a coach leaving the town of Leyden, Netherlands, early one morning are dressed in stage costumes to attract the attention of passers-by as they ride to the next town; a cold rain is falling, and the actor who plays the Grim Reaper in the troupe’s repertory has been

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“Je pourrais dire que tous mes livres ont été conçus avant l’âge de vingt ans, bien qu’il ait fallu trente ou quarante de plus pour les écrire” (“I might say that all of my books were conceived before the age of twenty, although I had to be thirty or forty years older to write them”). My translation. Shusha Guppy, “Une Interview de Marguerite Yourcenar,” in Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987), ed. Maurice Delcroix (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 380. 14 1933 is the publication date printed in La Mort conduit l’attelage, although Yourcenar states the year was 1935. 15 I shall examine Denier du rêve and the relationship between fascism and the baroque in Chapter 2. 16 Zénon, the hero of D’après Dürer, will become the hero of L’Œuvre au Noir (1968); Nathanaël and his son Lazare of D’après Rembrandt will become the heroes of Un homme obscur and Une belle matinée, respectively (1982).

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elected to drive the coach, given the relative warmth and impermeability of his voluminous costume... This scene reminds us forcefully, of course, of two of the baroque age’s commonplaces: life as theater (theatrum mundi) and death as all-pervasive. Clearly, however, this choice of title has another purpose, since the reader is only made aware of the textual reference on the last page of La Mort. The author’s objective is to set the scene for the three novellas by creating an allegory in which Time is a team of horses that the coachman, Death, utterly controls, not only choosing the path taken but also the speed of the journey, that is, both time and space. We the passengers in the coach of Life are helpless. There is then from the outset of La Mort a sense of suffocating relentlessness and cruelty. This trilogy is conceived as an allegory of death, and the youthful Yourcenar wants us to know it. In startling contrast to the collection’s title, therefore, are the titles of the three novellas it comprises: D’après Gréco, D’après Dürer, and D’après Rembrandt. Each title of the collection situates its text within a particular aesthetic, a particular time, and a particular geography. But more importantly, each is an affirmation of life and art, a literary homage to the creative genius of three larger-than-life painters. Suddenly, Eros confronts Thanatos in a struggle for ascendancy or, perhaps, in a bid for a fragile detente between aesthetic immortality and inexorable dissolution, between self-preservation and violent selfaggression. It is in D’Après Gréco, the most “finished” and clearly the most powerful of these three early novellas, that the tension between art and life (death) plays itself out in an extreme fashion. And, as we have already observed, the story also embodies the tension between Eros and Thanatos by its obsessive representation of the ecstatic body or the rotting corpse. In a self-conscious disavowal of her earlier, “painterly” titles, Marguerite Yourcenar reframed D’après Gréco much later in her career (1981-1982), giving it both a new title, Anna, Soror... and a new place in another trilogy of novellas: Comme l’eau qui coule. Instead of titles “qui sentent le musée” (“with the scent of museums”), Yourcenar writes, the title Comme l’eau qui coule suggests rather something of the “torrent, tantôt boueux et tantôt limpide, qu’est la vie” (CEC 242) (“that of the sometimes muddy, sometimes clear, stream or rushing river which is life”) (TLD 228). The increasing influence on the author of oriental beliefs, Buddhism in particular, is also quite apparent in this later title, which reflects almost fifty years after La Mort serenity acquired in the interim when confronting all facets of human existence,

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including the supposed transgressive, deadly ones. Thus, the novella once more takes its place, this time in a self-affirming, universal river of continuous flux and heterogeneity, in which, as the title suggests, human contingencies, incest included, lose their horror. In a curious reversal, the novella’s new title, rather than the collection’s title, bears the mark of death: Anna, Soror... is part of the engraving on the tombstone that the sister has erected to the memory of her dead brother. Eros, the life force expressed in the trilogy’s title, again meets Thanatos, but in a natural alliance or complementarity. And, as we shall later see, the relatively minor changes to the novella bear witness to a simultaneous evolution in the author’s perspective and conception of life that actually integrate the monstrous and the transgressive, that is, the abject. Marguerite Yourcenar’s “painterly” titles in La Mort forcefully impose on the reader the author’s concept of writing as first and foremost an aesthetic exercise. She even refers to the three novellas in her brief preface to La Mort as “esquisses” (“sketches”) whereby, like a “chercheur” (“historian”), she hopes to “[m]ettre sur les visages, non seulement un nom, mais une vie” (“put not only a name, but a life, to the faces”) (“Préface,” MCA). She not only seeks to capture in words the mood or tone of El Greco and Caravaggio; she also succeeds, as we shall see, in painting with words still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. In perhaps no other fictional work by Yourcenar is there such a transparent utilization and sheer concentration of different painterly genres. I would argue that this is because the stakes are very high in D’après Gréco aka Anna, Soror... The verbal homage to painters and painting is an extreme aestheticization of what is otherwise too transgressive or too painful to formulate. Yourcenar writes that the original title of Anna, Soror..., D’après Gréco, captured the “faire convulsif et tremblé” (OR 931-32) (“nervous, agitated style”) (TLD 229) of El Greco’s paintings and in its “violence” the sensuality of Caravaggio’s paintings. This is an interesting comment, for while they are roughly contemporary, the styles of the two artists are very different: one is mannerist, the other baroque. According to art historians, mannerism is a pre-baroque, transitional stage between Renaissance classicism and the baroque. El Greco is a considered mannerist painter because of his unique personal vision, his horror vacui, and his use of unnatural, distorted forms and strange color groupings. Caravaggio, by contrast, is considered an early baroque painter, foregoing the search for “effect” or virtuosic

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complexity sought by mannerist painters. He introduced naturalistic painting, using lower-class models and the technique of chiaroscuro (the play between light and dark), which created great dramatic and emotional effect.17 Thus we would expect to find in the text of Anna, Soror... evidence both of mannerist qualities—distortion, a horror of the void, and virtuosic artifice—as well as a more “natural” style whose ambiguous shades of light and shadow (which we might equate with good and evil in the case of Anna, Soror...) are not sharply delineated. In any case, both artists depart from classical precepts. Classical syntax in French poetry of the classical age has been described as follows: Dans une fable de La Fontaine, une scène, un dialogue, une argumentation, une description se dessinent linéairement. . . . Cette “musique” n’est pas celle qu’on peut être tenté d’assimiler à un art “pictural”; elle est musique de clavecin ou de piano sans pédale. Aucun glissando. Ce n’est pas un dynamisme émotionnel qui promeut le discours. Le détail vaut par lui-même, tout en occupant dans l’ensemble une place très déterminée. In a fable by La Fontaine, a scene, a dialogue, an argument, a description are drawn linearly. . . . This “music” is not one that we would be tempted to associate with a “pictorial” art; this is piano or harpsichord music with no pedals, no glissando. No emotional dynamic propels the discourse. The detail is sufficient by itself, occupying within the whole a very specific place.18 Paradoxically, Marguerite Yourcenar’s “neoclassical” text forcefully breaks classical rules, suspending the linear, narrative flow to indulge in the kind of emotionally charged, “painterly” prose that evokes the original title of the novella (D’après Gréco) and flaunting a mannerist virtuosity. The three passages that follow are illustrative of the

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“El Greco,” “Caravaggio” (Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2002). Marcel Raymond, Baroque & renaissance poétique (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1955) 34. My translation. 18

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subversion of the neoclassical text. Let us examine the first passage, a verbal transcription of a Flemish still life painting. la grande salle envahie par la surabondance de la ferme. Des tas de raisins déjà confits dans leur propre suc engluaient le carrelage à la moresque, fréquenté des mouches; des bottes d’oignons pendaient aux voûtes; la farine coulant des sacs s’insinuait partout avec la poussière; on était saisi à la gorge par l’odeur du fromage de buffle. (OR 884) it was infiltrated by the surplus produce of the farm. Piles of grapes already sticky with their own juice and alive with flies smeared the Moorish tiles on the floor; bunches of onions hung from the rafters; flour oozing from sacks was mixed with the omnipresent dust; the pungent odor of strong cheese caught in one’s throat. (AS 159)19 This abundant, late summer harvest conveys to our senses an organic world run amok, poised on the edge of the abyss of formless decay. Words paint a scene of excess and dissolution. The syntax follows suit, broken by four stops, breathless, taxinomic. There is no “center,” but rather effects accumulating, piling upon one another. This scene, which one can visualize, smell, and touch through the juxtaposition of sonorities (“suc . . . engluaient . . . mouches . . . voûtes . . . coulant . . . s’insinuait . . . poussière . . . l’odeur”) catches the reader unawares, inserted as it is in the middle of the relatively sober, limpid prose which characterizes much of the novella. We might well have expected the author to stop the text after “par la surabondance de la ferme.” Instead, to our surprise we skirt putrefaction and death, but within the safety of aesthetic boundaries: a genre of painting. The dissolution and chaos represented by this overabundant harvest produces a reaction of nausea, because it constitutes precisely “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. . . .”20 The passage is an allusion to the truth about the emotions of Miguel and Anna, and these emotions in

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My emphasis. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

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fact border on the abject, in the form of incestuous feelings. Marguerite Yourcenar however, has aestheticized them. “Writing,” Kristeva notes, “implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacement of verbal play.”21 The “displacement” in this instance is the author’s sure artistic intuition and her connectedness to the physical senses: we can almost visualize the high gloss on the skin of a grape, the translucence of a fly’s wing, just as we can also sense the nausea of smelling a strong cheese in the intense southern Italian heat. The true cause of the characters’ nausea is thus turned aside. Let us look at a second passage, in which the author interrupts the narrative flow to evoke a landscape from hell, a bleak metaphor of total (spiritual and physical) abjection, which the vocabulary pointedly reinforces: [Miguel] se lançait à l’aventure très loin dans les terres basses. Le sol s’étendait noir et nu; des buffle immobiles, couchés par masses sombres, semblaient dans l’éloignement des blocs de rochers dévalés des montagnes; des monticules volcaniques bossuaient la lande; le grand vent passait toujours. (OR 886) Miguel rode, with no predetermined destination, far off into the low-lying countryside. The earth stretched before him black and naked; motionless oxen, lying in dark masses, seemed from a distance like clumps of rock fallen off the mountains; volcanic hummocks rose out of the heath; a strong wind blew ceaselessly. (AS 161)22 In this vividly depicted landscape, Miguel is a “stray,” “on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, [but] it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance.”23 The narrator makes us feel the masochistic pleasure inherent in discovering parallels between a bleak, ugly terrain and one’s inner “terrain.” If ever a physical landscape could embody the “excluded ground” of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, it is this one:

__________________ 21

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16. My emphasis. 23 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 22

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“black,” “naked,” “motionless,” “fallen”: these are surcharged signifiers that approach the frontiers of dissolution and death, a state of pure abjection. Yet, both the painterly evocation of this stark, southern Italian terrain and the baroque metaphorical component (the landscape representing Miguel’s soul) divert our attention to some extent from the weight of the signifiers, which in no uncertain terms express the abject. The baroque aesthetic thus enables the abject to enter the scene while it contains and disables it. Finally, let us consider the delicately wrought portrait in which the author compares Valentine, the mother of Anna and Miguel, to her collection of sardonyx intaglios: “tout enveloppée de l’or oblique du crépuscule, Valentine elle-même semblait diaphane comme ses gemmes” (OR 883) (“enveloped in the slanting gold of the sunset, Valentina seemed herself as diaphanous as those gems”) (AS 158).24 Yourcenar sketches an exquisite, even sublime, portrait of Valentine. Her physical form preserved for posterity like a profile carved into a precious mineral, Valentine exerts an almost bloodless, otherworldly charm. We observe Valentine through her children’s eyes: we have no way of knowing which emotions, other than admiration for her beauty, might be stirred in Anna and Miguel at this moment. Valentine, in any event, is a strangely detached, ambiguous figure. She is insubstantial, almost nonexistent. The narrator later tells us, for example, upon her “death without suffering”: “la vie de Valentine n’avait été qu’un long glissement vers le silence; elle s’abandonnait sans lutter . . . aucun étonnement ne vint se mêler à leur tristesse. Donna Valentine était de celles qu’on s’étonne de voir exister” (OR 894) (“Valentina’s life had been one long drifting into silence; she surrendered without a struggle. There was no surprise mingled with their sadness. Donna Valentina had been the sort of person one was surprised to see existing”) (AS 170). There is then something: something about Valentine and something in this passage that engenders doubt and hesitation, as well as wonderment and a vague, undefined fear. It contains, in short, something of the Freudian uncanny:25 a premonition of death and a

__________________ 24

My emphasis. My emphasis. The uncanny is related to the abject but is weaker, producing feelings of uneasiness of the “repressed that manifests itself anew.” Powers of Horror, 5. Christine Buci-Glucksmann has noted that Freud’s definition of the uncanny is too limiting: “demonological [and] traced back to a primal terror . . . to the truly dizzying abyss which is the mother’s womb/genitals.” She argues we should follow Lacan’s suggestions of “a more female side in which the uncanny [l’étrange] merges with the angelic [l’être-ange].” It is a “beauty coming from the abyss.” This “other” uncanny is 25

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sense of absence. Once again, we can see that certain signifiers— ”crepuscule,” “diaphane”—connote the threat of termination and disappearance. Be it still life, landscape, or portrait: by employing these artistic genres, the narrator can confront the abject or the uncanny “in the open” and then quickly immobilize it. Furthermore, framed by a classical style and posing as historically delimited baroque topoi, death and incest cease to appear abject. This is only one part of the strategy based on the baroque aesthetic, we shall see, that prevents us from identifying Anna, Soror... as a text of abjection. Marguerite Yourcenar in other instances employs neoclassical clarity and restraint antithetically in order to draw attention to obscure, disturbing emotions. Take the following litote, in which Miguel reproaches himself for being hard and distant with his sister Anna: “Elle lui fit pitié. Il eut honte de lui-même. Il s’en voulut de ne pas assez l’aimer. Ils reprirent leur vie d’autrefois” (OR 898) (“He pitied her. He was ashamed of himself. He reproached himself for not loving her enough”) (AS 175). Miguel “reasons” with himself in short, clipped sentences that appear logical but mask inner turmoil, irrationality, and dysphoria. Just as the classical ideal represents order, limits, and transparency, Miguel in this passage is making a desperate attempt through language to adhere to the “Prohibition and Law . . . necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law.”26 As the clipped, neoclassical style in the above passage serves to expose Miguel’s struggle with his dark emotions (that is, with the abject), the dominant neoclassical distance and perspective— established by means of third-person, indirect discourse and descriptive narrative—are on occasion breached by the unexpected insertion of a scene employing direct discourse (of some length, more than just one or two lines). Let us examine the scene in which Miguel encounters for the first time a gypsy snake charmer (“siffleuse de serpents”) in the

__________________ present, she explains, in the writing of Baudelaire, for whom “Beauty remains enigmatic and silent, like ‘a misunderstood sphinx’.” There are interesting parallels between the Baudelairian sphinx with “marble eyes” and the “enigmatic and silent” Valentine carved out of sardonyx. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, 43 and 165-66. For Freud’s complete essay on the uncanny, see Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans./ed. James Strachey, vol. XVII (1917-1919) (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955 [1964]) 217-56. 26 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16.

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ruins of an ancient Greek temple—Paestum in fact. Not only does the author break the flow of indirect discourse with this scene; she also distances herself from certain neoclassical stereotypes by virtue of her ambivalent portrayal of classical antiquity. While the ruins of Paestum evoke an image of “pure” Greek classicism for most of us, Yourcenar distorts that image or, perhaps to be more accurate, portrays the truth about a transgressive, passionate, and pagan antiquity that neoclassicism generally refuses to acknowledge. As Miguel approaches the ruins, tired after his long ride, he recognizes them as “une de ces villes où avaient vécu les sages et les poètes dont leur parlait donna Valentine; ces gens avaient vécu sans l’angoisse de l’enfer béant sous les pas. . . ” (OR 886) (“one of those cities where the philosophers and poets Donna Valentina spoke of had lived; those people had existed without the agony of hell yawning beneath their feet . . .”) (AS 161). The gypsy, as ambiguous in her own way as Valentine (Is she a dream or real? Is she pagan or Christian? Is she good or evil?), serves as a metaphor of Miguel’s inner turmoil, of the entre-deux in which he is trapped. Their exchange is intense, and the gypsy reveals in sybilline utterances uncomfortable truths about the corruptibility of human nature: “Ma soeur”, dit-il, troublé malgré lui par cette rencontre dans la solitude, “comment s’appelle cet endroit? –Je n’ai pas de frère, dit la fille. Il y a beaucoup de noms qu’il est meilleur de ne pas savoir. Ce lieu est mauvais. –Tu y sembles à l’aise. –Je suis chez mon peuple.” . . . Une étroite tête triangulaire jaillit de la fissure. Don Miguel écrasa la vipère sous sa botte. “Dieu me pardonne, dit-il. Serais-tu sorcière? –Mon père était siffleur de reptiles, dit la fille, Pour vous servir. Et il gagnait gros. Car les vipères, monseigneur, ça rampe partout, sans compter celles qu’on a au coeur.” Alors seulement, Miguel crut s’apercevoir que le silence était plein de frémissements, de froissements, de coulées; toutes sortes de bêtes à poison rampaient dans l’herbe. [. . .] Et d’innombrables yeux jaunes comme ceux de la fille étoilaient la terre.

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Baroque Fictions Don Miguel voulut faire un pas en arrière, et n’osa. “Allez, monseigneur, dit la fille. Et rappelezvous qu’il y a des serpents ailleurs qu’ici.” (OR 887) “Sister,” he said, troubled in spite of himself by this chance meeting in that lonely spot, “what is the name of this place?” “I have no brother,” the girl said. “There are many names it is better not to know. This place is evil.” “Yet you seem at ease here.” “I am among my people here.” . . . A narrow, triangular head emerged from the fissure. Don Miguel crushed the viper with his boot. “God forgive me!” He exclaimed. “Are you a witch?” “My father was a snake charmer,” the girl replied. “At your service. And he made a lot of money. Because vipers, sir, they’re everywhere, not counting those in the heart.” Only then did Miguel think he noticed that the silence was replete with quiverings, rustlings, slitherings; all sorts of poisonous creatures were creeping through the grass. [. . .] Innumerable eyes, yellow like the girl’s, formed stars on the ground. Don Miguel wanted to step back but didn’t dare. “Go away, my lord,” said the girl. “And remember that elsewhere there are serpents too.” (AS 162-63)

When confronted with this liberated, ambiguous being or vision, who apparently coexists comfortably with what is traditionally considered evil and dangerous (“I am among my people here”), Miguel experiences intense fear, but he is at the same time mesmerized. In this encounter, the three symbolic pillars necessary to ward off the abject— ”Religion, Morality, Law”—crumble and fall. The place of the encounter flourished in some vague, exceedingly distant past in which, we are led to surmise, there might have been another morality, another law, another religion, less exclusionary: an Edenic yet ambiguous age that neither condoned nor punished, neither rejected nor accepted, an

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age of thought and art that permitted the abject, perhaps found ways to justify it. It is that space of modern literature—one, I believe, that Marguerite Yourcenar was certainly striving to create for herself—in which occurs “a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality an Immorality.”27 In no manner does the author condemn her protagonists, Anna and Miguel. If anything, quite the opposite is true, as she tells us in the “Postface”: “J’ai goûté pour la première fois avec Anna, soror… le suprême privilège du romancier, celui de se perdre tout entier dans ses personnages, ou de se laisser posséder par eux” (OR 936) (“With Anna, Soror... I tasted for the first time the ultimate privilege of the novelist, that of losing himself completely in his characters, or of letting himself be possessed by them”) (AS 236). These rather diverse examples of rupture or suspension all occur at moments in the text when the narrator seems to want to contrast what is “natural” and what is “unnatural.” They subvert not only the text’s form, but also normative ethical and societal models: for what seems “unnatural” to the character—causing nausea and fear—is in fact “natural,” whereas the unhappy existences they are forced to lead by the society of that age are monstrous and “unnatural,” the result of stifling political and religious regimes, ideological systems. These signs of rupture, these symptoms of a “contaminated” classicism, seem to coincide with the exposure of the “truth”: whether sic transit Gloria, dissolution, and death (for example, the rotting harvest in the still life), or human nature’s hypocrisy, evil, and indifference to the suffering of others. While we normally think of a classical text as representing the truth, the neobaroque ruptures in the neoclassical text of Anna, Soror... paradoxically permit its revelation. Neoclassicism in this text thus constitutes more than simply a virtuosic deployment of the techniques of the récit à la française. It is a strategy to expose failure: the inherent failure of any purportedly “complete,” “transparent,” and hierarchically ordered system to decode life, which includes the non-normative, the chaotic . . . the abject. And in the process, any pretension of neoclassicism to ultimate truth is condemned. As we have already observed, the title La Mort conduit l’attelage is clearly an allegory, and we may assume that the three novellas follow suit. In the case of D’Après Gréco aka Anna, Soror..., the very act of incest that Marguerite Yourcenar chose to portray

__________________ 27

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 16.

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constitutes, together with killing others (as Freud and others remind us), one of the most archaic of societal prohibitions, suggesting a universality that lends itself to allegory. We must also consider the baroque context of the story: Yourcenar chose the apogee of the baroque in which to stage her novella; death and incest are imminently baroque themes, and the conceits that haunt the text (masks, water, mirrors, labyrinths, and so on) are likewise emblematic of the baroque. Finally, allegory, which literally is defined as “to speak so as to imply something other,” provides Yourcenar a vehicle by which to advise us without seeming to do so. By means of the particular allegory that Anna, Soror... embodies, Marguerite Yourcenar can revolt: she can expose the archaic prohibition of abjection—a potentially dangerous move on her part—while simultaneously glorifying and exonerating it. This allegory is the myth of the androgyna.28 It is no accident, I believe, that Yourcenar mentions early in the novella Plato’s Symposium, the source of the androgyna myth as it was later used by literature (OR 882-83 and AS 157). Furthermore, not only does she frequently point to the similarities between Miguel and Anna: they are approximately the same age, share similar physical traits, and have the same education. She also writes that they are in each other’s company much of the time, quite often physically facing each other: in the coach to Naples, in their mother’s room, or later in the fortress after their mother’s death. Each is, literally and figuratively, the other’s double, the mirror image, the missing half. In her postface Marguerite Yourcenar even recalls her own androgynous travestissement through her creations:

__________________ 28

Maria-José Vasquez de Parga interprets the text of Anna, Soror… in its entirety as an illustration of the complete alchemical process, from the black through the red phases. Following Fulcanelli’s description of the alchemical union, Parga writes, “Valentine serait la matière première, le mercure, la Vierge. Don Alvare serait le soufre, Saturne, l’Adam, le Vieillard. Des deux unions successives de l’union de Valentine et Don Alvare, du soufre et du mercure, naissent Anna et Miguel, les jumeaux, deux êtres égaux mais de sexe different: l’androgyne. De l’union de l’androgyne naît la Pierre Philosophale, qui signifie la resurrection après une période de noiceur, de mort” (“Valentine would be primary matter, mercury, the Virgin. Don Alvare would be sulfur, Saturn, Adam, the Old Man. From the two successive unions of the union of Valentine and Don Alvare, of sulfur and mercury, Anna and Miguel, the twins, are born, two equal beings but of different sexes: the androgyna. From the union of the androgyna the Philosopher’s Stone is born, which signifies resurrection after a time of blackness, of death”). See “Mort alchimique: Anna, Soror.. à la lumière de Fulcanelli,” Le Visage de la Mort dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque international tenu à l’Université du Minnesota, 123-33.

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j’ai vécu sans cesse à l’intérieur de ces deux corps et de ces deux âmes, me glissant d’Anna en Miguel et de Miguel en Anna, avec cette indifférence au sexe qui est, je crois, celle de tous les créateurs en presence de leur créatures . . .(OR 936). I lived uninterruptedly within those two bodies and those two souls, slipping from Anna into Miguel and from Miguel into Anna with that indifference to sex which is, I believe, that of all creators in the presence of their creations. . . (AS 236-37). There could hardly be a more direct allusion to the Androgyna than this, the author’s own. To better grasp the exonerating power of this allegory, let us now recall Aristophanes’s story of the Androgyna, as he tells it in the Symposium. Ancestor of the human race, the Androgyna was a spheroid, completely self-sufficient creature consisting of two harmonious halves, joined face to face: some were male/female, others male/male and female/female. Zeus found the creatures too arrogant because of their perfect self-sufficiency and with his thunderbolt rent them asunder. The incomplete halves became humans as they are today. After this punishment for hubris, each half (that is, each human being) was obliged to seek his/her missing half.29 The neoplatonists interpreted this myth in the Christian sense of man’s post-lapsarian fragmentation and quest for wholeness and reunification with God. The notion that through perfect love, that is, through reunification with the missing half, a human being could at least partially transcend his/her low estate and come closer to the divinity (God, the One, the All, and so forth) was also popularized in Renaissance literature. The Androgyna for C. G. Jung is a significant symbol of the quest for modern subjectivity. In his work on archetypes and the collective unconscious Jung explored the history of alchemy and its symbols. He saw in the alchemists’ search for the mystical, spherical philosophers’ stone the quest for what he called the self, that is, the whole being. This wholeness—the desire and the quest of every human being—was achieved through a process he called individuation, or

__________________ 29

Plato, Symposium in Warmington, Eric H., and Philip G. Rouse, eds. Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1956) 69-117.

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self-realization. The alchemical process, whose union of (male) sulfur and (female) mercury, if successful, was supposed to result in the creation of gold—the philosophers’ stone—was explained in allegorical terms as the incestuous union (l’inceste philosophal) of the Sun and the Moon, that is, of Apollo and Diana, in Greek mythology brother and sister. They of course represented the joining of male spirit and female material, the yin and yang of Chinese Tai Chi. In Jungian terms, they were the animus (masculine spirit) and the anima (female soul). The product of this union was the alchemical hermaphrodite or Androgyna, which represented wholeness through the successful joining of opposites (coniunctio oppositorum) in a sacred union (hieros gamos). Later, as Jung notes, the alchemical Androgyna was sometimes equated with Christ.30 That Marguerite Yourcenar was already quite familiar with alchemy when she published the trilogy La Mort conduit l’attelage can hardly be doubted. As we can recall, D’après Dürer, one of the other two novellas, later became L’Oeuvre au Noir, whose protagonist Zénon is an alchemist, physician, and philosopher. Miguel and Anna’s incestuous passion, seen in the light of the Androgyna myth and the metaphysical and psychological meanings attached to its symbolical traditions, ceases completely to be an expression of abjection. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s studies of the nineteenth century and German Baroque theatre, Willem van Reijen writes: “The allegory articulates the tension between construction and destruction, hope and sorrow, dream and waking, reality and fiction.”31 The allegory of Anna, Soror... likewise postulates tension: that between what is supposed “unnatural,” abject, and prohibited, and what is supposed “natural,” expressed in the novella as cruelty, intolerance, and suppressed drives. The passion of Miguel and Anna symbolizes the paradoxes that deconstruct moral certitude, the “fundamental doubts regarding the reliability of human knowledge and the success of our actions,”32 the dilemma of the human condition. There are no answers

__________________ 30

Carl Gustav Jung, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy” and excerpt from Psychology and Religion, in C. G. Jung, The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violet S. de Laszlo (New York: Random House, Inc., 1959) 433-68, 469-531. For more on the allegorical erotic of alchemy, see Elie-Charles Flamand, Erotique de l’alchimie (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1970). 31 Willem van Reijen, “The Return of Baroque in Postmodernity,” Theory Culture & Society 9.4 (November 1992): 3. 32 Ibid., 1.

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to be found in “typifying society”:33 in a mystical (and popular) baroque antithesis, for example, Don Alvare, a man of wealth and worldly power, declares that “Tout est rien.” Miguel and Anna transgress the narrow strictures of an intolerant place and time that literally “broke” the spirit of those who lived by its rules. These fragmented subjects were relegated to rigid roles—statesman, soldier, priest, in the case of men; nun, whore, or submissive spouse, in the case of women—which would never permit them to be whole. Anna and Miguel, thanks to the accident or the destiny of their passion, escape this societal fragmentation. Yet, if “totalizing systems” and classical hierarchies do not provide the answers, neither does rebellion or “ex-centricity”: Miguel and Anna suffer atrociously; they are “punished” after their incestuous act; and suicide (literal in Miguel’s case, figurative in Anna’s) seems to be the only solution. This is in keeping with Marguerite Yourcenar’s “realism,” or what many of her critics called “pessimism.” Like the baroque subject, with whom she had such a strong affinity, she viewed life as essentially tragic, absurd, and chaotic. The increasing comfort she took in oriental philosophies as time passed attests to this saturnine Weltanschaung. That there can be no final, categorical answer and that right and wrong are relative terms is Marguerite Yourcenar’s own sense of “baroque reason,” to borrow Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s expression. 34 Ambivalence is humanity’s lot and natural element. Paraphrasing, for example, the baroque poets Timothée de Chillac and Pierre Mathieu,35 the narrator writes: “car personne ne sait encore si tout ne vit que pour mourir ou ne meurt que pour revivre” (OR 926) (“since no one yet knows whether everything lives only to die or dies only to live”) (AS 211). Even the dénouement of Anna, Soror... remains open to conjecture: Anna on her deathbed is heard to murmur, “Mi amado...” The nuns and priest(s), who know nothing of her transgression and have witnessed only her Christian devotion in the convent, believe Anna is speaking to God. The reader thinks he/she knows better until, unexpectedly and equivocally, the narrator concludes: “Ils pensèrent qu’elle parlait à Dieu. Elle parlait peut-être à

__________________ 33

Yurkievich, “Baroque Fusions,” 112. “baroque reason, with its theatricization of existence and its logic of ambivalence.” Baroque Reason, 39. 35 Course, “Le Temps ou la mort en mouvement,” Les Visages de la mort dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque, 118-19. 34

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Dieu” (OR 929) (“They thought she was speaking to God. Perhaps she was”) (AS 216). In view of the artistic references that gird this text, the final sentence could be a veiled reference to El Greco or Bernini’s famous statue of Saint Teresa of Avila in her mystical ecstasy—a mannerist finale to a mannerist novella. One thing appears clear: the baroque aesthetic, allegory in particular, permits the author enough “play” to deprive the reader of closure, an unequivocal ending. We are left with a provocative thought: there are apparently no untainted “situations”; all morality is tinged with ambiguity; and God or Christ, as we have seen in the allegory of the androgyna, may well be the product of Anna and Miguel’s “unholy” union. In terms of the author’s growing sense of life’s ambiguity and lack of order, it is also revealing to compare the changes that occurred between the versions of 1933 and 1981. In the “Postface” to Anna, Soror..., the ever-vigilant Marguerite Yourcenar notes two seemingly minor adjustments to the plot. First, Miguel’s dramatic decision to depart from Naples, made after consummating his passion for his sister, is delayed because there is no wind to set sail. Second, the widowed Anna toward the end of the novella has a passionless sexual liaison—a one-night stand, we would say today—with a stranger passing by her estate. Yourcenar notes in effect that such random events—the one, anticlimactic after the consummation of Anna’s and Miguel’s love, the other seemingly inconsistent with Anna’s preservation of her love for and her memory of Miguel—simply “happen” in life, where “tout flue comme l’eau qui coule” (OR 939) (“everything floats past like an every-flowing stream”) (TLD 242). On the one hand, these changes may evidence the author’s striving for greater verisimilitude, in the realist, neoclassical tradition. On the other hand, we might just as readily interpret these modifications as “ex-centric,” pulling at the edges of the tighter, more symmetrical form of the original novella, and as an acknowledgment of life’s contingency and chaos: a natural transition, perhaps, from a modern to a postmodern Zeitgeist.

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We have seen how abjection, through formal and thematic deployment of the baroque, is given droit de cité in this short work, its power and horror in essence nullified through the alchemical allegory of “inceste philosophal.” We have also seen a reordering of the Western, classicist hierarchy of values: through textual strategies, neoclassical order and transparency are shown to be at the least ineffective, at the most deceitful and hypocritical (even “language is no royal road to truth”36), while baroque disorder and transgression reveal truth. Toward the end of her life, Marguerite Yourcenar told a journalist: “je serais presque disposée à dire que tout est sacré, même les choses les plus déplorables sont sacrées à leur manière” (“I would almost be inclined to say that everything is sacred; even the most deplorable things are sacred in their fashion”).37 This remark, like so many by the author, equivocates (“serais,” “presque” “disposée”), yet the message is clear. And the author of Anna, Soror..., whose reputation as a neoclassical author should perhaps be reassessed, neither condemns nor condones Anna and Miguel’s passion, but rather employs it to sow seeds of doubt about the validity of our judgments, Western humanism, “history,” and the very existence of truth.

__________________ 36

A reference to Nietzsche. Van Reijen, “The Return of Baroque in Postmodernity,” 18. My translation. See “Rencontre avec Marguerite Yourcenar,” in Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987) (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 356. This interview took place from June 18-20, 1986, between the author and Francesca Sanvitale of the RAI (Italian Radio and Television). It aired on January 6, 1987.

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Chapter 2 Denier du rêve: Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices rien ne peut justifier complètement l’atrocité foncière de l’aventure humaine.1

In Anna, Soror... we observed how the plastic arts and the allegorical potential of ancient Greek myth served Marguerite Yourcenar as tools to approach safely the powerfully subversive theme of incest. These aesthetic devices and the novella’s neoclassical form and syntax provide the protective structures that enable the author simultaneously to lay bare and disable a signifier of vast transgressive potential, thereby satisfying a profound, personal compulsion to express and liberate the forces of disorder and heterogeneity. In Denier du rêve the setting, 1933 fascist Rome, provides Yourcenar the means to invoke once again, but within another aesthetic, an unacknowledged, regressive desire for chaos—for disease, death, and spiritual impoverishment. In fact, Yourcenar does not critique fascism as much as she exhibits some of its characteristics in a clash of dependencies that demands structure even as it seeks disorder. The fascist foil is an inspired choice, since fascism is inherently heterogeneous, embracing the contradictions between “masculine” and “feminine” and falsely resolving them by force (that is, by the persona of Il Duce). Fascism is conservative and revolutionary, technologically progressive and spiritually retrogressive, extolling manly (read “classical”) virtues but inevitably embracing “feminine” (read “mannerist” and “neobaroque”) characteristics: histrionics, primitive ritual, sadism, and the death drive that it so demonstrably rejects. According to one critic, it seeks to obfuscate this “unstable ideological core” through an “aesthetic overproduction” (signs, slogans, buildings, and so on) which manipulates the public by confusing and distracting it.2

__________________ 1

Letter to Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, Marguerite Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis et quelques autres, ed. Michèle Sarde and Joseph Brami (Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1995) 187. 2 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations. Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,” in Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover: UP of New England) 3.

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In Denier du rêve Yourcenar seeks to deflect attention from her obsession with and textual expression of regressive/transgressive desires by way of similar performative strategies. The first involves a virtuosic, politically conscious/politically correct dismantling of fascist, (neo)classical myths of wholeness, health, and harmony of the body politic through the “degenerate” or ethically questionable acts of the characters. This strategy in effect directs the reader toward a political or existential reading of the novel. As I shall endeavor to show, however, such a reading is hardly credible for a number of reasons. The second strategy suggests another type of “aesthetic overproduction” applied the same way and for the same purpose as the fascist variety: to stun and confound the reader with a dazzling barrage of baroque and mannerist tropes, rhetorical devices, and mythical metaphors. The entire novel is rather obviously an exaggerated, neobaroque tribute to the baroque age and ostensibly to Rome as well, the “cradle” of the baroque. In the process of deconstructing the caricature of classicism represented by fascism, the author is obliged to expose the fascist connection with the baroque in the guise of “degenerate” eroticism, disease, madness, suffering, and death. Invested in her baroque “blueprint,” she must apply her artistry to distort and aestheticize these traits, mixing the “precious” and the grotesque. Behind exquisite, heavily structured formal artifice, she may paradoxically (but freely) indulge in a repressed desire for vertiginous chaos while building a protective wall around the yawning abyss. Her characters, all commedia dell’arte abstractions to which she has added a token “substance” of a past life and what she calls the “grandeur” embodied in mythical figures (Prometheus, Medusa, Aphrodite, Gaia, Mercury, and so on),1 must nevertheless do her bidding, suffering or dying as she commands. Denier du rêve opens in Rome in the Year XI (1933) of Mussolini’s dictatorship, and links together for one day the lives of several people—native Romans, Italians, and foreigners of all classes (from a flower vendor and a street cleaner to a screen idol and a surgeon)—by the conceit of a ten-lira coin passed from one character to the next in a seemingly random fashion, usually in exchange for services

__________________ 1

Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts. Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey (Paris: Le Centurion, 1980) 81; and With Open Eyes. Conversations with Matthieu Galey, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980) 60.

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or commodities.2 The novel’s epigraph is a quotation from Montaigne that sets the tone of the novel: “C’est priser sa vie justement ce qu’elle est, de l’abandonner pour un songe” (“To abandon one’s life for a dream is to know its true worth”) (Essais, Book III, Chapter IV) (OR 167). As the coin passes from one person to the next, it becomes clear that each character “purchases” an illusion (love, health, eternal salvation, a return to an illusory utopia, a prolongation of life, and so on). The author writes early in the novel: “on achète du rêve; cette denrée impalpable se débite sous bien des formes” (“dreams can be bought; these intangible goods are sold in many forms”) (OR 169 and CNH 6). The nine chapters vary considerably in length and are intentionally unnumbered, perhaps to reinforce the sense of “drift” we are meant to detect. Each of them focuses on the character to which the coin is passed. The fifth and central chapter is the locus of the action upon which the loose plot of the novel turns: a failed attempt by one of the central characters, a female anti-fascist anarchist, to assassinate the dictator. Yourcenar published the original version of Denier du rêve in 1934 and the second, “definitive” version in 1959. Eleven years later, she published a three-act play, Rendre à César, also based on the definitive version of the novel. Clearly, therefore, the theme and the characters continued to be a preoccupation of the author during most of her career. The initial version was contemporary to the “action,” published just one year after 1933, the date of the story. This “contemporaneity” and its purportedly political motivation are the main reasons why many critics consider Denier du rêve an anomaly in Yourcenar’s fiction. Yet, as is often true in examining Yourcenar’s oeuvre, we must question these assumptions. In the first place, the rewritten, republished, “definitive” Denier du rêve of 1959 joined the ranks of her “historical novels,” partly because of Yourcenar’s “revisionist” revisions, so to speak, and partly because of the lapse of more than twenty-five years preceding its republication. This is the version familiar to the public, curious to read more works by the author of Mémoires d’Hadrien (1950).3

__________________ 2

While the novel’s French title is more allegorical (literally, “currency of dreams”), the English title, A Coin in Nine Hands, neatly accounts for the artifice upon which the entire novel turns. 3 The original version of Denier du rêve is difficult to find. It was not widely read when it was published, and its relative obscurity was no doubt one reason why Yourcenar felt confident republishing it as a “new” work, although the differences in the two versions are not as extreme as she would have us believe.

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Second, the hypothesis that the author was initially and primarily politically motivated (some critics have even called Denier du rêve a political allegory4) seems most unlikely. Part of the confusion, certainly, lies in the author’s own comments, for she in fact claims with some pride that she was one of the first authors of her generation to recognize and write about the “façade boursouflée du fascisme” (“the bloated façade of Fascism”) (OR 164 and CNH 173). In this regard, she also states rather sweepingly that French writers at the time had no idea what was taking place in Mussolini’s Italy, some even entertaining fanciful notions about the return of the Roman Empire in the twentieth century.5 Yet Denier du rêve, to my knowledge, has never been grouped or mentioned in the same breath with other famous European political satires and allegories such as Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus or Klaus Mann’s Mephisto. (George Orwell’s Animal Farm is of course the prototypical political allegory of the last century.) It is far too contradictory an epithet, moreover, for an author who eschewed the political and was suspicious of all ideologies and systems her entire life. Political allegory, after all, presupposes trenchant criticism or satire and vocal opposition against one group or another, one belief or another. It is by no means clear that the antifascist anarchists in Denier du rêve fare any better in the author’s view than the dictator and his supporters or the faceless, nameless masses— whether working-class or petit-bourgeois—whose indifference permitted fascism to take hold and flourish. Yet here once again, the assumption that Denier du rêve is a “political allegory” is understandable: Yourcenar chose a politically charged setting (1933 fascist Rome) and freely acknowledged that the novel’s characters not only were inspired by the stock figures of the commedia dell’arte but also had their counterparts in classical Greek deities. There is even the occasional reference to Biblical or Christian figures: Judith, Christians thrown to the wild beasts, and so on. Thus, to conclude that Denier du rêve is an allegory seems warranted. Let us examine this assumption. One of the characteristics of the literary scene in France during the interwar years was a resurgence of the use of classical Greek mythology, in part as homage to the French classical tradition of the Grand Siècle and as a reaffirmation of classical values. Giraudoux,

__________________ 4

See, for example, Georgia Hooks Shurr, Marguerite Yourcenar. A Reader’s Guide (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987) 33-45. 5 Les Yeux ouverts, 80; and With Open Eyes, 60.

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Cocteau, Gide, and Valéry, and, of course, Marguerite Yourcenar continued to use the Greco-Roman figures, images, and myths that Corneille and Racine had made so memorable.6 Classical myths served as a reminder of humanist traditions that seemed in danger of extinction after World War I. The “classical” aesthetic was also implicated in the popular conservative wave, represented by the rise of fascism, first in Italy, later in Spain and Germany, which desired order and control to counteract “dangerous” anarchist (socialist and Marxist) social forces. Yourcenar certainly was caught up in a number of current literary trends in the 1920s and 1930s: as noted above, in her use of classical Greek mythology, but also the neoclassical narrative in the style of Gide as well as expressionism. “Allegory” has been defined variously as an extended metaphor and as a literary narrative that conveys an underlying symbolic meaning distinct from but parallel to its literal meaning (as does, for example, Pilgrim’s Progress or Le Roman de la Rose).7 It is “a mode of expression . . . so natural to the human mind that it is universal. . . . In fact, most classical myth is allegorical.”8 I would argue, however, that Yourcenar’s pairing of Greek deities to her characters in Denier du rêve does not of itself meet the criterion for “allegory,” and especially not political allegory. The narrative fails to sustain an underlying single myth, unified mythical theme, or metaphor in a way that parallels the literal narrative. Myth in Denier du rêve, employed diversely and as tropes (mostly in the form of similes or metaphors), functions more on an aesthetic rather than on a didactic or spiritual level. In fact, the author never lays claim to political activism: rather, she describes herself as a foreign witness. As an adolescent and a young adult, she was confronted first-hand, almost incidentally really, with dramatic political events. She recounts how she and her father happened to be present (“je me suis trouvée là par hasard,” “I happened to be there”9) for the March on Rome in October 1922, which marked

__________________ 6

Of all Yourcenar’s fictional texts, Feux, published two years after Denier du rêve, shows the greatest influence of myth. 7 J. A. Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1992) 22-24; and “Allegory” and “Mythology,” Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2002. 8 Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 23. 9 Marguerite Yourcenar. Marguerite Yourcenar. Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987), ed. Maurice Delcroix. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 192. My translation.

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Mussolini’s definitive ascent to power. Later, she was visiting Rome in 1924 and 1925 when the socialist deputy Matteoti was assassinated under mysterious circumstances, presumably by Mussolini’s blackshirted thugs. She had some contact—how much is really never clear— with anti-fascist Italian militants who, she told Matthieu Galey rather vaguely, “m’apportaient cette excitation et cette émotion du moment” (“brought me the excitement and the emotion of the moment”).10 It is this sense of “Italian” drama, the “emotion of the moment,” that makes Denier du rêve, for Yourcenar, unique among her fictional works. Certainly, references to opera and theater, particularly the Italian commedia dell’arte, dominate all of her comments of this text: “D’abord Denier du rêve est un thème spécifiquement italien, par conséquent entre en jeu ce que j’appellerais l’opéra, le baroque, cette espèce de chant dans le cri qui est particulièrement italien et que je ne vois pas s’instaurant dans d’autres livres, se produisant ailleurs” (“To begin with, A Coin [in Nine Hands] is based on a specifically Italian theme and therefore involves what I am tempted to describe as opera, the baroque, that sort of melody in plaint which is so peculiarly Italian and which I don’t find in any of my other books, or elsewhere in reality for that matter”).11 In “Histoire et examen d’une pièce” (the preface to her play Rendre à César), she refers to “le chant profond des personnages” (“the profound song of the characters”), her need to “faire appel à toutes les ressources . . . de l’aria et du cri” (“to have recourse to all the sources . . . of the aria and the cry”), of her “parti pris lyrique” (“lyrical bias”) to employ “ce bel canto si proche de l’opéra italien et des courbes véhémentes du baroque romain” (“this bel canto so close to Italian opera and the vehement curves of the Roman baroque”).12 She likewise affirms that the characters of Denier du rêve appear to readers to have escaped from a “Commedia ou d’une Tragedia dell’Arte moderne” (“a modern-day commedia or a tragedia dell’arte”).13 The author emphasizes the theatrical and operatic aspects of the novel by using other terms in her paratexts such as “figures tragicomiques” (“tragi-comical figures”), “transitions brusques du drame à la comédie ou à la satire” (“brusk transitions from drama to comedy or satire”), “dialogue dramatique” (“dramatic dialogue”), and “aria lyrique” (OR 162) (“lyrical passages resembling arias”) (CNH 170).

__________________ 10

Les Yeux ouverts, 80; and With Open Eyes, 59. Ibid., 81; and Ibid., 60. 12 In Marguerite Yourcenar, “Histoire et examen d’une pièce,” Théâtre I (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971) 9-25. 13 Ibid.; and OR, 161-62. 11

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As the expression “cette espèce de chant dans le cri” suggests, the medium of opera offers Yourcenar the possibility of articulating and controlling the cry by means of her art, that is, her writing. At the same time, the expression suggests the inherent threat of the song’s becoming lost, swallowed by the uncontrolled cry. We shall come back to this idea later in analyzing some of Denier du rêve’s anguished passages. The operatic elements of Denier du rêve cited by Yourcenar accrue an even greater significance when we consider opera in its cultural context. Beginning in the nineteenth century, European opera began to reflect society’s mounting anxiety about and obsession with disease and death, frequently connecting both conditions with sexuality. As a result, disease and death within operatic productions became emblematic to bourgeois audiences of moral degeneracy. Denier du rêve, offering its readers two dramatic suicides and a host of illnesses—tuberculosis being especially apposite to the novel’s operatic function—continues the operatic tradition of linking moral destitution with “irregular” sexuality, disease, and death.14 Hence, it certainly enables the author to reinforce the notion of a diseased body politic (fascism). The metaphor of opera may also work for Yourcenar in another, more ambivalent way, however. As a rhetorical device, it dramatizes and inflates the text, not unlike the fascist “rhetoric of crisis,” which Mussolini, whose image as a man of action was crucial to the success of the movement, sought to develop in reaction to empty, parliamentary jargon. In the “rhetoric of crisis,” the lines of demarcation between action and language become blurred in such a manner that “speech rhetorically performs an action.”15 A phrase in a speech, such as “now is no longer the time for words, but for action,” would be a good example.16 It could be argued that Denier du rêve contains a good deal of exquisite “rhetoric” but is a novel about nothing. Reminiscent of Flaubert’s “un livre sur rien,” language and style are the “point” of Denier du rêve.17 Expectations, in the end

__________________ 14

See Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera. Desire. Diseases. Death (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). See especially Chapter 1, “Melodies and Maladies: An Introduction,” 1-27. 15 Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 133. 16 Ibid. 17 While working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote: “ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style, . . . un livre qui n’aurait Presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible. . . .” “Fond” would take precedence over “forme”; content would be “devaluated.” See Tony McNeill, ”Les chemins du savoir,”

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unfulfilled, are what sustain the reader’s interest, at least on one level. As we shall see later, the fifth and central chapter arguably implodes from the “force” of a non-act: Marcella’s failed and pointless assassination attempt. Much of the text surrounding this non-event is taken up either in detailed third-person narrations of the characters’ sad pasts or pathetic present lives, or in highly dramatic conversations (Alessandro/Marcella, Giovanna/Marcella, Marcella/Massimo, Massimo/Clément Roux) which nonetheless do not move the plot forward. By investing her essentially banal characters with “mythic grandeur,” moreover, Yourcenar confers a kind of dignity upon them akin to that of “action heroes.” Like a speech by Il Duce that promises “action” but is still in reality merely a speech, Denier du rêve possesses the trappings of a conventional “action” novel, yet in the end leads nowhere: it is a neobaroque expression of virtuosity whose intentions are situated elsewhere—in the “superficiality” of style and language—but which engages the reader’s attention by a kind of subterfuge. “Baroque” is a word that recurs quite naturally in exposés of operatic and theatrical elements in Denier du rêve, since no literary genre is more closely and visibly associated with the baroque age than the theater. It might be still more appropriate to speak of the novel’s “mannerist” elements. As we have already seen in Anna, Soror..., Yourcenar drew inspiration both from a mannerist painter, El Greco, and a baroque painter, Caravaggio, and probably interchanged the terms rather freely, for they share certain characteristics such as conflict, intensity, and emotion. Nevertheless, baroque artists tended consciously to reject mannerism’s artificiality and elitism, and, influenced by Caravaggio, strove for some degree of naturalism and realism.18 The leaders of the Counter Reformation, furthermore, also

__________________ http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/chemin/bovrien.htm, which cites Flaubert’s Correspondence III (Paris: Conard, 1926-33) 345. It is noteworthy that Yourcenar as a young adult was an avid reader of Flaubert’s correspondence, even taking a volume of his letters with her when she traveled. 18 Robert N. Nicolich’s article “Mannerism and Baroque: Further Notes on Problems in the Transfer of These Concepts from the Visual Arts to Literature” is a helpful examination of the causes for confusion between the terms “mannerist” and “baroque.” He concludes that mannerist antitheses in literature remain “in the realm of ambiguity as both elements of the contrast are maintained in simultaneous contradiction” whereas baroque antitheses have structures “conveying progression, resolution, integration” (450). According to these distinctions, Yourcenar’s themes convey mannerist ambiguity, while on the formal level, her works display mannerism’s desire to surprise and astonish: what Nicolich describes as “the cultivation of inventiveness, with the ‘stylish’ approach to creating with virtuosity” (450). But Yourcenar’s application of the

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frowned on the “God-less” virtuosity of mannerism and encouraged baroque art, one of whose aims was to inspire the uneducated public with reverence for God and the Catholic Church. Mannerism, on the contrary, had been born as humanism’s optimism was waning and the worth of the individual was displaced by inhumane wars of religious ideology. It exaggerated and distorted form, frequently privileging the bizarre or the grotesque and mixing incongruous elements. In their efforts to startle or astonish their audience, mannerist artists enjoyed juxtaposing irreconcilable opposites and introducing surprising erotic touches. All of them prized virtuosity; that is, the skill or mastery of complex, formal, artistic execution, producing wonderment and surprise in the spectator.19 The renewed interest in mannerism in the twentieth century came about as a result of its perceived similarity to modern nonclassical and non-naturalistic movements such as Surrealism and Expressionism. Both arose in times of social crisis: “a mannerist proclivity recurs throughout history as a universal expression of the inner anguish of the artist in relation to a specific society.”20 Not unlike her spiritual antecedents three hundred years earlier, Marguerite Yourcenar seemed to experience what the scholar of the European baroque Didier Souiller calls “a global crisis of the vision of the world . . . made manifest by general uncertainty and anguish.”21 Not surprisingly, Yourcenar draws a parallel between the operatic and dramatic elements she employs in Denier du rêve and the “expressionisme baroque” that she favored in the 1930s and continued to defend decades later: “J’ai dit ailleurs les vertus que je continue à trouver à ce genre d’expressionisme lorsqu’il s’agit d’exhaler l’émotion poétique sous sa forme la plus subjective. Je n’aurais pu, à l’époque, écrire Feux autrement, ni ne souhaite maintentant l’avoir fait” (“I’ve spoken elsewhere of the virtues I continue to find in this type of expressionism when it means exhaling poetic emotion in its most subjective form. At that time, I could not have written Feux in

__________________ two terms to her own “expressionist” works of the 1930s is somewhat vague. In Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 10.19: 441-57. 19 Paul C. Castagno, The Early commedia dell’arte (1550-1621). The Mannerist Context. American University Studies, Series XXVI Theatre Arts, vol. 13 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994) 147-53. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 La Littérature baroque en Europe (Paris: PUF, 1988) 12. Translation mine.

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another way; nor do I wish today to have done so”).22 Denier du rêve, like Feux published not long afterward, is intensely expressionistic and constitutes a modern, “mannerist” response both to a crisis of the subject and a crisis of modernity. Yet even as Yourcenar’s expressionism allowed her to vent her “poetic emotion,” its formalistic play served as a bulwark against those very emotions. As we have observed in Yourcenar’s own paratextual remarks, the other form of the performing arts that, together with opera, infuses Denier du rêve is commedia dell’arte; this latter, the author tells us, initially inspired the novel’s character types. In her analysis “Marguerite Yourcenar and Liberalism,” Erin Carlston writes that Denier du rêve is actually “ideologically undifferentiable”23 in spite of Yourcenar’s claims to anti-fascism. In fact, she concludes, Yourcenar’s usage of commedia dell’arte in Denier du rêve suggests she was “seduced by Italian fascism’s aestheticized and theatrical selfrepresentation.”24 I also believe it important to examine Yourcenar’s use of commedia dell’arte, but for other reasons. Art historian Paul Castagno convincingly demonstrates that the early commedia embodies all of the salient characteristics of mannerism. Most of us know commedia best, of course, for its two-dimensional stock characters, its use of masks or half-masks, and its conventional or artificial forms and scenarios from which the players improvised dialogue. In adhering to such conventions, Castagno argues, the commedia dell’arte reduced and abstracted the individual personality and suppressed the will in a way that was both anti-humanist and anti-classical.25 Since fascism, if for completely different reasons, did these things too, Yourcenar’s employment of commedia dell’arte stock characters raises questions about her ambivalent relationship with fascism: was she merely “seduced” by fascism’s theatricality? By employing commedia dell’arte in Denier du rêve, was she also borrowing another fascist tactic to maintain perfect control of the text and perhaps in the process manipulate the reader?

__________________ 22

“Histoire et examen d’une pièce,” Théâtre I, 9-25. The play in question is of course Rendre à César, which is based on Denier du rêve. As I mentioned above, Feux (1936) is considered by Yourcenar and by critics alike as her most expressionistic fictional work. The work consists of a collection of intensely emotional and subjective prose poems whose theme is amorous passion (both ecstasy and pain). They combine ancient myth and references to modernity and aim for startling anachronisms and exaggerated effects. 23 Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism. Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 135. 24 Ibid., 122. 25 Ibid., 84-85.

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Yourcenar’s criticism of Italian fascism is generally anodyne. It represents something “grotesque,” which “ne m’avait pas paru beau” (“it wasn’t pleasant to look at”).26 She said later in an interview that she had felt “indignation” toward Mussolini and his followers.27 She refers to fascism elsewhere as a “spectacle” (“show”) that left its mark on her.28 These are all fundamentally aesthetic, though negative, opinions, rather than ethical or moral judgments (“indignation” can by no stretch connote “repulsion”), indicating that for Yourcenar fascism is above all an affront to taste and simply bad acting. In the course of reading Yourcenar’s various comments about fascism in interviews, prefaces, postfaces, and so on, one becomes cognizant of the singular lack of commentary on fascism by Yourcenar’s father, Michel de Crayencour. It was, after all, with her father that she made these formative visits to Italy in the 1920s, witnessing the March on Rome and the ascension of Mussolini. Yet, Michel’s views on fascism are nowhere recorded. The adolescent Marguerite shared a close relationship with her father: Marguerite lost her mother, Fernande, to childbed fever only ten days after her birth, and Michel, some fifty years old at the time of her birth in 1903, was more of a companion to his daughter than a father in a traditional sense. Studies of Marguerite Yourcenar’s “virile” prose style and denial of the subject, misogynistic treatment of female characters, and predilection for male, bisexual protagonists are not lacking. Even disregarding for the moment the profound underlying causes of her apparent over-investment in the symbolic, we can easily understand, based solely on biography, why the young woman identified strongly with her father. It would come as no surprise, therefore, if young Marguerite Yourcenar’s rather muted, aestheticized disapproval of Italian-style fascism with a patriarchal Mussolini at the helm was influenced not only by her strong bond with a male authority figure, but also perhaps by the tenor of her father’s criticisms. A leisured aristocrat who dabbled in letters and who by the 1920s represented a bygone era, Michel may well have found Mussolini’s coarseness wanting, but not his conservative views. Of course, Marguerite Yourcenar and her father were not the only ones to find this first phase of Italian fascism relatively harmless

__________________ 26

Les Yeux ouverts, 82; and With Open Eyes, 61. Portrait d’une voix, 141. 28 Ibid., 140-41. 27

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as a political movement: neither they nor many educated Europeans from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s perceived the impending storm. In a post script added much later to an essay composed in 1928 called “Diagnostique de l’Europe,” Yourcenar wrote: “j’imaginais une ère de discipline qui allait suivre: c’est au contraire un chaos bien plus total qui était vrai, et qui fait paraître 1928 comme une période d’encore quasi-stabilité” (“I imagined that an era of discipline was going to follow: instead it turned out to be a far more total chaos, which makes 1928 seem like a period of quasi-stability”).29 Finally, there is still another reason why Marguerite Yourcenar’s moral or ethical critique of fascism seems weaker than her aesthetic distaste: a part of the fascist strategy of achieving consensus among the Italian populace lay precisely in conflating the political and the aesthetic.30 In the following passage from an essay called “Forces du passé et forces de l’avenir” (also 1928), the young author does precisely that: “Et certes, nul ne conteste qu’il y ait de la beauté dans l’exaltation passionnée de tel jeune Nazi et dans son sacrifice total à son chef bien-aimé, même si cette exaltation et ce sacrifice portent en eux leur poison” (“Certainly, no one disputes that there is beauty in the passionate exaltation of a young Nazi and in his total sacrifice to his beloved chief, even if this exaltation and this sacrifice contain their own poison”).31 If we remember that Yourcenar had for some time been observing first-hand Italian fascism while her knowledge of German National Socialism was secondary and quite limited (Hitler did not come to power until January 1933, in any case), her confusion of the aesthetic and the ethical in this statement makes perfect sense. Moreover, her remark about the “beauty” inherent in the “passionate exaltation of the young Nazi” suggests an unacknowledged fascination with fascism’s dark side: a “degenerate,” erotically shaded sadomasochism, encouraged by the fascists’ and Nazis’ homosocialization of society. Certainly, as I alluded to above in speculating about Michel de Crayencour’s likely influence on his daughter’s perception of Italian

__________________ 29

See Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990) 499. Translation mine. 30 “putting forward the first Modern(ist) politics of spectacle, [fascism] placed the conventional polarities of Marxist and Liberal theory under constant pressure, confusing superstructure with structure, private with public, the state with civil society. Fascism may thus be said to have ushered in a new dispensation in which all oppositions between aesthetics and politics are swept up into a new image politics.” Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations,” 3. 31 Marguerite Yourcenar, En pèlerin et en étranger (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989). Translation mine. Also quoted by Carlston, Thinking Fascism, 114.

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fascism, Marguerite Yourcenar’s vision of the world from the debut of her literary career was male-oriented: in her fictional works she glorifies male friendships and bonding, which in the case of her male protagonists almost always involves a sexual preference for other males. In her two best-known fictional works, Mémoires d’Hadrien (1950) and L’Oeuvre au Noir (1968), female characters are either relegated to secondary roles or portrayed in an unflattering, arguably misogynistic light, not unlike Italian fascism, which reduced woman to her biological function of child-bearing.32 It thus is reasonable to conclude that what ethical or moral disapproval there may be in Yourcenar’s comments with regard to fascism is relatively weak. Her aesthetic repugnance is simply no substitute for the violent antipathy or despair that a politically committed anti-fascist militant would feel. Yourcenar grounded her novel in 1933 fascist Rome for reasons other than political ones. What fascism purported to be and was to its followers and admirers was, on the contrary, aesthetically pleasing: it was pure classicism manifested in the political. By that, I mean that it not only celebrated the virtues of ancient republican Rome such as stoicism and sacrifice to the state. It also laid claim to classical notions of unity, transparency of vision, and “the permanence of unquestionable values.”33 Harmony and health were in fact guaranteed, since the subject vanished in a total fusion with the State and the dictator, whose ideals and physical vigor were to be substituted for those of the Italian people: Italy was to be of one mind and one body under fascist rule. The appeal of these images is obvious, especially after the Great War and the social and economic unrest in its wake: order, safety, a sense of purpose and belonging, and an absence of personal responsibility, in the existential sense. In psychoanalytic terms, the “best” of the symbolic had somehow merged with the “best” of the imaginary: order within blissful, seamless connectedness. The people returned to an infantile state, fusing with Mussolini, the “law of the father,” in a ritualistic symbiosis whereby he conferred his wholeness and vigor upon them and they in turn increased his perfection through their unification with him.

__________________ 32

Erin Carlston also notes, “Eric and Conrad’s relationship [in Coup de grâce (1939)] is strongly reminiscent of a fascist model of fraternal homoeroticism . . . the misogynist fascist vision of an ‘earthly Paradise in which woman has no place.’” Thinking Fascism, 91. 33 “Introduction,” Golsan, Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, xv.

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Like classicism, moreover, Italian fascism, which had developed an extensive array of ritual, symbols, and icons, was not just political; it was also aesthetic, in the same way that religious ceremonies can be considered aesthetic. In a now famous remark, Walter Benjamin defined fascism as the “aestheticization of political life.”34 Fascist mass gatherings were carefully calibrated “events,” designed to “regenerate” the public and reunite it with its traditions. Like a classical work magnified exponentially, fascism was supposed to simplify, to create stability and order within a finite, well-ordered space. And its “unquestionable values” (see supra) were just as sacrosanct as the classical reverence for Aristotle, Horace, and their rules. The staged events, exhibitions, parades, and so on aimed to please, or at least stir the public to patriotic fervor, as well as to instruct the citizens in Italy’s glorious history and collective values, recuperated from republican and imperialist Rome. Fascist “neoclassicism” even extended to a new mythico-heroic style of architecture,35 not to mention the classical, “aesthetic” appreciation of young, fit, masculine bodies. Similar to its classical counterpart in seventeenth-century absolutist France, fascist neoclassicism was a subtle way of policing the minds and wills of the people and of achieving consensus. Finally, we should not overlook the fact that classical values of logic, objectivity, and order are traditionally associated with the masculine, which coincided nicely with fascism’s debasement and exclusion of women. The characters of Denier du rêve are all in one way or another bound to the fascist state. There are, of course, the Italian inhabitants of Rome—Mère Dida the flower vendor, Oreste Marinunzi the public works repairman, the prostitute Lina Chiari, the surgeon and party member Alessandro Sarte, his wife and anti-fascist anarchist Marcella, the petit bourgeois shopkeeper Giulio Ludovisi, and Rosalia di Credo (this last character, though Sicilian like her sister Angiola, has been living in Rome for a number of years when the novel opens). The Italian “visitors” to the city include the Italian screen actress Angiola Fidès (aka di Credo, Rosalia’s sister) and Paolo Farina, the small-town Tuscan lawyer. Finally, there are the foreign visitors: Clément Roux, whose paintings are being exhibited at the state-sponsored “Triennale”

__________________ 34

Andrew Hewitt, “Fascist Modernism, Futurism, and ‘Post-modernity,’” in Golsan, Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, 43. 35 Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations,” in Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, 4-5.

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art exhibit, and Massimo Iakovleff, a Russian-born university student and informer for the fascist state. As “members,” honorary or otherwise, of the fascist “body politic,” they should ideally display “health”: unity of purpose, belief in the state, and identification with the leader. Yet, playing their parts against the fascist backdrop, they together display a complete political indifference, if not cynicism. More telling still, the “body politic” is exposed by the characters as hyper-eroticized, ill, and dying. Yet, under Italian fascism, as we have seen, the subject, specifically the body of the subject, is supposedly disembodied and de-eroticized by means of a complete unification with the State and the patriarchal Il Duce. In Denier du rêve, furthermore, the female characters are far from being passive baby makers, and the men are not the manly, heroic robots of the fascist ideal. Heterogeneity, asymmetry run rampant, and the progressive, fascist “machine” is dysfunctional. “Degenerate” sexuality and physical or mental illness serve as forceful metaphors in Denier du rêve for the cracks in the smooth face of fascism’s unity. The body, the individual, the feminine, the contingent: all are overwhelmingly present, defying and denying fascist myths about the “classical” (read “masculinized”), depersonalized body. While physical and mental illness and “degenerate” sexuality in Denier du rêve are ideal metaphors for fascism’s corrupt core, we should keep in mind that this novel owes much of its decadent flavor to the evolution of Romanticism. As Mario Praz has noted, while “erotic sensibility” in romantic works illustrates the insistent recurrence of certain themes such as the Medusa, vampires (male and female), and “morbid” fascination with incest, sadism, homosexuality, and lesbianism, there is at the same time a progression in romantic thought beginning with the “cooling of the passionate quality with which the first of the Romantics had invested even morbid themes, and finally to the crystallization of the whole of the movement into set fashion and lifeless decoration.”36 The influence of this latter development of Romanticism—the “Art for Art’s sake” and “Decadent” movements—is strongly evident in Denier du rêve. However, as I shall endeavor to show below, it is an influence that does not dominate Yourcenar, but rather accommodates her ultimate strategy.

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Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1968 [1956]). See in particular the “Forward to First Edition,” vii-xvi.

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Eroticism suffuses Denier du rêve in “degenerate” (we could also call them mannerist) ways that distort the simple and “healthy” fascist notion of sex in the service of the state. Alessandro and Marcella are childless and estranged, divorce not being allowed; the bourgeois Giulio is unfaithful to his wife in spirit, timidly fantasizing about the young Englishwoman Miss Jones and fetishistically caressing the marble foot of Mary Magdalene in church; Massimo is bisexual, having had sexual relations both with Marcella and the imprisoned anarchist Carlo Stevo; Angiola Fidès and Alessandro Sarte engage in anonymous sex in a darkened movie theater; the latter character is a cold Don Juan whose sexual encounters are cynically clinical; Rosalia di Credo has repressed incestuous feelings for her sister Angiola; Ruggero di Credo, the father of Rosalia and Angiola, has had incestuous feelings for his young daughters; Lina Chiari is a prostitute and once either contracted a social disease or had an abortion (this is not specified); Angiola Fidès (formerly di Credo) had an abortion prior to marrying Paolo Farina, whom she deserts for another man. Oreste Marinunzi, the only character that on the face of it has fulfilled the fascist injunction to go forth and multiply “little fascists,” sits in a bar and drinks himself unconscious while his wife at home gives birth to their fourth (unwanted) child. Not only is the neoclassical, fascist “body” sexualized. In Denier du rêve the author opposes the ideal of a “classical,” healthy, fit, and aesthetically perfect body to a mortally ill body: its “cells” suffer from cancer, tuberculosis, coxalgia, heart disease, asthma, and obesity. The state of its psychic health is equally labile: one character is an alcoholic; two commit suicide; all are either depressed, delusional, or both. Most of the characters behave, moreover, as if the fascist state did not exist; they are simply disinterested. Only Alessandro Sarte and Giulio Ludovisi give the new order lip service out of convenience or fear and not conviction. Marcella, the anarchist, tries and fails to assassinate the dictator not because she embodies unwavering revolutionary fervor, but because she wants to end her own life, a compromised failure in her view. In this way, Yourcenar, with “politically correct” insight, deconstructs fascism. Then, she proceeds with Schopenhauerian thoroughness to deconstruct everything else, as well. While the agonizing or the exultant body may win the battle by invalidating fascism as a political system and ideology, it does not win the war, because there are no winners. In Denier du rêve Yourcenar demeans not only fascism, but also all other belief systems; this universal

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derision is no doubt part of the reason why Erin Carlston described the novel as “ideologically undifferentiated.”37 Denier du rêve portrays two anti-fascist anarchists. Carlo Stevo is never actually introduced as a character: we learn about him through the conversations and the interior monologues of Marcella, Massimo, and his father-in-law Giulio Ludovisi. Carlo is a political prisoner on the island of Lipari, near Sicily. Before dying of tuberculosis (which he had contracted prior to his imprisonment) and physical/emotional deprivation, we learn through the character of Alessandro Sarte that Carlo has recanted. Knowing this, Marcella, the novel’s other anti-fascist anarchist, nonetheless carries out her assassination attempt, less out of profound conviction for the socialist cause than to escape from and/or punish herself for a compromised existence. Thus, Yourcenar seems to disdain the anti-fascist (socialist, Marxist) cause. If, as seems to be the case, there are no political ideologies left, is it possible for human beings to achieve a sense of purpose and rise above the human condition through other “things that matter” that are often thought to compose the liberal humanist tradition? Religion, it turns out, is no better than any political ideology, as the scene in the church early in the novel demonstrates: “Une dizaine de fidèles . . . reprenaient en choeur les appellations des litanies sans même chercher à en suivre le sens, trop occupés à accomplir cette espèce de continuelle génuflexion de la voix” (“A dozen faithful . . . took up in chorus the appellations of the litany, not even trying to make sense of them, too busy accomplishing a sort of continuous vocal genuflection”) (OR 184 and CNH 27). Here the author, not unlike the Marxists whom she has already dismissed, derides religion as a spiritual opiate. The other “faithful” who do listen to the mass do not reflect upon the meaning of the words but myopically relate words here and there to something in their own lives. At the end of this chapter, the narrator tells us that if Giulio Ludovisi had been clairvoyant (which he is not), he would have realized the vanity of prayer. Even the kindly priest Père Cicca, though a devout man, does not seem to communicate well with his parishioners. Religion, then, is not a solution. The family is hardly a support, either. The two “nuclear” families whose pasts the narrator permits us to see, the di Credos of Sicily and Mère Dida’s brood, are either cruel or demented. Mère Dida

__________________ 37

See footnote 23, supra.

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is miserly and lives in constant fear of being murdered for her money by her son-in-law Oreste Marinunzi or cheated by another family member. Rosalia and Angiola di Credo are irreparably scarred by their childhood. In fact, in Marguerite Yourcenar’s description of Don Ruggero di Credo, his ex-prostitute Jewish wife, and their two daughters, we can detect traces of theories of biological and sociological degeneracy of the late nineteenth century, which the fascists and Nazis later used to their own ends.38 Here again, as with her use of commedia dell’arte characters in the novel, we may permit ourselves to question the author’s ambivalent relationship with fascism: she clearly denied it on aesthetic grounds, but as we have seen, it in fact fares no worse as a man-made belief system than does Marxism, Catholicism, family values, or the humanistic values of friendship and love. How does Marguerite Yourcenar deal with friendship in Denier du rêve? There are three examples of possible friendship: Massimo and Carlo Stevo, the imprisoned, dying anarchist; Marcella and Carlo Stevo; and Massimo and Lina the prostitute. Massimo turns out to be an agent of the state, possibly responsible for Carlo’s imprisonment. Carlo recants in prison, effectively denying the basis of his friendship with Marcella and potentially implicating her. Massimo uses Lina for comfort; Lina cannot confide in or count on Massimo. There is no way love could possibly exist in this atmosphere; it is always an illusion to be qualified between quotation marks: “love.” Alessandro and Marcella, we discover, once loved each other, and Marcella even admits she still loves him, but we clearly see how she confuses love and physical passion. Alessandro’s renewed contact is

__________________ 38

For an interesting resume of the theories of individual and cultural degeneracy as seen through the prism of Richard Wagner’s music, see Thomas Grey, “Wagner the Degenerate: Fin de Siècle Cultural ‘Pathology’ and the Anxiety of Modernism,” Nineteenth Century Studies, 16 (2002): 73-92. Female hysteria, regressive primitivism, and “atavistic impulses” are all characteristics of “degeneracy” as described by theorists such as Max Nordau, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. There is certainly something quite atavistic and regressive in Rosalia di Credo’s obsession about her ancestral home, Gemara, in Sicily. Her “hysterical” attachment to Gemara and its subsequent loss will prompt her to commit suicide. Her sister Angiola (aka Angiola Fidès) displays signs of “degeneracy” in her uncontrollable erotic impulses: we learn that in the past she has had an abortion and, quickly abandoning Paolo Farina after their marriage, runs away with an opera singer. When we encounter the actress Angiola Fidès, she engages in anonymous sex with a stranger (Alessandro Sarte) in the darkened loge of a movie theater.

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only a bid for power, a will to re-conquer Marcella, who has escaped his influence. Carlo Stevo married the bourgeois Giovanna Ludovisi in a moment of illness and spiritual weakness; he quickly abandoned her to pursue his anti-fascist political activities. Rosalia di Credo is obsessed with her sister Angiola, to the point of experiencing unacknowledged erotic feelings for her. Lina the prostitute, finally, pathetically “loves” her narcissistic friend Massimo: lonely and ill, she sees in him an unattainable dream. What about the “self” as transcendental subject? Could it be “the thing that matters”? Yes and no. Characteristic of her classical education and intellectual rigor, Marguerite Yourcenar held in disdain people (in general) and authors (in particular) whose egocentrism led them to wallow in and expose their subjective selves, so many insignificant particles. To a question about the possibility of her writing “that kind” of confessional book, Yourcenar responded with an almost physical repulsion: “Je craindrais de laisser couler hors de soi cette espèce d’abominable ectoplasme qui est l’image que nous nous faisons de nous-mêmes et qui englue une grande partie de la poésie et du roman d’aujourd’hui” (“I would be afraid of letting leak out this kind of abominable ectoplasm that constitutes the image we have of ourselves and that gums up a lot of contemporary poetry and novels”). 39 Nevertheless, Yourcenar’s intellectual elitism (“Calvinism”?) allows for the remote chance of the subject’s being able to form a “less subjective” self, as she explains elsewhere in reference to her disinterest in politics: “je me suis éloignée très vite de la politique en me persuadant que l’essentiel était ailleurs, que le drame profond se situe au niveau de l’éducation, de la pensée, de la conversion personnelles” (I distanced myself very quickly from politics, persuaded that the essential was elsewhere, that the fundamental drama is at the level of education, of thought, of personal conversion”).40 Yourcenar implies that she has attained this “higher” level of subjectivity, which involves erudition, critical thought, and the courage of one’s convictions. Do any of her characters in Denier du rêve achieve it? Sadly, no. They remain on the level of “abominable ectoplasm,” unable to free themselves from their myopic self-deception and “the fiction of hope.”

__________________ 39 40

Portrait d’une voix, 185. Translation mine. Ibid., 192.

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Denier du rêve, then, is paradoxically built upon a series of negatives. As we have seen thus far, Yourcenar exposes fascism as a moribund body. She also dismantles or dismisses Marxism, religion, and, one by one, the pillars of liberal humanism. At best, we have a dark microcosm of the universal human condition, for which there is no solution. In her preface to the definitive edition (1959), the author in fact tells us that the hopeless human condition is what motivated her to rewrite and republish Denier du rêve: Le sentiment que l’aventure humaine est plus tragique encore, s’il se peut, que nous ne le soupçonnions déjà il y a vingt-cinq ans, mais aussi plus complexe, plus riche, plus simple parfois, et surtout plus étrange que je ne n’avais déjà tenté de la dépeindre il y a un quart de siècle, a sans doute été ma plus forte raison pour refaire ce livre. (OR 165) The feeling that the human story is even more tragic, if that’s possible, than we suspected a quarters of a century ago, but also more complicated, richer, sometimes simpler, and especially stranger than I had tried to depict it then—this was perhaps my strongest reason for rewritng the book. (CNH 174) This explanation, as sincere as it may well be, is insufficient and too easily composed through the lens of moral and philosophical hindsight. True, fascist Rome, as the author herself reminds us in various paratexts, is the mobile for the text’s “operatic” and “theatrical” excess. She certainly recognized and disdained fascism’s crude theatricality! But can we not consider this setting, simultaneously, a plausible and convenient alibi enabling her, like a mannerist painter, to over-perform and out-perform, to parade her virtuosic talents while concealing the dangerously subjective, repulsive “ectoplasm” of the self, of the abyss? Nevertheless, that dreaded abyss, presumably kept at bay by means of these aesthetic techniques, is everywhere present in Denier du rêve: ironically, owing in part to those same devices. In our examination of nineteenth-century opera, mannerism/expressionism, and early commedia dell’arte, all resources used by the author in this novel, we found them to convey not just formal excess, but powerful, subliminal messages as well about disease, death, spiritual pain and uncertainty, and dehumanization. Furthermore, can Marguerite

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Yourcenar’s rational, universalized, “humanistic” explanation (“human story,” “tragic,” “complex,” “rich”) possibly account for the pervasive, intensely disturbing passages and tropes of organic decay, distorted eroticism, suffering, and death which we find in Denier du rêve? Nor should we forget that, having first established the relative gentleness of her politically disengaged, aesthetically based disapproval of fascism, we subsequently detected some ambivalence in Yourcenar’s relationship to fascism. Her initial inspiration for the novel’s characters was the depersonalizing and anti-humanistic commedia dell’arte: they are her puppets. She applies the fascist “rhetoric of crisis” to maintain the semblance of novelistic conventions where there are none. For reasons possibly related to her social milieu and her father’s influence, we observe in the di Credo family an exemplum of late nineteenth-century theories of sociological and biological degeneracy. Finally, and also probably a result of her milieu or the paternal influence, an early essay by Yourcenar finds beauty in a young Nazi follower’s ardor and self-sacrifice at all costs. This suggests a certain attraction to fascism’s homosocialization, which expressed a darker, sado-masochistic tone in the denigration of women and in homoeroticism. All this might lead us to conclude that Yourcenar employs certain fascist techniques allowing her tyrannical powers over her truly pathetic cast of characters and empowering her at the same time to manipulate the reader. It also implies a degree of sympathy—almost malgré elle, one could say—with certain fascist notions. While she proudly claims, as we know, to be the first French writer of her generation to expose fascism in Denier du rêve, in effect she dismantles by means of her characters only its most caricatural, pseudo-neoclassical avatar. The fascist “body politic” is exposed as fraudulent: demented and moribund, it is very unclassical. Yourcenar’s own ambivalence toward or hesitation in rejecting out of hand the darker aspects of fascism and certain fascist behavior, however, is not for display or even to be recognized as remotely possible, and her paratexts warn us away from any such notions. Yet, these fascist practices serve as her instruments both to circumvent the abyss and, paradoxically, to open for her a passage into it. “Cleansing, securing, containing, deterring”: these, according to Kriss Ravetto, are “fascist notions and practices that have become nearly ubiquitous” and to which we Westerners of the early twenty-

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first century have become desensitized.41 As paradoxical as it seems, Ravetto writes, “Liberal, democratic, humanitarian, liberating discourses also function as a manifestation of violence.”42 In other words, the governments that represent liberal humanist beliefs may be just as guilty of employing the fascist techniques they condemn, unaware that they are doing so because these last are “represented” as something else.43 I bring up Ravetto’s observation because it is analogous to the strategies Marguerite Yourcenar employs in Denier du rêve. Also an interpreter of universal liberal humanist traditions and values (she could not otherwise have been elected to the Académie française, nor become a major figure of the twentieth-century literary canon), Yourcenar employs the textual strategies I have mentioned and the paratextual explanations we have explored precisely to “cleanse” the text of subconscious, doubtful motives; to “secure” the optic of the reader; to “contain” critical discourses; and to “deter” (deflect) further investigation that could lead to uncomfortable questions. The text is thus “represented” by its liberal humanist author as one that, for didactic purposes, permits excess and distortion. Nonetheless, these practices cannot prevent us from experiencing, eventually, a sense of unease—something even approaching physical discomfort—as we read Denier du rêve. This malaise is a function of the author’s obsessive, almost sadistic delectation in the spectacle of death, of her characters’ physical and moral suffering, and the nightmarish, often organic, expressionist images into which she translates this suffering. The seemingly gratuitous nature of these aesthetically polished, yet cruel descriptions increases the sense of unease: it calls to mind Flaubert’s ostentatious, apparently gratuitous display of atrocities, inhumanity, and brutality in Salammbô, by means of which, argues George Lukács, Flaubert sought to break free from stifling bourgeois conventions and detachment.44 Though Yourcenar’s revolt appears both broader and more ambiguous than Flaubert’s, the parallel is readily apparent: both novels defy

__________________ 41

Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 231-32. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. Ravetto gives several examples: the American B-52 carpet-bombing in North Vietnam represented as “justice, liberty, and peace”; the Gulf War, Sudan, and Afghanistan as “kicking the Vietnam syndrome”; the UN actions in the Yugoslavian civil war that fought “ethnic cleansing” with “strategic bombings,” and so on. 44 See Georg Lukács, Der historische Roman und die Krise des bürgerlichen Realismus (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955) 205.

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classicism’s forme/fond equation by refusing to integrate these brutal scenes “logically” (whether the “logic” is aesthetic or substantive) in the narrative, by their “exceeding” the bounds of the narrative. I begin with Yourcenar’s treatment of the female characters of Denier du rêve for the simple reason that we cannot help but notice that the majority of the novel’s female characters, yet none of the male characters, are quite literally eliminated (Lina Chiari, Marcella Sarte, and Rosalia di Credo: one mortal illness and two suicides), as if the author at some level, as we have suggested, shared in the misogynistic fascist vision of a universe absent of women. Perhaps, too, it is the author’s way of compensating: “masculinizing” her vision even as she “writes” the feminine, that is, the vertiginous abyss, organic chaos. In any case, only Mère Dida and Angiola Fidès survive the “massacre”: the former because of an Arcimboldesque fusion with the vegetal world and the earth that makes this old peasant woman unassailable; the latter because the actress’s split self has disabled her, crippled her emotionally and spiritually. Devoured by her screen image, we are made to understand that Angiola is as good as dead: “. . . elle n’apercevait qu’une morte . . . ce pâle monstre avait bu tout le sang d’Angiola, sans pourtant réussir à s’envelopper de chair” (“. . . she was watching a dead woman. this pale monster had drunk Angiola’s blood yet had not succeeded in becoming flesh”) (OR 240 and CNH 105). The death of Rosalia di Credo builds slowly to its climax, from the moment she recognizes her desire to die. In four-and-a-half beautifully crafted pages, the author portrays the asphyxiation in an inferno of her own making of a hopeless, delirious woman who has crossed the threshold of madness. As for Marcella Sarte, while the narrator does not describe the moment of her death, we witness her shattered, beaten corpse at the police morgue: une femme assommée . . . est déposée sur le carrelage. . . . Une robe noire, trempée de pluie, colle au corps de la meurtrière, donnant à cette morte l’apparence d’une noyée. Un peu de sang et de salive a coulé de la bouche grande ouverte. . . . Et les yeux fixes, mais aveugles, plongent dans ce néant qui pour elle est tout l’avenir. (OR 250) a woman beaten to death. . . . A black dress soaked with rain clings to the body of the murderess, giving the corpse the appearance of drowning. A little bit of

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Lina Chiari, the prostitute stricken with advanced breast cancer, is a walking corpse. The full force of her impending death is detailed in ten harsh pages: [Le silence de Lina] grossissait, durcissait, pesait davantage, comme s’il avait été, lui aussi, une tumeur maligne qui peu à peu l’empoisonnait. (OR 171) But [Lina’s] silence grew heavier, hardened, as though it, too, were a malignant tumor slowly poisoning her. (CNH 9)

Un épisode lointain lui revint en mémoire: . . . une baignade au pied des rochers où un poulpe s’était agrippé à sa chair. Elle avait crié; elle avait couru, alourdie par ce hideux poids vivant. . . . Toute sa vie, elle avait gardé en réserve le souvenir de ces tentacules insatiables, du sang et de ce cri. . . (OR 173). A distant episode came back to her: . . . she was swimming by some rocks when an octopus fastened on her flesh. She screamed, she tried to run, weighed down by this hideous living burden. . . .All her life, she had kept the memory of those insatiable tentacles, of her blood and of the scream. . . (CNH 12). These three death scenes, neither romanticized nor metaphysically ennobled, seem to betray a slightly sadistic, regressive nostalgia for and fascination with organic corruption, suffering, and death. Yet, heavily aestheticized and invested in the novel’s mannerist/baroque “project,” they masquerade as a baroque preoccupation with the theme of death. Hence, the reader might fail to recognize immediately the subversive pleasure they seem to provide the author. Other violent and repulsive images of organic corruptibility and death, vertigo and le néant, permeate the text: tirer sur cette brute, l’abattre, trouver ce sac plein de sang.(OR 212)

Denier du rêve: Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices Shoot this thing, destroy it, make a hole in this bag full of blood. (CNH 66-67) (Marcella imagines killing the dictator, portrayed as a bloodsucking tick) l’envie folle, lancinante, affreuse, d’étouffer l’enfant sous un oreiller, puis de mourir. (OR 214) a desperate, sharp, horrible desire to stifle the child under a pillow, and then kill herself. (CNH 68) (Vanna Stevo imagines killing her deformed child) Nous sommes tous des morceaux d’étoffe déchirée, des loques déteintes, des mélanges de compromis. . . (OR 230). We are all shreds of material, faded rags, a mixture of compromises. . .(CNH 90). (Massimo, talking to Marcella) Le fleuve infernal . . . roulait dans ses flots d’inertes noyés qui se croyaient des vivants. (OR 236) The river of shades . . . carrying along in its waves inert, drowned corpses who thought they were alive. (CNH 99) (pedestrians in Rome) la faille des lèvres ouvrant sur l’abîme intérieur. (OR 240) the lips opened to reveal the interior abyss. (CNH 105) (Angiola’s screen image) l’abandon de cette femme . . . ne différait pas tant du sursaut, du spasme, ou de la docilité d’une patiente. (OR 245-46) the yielding of this woman, gradually subjugated by pleasure, was not unlike the involuntary start, the spasms or the docility of a patient. (CNH 112) (Alessandro Sarte’s seduction of Angiola Fidès in the Cinema Mondo) son vieux corps à l’abandon n’est plus qu’une masse de chair grise et de poils gris. (OR 278)

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Baroque Fictions his old slack body is a mass of gray flesh and gray hair. (CNH 158) (the aged artist Clément Roux, asleep)

The god-like narrator who controls the “master’s discourse,”45 the behind-the-scenes director of her personal theatrum mundi, makes of these characters her toys: she endows them with life, only to strike them down with disease, madness, and death. The “human beings” in these passages are masses of flesh, abysses, laboratory animals, bloodsuckers, drowned victims, shreds of cloth, mad assassins. “L’abandon,” that is, yielding, disintegration, whether in the sexual act or in death, is their lot. They “flottent” and “roulent,” verbs indicating absence of control, direction, boundaries. They are imminently perishable, organic: “sac de sang,” “chair grise/poils gris,” “d’inertes noyés,” “la faille des lèvres ouvrant sur l’abîme intérieur” (this certainly calls to mind Munch’s expressionist painting, “The Scream”), “du sursaut, du spasme.” With what exquisite cruelty Marguerite Yourcenar the moralist shows us where that dangerous subjectivity, the “abominable ectoplasm,” the abyss can and does take human beings. This is where Yourcenar attempts to exercise complete mastery, presumably, over herself and over us the readers: where she puts to the test those fascist practices we are not meant to identify as hers: “cleansing, securing, containing, deterring.” These sadly misguided characters are supposed to lead us, in heuristic fashion, to the “truth” (according to Yourcenar) of our human condition. Simultaneously, with what undisguised, virtuosic delight and fearful inventiveness (a varied array of mental and physical illnesses and deaths awaits them) Marguerite Yourcenar, the mannerist bourreau, tortures and destroys her characters. Indeed, so real did these commedia dell’arte figures become to her eventually that she endowed them all at the end of her play Rendre à César with an état civil; that is, with dates and places of birth and death.46 They exist: but they must be made to suffer the way that their inventor suffers from the pain of a deep, unhealed wound. Here we encounter the “espèce de chant dans le cri”47 at the pivotal moment when “le cri” is so loud, so insistent, that it

__________________ 45

Saúl Yurkievich, “Baroque Fusions and Effusions (The Tumultuous Perception of the Emotions),” trans. Pedro Cuperman and Irene Vilar. Point of Contact 3.3 (April 1993): 112. 46 Yourcenar, Théâtre I, 133-34. 47 See footnote 13, supra.

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threatens to engulf “le chant.” This is where the false and absolute fascist values of courage, heroism, and ironclad rejection of the feminine give way (“l’abandon”) to the chaotic abyss. The fascist symbolic, the law of the father, crumbles to expose the fascist imaginary, expressed publicly in homosocial cults of death and privately in amoral, sado-masochistic behavior: an infantile longing for retreat into the maternal imaginary, “l’orgasme de mourir” (OR 246 and CNH 113).48 For only exceedingly violent affects could produce the desperate tropes of organic dissolution, pain, and degradation that I cited above: affects such as anger, guilt, and profound longing, never acknowledged by the author. First, there is the anger for the mother’s childbed death and abandonment of her daughter ten days after her birth; second, there is the author’s own guilt for having been the cause of that death; and finally, there is the longing for the mother she never knew. Yourcenar made the following remark to Matthieu Galey in her interview Les Yeux ouverts: “Je ne suis peut-être pas née pour l’inquiétude. Pour la douleur, plutôt, pour l’infinie douleur de la perte, de la séparation des êtres aimés. . .” (“It may be that I was born not for anxiety but for pain, for the infinite pain of loss, of separation from loved ones. . .”).49 In an illuminating, even, I believe, ground-breaking study on “l’ombre géante du maternel” (“the giant maternal shadow”) that she believes determines the Yourcenarian oeuvre,50 Pascale Doré comments on those words, as follows: “Comment ne pas penser à la perte primordiale, niée, chez celle qui fait ici de la douleur de la perte le fil conducteur de sa vie?” (“How can we not think of primordial loss denied by she who here makes the pain of loss the main theme of her life?”).51 Marguerite Yourcenar’s choice of a fascist time and place for Denier du rêve may well have been instinctual. It provided for her needs on several levels. First, fascism’s false, tawdry neoclassicism, “la façade

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The expression is Alessandro Sarte’s. Having just made love to a perfect stranger, Angiola Fidès, in the Cinema Mondo, he is musing to himself about his fleeting desire, earlier, to join his estranged wife Marcella in “l’orgasme de mourir”--her assassination attempt and certain death. Curiously, in A Coin in Nine Hands, on whose translation Yourcenar collaborated, this expression becomes “the culmination of death.” If Marguerite Yourcenar did not care for the expression’s immediately recognizable association with Freudian sex and death drives, we have to ask ourselves why she ever used in the first place. This is just another example of the author’s tendency to “brouiller les pistes.” 49 Les Yeux ouverts, 35; and With Open Eyes, 18. 50 Pascale Doré, Yourcenar, ou le féminin insoutenable (Genève: Droz, 1999) 304. Translation mine. 51 Ibid., 47. Translation mine.

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boursouflée,” which she dismantles easily and ostentatiously using her characters, places her on the right side of classicism and even of humanism. For Yourcenar’s humanism in effect disdains “conventional” contemporary notions of religion, family, friendship, love. As a member of the intellectual elite, she thus criticizes her times from a safe distance, which has apparently been taken by some as a sign of authentic, if “artistic,” political engagement. Fascist theatricality also provides Marguerite Yourcenar ample literary space to apply theatrical, operatic, and expressionist (mannerist) language, tone, and techniques without being questioned about her motives. For fascism is all these things, is it not? The mannerist virtuosity of her novel, moreover, can be perceived as a clever, literary parody of fascism’s superficiality: an ideal alibi to deflect a reader’s attention from: a) her personal pleasure in the excess of the “master’s discourse,” in her absolute and absolutist control of the word, herself, and the reader, and b) her personal pleasure in the cruel and unusual ways by which she punishes her characters. Yet, these two personal levels are precisely where Marguerite Yourcenar employs fascist practices and makes forbidden fascist pleasures her own. We can only surmise the depth of the psychic wound, posited above and supported by recent Yourcenarian studies, which drove her—unconsciously we must believe—to such extremes.

Chapter 3 Neobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss” in L’Œuvre au Noir1 Et puis, [Zénon] s’écrit en caractères d’éclair, en zigzag.2

Both Denier du rêve and Anna, Soror... show Marguerite Yourcenar finding ingenious, invariably aesthetic means of expressing social transgression and indulging vicariously in “forbidden pleasures,” which suggest a writer heavily preoccupied, if not obsessed, by the “passionate” (either ecstatic or suffering) body. The reasons for this, as I speculated at the end of Chapter 2, seem partly to lie in unresolved psychic wounds related to her mother’s childbed death, which cause her to despise and mistrust the body while being fatally drawn to a number of its most extreme “incarnations”: incest, bisexuality, disease, death. The protective textual subterfuges that allow her to express the body in these various states of excess are as elaborate and “virtuosic” as her polished, “classical” prose; indeed, her “classicism,” as we have observed, is a part of the strategy by which she ensures authorial absolutism. Once that authority is ensured, the author may coerce others (both her characters and her readers) to participate in her pain and guilt, either as victims or as captive observers. In L’Œuvre au Noir (The Abyss) Marguerite Yourcenar finds the outlet that allows her to express her own revolt against the limitations of Western humanism and the classical ideal while simultaneously performing to a captive and submissive audience. The novel’s themes, as we shall see, are anything but classical and reveal instead an author whose catastrophic worldview and pretensions of

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In the expression “L’humanisme qui passe par l’abîme,” “a humanism which sounds the abyss,” Marguerite Yourcenar endeavors to encapsulate Thomas Mann’s worldview. See “Humanisme et hermétisme chez Thomas Mann,” Sous bénéfice d’inventaire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1978) 202; and “Humanism and Occultism in Thomas Mann,” The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard in collaboration with the author (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980) 205. 2 Marguerite Yourcenar, Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987), ed. Maurice Delcroix (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 58. Yourcenar explains in an interview why she chose to name the protagonist of L’Œuvre au Noir Zénon.

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absolute freedom and transgression are neo-baroque, even postmodern. Meanwhile, the author’s pervasive and insistent use of rhetorical devices as strategies of aesthetic performance and ways of ensuring absolute “author-ity” over the reader results in a proliferation of forms relative to disappearing content. Her forceful reassertion of that “master’s discourse,” which we have already witnessed Chapter 2 especially, constitutes the other extreme of her neobaroque vision and is, it could be argued, less a conscious choice than a fatality. The reader is absolutely essential to the aesthetic performance; yet he or she may not violate the space that the author’s epiphany, and hers alone, requires. Although a certain continuity will become apparent as this chapter unfolds, L’Œuvre au Noir is a much broader, more daring project than either of the works examined in Chapters 1 and 2. Set in sixteenth-century northern Europe—what is today Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany—this complex, multidimensional novel recounts the life and times of Zénon Ligre, the illegitimate nephew of a wealthy and powerful cloth merchant and financial broker. A mélange of many well-known giants of the Renaissance, the protagonist is simultaneously a medical doctor, a philosopher, and an alchemist. Destined for the priesthood, he leaves his native city of Bruges at the age of twenty on a daring quest for knowledge that will endanger his life and ultimately lead to his condemnation by the Catholic Church as a heretic. To avoid being burned at the stake, he commits suicide in his prison cell the day before his execution. In L’Œuvre au Noir, it is no longer merely a question for Marguerite Yourcenar of finding an aestheticized outlet for the body in all its transgressive potential, although questions of the body are also addressed both in the guise of the protagonist’s bisexuality and his observations as a physician of bodily functions. The author, I shall argue, must try to reclaim through her protagonist nothing less than absolute, unconditional freedom: the power—her power—which she perceives has been curtailed by the restrictive authority of modern institutions and belief systems. All institutions limit human beings to “rational” explanations. Yet there are alternatives to “rational” ways of apprehending and defining reality, and the physician-alchemist-philosopher protagonist of L’Œuvre au Noir will reveal them as he traverses the stages of his personal transformation, symbolized by the three stages and colors of the alchemical Great Work. The black work represents the abandonment of all illusions; the white work constitutes selfless

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service and sacrifice to others; and the red work is the ultimate achievement of perfection, which can only be conceived as physical death. Self-exiled (“partout et . . . nulle part droit de cité,” “like a man who has rights of citizenship both everywhere and nowhere”) (OR 684 and A 166), constantly under the threat of arrest for his “heretical” ideas, actions, and writings, the restless vagabond who knows too much becomes Yourcenar’s cipher and mouthpiece. After his spiritual œuvre au noir, he abandons all illusions, understands, and prefigures the fate of humankind: the violence and intolerance to which he falls victim in his own time and which will be repeated in ours. The time and place in which L’Œuvre au Noir is situated, is a mirror, the author tells us, of the human condition.1 In this mirror, the sacred nature of the alchemical uroboros or “eternal return” is tragically perverted, becoming instead an uroboros of inhumanity. It should come as no surprise, since we are familiar with the genesis of Anna, Soror... and Denier du rêve, that L’Œuvre au Noir, finished in 1965 but published only three years later2 and coinciding by a strange twist of fate with the May ‘68 riots in Paris, actually reaches as far back as the 1920s. It was one of those “bits” that Marguerite Yourcenar preserved from her “roman-océan” Remous. She published the seventy-page novella D’après Dürer as part of the trilogy bearing the title La Mort conduit l’attelage in 1933. Yourcenar had in fact begun re-writing D’après Dürer (she first thought of calling the new version L’Abîme, also Le Grand Œuvre) in the mid-1950s, while she was still finishing the revised version of Denier du rêve. An essay on the work of Thomas Mann which Yourcenar was asked to write in 1953 led her to become more familiar with alchemy, and she began to read more texts on the subject.3 She was eager, she told a journalist, to display this newly acquired knowledge, and L’Œuvre au Noir became her vehicle.4

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“une espèce de miroir qui condensait la condition de l’homme à travers ces séries d’événements que nous appelons l’histoire” (“ a kind of mirror, which concentrated the human condition itself in the series of events that we call history”). Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts. Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey (Paris: Le Centurion, 1980) 161; and With Open Eyes. Conversations with Matthieu Galey, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) 134. 2 Yourcenar was involved in a lengthy lawsuit against the publishing house Plon, which she won in the end, to grant Editions Gallimard the publishing rights to L’Œuvre au Noir. 3 Portrait d’une voix, 102. 4 Ibid. She states: “comme tous les gens qui commencent à apprendre quelque chose, j’étais très anxieuse de l’apprendre à tout le monde et de le mettre sur papier” (“like all

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Indubitably Yourcenar’s most ambitious work of fiction both in terms of its length—some 450 pages, almost 150 pages longer than Mémoires d’Hadrien—and in terms of its sometimes deceptive epic character, its erudition, and its syncretistic approach to religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and history, L’Œuvre au Noir presented its author with enormous challenges. There were in fact moments when she was so discouraged that she would drop the project only to pick it up again.5 We should take a moment to remind ourselves that we have now crossed what the second of the author’s three biographers, Michèle Sarde, calls “le partage des eaux” (“turning point”) in the literary and personal evolution of Marguerite Yourcenar.6 By this, Sarde refers to the important transformation that occurred between 1939, the year in which, on the eve of World War II, Yourcenar left Europe behind to come to the United States, and the difficult years that followed in a country she adopted more by chance, and perhaps by expediency, than by choice. For the author, this period was a sort of personal œuvre au noir, symbolizing the first, most difficult stage of the alchemist’s (read: “the human being’s”) initiatory process of enlightenment and self-realization.7 This is the stage that entails a renunciation of the ego and the abandonment of all preconceived ideas, metaphysical and epistemological “systems”: in short, of everything that the initiate has taken to be “real” and “true.” In the preface (1970) to her play or “divertissement” La Petite Sirène (1942), she refers to that harrowing transition, the little mermaid of her play being, of course, herself: Je me rends compte avec quelque retard de ce qu’a pu obscurément signifier pour moi à l’époque cette créature brusquement transportée dans un autre monde, et s’y trouvant sans identité et sans voix. Mais de plus,

__________________ people who are beginning to learn a particular subject, I was very anxious to teach it to everyone and to put it down on paper”). Translation mine. 5 Yourcenar spent ten years rewriting D’après Dürer, She wrote in a letter to a friend in 1962: “Je crois qu’il vaut mieux ne pas insister sur cet ouvrage que je ne terminerai peut-être jamais dans sa totalité” (“I think it better not to dwell on this work, which I shall perhaps never entirely finish”). Michèle Goslar, Yourcenar. Biographie. “Qu’il eût été fade d’être heureux” (Brussels: Editions Racine, 1998) 237. 6 Michèle Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar. La Passion et ses masques (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1995) 318. 7 C. G. Jung’s term for psychological wholeness.

“Sounding the Abyss” in L’Œuvre au Noir et surtout, cette rêverie océanique date d’un temps où le vrai visage, hideux, de l’histoire, se révélait à des millions d’hommes dont une bonne part sont morts de cette découverte ; même à la distance où le hasard m’avait mise, j’avais vu ce que j’avais vu. C’est à partir de cette époque et par l’effet d’une ascèse qui se poursuit encore, qu’au prestige des paysages portant la trace du passé humain, naguère si intensément aimée, vint peu à peu se substituer pour moi celui des lieux, de plus en plus rares, peu marqués encore par l’atroce aventure humaine. . . . Ce passage de l’archéologie à la géologie . . . a été et est encore par moments ressenti par moi comme un processus douloureux, bien qu’il mène finalement à quelques gains inestimables. De cette rupture et de cet acquis, la petite sirène abandonnant ses jeux d’acrobate et le poignard de ses rancunes pour rentrer dans le monde primordial dont elle est sortie était, je m’en aperçois aujourd’hui, à la fois la préfiguration et le symbole. It took me some time to realize what this creature could have meant to me, in an obscure way, at the time: she was suddenly transported into another world, found herself with no identity and no voice. But more importantly, this oceanic reverie dates from the time when the real, hideous face of history was revealed to millions of men: a great many died as a result of this discovery. Even from the distance where chance had put me, I saw what I saw. From that moment on and by means of an asceticism that I still pursue, I began little by little to favor, not landscapes revealing traces of the human past, but rather those (they are becoming harder and harder to find) still scarcely marked by the atrocious human adventure. . . . This shift from archeology to geology . . . was and still is for me a painful process, though it has brought with it inestimable gains. Today I see both the prefiguration and the symbol of this rupture and this acquisition in the little mermaid, who abandoned her acrobatic

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Baroque Fictions games and the dagger of her rancor to return to the primordial world from which she had come.8

This is a long passage, but it is crucial to understanding fully the transformation that distinguishes Marguerite Yourcenar’s prewar fictional works from the postwar ones. Although mention is made of this sea change elsewhere—in essays, paratexts, and metatexts— perhaps no passage reveals as clearly as this one the tremendous pain and anger that Yourcenar experienced in connection with this “voluntary” exile. The most immediately visible result was her apparent renunciation of her subjectivity. As we saw in Anna, Soror... and Denier du rêve, Marguerite Yourcenar went to extraordinary lengths to write the abyss while simultaneously shielding her from it. In both works, her unhealed psychic wound is covered by a protective aesthetic dressing. That same pain, anger, and confusion, as the words highlighted in the above passage suggest, are far more intense following her exile. What could be more devastating to a person educated in the Western tradition than suddenly having “no identity,” “no voice”? In Europe, particularly thanks to her long stays in Greece and Italy, she had never ceased to immerse herself in the humanistic pursuits she had begun as a child, haunting museums, archeological sites, churches, and historical monuments. While she led a peripatetic existence from her midtwenties to her late thirties and remained by choice on the fringes of the Parisian literary scene, she had cultivated a group of friends and acquaintances from among the better-educated, avant-garde literary and artistic circles. And she had continued to write. Now in the United States, she had lost these support systems and points of reference: she no longer had even “art” at her disposal to express or deny her pain. Conditions were arduous, especially during the initial years: she was forced for the first time in her life to follow a schedule in order to earn a living (teaching part-time); she was writing relatively little because of that schedule and lack of inspiration; and she was adjusting to the very different culture of the United States, which almost seemed to be another planet. She had ceased to exist, at least in the way she had understood existence until then. Human beings are amazingly adaptable, however, and Marguerite Yourcenar was no different. She

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Marguerite Yourcenar Théâtre I (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971) 146. Translation and emphasis mine.

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did what she had to do to survive. I do not for a moment mean to suggest that the events of the Second World War did not shock and depress her, as they did millions of others. Yet, the war, serving as the catalyst for, and thus coinciding with, this loss of faith, was also the ideal justification for submitting to an œuvre au noir in which the ego had to be immolated (it had already happened): but this time, for a higher purpose, a higher good. Yourcenar’s pain and bitterness, which we have witnessed in Chapters 1 and 2, are henceforth far more easily legitimated, and the author can be much more open about expressing disorder, horror, pessimism, and the suffering body. These constitute the human condition; they are history. Paradoxically, her lost identity would re-emerge transformed but triumphant: validated, enhanced, crystallized as a result of her “sacrifice.” Ten years after her arrival in the United States on the eve of the war, she began living in relative seclusion with her American companion Grace Frick in Mount Desert Island, Maine. There she would gradually assume the persona of a modern moralist, a voice of progressive activism in a world of “bad” things: rampant capitalism, unchecked consumerism, a lack of spirituality, the Cold War, ecological horrors, global famine and disease, and so on. Her “asceticism” and retreat into prehistory, even pre-humanity, would serve as a mute protest against a world perceived as chaos and pain. This is made abundantly clear in L’Œuvre au Noir, in which the author inscribes her own pain, anger, and sense of betrayal by the ideals of Western traditions upon the consciousness of the protagonist Zénon. From the moment she finished creating the character of the “definitive” Zénon (1964) until her death in 1987, Yourcenar, born under the astrological sign of Gemini, thought of her literary character as a brother and believed he would be at her side in her final agony, her “mauvais quart d’heure” (“trying quarter of an hour”).9 Zénon, whose bisexuality is at least partially symbolic, reflects an ideally balanced concern for the body and nature in general (the female element), through his profession of physician, and the intellect and spirit (the male element), as reflected in his humanistic studies and his curiosity about the world around him. By means of the alchemical coincidentia oppositorum, these two aspects of Zénon the man are converted, at the

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An expression the reader will find throughout Yourcenar’s works. In L’Œuvre au Noir, it occurs in the chapter “La Visite du chanoine” (“The Visit of the Canon”), in which Zénon’s childhood tutor the Canon Bartholémé Campanus visits Zénon in prison on the eve of his execution. See OR, 823.

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moment of his “surrender” and suicide at the close of L’Œuvre au Noir, into a perfect life force greater than the sum of its two parts. As Yourcenar herself wrote in a letter to Henri de Montherlant, Zénon, who had recognized the presence of “a god” (small “g”) within himself, was well on the way before his death to becoming a nonChristian “saint.”10 The author’s unquestionably sincere and passionate identification, almost a fusion, with Zénon clearly was additional mortar in the construction of her unassailable image in later life. As I suggested above, she was perceived as a progressive activist and a sage11 who somehow remained above the awkward moral ambiguities and/or excesses of real political engagement, and also, on a personal level, above her own irrational impulses, passions, and subjectivity. These last, allzu menschlisch traits would nonetheless erupt violently in the last decade of her life: a passionate attachment to her young American travel companion, Jerry Wilson. This constitutes an emotional reawakening that, upon reflection, far from diminishing her stature, exposes a joyous and violent force, thereby disrupting what one frustrated interviewer, having likened her to a medieval fortress, called “la sérénité de ses bulletins de victoire” (“the serenity of her dispatches”).12 We are reminded of Erasmus’s “sage folie,” which the humanist opposed to the “nonsensical wisdom” of dogma and intolerance. Without perhaps even being aware of it, the author came closer as a result of this last passionate, seemingly irrational “fall from grace” (as some puzzled observers clearly viewed it13) to replicating Zénon’s final state of grace: informed by Buddhism and other oriental philosophies such as Taoism, to Yourcenar all life experiences would have a place and a value. For example, toward the end of his initiatory journey (his life), Zénon is sorely tempted to join two foolish young girls and some young monks, “la bande des Anges,” in their sexual games in the subterranean caverns of the church and monastery in Bruges where Zénon has been serving as a physician to the poor. While

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Portrait d’une voix, 397. As Matthieu Galey noted in his interview with the author, “vos lecteurs ont tendance à chercher chez vous une sorte de ‘maître à vivre’” (“your readers . . . are inclined to look to you as someone who can teach them how to live”). Les Yeux ouverts, 307; and With Open Eyes, 258. 12 Patrick De Rosbo’s remark in Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990) 353. 13 One need only read any of her three biographies. 11

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he resists this urge, recognizing the immaturity of the band as well as the mortal danger of “heresy” involved in its games (of which he warns the band’s leader), he does not condemn it because of its sexual license (OR 731-42 and A 226-38). In this respect, we may likewise recall that Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, after leaving his comfortable Brahmanical (“bourgeois”) existence, realizes that his subsequent life of asceticism is a path just as incomplete and unsatisfactory as the exclusive, “irrational” enjoyment of the senses and the transient world; he must traverse and leave them both behind him before attaining wisdom.14 Marguerite Yourcenar’s “excesses” would occur, however, more than a decade after the publication of L’Œuvre au Noir. Meanwhile, in the 1960s she and her companion and translator Grace Frick appeared to enjoy a stable, productive partnership,15 and the author’s creative faculties had reached their full potential. Yourcenar had acquired an almost irrefutable reputation as a measured, “classical” writer endowed with a humanistic education, a serene, rational (classical) intelligence, and oracular wisdom. This image was without doubt reinforced by the publication of Mémoires d’Hadrien (1950), her remarkable fictional re-creation of the Emperor Hadrian’s life as written down by the emperor himself in a long epistle to his heir, Marcus Aurelius. And it was no doubt also this image that facilitated her election to the Académie française in 1980. This profile seems in some respects at odds with the fiercely intractable, alienated hero of L’Œuvre au Noir. Michèle Sarde believes that the author’s works generally reflect not what she was, but rather “what [she] wanted to be.”16 It is as if, from a Freudian perspective, the author’s superego were completely invested in her work. If we follow

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Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (New York: MJF Books, 1951). Grace Frick was not only the English translator of three of Marguerite Yourcenar’s fictional works: Le Coup de Grâce, Mémoires d’Hadrien, and L’Œuvre au Noir; she also handled many of the quotidian tasks and travel arrangements, freeing the author to devote more time to her writing. She accomplished all of this in spite of a twenty-year battle with cancer (1960-1979). 16 Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 285. Sarde’s source for the original expression is Yourcenar’s Carnets de Notes de “Mémoires d’Hadrien,” in which the author writes: “Ne jamais perdre de vue le graphique d’une vie humaine, qui ne se compose pas, quoi qu’on dise, d’une horizontale et de deux perpendiculaires, mais bien plutôt de trois lignes sinueuses, étirées à l’infini, sans cesse rapprochées et divergeant sans cesse: ce qu’un homme a cru être, ce qu’il a voulu être, et ce qu’il fut” (“Never lose sight of the graph of a human life, which is not, contrary to popular opinion, composed of a horizontal and two perpendicular lines, but rather of three curved lines, infinitely long, constantly drawing nearer, constantly pulling away from one another: what a man believed he is; what he wanted to be, and what he was”). Translation mine. OR, 536. 15

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that supposition to its logical conclusion, Zénon’s voluntary death at the end of the novel is the price the protagonist must pay for having achieved on behalf of the author l’œuvre au rouge. That death, in the final analysis, is an absolutist solution to the author’s absolutist desire for unconditional freedom from exclusionary Western epistemologies, which had failed her. Zénon spends the entire novel seeking his “self.” This “self” is not the solipsistic, subjective self of the romantic hero, which the author despised,17 but rather the Jungian knowledge- and wisdomseeking suprapersonal “self,” comprising the conscious and the unconscious, to which she continuously and consciously aspired. Zénon becomes “the archetype of unity,”18 unaware of the role of surrogate he had been assigned, enacting the unconditional surrender we find in oriental philosophies; this fusion of extremes, this movement beyond all Western definitions of “self,” obviously, the author wanted, but never could, practically speaking, achieve. The author’s personal œuvre au noir, which I sketched above, manifests itself most distinctly in the text’s structure and tone as a panoramic yet disjointed view of the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century that, dominated by the Reformation and Catholicism’s explosive response, is dark and chaotic, cruel and irrational. Writes the author: “les thèmes boschiens et breughéliens du désordre et de l’horreur du monde envahissent l’ouvrage” (“Boschian and Breughelian themes of disorder and horror of the world invade the work”) (“Note de l’auteur,” OR 838, footnote; and “Author’s Note,” A 360, footnote). This is “history” either unguided or ruled by forces so obscure and complex as to appear unguided. Yourcenar comments elsewhere: l’histoire devrait être considérée comme une espèce d’œuvre au noir. . . . on finit par s’apercevoir de la vanité de l’histoire. Les conventions qui nous font l’admirer ou la détester se brisent et l’on arrive à une espèce de chaos humain qui n’est plus tout à fait ce que les philosophes aiment appeler l’histoire.

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Cf. infra, Chapter 2, footnote 41. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series (1968; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 25.

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history should be considered a kind of œuvre au noir. . . . one ends up by seeing the vanity of history. The conventions that make us either admire or detest it break down and one ends up with a kind of human chaos that is not exactly what philosophers like to call history.19 This altogether neobaroque dismissal of linear, conventional (classical!) concept of history no doubt has much to do as well with the novel’s narrative structure, which deforms both time and space in ways that Lewis Carroll would not find unfamiliar. Somewhere between the two poles of a transgressive theme and a classical, orderly style, we can situate the narrative structure. Somewhere between forme and fond, the structure contributes to both, establishing the novel’s somber tone and epic sweep, initially by replicating the unrest and confusion of the century, and later by drawing us into the narrowing spiral of Zénon’s alchemical voyage,20 as we observe him descending ever further into himself to discover his “essence” or being, the Jungian unconscious. Eschewing classical linearity, the author begins the novel in medias res, just when Zénon, twenty years of age, begins his wanderings; she subsequently doubles back in the next three chapters to his boyhood and adolescence. The hero then drops out of the novel altogether for three chapters. In these, we are first privy to reports about Zénon’s dubious activities through hearsay and rumor; followed by the Anabaptist rebellion in Münster and the beheading of Zénon’s Anabaptist mother Hilzonde when the city is recaptured; and lastly, by

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Portrait d’une voix. 195. My translation. Yourcenar expressed similar views elsewhere. Josyane Savigneau recalls that Marguerite Yourcenar, like William Shakespeare, saw life as (and she quotes Yourcenar) “ce chaos d’épisodes informes et violents d’où éminent, il est vrai quelques lois générales, mais des lois qui, précisément, demeurent presque toujours invisibles aux acteurs et aux témoins” (“that chaos of shapeless and violent episodes in which can be discerned, it is true, certain general laws, but laws which almost always remain invisible to protagonists and to witnesses”). In Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990) 323. Savigneau’s citation is taken from Yourcenar’s essay, “Les visages de l’Histoire dans l’Histoire Auguste,” Sous bénéfice d’inventaire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1978) 15. This essay appeared in English in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard in collaboration with the author (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985) 11. 20 Manuela Ledesma, “Spirale narrative, spirale alchimique,” in Simon Delcroix and Maurice Delcroix, eds., Roman, histoire et mythe dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar (Tours: S.I.E.Y., 1995) 279-92.

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the sullen and bitter embourgeoisement of Zénon’s half-sister Marthe, adopted by her paternal aunt and brought to Cologne after Hilzonde’s death. In the novel’s central chapter, “L’Abîme” (“The Abyss”), Zénon, whose submission to the black work the chapter describes, experiences these deformations of time and space at the microcosmic level: all along, of course, the author has been reflecting them at the macrocosmic level. Like the alchemists, magicians, and philosophers of the sixteenth century who inspired her, Yourcenar manipulates and distorts time, now accelerating it, now slowing it to a crawl. Chronological timelines and “real time” surface only intermittently in selected episodes and, of course, in dialogues (for instance, “La conversation à Innsbruck,” “La maladie du prieur,” or “La visite du chanoine”). Space varies according to the narrator’s omniscient perspective, which shifts frequently. Sometimes we are privy to a panoramic view, as in a low-flying aircraft. Elsewhere, Yourcenar evokes scenes of town or country life, similar to the Brueghel paintings that the author had contemplated in museums, or portraits of certain characters (there is even a direct reference to the resemblance of Zénon’s mother, Hilzonde, to a Van Eyck painting). At other moments, we see the world almost as through the lens of a weak microscope: Zénon does so when he falls asleep and awakens to see monstrous eyelashes reflected in his magnifying glass.21 In the last two parts of the novel, “La vie immobile” and “La prison,” space shrinks to Bruges, then to four walls of a prison cell, while the passage of time becomes barely perceptible to Zénon in the quiet routine imposed first by him, then by his imprisonment. These variations and at moments deformations of time and space create a sense of fragmentation and turbulence. A vast cast of characters enters and exits, often only in Zénon’s memories, in a sort of Brownian movement, which, while altogether consonant with the peripatetic existence of the protagonist, gives a sense of endless flux and circulation. Literary reviews at the time of its publication described L’Œuvre au Noir as “mou, dispersé, un peu confus” (“flaccid, scattered, and a little confused).”22 One critic considered it to be written in a “baroque way,” because of its

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For a detailed analysis of Yourcenar’s manipulation of time and space in L’Œuvre au Noir, particularly Part I La Vie errante, see Ledesma, “Spirale narrative, spirale alchimique.” 22 Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 320.

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superimposed layers of alchemy, medicine, history, ideas, and so on.23 Another review, seizing upon Marguerite Yourcenar’s essential ambiguity, characterized hers as a “subversive classicism,” owing to “her reinterpretation of human thought and conduct.”24 In light of Marguerite Yourcenar’s own reflections about history as undifferentiable chaos, the narrative’s convoluted structure, as we have just examined; and the novel’s deeply transgressive theme, it is almost with surprise that we find the novel still being perceived as “classical” by many of her critics and readers. We must turn to the narrative style to understand this. “Virile,” “controlled,” and “unemotional,” all descriptors belonging to the realm of the Symbolic, 25 are encountered repeatedly in descriptions of Yourcenar’s style in L’Œuvre au Noir. We have encountered this dichotomy elsewhere in Yourcenar’s fiction: it is, in my view, part of a general strategy, not unlike other strategies we have explored thus far, to achieve two contradictory goals. On the one hand, the persona of Zénon and his alchemical voyage and transformation are vehicles that permit the author to

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Georgia Hooks Schurr, Marguerite Yourcenar. A Reader’s Guide (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987) 74. 24 Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 320. 25 Both Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, using the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic Orders as a point of departure, distinguish between feminine or “semiotic” language (“semiotic” for Kristeva being somewhat equivalent to Lacan’s Imaginary Order) and masculine or “symbolic” language, which is phallus-based (the “phallus” symbolizing power and patriarchal authority). Cixous coined the term “phallogocentrism” to describe this patriarchal language. Semiotic discourse, on the other hand, is antipatriarchal in its ways of thinking and writing, because its practitioners either resist, or are not obliged to experience, Lacanian castration anxiety. Those writers either reject outright or disrupt from within the “symbolic” discourse, which sets them free to express in their writing jouissance and a creative play of language. Josyane Savigneau, Yourcenar’s first biographer, mocks certain critics for their “simplistic” view according to which intelligence, rigor, and absence of emotion are “masculine” attributes, whereas warmth, emotion, and gracefulness are “feminine” qualities, and is equally skeptical of the écriture féminine that Cixous espouses (Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 321). Feminist theorist Toril Moi cautions: “It is, after all, patriarchy . . . that insists on labeling women as emotional, intuitive and imaginative, while jealously converting reason and rationality into an exclusively male preserve.” Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985) 123. Nevertheless, these descriptors certainly contribute to forming the basis of Yourcenar’s “classical” label. An “aesthetic” binary equivalent to “symbolic” and “semiotic” discourse would be, of course, Nietsche’s “Apollonian” / “Dionysian” dichotomy. The “classical” is masculine and Apollonian, the “chaotic” is feminine and Dionysian.

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express her need to privilege primal chaos and complete freedom associated with the paradoxical process of self-actualization. In so doing, Yourcenar both transcends and invalidates restrictive Western humanistic traditions associated with the conscious mind’s discrimination of opposites. 26 In an essay entitled “Approches du Tantrisme” (1972), Yourcenar, echoing Jung, writes the following: Une des erreurs irréparables de l’Occident a été probablement de conceptualiser la complexe substance humaine sous la forme antithéthique âme-corps, et de ne sortir ensuite de cette antithèse qu’en niant l’âme. . . . Bien plus, pour l’Occidental, il semble que perfectionnement et libération s’opposent brutalement l’un à l’autre, au lieu de représenter les deux aspects d’un même phénomène. Surely one of the irreparable mistakes of the West has been to conceptualize the complex human substance under the antithetical form of body-soul and then to escape from this antithesis only by denying the soul. Even more, it appears that, for the West, perfection and liberation are brutally opposed to each other instead of being represented as two faces of the same phenomenon.27 Later in the same essay, Yourcenar writes: “Mon étude du Tantrisme m’a rapprochée, et non éloignée de la pensée chrétienne . . . ce ne sera

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C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1968; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 25. Jung’s study, first published in 1953, was one of Yourcenar’s main references when writing L’Œuvre au Noir, and it is important to keep some of its theories in mind as we go along. It was not available when in 1933 she published the precursor to L’Œuvre au Noir, D’après Dürer, or, for that matter, D’après Gréco, which became Anna, Soror… (both novellas belonging to the trilogy La Mort conduit l’attelage; see Chapter 1, infra). Jung’s direct influence on the definitive version of this last work is no doubt less significant, because Yourcenar’s modifications to D’après Gréco are very minor indeed when compared with those made to D’après Dürer. Yet as her interest as a teenager in the works of Rabindrath Tagore and “Kali décapitée” in Nouvelles orientales (1938) certainly attest, Yourcenar’s interest in Oriental philosophies is of long date. But it was only much later in her career that she began to study them in more depth. 27 Marguerite Yourcenar, Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1983) 200; and That Mighty Sculptor Time, trans. Walter Kaiser (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992) 188. Emphasis mine.

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jamais contrarier la notion d’humanisme que d’essayer de connaître et de contrôler les forces qui sont en nous” (“My own study of Tantrism has brought me closer to, rather than further away from, Christian thought . . . to try to understand and control those forces which are within us is never contrary to the notion of humanism”).28 Hence, Yourcenar seems to have found in Tantrism a way of reaching total liberation while preserving structure. It is rather a certain wrongheaded, restrictive notion of humanism and Christianity that she claims to deplore. Thus the author’s humanist hero Zénon will act on her behalf to denounce such restrictive Western humanism. Jung had posited, as Yourcenar knew, that the Eastern tradition of uniting body and soul, evil and good, models nature and is the only way to achieve self-actualization. Likewise, he writes, “Alchemy is pre-eminently concerned with the seed of unity which lies hidden in the chaos (of the earth) and forms the counterpart to the divine unity.”29 Zénon the alchemist hero will champion, on the author’s behalf, the Eastern attitude, finding complete liberation and self-actualization, but only at the moment of death. Simultaneously, however, I believe there is something about the narrative style that confounds and confines the reader, preventing her or him from participating with the narrator either in the metaphysical journey of the protagonist Zénon or with the other characters as intensely or as fully as she or he might have expected and wished. There may be several reasons for this. First, stable references for interpretation are required if the reader is to identify fully with the text. Meanings in Yourcenar’s text, on the contrary, appear and disappear, seeming to proliferate and to transform themselves gratuitously. So do the personae in L’Œuvre au Noir, of which all told there are several hundred. The reader can feel little or no affective identification with them, precisely because they appear interchangeable and gratuitous. The characters come across as abstract vehicles or paradigms of various currents, classes, types, or ideas. They lack the specificity, humanity (in the broad sense), and three-dimensionality that would persuade or even compel us to attach ourselves to their fate. In this regard, we must even struggle with Zénon, who, while undeniably the author’s invention, nevertheless constitutes a collage of several well-known Renaissance figures and who, clearly, is a vehicle

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Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, 204; and That Mighty Sculptor Time, 191. Emphasis mine. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 8 and 25.

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for denouncing “modern” humanism and for advocating enlightened modes of living and thinking. Finally, and no less important in the process of reader identification, we must consider syntax as well. Accessory information is incorporated in branching patterns, which, albeit hierarchically organized, interfere with our focus, with the construction of images, that is, with our imagination. The author seems more interested in “painting” a scene to be contemplated by the reader from a distance, as we would in a museum, than permitting the reader to enter that scene. Mazelike and copious discursive structures overload and blunt our receptive faculties. “(L)a phrase se balance, sur le noble rythme de la berceuse classique, sans heurt, sans trou, sans vertige, loin du précipice où le ‘je’ risque sans cesse de ‘dégringoler’” (“[T]he sentence is rocked to the noble rhythm of a classic lullaby, with no bumps, no holes, no vertigo, far from the cliff, over whose edge ‘I’ is constantly in danger of ‘falling’”), notes Pascale Doré in her Freudian analysis of Yourcenar’s writing.30 This seems to be an accurate observation. The rocking movement initially may seem soothing but is in fact disorienting in the way that walking on the deck of a ship at sea may cause us to feel unsure and uncomfortable if we are not accustomed to it. The smooth surface (and surfeit) of words truly leaves no holes or rough spots where we might gain a foothold. The reader eventually emerges from the well-ordered, multicursal labyrinth (the classical labyrinth, as opposed to its postmodern rhizomatic model31) unscathed, but anesthetized and submissive to a play of language that the narrator orchestrates with vertiginous results: vertiginous for the reader but not for the narrator. In the following sentence, we can examine some of these indices of reader identification.32 The narrator refers to the young mother of Zénon, Hilzonde, who has been abandoned by her lover, a dashing young Roman prelate who had spent several months in Bruges conducting personal business with Hilzonde’s banker-brother. He has precipitously departed Bruges and Hilzonde to advance his ecclesiastical career in Rome. She has given birth meanwhile to their

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Pascale Doré, Yourcenar ou le féminin insoutenable (Geneva: Droz, 2000) 49. Translation mine. 31 Umberto Eco distinguishes these three types of labyrinths. Wendy B. Faris, Labyrinths of Language. Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988) 158. 32 There will be other opportunities for analyzing other passages chosen at random, in order to revisit these hypotheses and test additional ones.

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bastard son, Zénon, and continues to live, damaged and withdrawn, under her wealthy and indulgent brother’s roof. Elle assistait ponctuellement aux offices de l’Eglise; le soir pourtant, après le repas, s’il arrivait qu’un convive d’Henri-Juste dénonçât les débauches et les exactions romaines, elle arrêtait pour mieux entendre son travail de dentelle, cassant parfois machinalement un fil qu’ensuite elle renouait en silence. (OR 570) She went punctually to Mass and the other offices, but evenings, after supper, if some guest of Henry Justus were denouncing the debaucheries of Rome and Papal extortion, she would stop her lace making the better to hear, sometimes mechanically breaking the thread, only to reknot it again in silence. (A 18) The seemingly direct, transparent meaning of the sentence is actually obscured in at least two ways. First, the complex syntax delays the reader’s synthesis and absorption of the sentence by introducing numerous, branching subsections, punctuated by a semi-colon and four commas. By the time we reach the end of the sentence, it is unlikely that we will have retained the contents of the first part, fragmented into so many sub-units. Second, concrete words do not readily connect to one another to form a synthetic, meaningful phenomenological experience. The first part of the sentence, separated by a semi-colon, seems to have little to do with the rest: the “pourtant,” which acts as the connection, does little to enlighten us. The analogies are virtual, at best oblique. In a kind of reverse personification, the “débauches et les exactions romaines,” which cover a broad spectrum of negative political, economic, and social relations with the Holy See, may symbolize for Hilzonde, we vaguely sense, the character of her faithless lover. But we are not sure: Hilzonde may simply be interested in everything related to Rome and the Church, since she is awaiting a reply from her lover to her letter. The sentence ends with a possible analogy, but again we cannot be certain because one element of the analogy is missing: the lace may, or may not, represent the fabric of Hilzonde’s life, just as the breaking off and reknotting of the thread may, or may not, symbolize despair reclaimed by a grim resolve. The character Hilzonde and meaning itself remain ambivalent and detached, suspended in an “entre-deux” that eludes the reader. Having

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failed to establish meaning and so remaining shut out of the text, the reader is likely to turn to art (form) in an effort to resolve the uncertainty and make some sense of the sentence, quite possibly connecting the “scene” it sketches to paintings of Flemish bourgeois life, for example, to Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker.” Yet here again, the subjective gaze of the reader, as in a museum, remains far removed from the text. A similar, confusing distancing effect may be detected in the way in which Yourcenar applies the conventions generally associated with the sub-genre of the historical novel. Her epic re-creation of the age of northern European humanism in which the author situates her hero makes such a classification relatively automatic. She dutifully applies a number of standard techniques to create verisimilitude,33 such as employing realistic everyday discourse based on documents of the era, scattering real historical figures among the fictional characters (Marguerite d’Autriche, Catherine de Médecis, the King of Sweden), and incorporating true historical events. The profile of Zénon, as mentioned, while clearly a creation of fiction, is based on a number of historical titans of the Renaissance: Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Cornelius Agrippa, and Leonardo da Vinci, among others. Yet, as I shall illustrate later in this chapter, there are passages in which the reader, though submerged in a flood of historical information, remains vainly trapped outside of the narrative. To understand how this occurs, we shall have to dissect Yourcenar’s apparent adherence to each of these conventions. What tactics does the author employ in order to withhold reader participation and retain power: the power of knowledge, or more precisely, of erudition? And of equal interest to my analysis, why does she do so? In the above textual example, we can begin to perceive some of the ways by which the text excludes the reader. Total freedom for the author, exclusion of the reader: these two projects form an important dichotomy in L’Œuvre au Noir and requires further examination. The two components of the dichotomy represent a familiar neobaroque extreme: a hallucinatory freedom and rebellion in terms of the theme, on the one hand, and a will to control and power,

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In the “Note de l’auteur” (489-511), Yourcenar describes her historical sources in considerable detail. See also her essay, “Ton et language dans le roman historique,” Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur, 61-66.

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achieved by means of conventional, “classical” narrative techniques, on the other hand. Marguerite Yourcenar’s wildly subversive, anarchical theme is quite legitimately postmodern, if we define postmodernism as “[an attitude of skepticism] to many of the principles and assumptions that have underpinned Western thought and social life for the last few centuries” and which is “intrinsically anti-authoritarian in outlook.”34 Yourcenar has in effect substituted “the oppressive rules”35 that comprise Jean-François Lyotard’s grandes narratives with the nonexclusionary, all-embracing, infinite possibilities of the Grand Œuvre. In what other “neobaroque” ways does hermeticism, more specifically alchemy, work for Marguerite Yourcenar as she developed the novel’s thematic lines? First, alchemy is the most syncretistic, the most heterogeneous of beliefs. It embraces, at least some elements of Christianity, the Kabala, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Taoism, Sufism, the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, Alexandrian neoplatonism, and aristotelianism. It filtered into Europe through the Arab scholars in Spain. 36 Alchemy serves as a window onto infinity and unrestrained freedom. It is thus inherently subversive, but paradoxically its adepts were submitted to a complex (often incomprehensible) and delicate set of procedures, which if not followed precisely, could lead to failure and even death. Thus there was considerable risk involved in this simultaneously scientific and esoteric quest for the philosphers’ stone, that is, for perfection and eternal life. Moreover, successful completion of all three stages of the alchemical process was virtual: for the most part, only charlatans who tried to capitalize on its popularity or who crassly envisaged the creation of the philosophers’ stone as the secret formula for turning base metal into gold claimed success. At the height of alchemy’s popularity in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, its followers attempted to hide its “sacred” doctrines from the profane and

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“Postmodernism,” in Stuart Sim, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism Routledge Companions Series (London: Routledge,, 1998) 339-40. 35 Ibid. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1984; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 36 Books about alchemy abound, and some are very obscure and difficult to follow. For an excellent overview of the origins of alchemy and its nature as a worldwide phenomenon (China, India, Egypt of the Ptolemies, the Middle East), see M. Caron and S. Hutin, Les Alchimistes (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1959).

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the uninitiated by means of seemingly illogical (to the uninitiated) contradictions and obscure language. The baroque, much like alchemical thought, “aura été un principe transculturel d’ouverture au réel. Chaque fois qu’un nominalisme, un dogme ou un fondamentalisme le refermera, ce réel, un néobaroque resurgira sans doute” (“is a transcultural principle of opening onto the real. Each time that nominalism, a dogma or a fundamentalism tries to close up this real, a neobaroque undoubtedly resurfaces”).37 The “real,” according to this passage, to which the baroque way of thinking provides access, is in effect ultimate truth and enlightenment, indiscernible to the uninitiated. The alchemical quest is supposed to provide these by means of the virtual fusion of a limitless series of universal contraries analogous to the far-flung, excessive antitheses sought by the baroque artist or poet: male/female, water/fire, high/low, ascent/descent, order/disorder, matter/spirit, light/dark, inner/outer, activity/passivity, God/man, and so on. There is eternal, infinite connectedness among all things, even their opposites, and with this, the idea of the uroboros, of a cosmos without beginning or end. In attempting to perfect matter, the alchemist is trying to perfect himself.38 Hence, multiplicity and inclusion, rather than finitude and exclusion, define “perfection.” As the alchemist proceeds on the path toward this hypothetical perfection, a series of metamorphoses occurs. The notion of metamorphosis, or flux and mobility, once more, is not classical but rather inherently baroque: as Jean Rousset reminds us, classicism’s unity depends on immobilizing all parts around a fixed center, whereas the baroque invokes instability and multiplicity.39 Alchemy represents an unending metamorphosis, since the attainment of the red work, that is, of perfection or the “philosopher’s stone,” means literally speaking death—the ultimate immobility—and thus remains forever hypothetical. But the movement toward such perfection is ongoing. Like the baroque work of art, in which “a harmonious solution will always be found in the end,”40 the alchemical

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Per Aage Brandt, “Morphogenèse et rationalité. Réflexions sur le baroque,” Christine Buci-Glucksmann ed., Puissance du baroque (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1996) 109. Translation and emphasis mine. 38 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (1962; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978) 169. 39 Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1954) 245-46. 40 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964) 60.

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coniunctio oppositorum results, at the physical level, in the “harmonious” fusion of contraries inherent in the “uniting symbol,” mercury. From this fusion in the alchemist’s laboratory, which as we saw is always virtual, emerges the perfect “philosopher’s stone.”41 In Jungian terms, it constitutes the union of the conscious with the unconscious and results in self-realization and enlightenment: true freedom. The metaphor of alchemy works for Marguerite Yourcenar in another important way. Here, I shall let her “brother” Zénon speak for her: “toute vue de l’esprit s’étaie sur des fondements arbitraires. . . . Toute doctrine qui s’impose aux foules donne des gages à l’ineptie humaine. . .” (OR 821). (“all systems of thought are built upon arbitrary foundations. . . . Furthermore, every doctrine which gains general adherence makes some concession to human stupidity. . .”) (A 340). Yourcenar was always highly suspicious of dogma and doctrine, of all epistemological systems in fact. Instead, she sought out frontiers and what lies beyond frontiers, because in so doing she recognized “Une certaine liberté, d’abord, de juger de ce qui est supposé au centre” (“A certain liberty, for one thing, to evaluate what is supposed to be the center”).42 To use alchemy as a belief structure or metaphysical “system” is in essence to use no system at all, because it is none and all of them at once. Alexandre Koyré notes: Ce qui rend si difficile la compréhension et la présentation en système de la conception du monde de la philosophie alchimique en général . . . c’est le fait qu’il y faut, pour ainsi dire, partir en même temps d’en haut et d’en bas. . . . La conception organiciste du monde et de l’évolution se plie difficilement aux cadres logiques. What makes the understanding and the presentation as a system of alchemical philosophy so difficult,

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“[Mercurius] stands at the beginning and end of the [(Great Work]. . . .He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught—a symbol uniting all opposites.” Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 294-95. 42 Portrait d’une voix, 256. Translation mine.

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Baroque Fictions generally speaking . . . is the fact that one needs, so to speak, to start out simultaneously from above and below. . . . The organic concept of the world and of evolution fit with difficulty into a logical framework.43

Positing “logical frameworks” is what classicism does best—and what Yourcenar would not, could not, do. Baroque thought, as another cultural historian has pointed out, also took one of the two paths just outlined above: either rejecting all rational constructs, or succumbing to the “facilities” of syncretistic thought.44 In this respect, it is interesting to note that one of Yourcenar’s favorite alchemical mottoes was: “Ne pas s’instruire, mais souffrir, subir” (“Do not study, but suffer and submit”).45 Alchemy in this way allows the author to invalidate the classical and humanist tradition, which, she notes in a letter to the orientalist Gabriel Germain, are normally used “pour ne pas aller plus loin” (“not to go any further”).46 Humanism and classicism are therefore far too limiting for the author. As her essay “Approches du Tantrisme” illustrated (cf. note 30), the Western notion of humanism fragments human beings by splitting body and soul, and then proceeds to reject the soul. To put it another way, the concept of Western humanism is all too often assumed to be strictly Apollonian, rather than a fusion of Apollonian and Dionysian elements. Or, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann would say, Western humanism consists of “false (and impossible) totalities,”47 because it fails to acknowledge fragmentation, chaos, and imperfection: paradoxically, it cannot be “whole” without those elements. Perhaps because it seems to be the most obvious analogy, I have deferred until now examining the rebellious philosopher and alchemist Zénon as a neobaroque figure: he is clearly neobaroque in terms of his character of “homme révolté.” Yourcenar’s passing references to Prometheus and Faust, both larger-than-life baroque symbols of institutional rebellion, recall elements of Zénon’s character. In the first chapter of the novel (“Le grand chemin,” “The Highroad”), where we first meet Zénon, twenty years of age and just setting out on

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Alexandre Koyré, Mystiques, spirituals, alchimistes du XVIe siècle allemand. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971) 114-15. Translation mine. 44 Didier Souiller, La Littérature baroque en Europe (Paris: PUF, 1988) 231. 45 Portrait d’une voix, 372. Translation mine. 46 Lettres à ses amis et quelques autres (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995) 422. 47 Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage Publications, 1994) 94.

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his great adventure, he remarks to his cousin Henri-Maximilien, “Il s’agit pour moi d’être plus qu’un homme” (“For me it’s a matter of being more than a man”) (OR 564, A 10). Zénon, moreover, both the subject and object of the alchemical Great Work, is not unlike the hero of a baroque picaresque novel, engaged in a personal combat and a spiritual quest from an eschatological perspective.48 In the first section of the novel, “La vie errante” (“The Vagabond Life”), Zénon without realizing it is being prepared to undergo the stages of the Great Work. He is both prima materia and mercury (he is both the subject and object of the Great Work), which the alchemist needs to begin and complete the process.49 But Zénon must first spend some thirty years of apprentissage, trying and discarding various belief systems, finally losing faith in all of them and in mankind in general: “Peu de bipèdes depuis Adam ont mérité le nom d’homme” (“Few bipeds, from Adam’s time down, have been worthy of the name of man”) (OR 646, A 114). The alchemical stages are undergone in the last two sections of the novel, “La vie immobile” and “La prison.” In Bruges Zénon embarks without realizing it upon the white work through his selfless service as a physician. There, he also experiences the epistemological and ontological dissolution of the black work and even the alchemical “bain philosophique” (in the chapter “La promenade sur la dune,” “A Walk on the Dunes”), which purifies and transmutes base metal before the final coniunctio. As mentioned, by his voluntary death he achieves the red work, the final, ineffable union of man and cosmos, matter and spirit. Much has already been written about the alchemical “spiral” that informs L’Œuvre au Noir. The spiral narrows, leading Zénon from his peripatetic exploration of the world around him, that is, “Le Tour de la prison” (“the round of the prison”), to “la vie immobile” (“the sedentary life”) in Bruges, where he serves the poor as a physician in a local monastery. By the time of his actual death, he has reached the

__________________ 48

Souiller, La Littérature baroque en Europe, 229. Marguerite Yourcenar had Zénon’s astrological chart drawn. He was born on February 24 under the sign of Pisces, which is secretive and solitary. His ruling planets are Saturn and Mercury. Readers may be surprised that she seemed to take astrology very seriously, although she certainly set no store in commercialized astrology. She did, however, agree with Jung, who wrote: “As we all know, science began with the stars, and mankind discovered in them the dominants of the unconscious, the ‘gods,’ as well as the curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected theory of human character. Astrology is a primordial experience similar to alchemy.” Psychology and Alchemy, 245.

49

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narrowest point of the spiral: a prison cell. Just as we have already found other points of similarity between alchemical thought and the baroque worldview, we may notice that the alchemical spiral provides a framework for the techniques of “emboîtement” and “mise en abyme” so characteristic of baroque literature. The great prison of the world encloses another prison of habit and voluntary asceticism, which encloses a real prison, the prison cell, and finally, the bed on which Zénon dies. To make matters still more complex, one could say that with each successive phase of “emboîtement” Zénon is a different man, for his metamorphosis does not cease: unus sum et multi in me. Multiplicity, flux, and heterogeneity are not simply validated: they constitute the essence of metaphysics according to Zénon. While Yourcenar’s choice of the alchemical allegory as the framework for her novel was certainly conscious and voluntary, it was no less the expression of a necessity. The little mermaid’s bitter sense of impotence and her “postmodern” disillusionment with man-made, thus inherently inept institutions and epistemological systems led her to valorize neobaroque solutions in L’Œuvre au Noir. These afforded her absolute freedom while also permitting her to reclaim the power of the Word that she had lost. “L’obsession de ‘l’ineptie humaine’” (“The obsession with ‘humain ineptitude’”) is one of the main reasons why Yourcenar was obliged to seek freedom beyond humankind’s flawed structures, and human ineptitude is another central theme of L’Œuvre au Noir.50 The author paints a fresco of such monumental cruelty, intolerance, greed, hypocrisy, and confusion that the reader is clearly oriented toward a comprehension of and empathy for Zénon’s revolt against his age’s dogmas and epistemologies. We can only applaud Zénon’s heroic search for answers and solutions in the midst of such chaos. It is at this universal, thematic level—we readily recognize the horrors of our own age—that Yourcenar seems to permit the reader entry into the tableau of strife and depredations of sixteenth-century Europe she endeavors to re-create. Yet the themes of human ineptitude, intolerance, and greed on the one hand, and the search for meaning, truth, and justice, on the other are so apparent in L’Œuvre au Noir’s depiction of the sixteenth century that Marguerite Yourcenar may offer them to the reader “free of charge,” so to speak. They are a kind of bonus and a gauge of sincerity that establishes a misleading sense of trust—or perhaps

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Lettres à ses amis et quelques autres, 465-66.

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complicity is a better word—between the reader and the author, a pact of sorts whose validity I believe must be questioned. It must be questioned, because the sense of freedom and rebellion the author allows herself in the guise of Zénon’s journey of self-actualization and the simultaneous exclusion of the reader from participating in the text (of which we looked at an example earlier in this chapter) are at odds with each other. According to reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser, there must exist both a set of stable conventions in the text and a “condition of willingness of both [text and reader] to participate” in the production of meaning.51 He also reminds us of the role illusion plays in “apprehending” a text. This illusion comes about from a natural tendency on the part of the reader toward “consistencybuilding,” to want to impose structure (plot, meaning, and so on) on chaos. This is why, with live television programs and with certain modern films [there is a] frustration of the viewer’s “fictional” instinct. . . . It is only natural that life should be more like Ulysses than like The Three Musketeers; and yet we are all more inclined to think of it in terms of The Three Musketeers than in terms of Ulysses—or, rather, I can only remember and judge life if I think of it as a traditional novel.52 The “historical novel” carries certain conventions and expectations, whether we agree with them or not, which are fulfilled in name but not in spirit in L’Œuvre au Noir. Granted, Marguerite Yourcenar’s reliance on primary sources may have contributed to a tone that strikes us as flat and distant. But events and figures in history also seem to be vastly truncated or stereotyped. The author tells us that she examined realia—court records, chronicles, and so on—to become familiar with patterns of speech common to the sixteenth century. Yet, interspersed among the flat bits of narrated history is direct discourse, which often strikes us as being far too mannerist or rhetorical to pass for everyday speech. Let us take, for example, the words of Thierry Loon, one of the beleaguered cloth

__________________ 51

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 69. 52 Ibid., 124-25. Quoted from Eco’s study, The Open Work.

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workers who by means of a petition try to bring their plight to the attention of Princess Marguerite of Austria, visiting Zénon’s uncle, an ultra-wealthy merchant and financier. One could argue that this character, a troublemaker and the self-appointed spokesman of the cloth-makers, is bound to be more “eloquent” than his peers, but it remains doubtful that an uneducated manual worker in Flanders of 1529 would use this language: [speaking to Zénon]: Laisse là Colas et Thomas, et pense à nous dorénavant. Nos gens te suivraient comme le fil suit la navette, chuchota-t-il. Il sont pauvres, ignorants, stupides, mais nombreux, grouillants comme des vers, avides comme des rats qui sentent le fromage. . .(OR 594-95). Drop Colas and Thomas, and think about the rest of us from now on. Our men would follow you as thread follows the shuttle,” he whispered. “They are poor, ignorant, and stupid, but they are many; they are active and stirring like worms, and as avid as rats that smell cheese. . .(A 50). In this short passage, we find no less than three similes and a list of qualifiers that together constitute a well-constructed periphrasis. Periphrasis is, in fact, particularly characteristic of Marguerite Yourcenar’s style; similes, metaphors, and antitheses are thus plentiful. Despite the author’s assurances to the contrary, the text does not fulfill the conventions of a historical novel in terms of authentic language and does not provide the conditions permitting the reader to satisfy conventional notions of authenticity. Instead, the disjuncture between the rhetorical language and ideas of historical language held by the reader generates uncertainty. Of course, “rhetorical” discourse is something we would find more natural between educated characters: Zénon, the prieur des Cordeliers, or even Zénon’s cousin, Henri-Maximilien, a kind of soldier-poet. Yet, once more, this theory fails the test. Because the sentences are relatively short, I finally settled upon part of the conversation between Zénon and Henri-Maximilien, which occurs in the opening chapter “Le grand chemin.”

“Sounding the Abyss” in L’Œuvre au Noir HM: (both are seated on the ground)... Mais pourquoi se rendre à Compostelle? Je ne vous vois pas assis parmi les gros moines et chantant du nez. Z: Hou... Qu’ai-je à faire de ces fainéants et de ces veaux? Mais le prieur des Jacobites de Léon est amateur d’alchimie. Il a correspondu avec le chanoine Bartholommé Campanus, notre bon oncle, ce fade idiot qui parfois s’aventure comme par mégarde sur les limites interdites. L’abbé de Sain-Bavon à son tour l’a disposé par lettre à me faire part de ce qu’il sait. Mais je dois me hâter, car il est vieux. Je crains qu’il ne désapprenne bientôt son savoir et qu’il ne meure. HM: Il vous nourrira d’oignons crus, et vous fera écumer sa soupe de cuivre épicée au soufre. Grand merci! J’entends conquérir à moins de frais de meilleures pitances. (after both have stood up) La paix branle dans le manche, frère Zénon. Les princes s’arrachent les pays comme des ivrognes à la taverne se disputent les plats. Ici, la Provence, ce gâteau de miel; là, le Milanais, ce pâté d’anguilles. Il tombera bien de tout cela une miette de gloire à me mettre sous la dent. Z: Ineptissima vanitas... En êtes-vous encore à attacher de l’importance au vent qui sort des bouches? (ON 563) HM: But why Compostela? I hardly see you sitting among those fat monks, singing through your nose. Z: Bah! . . . What are those dolts and sluggards to me? But the Prior of the Jacobins at Leon practices alchemy. He has corresponded with our good uncle, Canon Campanus, that simpleton who sometimes treads forbidden ground without knowing what he does. The Abbot of Saint Bavon, in his turn, has written to the Prior and has disposed him to impart his knowledge to me. But I must hurry, for he is old, and I fear lest he soon forget his learning, and die. HM: He will feed you on raw onions, and will set you to skimming his brew of copper laced with sulphur. Not for me, thank you! I mean to win better rations at less expense.

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Baroque Fictions (after both have stood up) The peace is tottering, friend Zeno. The princes are grabbing up countries like drunkards in a tavern snatching each other’s plates: here Provence, this honey cake; there Milan, as choice a bit as eel pie. From such a fine feast I can surely pick up some crumb of glory. Z: Ineptissima vanitas...Aren’t you old enough yet to know what is merely wind in men’s mouths? (A 9-10)

In keeping with the conventions of verisimilitude that we expect to be followed in historical novels, ideas or objects familiar to the period (Latin expressions, Rabelaisian monks, alchemy, “pâté d’anguilles,” “gâteau de miel”) are a part of the textual lexicon. But, even giving just due to an age in which rhetoric was much more common than it is today, we can permit ourselves to question the speakers’ heavy use of complex tropes, and I have highlighted parts of the dialogue to expose circumlocutions that often dislocate the path of the conversation. After Henri-Maximilien’s long, intricate metaphor of drunken gluttons quarreling over a meal to represent monarchs dividing up the spoils of Italy and France, Zénon replies directly with a Latin expression that means “all is most stupid vanity.” He then mocks Henri-Maximilien by asking him if he is still so backward as to believe in “what is merely wind in men’s mouths”: another metaphor, but one unrelated to HenriMaximilien’s—except for the metonymy they share, which is not immediately apparent: bouches (mouths). The two metaphors, linked only by this artfully concealed metonymy, thus form a partial non sequitur, which we have to “digest” before continuing. In the final analysis, this short passage reveals the complexity and intricacy of textual tropes, and how the need to decode, then resituate, their meaning focuses attention on the mechanics of form, affecting in the end the reader’s participation in producing the illusion of reality. There is, moreover, an unnatural or staged quality owing to the “rhetoricized” dialogue, which suggests we are the audience, rather than the participant, of the text’s performance. As for Marguerite Yourcenar’s use of historical characters, once again it meets in theory the expectations and conventions of the historical novel. Yet in reality it constitutes only a superficial obeisance to those conventions. The characters appear only briefly, for example: Princess Marguerite of Austria and the Queen Mother of France Catherine de Médicis. A number of other historical figures enter the scene indirectly, usually appearing in Zénon’s memory, but

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briefly: for example, Jean Calvin, Martin Luther, Michel Servet, the Lyonnais book publisher Etienne Dolet, and King Vasa of Sweden. Historical events, such as recurrences of the plague, the Council of Trent, and the Anabaptist rebellion of Münster fall short of expectations of what historical novels deliver: behind-the-scenes, “human interest” stories that, for better or for worse, make the past “live” for us. Let us take two examples: the first of a historical character, the second, of a historical event. Zénon’s meeting with Catherine de Médicis occupies three pages of L’Œuvre au Noir. Seeking a situation in which he might practice his medical art with a degree of security, Zénon is about to accept a position in Catherine’s court as physician to her eldest son and heir to the throne of France, who suffers from tuberculosis. When it is clear to him that the Queen will not protect him from the theologians of the Sorbonne, he departs. The brief description of the Queen’s dress and demeanor provides us hardly more of a profile than we might glean from a portrait or a condensed history of sixteenth-century France, while her words with Zénon are sufficient to sketch only the most general (and well-known) character traits: in this instance, her machiavellian prudence and cunning. These historical characters fail to move us with their “humanness,” seem passionless and interchangeable: they are oddly stiff and detached, like masked personae or paintings and sculptures in a museum. The chapter “La mort à Münster” (“Death in Münster”) certainly comes nearer to recreating the “air of the times” than any other historical episode in the novel. Indeed, the author devotes an entire, lengthy chapter to the miserably failed Anabaptist uprising in the German city of Münster. In the “Note de l’auteur,” she tells us that at least one-fourth of the characters who appear in L’Œuvre au Noir are taken “tels quels” (“as is”) from chronicles of the time (OR 845-46 and A 369). This includes the main actors of the Münster uprising, whose fanaticism and mass-induced hysteria as described in chronicles ring true to her. What nevertheless keeps the reader distanced from the events of this chapter is, first of all, the author’s unflagging irony, which I shall discuss in depth later, and perhaps second, the fact that she quite simply retransmits the information provided in the chronicles of the epoch in the same detached manner in which they were initially recorded: the distance between us and this far-away age is palpable. At best, we may become interested observers as we read this chapter, but we certainly do not “live” the horrors of the event with the vividness we might expect a historical novel to deliver. Her approach to history

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is descriptive and factual, not romantic and imaginative, such as the style of Michelet, for example, who sought to resuscitate history, to make it live. This factor would certainly also contribute to the reader’s difficulty in interacting with the text as historical fiction. Put another way, the imaginative space between denotation and connotation appears to be missing in L’Œuvre au Noir. Quite in keeping with Yourcenar’s penchant for the “entre-deux,” L’Œuvre au Noir’s “historicity” wavers on an uncertain borderline between, on the one hand, slightly fictionalized history and, on the other, strictly “historicized” fiction. There is one more aspect of Marguerite Yourcenar’s concept of “history” that needs to be addressed. As Eco’s earlier comment suggested, if a literary text presents reality as too “contingent” and “meaningless”—something that many modern texts do—the reader’s illusion-making capacity is impaired. Now as we already know, Yourcenar found the study of history nothing if not contingent and meaningless: history is chaos, an œuvre au noir. Reading L’Œuvre au Noir, we sometimes detect the impossibility the author senses in uniting or organizing this heterogeneity. This may be related to the author’s truly monumental erudition, which sought to capture or condense the hopeless chaos that the author considered the study of history to be. History is not infrequently presented in the novel as undeveloped bits and pieces, cryptic and unexplained, which may leave the reader frustrated, embarrassed, or simply unmoved—in any event, still on the outside. In the final analysis, L’Œuvre au Noir as a historical novel is an unusual combination of factual, almost denotative explanations of history (whether they are worked into the characters’ discourses or not) and of a narrative style which fails to fulfill the conventions regarding the presumed authenticity of language in a historical novel. This latter is a result of Marguerite Yourcenar’s privileging of poetic, rhetorical devices. Direct discourse thus seems exaggerated, at times even “bloated,” and the reader becomes engrossed in disentangling syntax and rhetoric at the expense of “meaning” in its most immediate sense. Furthermore, after we have eventually sorted out and absorbed the analogies and antitheses, what is left to the reader? And if no work is left to the reader’s imagination, Iser might ask, how can meaning be created? There is one member of the rhetorical stable, nonetheless, which does seem at first glance to permit the reader consistently greater participation in the text than the aforementioned conventions and rhetorical devices: that member is irony. Marguerite Yourcenar

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continuously employs bitter cosmic irony to implement her project of exposing the universality of human “ineptitude” and the eternal, recurring cycle of evil, which seems to be so much a part of human nature that humankind exercises no control over it. This cosmic irony is meant to act as a constant reminder of the age’s—our age’s, any age’s—monstrosity. It is not a question here of the irony of Voltaire or Mann, which makes us smile. This is angry, sarcastic irony: less resigned to stupidity, cruelty, and atrocity than some other forms of irony. Let us examine a single, outstanding example in the text, which will show evil to be truly eternal and ubiquitous. Through the alchemical power of words, Yourcenar may collapse time and space to make the absurd and the mutilated eternal and universal. Taken from the chapter, “Une belle demeure” (“A Noble Abode”), we are given Marthe, Zénon’s “damned” half-sister who has traded wealth and security for human decency and compassion. She and her husband have just refused a request by one of Zénon’s supporters to intervene on his behalf: Zénon is imprisoned and in imminent danger of being found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake. Marthe’s steward informs her immediately after the couple’s decision not to come to Zénon’s rescue that the Spanish government, which controls Flanders, has confiscated the property of a Flemish nobleman and patriot, recently captured by an act of treachery and beheaded by the Spanish authorities. Some of the deceased’s Aubusson tapestries, representing Biblical scenes such as “The Worship of the Golden Calf, Saint Peter’s Denial, The Burning of Sodom, The Scapegoat, and The Jews Thrown into the Fiery Furnace,” can be bought on the sly if she acts quickly: On ne pouvait pas dire que les Espagnols ne fissent pas les choses dans les règles. Mais grâce à l’ancien concierge du supplicié, il avait eu vent de l’existence d’un lot de tapisseries qui ne figuraient pas sur l’inventaire et dont on pourrait disposer à part. . . . Et, de toute façon, ces pièces augmentaient de valeur avec le temps. Elle y réfléchit un instant et acquiesça du menton. . . . Et elle croyait bien avoir vu jadis ces tentures dans l’hôtel de Monsieur de Battenbourg, où elles faisaient un effet fort noble. C’était une affaire à ne pas manquer. (OR 812)

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Baroque Fictions One could not complain that the Spanish did not conduct matters according to the regulations. But thanks to a former concierge of the dead man, the steward had had wind of the existence of one lot of tapestries which was not included on the inventory, and which could be disposed of separately. . . .And in any case, those pieces would increase in value with time. Martha reflected a moment, then made a sign of assent. . . . And she thought that she had formerly seen these tapestries in the mansion of Monsieur de Battenbourg, where they produced a truly noble effect. It was, indeed, an occasion not to be missed. (A 329)

Greed, hypocrisy, and ostentation are all in the passage. Anyone familiar with the confiscation of Jews’ property by the Nazis in World War II cannot miss the parallels. Nor can we ignore the more distant echoes of the Biblical scenes, in which the same scenarios had been played out thousands of years ago. The sacred uroboros of eternal return comes to symbolize, three times in this passage, the “eternal recurrence of barbarism, fragmentation and destruction as a critical force” of what Christine Buci-Glucksmann calls a “‘catastrophist’ utopia”:53 a type of modernity that refuses to consider history in a positive (progressive) Hegelian or Marxist light, but rather as fragmented, nonlinear, destructive. This is also Yourcenar’s modernity: “[J]e partage avec [Zénon] le sentiment de la mutilation d’un monde” (“I share with [Zénon] the feeling of the mutilation of the world”).54 Zénon, she remarks elsewhere, “se trouve déjà dans un monde qui a perdu le sens” (“in a world that has already lost all sense”).55 Loss of sense, belief in irreparable fragmentation (“mutilation”): these are all symptomatic of neobaroque, postmodern modes of perceiving the world. The text’s heavy cosmic irony is there, in the open, for the reader to comprehend and apprehend. And that is just the point: it is so integral to the author’s worldview, in fact, that it is essentially predetermined. There is no “work” here for the reader; he or she cannot share in discovering the folly of the world, because it has already been

__________________ 53

Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, 94 and 98. Portrait d’une voix, 223. 55 Ibid., 222. 54

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discovered for us, at every possible turn. Moreover, cosmic irony throughout the novel is disbursed between the narrator and Zénon. Whereas a strategy of unconscious irony helps foster a dynamic whereby the author and the reader share information that the protagonist does not, thereby encouraging reader-text interaction, the cosmic irony of L’Œuvre au Noir is the property of the author and the protagonist, to be subsequently disbursed to the reader as a passive, outside observer. Hence, we may consider Yourcenarian irony an element of the “bonus,” the pact of complicity, mentioned above, by which the reader is made to think that he or she is helping to create meaning, when in fact such is not the case. Having studied at some length the various impediments to the reader’s engagement in the text and analyzed two passages of direct discourse in terms of their adherence to conventions of historical fiction, we may now proceed to examine two randomly selected narrative passages in an effort to determine if the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning is greater or at any rate present. Because narrative is potentially less restrictive than direct discourse, and we could expect more possibilities for reader-text interaction. The first passage is from “L’abîme,” the second chapter of Part Two (La Vie immobile). At this mid-point of the novel, Zénon experiences a kind of reverse epiphany: he is indeed the recipient of a revelation, but it appears to lead not to light, harmony, and stability, but rather to obscurity, dysphoria, and dissolution. He discovers that the world is indeterminate, an interchangeability of time, space, and substance so complete that it demolishes every epistemological system, every scrap of erudition he has acquired—be it metaphysical or mystical, logical or empirical. There is no center, no chain of causeand-effect. In alchemical terms—with which the chapter is pointedly replete—Zénon has passed through the first of the three stages of the alchemical process leading to a total transformation: Toute sa vie, il s’était ébahi de cette faculté qu’ont les idées de s’agglomérer froidement comme des cristaux en d’étranges figures vaines, de croître comme des tumeurs dévorant la chair qui les a conçues, ou encore d’assumer monstrueusement certains linéaments de la personne humaine, comme ces masses inertes dont accouchent certaines femmes, et qui ne sont en somme que de la matière qui rêve. (OR 686, emphasis mine)

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Baroque Fictions All his life long he had been amazed at the way ideas have of agglomerating, divorced from feeling, like crystals in strange, meaningless formations; and of growing like tumors, devouring the flesh that conceives them; or of assuming certain human lineaments, but in monstrous wise, like those inert masses to which some women give birth, and which are, after all, only the incoherent dreams of matter. (A 168-69, emphasis mine)

We have already seen that long, complex, but hierarchically structured sentences are not atypical of L’Œuvre au Noir. Here, the author specifically seeks through language the effect of dissolution, as Zénon enters the black phase of alchemy which destroys everything in its path. Breaking down the sentence, we count five relative subordinate clauses, one ne . . . que construction, and three parallel infinitive phrases. Highlighted are three similes and a metaphor. Ideas are compared to randomly growing mineral crystals, cancerous tumors, and aborted fetuses, underscoring the formless chaos that, paradoxically, sustains rational thought, the cornerstone of classicism and humanism. The reader cannot help but be struck by the complexity of the three similes that occur in rapid succession and even more by the comparisons themselves. An element of Iser’s reader-response theory is what he calls “significance,” which is the ultimate step in the reading experience: it is a process in which the reader “[absorbs] the meaning into his own existence.”56 In this passage, the meaning is clear. We can comprehend cognitively where the text is positioning us: within the dissolution of the black work that Zénon is undergoing. Yet, there are two different processes at work in these tropes (the three similes and the metaphor) that obstruct significance. First, as we have already seen in other passages, there is little opportunity for the reader within the context of the passage to imagine “ideas” in any other way: the text has done all the work; the analogies are complex and far-reaching. Once more, it leaves no space for the subject as a participant. Second, three highly concrete images of brute, “unthinking” matter are sandwiched between two abstractions: “ideas” and “incoherent dreams.” The final metaphor cancels out the three preceding similes, in fact: the physical and the metaphysical are equated, and both are found to be unstable,

__________________ 56

Iser, The Act of Reading, 151.

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questionable notions. The influence on the author of Eastern philosophies is evident: reality is elsewhere, obviously, but in a cosmic realm where significance cannot be produced, for the meaning here cannot be absorbed into the empirical subject’s experience. This is Zénon’s journey, and not ours. Repulsive analogies such as decomposing fetuses and deadly tumors—which, incidentally, are highly baroque, grotesque images in their own right—have certainly been used by other writers. Shakespeare used them effectively: they belong to the dark side of the human condition. But all the tropes in the text in question have been intricately developed only to be cancelled out, in the end. The reader can do nothing with them. The second and final sample of narrative text is taken from the chapter about Zénon’s trial for heresy, “L’acte d’accusation” (“The Indictment”) in Part Three (La prison) of L’Œuvre au Noir. The sentence explains why the public opinion of the Patriots—a band of Flemish citizens trying to subvert Spanish rule—will be against Zénon in the end. The text in this example is more denotative than the other passages we have examined. Because it is less bound by tropes, we might suppose it to have more flexibility and more “blank spaces” to permit the reader to engage in the production of meaning: Les patriotes qui abondaient chez les bourgeois et composaient la meilleure part du petit peuple eussent dû soutenir ce malheureux qui passait pour avoir secouru leurs pareils ; quelques-uns le firent en effet, mais la plupart de ces enthousiastes inclinaient vers les doctrines évangéliques et détestaient plus que tout autre le seul soupçon d’athéisme ou de débauche ; de plus ils haïssaient les couvents, et ce Zénon leur semblait avoir eu à Bruges partie liée avec les moines. (OR 803) The Patriots, who were numerous among the burghers and who predominated among the common people, ought to have supported this man in misfortune, since he was said to have succored their like. Some few of them did, in fact, take his part, but most of these Partisans inclined toward Evangelical doctrines, and detested, above all, anything that smacked of atheism or debauch; besides, they loathed monasteries, and this man Zeno seemed to them to have made common cause with monks in Bruges. (A 318)

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The opening sentence of the paragraph to which this passage belongs prepares the reader for the welter of opinions that follow: “les opinions s’étaient alignées dès le début en schemas compliqués” (OR 803) (“opinions had been aligned, from the beginning, according to complicated patterns”) (A 318). In the above passage, two semi-colons have the effect of dividing the sentence into three symmetrical parts. The predominance of independent clauses –five compared with only two relative subordinate clauses—creates an impression of relative simplicity and directness. Similes and metaphors are absent. But the passage’s heavy cosmic irony already predetermines its univocal message: the Patriots exhibit a level of fanaticism and intolerance that makes them no better than the opposition. The reader is not so much indentured to complex syntactical structures and intricate tropes, this time, as to univocal meaning, preventing her or him from becoming fully “committed” to the text. As these various examples illustrate, the reader is less engaged than desired or expected in Yourcenar’s “historical novel.” In the case of unfulfilled expectations, it is natural to hope for and await their eventual resolution; the reader thus capitulates and continues. But buried in the very decision to continue is the reader’s agreement to submit, to be the audience to the text’s performance. As we have seen, the heavily rhetorical style, which favors circumlocution, periphrasis, and tropes plays a major role in this submission and sense of helplessness or entanglement. The novel’s themes of liberation and rebellion against injustice and stupidity, which, along with the pervasive “cosmic” irony, are quite apparent in the midst of the rhetorical and syntactical maze, are concessions to the reader’s desire to apprehend the text: they predispose the reader to yield to a performance of which he/she can be nothing but a neutralized spectator. The author can never relinquish her mastery or control of the text; the little mermaid can never again risk having her voice silenced after returning to her element. Beginning with Mémoires d’Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar always claimed to be surprised at the success of her works. To Mathieu Galey, for instance, she said: “Je ne m’attendais pas à ce que dix personnes lisent ce livre. Je ne m’attends jamais à ce qu’on lise mes livres, pour la simple raison que je n’ai pas l’impression de m’occuper de choses qui intéressent beaucoup la plupart des gens” (“I didn’t expect more than ten people to read the book. I never expect anyone to read my books, for the simple reason that I don’t think that the things

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that concern me are of interest to most people”).57 We can read into that remark either excessive modesty or excessive hubris; but certainly we may conclude that she wrote—had to write—for herself, not for the reader. Here is the comment of one frustrated critic who, clearly, was unable to produce meaning and significance from L’Œuvre au Noir: “Le récit [n’a] presque rien pour nous attacher. . . . Zénon lui-même est un personnage peu sympathique. . . . Il erre sombrement dans cette histoire, occupé de rudes affaires qui ne nous cause pas la moindre émotion” (“The story [has] almost nothing to attach us. . . . Zénon himself is a not a very likable character. . . . He wanders darkly through this story, concerned with difficult matters that don’t produce the least emotion in us”).58 The alchemical metaphor seems to extend to the reader-author relationship, for like the Great Work, the text is meant to open its portals to only a chosen few and remain an enigma to many. Zénon says as much to his cousin Henri-Maximilien in the chapter “La conversation à Innsbruck”: Un tri s’opère de la sorte parmi nos lecteurs; les sots nous croient; d’autres sots, nous croyant plus sots qu’eux, nous quittent; ceux qui restent se débrouillent dans ce labyrinthe, apprennent à sauter ou à contourner l’obstacle du mensonge. Je serais bien surpris si on ne retrouvait pas jusque dans les textes les plus saints les mêmes subterfuges. Lu ainsi, tout livre devient un grimoire. (OR 640, emphasis mine) By such means we sort out our readers: the fools take us literally; other fools, thinking us more stupid than themselves, abandon us; those who stay with us make their way in the labyrinth of our books, learning to jump the obstacle, the lie, or to go around it. I should be greatly surprised if the same subterfuges are not to be found even in the most sacred texts. When read thus, every book has a hidden meaning. (A 108, emphasis mine) Yet the readers have persisted. I firmly believe that the universal themes that occupy Marguerite Yourcenar—such as justice

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Les Yeux ouverts, 155-56; and With Open Eyes, 128. Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar, 320.

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versus injustice, freedom, personal integrity and simple decency, humankind’s eternally recurring inhumanity, and so on—concern many thoughtful people; the enormous popularity of her work, in particular Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au Noir, seems to prove this. I do submit, however, that the way in which she expresses these concerns poses the greater problem to many readers, and furthermore, that she was always aware of it: hence her surprise at having even ten readers. The author-reader pact with respect to L’Œuvre au Noir is very restrictive, as I have tried to show. It is this feeling of limitation on the part of the reader, tempered to some extent by thematic “bonuses,” that has helped to earn Marguerite Yourcenar the reputation of being a “classical” author: for classicism represents closed systems, control, and curtailment. Alchemical texts did the same: only the adept, after great hardship and suffering, were permitted to apprehend them. But the rewards reaped in exchange for the hardships endured were priceless. In keeping with the alchemical metaphor which informs L’Œuvre au Noir, therefore, Marguerite Yourcenar resolves within one text two paradoxical objectives: safeguarding by means of rhetorical strategies and artifice the submission of the audience and the performative powers of the initiate while attaining the open, pluralistic, and infinite cosmos that the Great Work promises.

Chapter 4 Neobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words Il faut peser le moins possible sur la terre.1

I have endeavored to illustrate in the three preceding chapters the amazingly circuitous aesthetic strategies that Marguerite Yourcenar employed both to disguise and to indulge in a liberating, transgressive revolt against certain Western notions of humanism and classicism. They permit her, among other things, to revel in the suffering or the exultant body (the passionate body) and to erect an elaborate protective edifice over the abyss, whose nature fluctuates between chaos and the void, both to be feared equally. They also impose upon the reader the role of audience rather than that of participant, for like the paradox of one hand clapping, the author’s aesthetic virtuosity could assume the posture of “master’s discourse” only in the presence of a distanced and captive reader. In 1982 Marguerite Yourcenar published two novellas, the rather long Un homme obscur and the much shorter “coda,” Une belle matinée, which together with Anna, Soror... comprised the trilogy, Comme l’eau qui coule. Un homme obscur/Une belle matinée were to be her last fictional works. With their publication she had brought to full fruition the three seeds preserved from her youthful “roman-océan” Remous, whose “seedlings” had been the three stories comprising La Mort conduit l’attelage (1934). D’après Dürer had become L’Œuvre au Noir in 1968; D’après Gréco, after minor revision, was henceforth Anna, Soror..., published in 1980; and D’après Rembrandt became the two récits just cited. Yourcenar considered Un homme obscur to be the third panel of a “triptych” that includes Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au Noir,2 as well as her literary “testament.”3 Respectively, the metaphors “triptych” and “testament” suggest progression and closure. Accordingly, I shall examine in this

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Lettres aux amis et quelques autres, ed. Michèle Sarde and Joseph Brami (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995) 828. 2 Portrait d’un voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987), ed. Maurice Delcroix (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 382. 3 Ibid., 324.

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final chapter why Un homme obscur, Marguerite Yourcenar’s last fictional work, constitutes the final step in a process that has progressively liberated Yourcenar’s texts from the burden of having to justify themselves using “meaning” as a general standard. This ultimate liberation entails the appropriation of an Oriental philosophy, Buddhism, in order to invalidate language itself: the indispensable conduit through which all purported meaning must first pass, however flawed such meaning may be. By exposing language’s failure, Buddhism serves an expiatory function and offers Yourcenar a means (to attempt) to extricate her work from the crisis of representation that has seemed to haunt it all along. But in privileging silence, represented in Un homme obscur by the protagonist Nathanaël, the Buddhistic trope works at crossed purposes with the author’s project of writing. The inevitable aporia can only be resolved by recognizing in the obvious devaluation of words the author’s ultimate artifice, one by which she will vindicate her aesthetic design: in this novella, the author suggests that words cannot be measured against their ability to produce meaning in the general sense—a futile endeavor at best—but rather against their capacity to produce beauty, and beauty alone. It is not too difficult to follow the basic progression of Yourcenar’s triptych, which resembles the path a sixteenth-century mystic might have taken.1 Mémoires d’Hadrien is about a man who is absolute ruler of most of the known world, although worldly power and wealth are exercised responsibly, for the most part. L’Œuvre au Noir is about a sixteenth-century philosopher-physician-alchemist who, until the last few years of his life, is interested in acquiring, like Faust, knowledge: knowledge for its own sake. His acquisition of knowledge is passionate, often bitter, and intensely lonely: the price he must pay in exchange at the hands of society is unimaginable, of tragic proportions, in spite of his sacrifice being framed as a successful esoteric (alchemical) initiatory journey. Un homme obscur is neither about worldly power and wealth, nor about the humanist’s dream of knowledge as power. It is instead about a humble man, living in the middle of the seventeenth century, whose fate, like that of countless other “faceless” human beings, will

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One example that comes to mind is Marguerite de Navarre’s poem “Les Prisons,” in which the narrator consecutively abandons worldly concerns, followed by knowledge, finally to attain union with “le Tout” or “le Rien.”

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remain unrecorded by historians and whose premature death likewise will be quickly forgotten by those who know him. Because of his natural simplicity and humility, the author suggests, he enjoys effortless harmony with the universe. A young Dutchman with a slight limp, Nathanaël grows up in Greenwich, England; his father is a ship carpenter of modest means; his mother is a strict Puritan. Fearing that he might have killed a man in self-defense, he stows away on a ship, spending a short time in the Caribbean before being shipwrecked off the northeastern coast of North America (Maine). The sole survivor of the wreck, he stays for two years in a coastal island settlement with the family that rescues him; during that time he marries their daughter. After she dies of tuberculosis (prefiguring his own end: perhaps he also contracted it from her), he finds a ship that returns him to Europe, and he settles in Amsterdam. Working first as a proofreader in his uncle’s printing and publishing business (which he is able to do thanks to a rudimentary education and knowledge of some Latin), Nathanaël marries a Jewish woman of loose morals who, he later finds out, is also a prostitute and a thief. She abandons him, not before having a baby he is not sure is his. Nathanaël becomes ill and, from the hospital where he is recovering, is taken by a charitable woman to the home of an ultra-wealthy merchant to be a household servant. There, he is exposed for the first time to the “finer” things in life: art, music, philosophy. He also falls quietly and discreetly in love with the gentle, kindly widowed daughter of the merchant. Thinking the fresh sea air will help strengthen his weak lungs and perhaps also to be rid of him, his wealthy patron sends him to a hunting island he owns off the Dutch coast to guard against poachers. There, after several months in almost complete solitude, Nathanaël quietly succumbs to his illness and dies, alone and peacefully, amidst nature. He is twenty-eight years old. From 1979, the year of her partner Grace Frick’s death, until her own in 1987, Marguerite Yourcenar continued to deepen her exploration of the Far Eastern beliefs that had long attracted her: Buddhism especially, but also Hinduism, Tantrism, and Taoism. She not only fundamentally altered D’après Rembrandt to become Un homme obscur; in 1981 she also published the essay Mishima ou La vision du vide, examining the life and work of the flamboyant Japanese author who committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, in 1970. Moreover, during these final years of her life she worked on a series of essays published posthumously and entitled Le Tour de la prison. Most of the essays describe her travels in Japan, “le choc bienfaisant d’une culture

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radicalement étrangère” (“the healthy shock of a radically foreign culture”).2 Marguerite Yourcenar’s interest in the philosophies of the Far East and the Subcontinent began in her teenage years: Rabindranath Tagore invited her to attend the school he had founded after she had sent him a complimentary letter, but she could not afford to make the trip to India. One of her favorite authors was the eleventh-century Japanese novelist Mourasaki Shikubu, whose novel GenghiMonogatari she considered one of world literature’s great masterpieces. The public first became aware of Yourcenar’s interest in the “Orient,” of course, as early as the 1930s, by means of her eclectic collection of traditional and contemporary fairy tales and folk tales, Nouvelles orientales, first published in 1938. Three of the ten tales deal specifically with the Far East and India (China in “Comment Wang-Fô fut sauvé,” Japan in “Le dernier amour du prince Genghi,” based on the Genghi-Monogatari, and India in “Kâli décapitée”).3 In the course of Yourcenar’s career, furthermore, one finds here and there essays consecrated to the Far East and the Subcontinent: in Le Temps ce grand sculpteur, the essays “Sur quelques thèmes érotiques et mystiques de la Gita-Govinda” and “Approches du Tantrisme”;4 and in En pèlerin et en étranger, the charming, Colette-like “Suite d’Estampes pour Kou-KouHaï,”5 a prose poem to her Pekinese dog. It is thus not surprising that Yourcenar in Un homme obscur finally attempts to imagine the life of a modern, European subject living in accordance with Buddhist precepts:6 a circumstance that gives the title one of its possible meanings, this one highly ironic. Nathanaël, an obscure man certainly from the vantage point of the seventeenthcentury Calvinist (Puritan) ethic, from which he hails, is in fact an

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Le Tour de la prison (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1991) back cover. OR, 1169-1248. 4 Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1983) 113-28 and 197-206, respectively. 5 En pèlerin et en étranger (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989) 79-90. The essay dates from 1927 and is followed by a postface written in 1980 in which the author reconfirms her early interest in Eastern literature and beliefs--even though her grasp of the subject was at times, she acknowledges, naïve or inaccurate. 6 For a closer examination of Buddhistic imagery and symbolism in Yourcenar’s works (including Un homme obscur), see Manuela Ledesma, “Quelques images du vide dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar,” Marguerite Yourcenar: écriture, réécriture, traduction: actes du colloque international de Tours, 20-22 novembre 1997 (Tours: S.I.E.Y., 2000) 173-86. 3

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“enlightened” man according to Buddhist precepts.7 Buddhistic enlightenment may be achieved by possessing the humility to acknowledge one’s own ignorance; that is, by recognizing one’s desires for that which is impermanent and perishable, which causes suffering. Once one acknowledges the true nature of the universe, in which all things perish, one will be liberated from such suffering. By following the so-called Middle Path or ethical practice, which seeks to avoid both the extremes of material desire and of excessive asceticism, one may refrain from evil acts. Adherence to this Middle Path is achieved by following certain commandments such as not to kill, lie, or steal and by practicing the cardinal social virtues of generosity, benevolence, cooperation, service, and compassion. Nathanaël faithfully embodies these virtues, and the author takes care to show him exercising all of them, in one form or another, as the narrative progresses. While we lack precise dates, we may situate the time of Un homme obscur between approximately 1615 and 1645 by means of some sparse historical references: a libelous pamphlet, for example, portrays the widowed French Queen and regent, Anne of Austria, the mother of the young Louis XIV, as being the mistress of her Prime Minister Mazarin. Historically speaking, then, we are at the apogee of the Baroque period and its culture of appearances, power, and ostentatious wealth, which, in light of the protagonist, constitutes a dichotomy that the author no doubt relished. The title Un homme obscur also makes an indirect reference to its predecessor, D’après Rembrandt, an artist well known as the baroque’s master of the technique of chiaroscuro, or clair-obscur. The technique is referred to directly as Nathanaël contemplates a painting in the home of his wealthy master: “un chef-d’œuvre de clair-obscur, c’est à dire qu’un peu de jour s’y mêlait à beaucoup de nuit” (OR 1003) (“a masterpiece of chiaroscuro—that is to say, a bit of day was intermingled in it with a

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Like alchemy, guides for Oriental philosophies are so numerous as to be bewildering. For the purposes of this dissertation, I selected the following: Willard G. Oxtoby, ed.., World Religions. Eastern Traditions (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1996); and Hajime Nakamura, “Buddhism,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Publishers, 1973) 247a-257b. Moreover, Buddhism has many variants, according to time and place of establishment. Two salient examples of Buddhism’s adaptations may be found in Japan, which developed a special form of Buddhism—Zen Buddhism—that is quite similar to what is known as Esoteric Buddhism; and in China, which amalgamated elements of Buddhism with elements of Taoism.

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great deal of night”) (OM 75). Moreover, in a perfectly “baroque” antithesis, the author makes of Nathanaël the most anti-baroque of heroes: he is as far removed as possible from the emotional excesses of the baroque persona, such as revolt, madness, melancholy, or violence, whose literary and mythical models were Prometheus, Hercules, Don Juan, and Faust. Nor does he ever adopt a posture, strike a pose, or wear a mask: in an ironic reversal, there are even moments when his simplicity and candor are assumed to be a disguise or a lie that hides something else. Uncommitted to the belief systems and social structures of his time, Nathanaël hovers on its periphery, simultaneously present and absent, like a Rembrandt portrait submerged in shadows. It would be simple enough to consider Un homme obscur merely the final stage in the logical progression of Marguerite Yourcenar’s triptych, and the three-part interpretation offered earlier almost begs to be applied, particularly in view of the author’s longstanding and, with age, ever-growing belief and comfort in Oriental philosophies. As we have already seen in L’Œuvre au Noir, Zénon spends a good part of his life trying on Western epistemologies before discarding them with dissatisfaction, if not bitterness. His “alchemical” progression in the last years of his life bear traces of alchemy’s Oriental origins: his compassion and generosity as a physician, his detachment and moderation, his silence finally, all attest to it. Unlike Zénon, however, the hero of Un homme obscur must neither “progress” to a final level of cosmic unification nor sacrifice his life to achieve it. It seems he has always possessed it and has been living it daily. The narrator repeatedly stresses Nathanaël’s “natural” sympathy for all living creatures and plants, his “savoir naturel [qui] échappe à la formulation systématique” (“a natural knowledge [that] escapes systematic formulation”)8 and that highlights, moreover, the basic impossibility of all human communication, whether written or spoken, whether expressed in letters, numbers, or symbols. Yourcenar and “savoir naturel,” Yourcenar and an Oriental “tentation du vide”: we understand these and accept them. We have seen ample evidence of her affinity to Buddhism, Tantrism, and so on. Furthermore, she perceived “la voix des choses” in much the same

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Bruno Tritsmans examines Marguerite Yourcenar’s “mystique de la matière,” which embraces humankind in “un univers vital.” See “Voix du Savoir dans Un homme obscur. De Caillois à Yourcenar,” Bulletin de la Société Internationale d’Etudes Yourcenariennes 12 (décembre 1993) 99-108.

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animist and pagan way that Nerval embraced them in his sonnet “Vers dorés.”9 Yet, regardless of whether we choose to see in Nathanaël a pagan animist, a transplanted Buddhist, or both (they are not necessarily contradictory), the fact remains that Un homme obscur is a relentless assault on language that potentially jeopardizes Yourcenar’s own aesthetic strategies of denial, demonstration, and control even as it excoriates once again classical, essentialist values. In doing so, Marguerite Yourcenar is fulfilling one aspect of the neobaroque agenda. In his essay Barroco, Severo Sarduy writes: . . . être baroque aujourd’hui signifie menacer, juger et parodier l’économie bourgeoise, basée sur une administration radine des biens; la menacer, juger et parodier en son centre même et son fondement : l’espace des signes, le langage, support symbolique de la société et garantie de son fonctionnement par la communication. To be baroque today means to threaten, to judge, and to parody bourgeois economy, which is based on a stingy administration of wealth; to threaten, judge, and parody it at its very center and base: the space of signs, language, society’s symbolic support and the guarantee of its functioning by means of communication.10 However, Sarduy pursues: “Dilapider du langage en fonction uniquement du plaisir . . . attentat à ce bon-sens moraliste et naturel . . . sur lequel se fonde l’idéologie de la consommation et de l’accumulation” (“To squander language uniquely for the pleasure of it . . . attack on this moralistic and natural good sense . . . on which the ideology of consumption and accumulation is based”).11 This is where Yourcenar’s deconstructionist project hits a snag, an aporia. For Sarduy’s idea—and those who know his fiction see it in his own

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Tritsmans, “Voix du savoir.” Tritsmans points out in footnote 3 (100) of his essay that Yourcenar used Nerval’s poem in La Voix des choses, a collection of aphorisms and poems published the last year of her life (1987) that had special meaning for her. 10 Barroco, trans. Jacques Henric and the author (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975) 155-56. Translation and emphasis mine. 11 Ibid., 156. Translation mine.

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texts—involves an explosive fragmentation of language in the text itself: Sarduy’s texts do just that. This is not so for Un homme obscur. Marguerite Yourcenar’s deconstruction of language leaves the text miraculously intact. Indeed, Un homme obscur, like L’Œuvre au Noir, like Mémoires d’Hadrien, like all of Yourcenar’s fictional texts, even the “expressionistic” ones of the 1930s, exhibits the markings of Barthes’s definition of the conventional novel as it developed during the nineteenth century. It called for the passé simple as the preferred verb tense and the third person singular as the preferred narrative voice. These elements constitute part of “an image of order,” of a “closed act” that safeguards the narrative from “la terreur d’une parole sans limite” (“the terror of the unconfined word”).12 One would certainly be correct in considering these conventions part of Yourcenar’s classical “baggage.” But they have not been directly dealt with until now—indeed, they appear to support her neobaroque “virtuosity”—since prior to Un homme obscur Yourcenar had attacked the Western epistemologies that depend on language, but never so vehemently the foundations of language itself. If all man-made (read “artificially constructed”) systems of communication are essentially impossible, as she intimates, then we are confronted with an “unresolvable undecidability.”13 Below are some passages from Un homme obscur that illustrate the impotence of the written and the spoken word:

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Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux Essais critiques (Paris: Les Editions du Seuil, 1972) 29. 13 To borrow Paul de Man’s expression. Though Yourcenar had no use for literary criticism and almost certainly viewed the futility of communication in a mystical or existential light rather than as a formal linguistic issue, the aporia set up in Un homme obscur bears a surprising though unpremeditated resemblance to de Man’s linguistic theories, which expose “the illusoriness of meaning, the impossibility of truth and the deceitful guiles of all discourse.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 126. Even de Man’s claim about the “rhetoricity” of philosophy, that is, the impossibility of philosophy to communicate understanding any more surely or clearly than a work of literature, is eloquently illustrated in the dialogue between Nathanaël and the philosopher Léo Belmonte (OR 1007-13). See The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 225-26. As we have now witnessed repeatedly, Yourcenar’s traditional texts seem to elude the conventions they ostensibly obey, manifesting something that is “virtuellement subversif” (see A Frontispiece, infra, footnote 2), echoing the “something other” of postmodern double coding (Introduction, infra, 61).

Neobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur le sentiment qu’il avait eu pour elles était plus simple et peut-être plus fort que celui qu’exprimaient ces poètes ruisselant de tant de pleurs, gonflés de tant de soupirs, et grillés de tant de feux (OR 969). yet the feelings he had had for them were much simpler and perhaps much stronger than those expressed by these poets streaming with tears, heaving with sighs, and burning with such fires. (OM 33) Nathanaël silently examining his feelings for the two women with whom he has been intimately attached il dormait les yeux ouverts. . . . Les paroissiens chantaient ou braillaient des hymnes, . . . puis repartaient, munis de dogmes, d’admonitions et de promesses pour une semaine. . . (OR 970). . . . he would go to sleep with his eyes open. . . . The parishioners sang or shouted hymns, relishing this communal vocal exercise; then they would go back . . . furnished with enough dogmas, admonitions, and promises for another week. (OM 34) Nathanaël listening to a sermon in church Ces myriades de lignes, ces milliers, ces millions de courbes par lesquelles, depuis qu’il y a des hommes, l’esprit a passé, pour donner au chaos au moins l’apparence d’un ordre. . .(OR 1009). Those myriad lines, those thousands, millions of curves along which, ever since man has existed, the mind has traveled to give at least the appearance of order to chaos. . .(OM 83). The Jewish philospher Léo Belmonte musing about written language Il pensait à cette écriture délayée par l’eau et à ces feuillets ramollis et flasques coulant dans la vase. Ce n’était peut-être pas pire pour eux que l’imprimerie d’Elie. (OR 1015) He thought of that handwriting blurred by the water and of all those sodden, limp pages sinking into the mud. Yet perhaps that was no worse a fate for them than Elie’s printing house would have been. (OM 90)

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Baroque Fictions Nathanaël learns that Belmonte’s manuscript was thrown into the canal after his death Une fois par se prouver qu’il possédait encore une voix et un langage, il prononça tout haut . . . son propre nom. . . . Mais ce nom inutile semblait mort comme le seraient tous les mots de la langue quand personne ne la parlerait plus. . .(OR 1033). Once, in order to prove to himself that he still possessed a voice and a language, he uttered [his name] aloud. . . . But that useless name seemed dead, as the words of a language are dead when no one speaks it any longer. (OM 113-14) Nathanaël, dying alone on an island off the coast of the Netherlands

Un homme obscur’s protagonist Nathanaël underscores the impossibility of communication by choosing usually to remain silent rather than speak for fear of being misunderstood or ridiculed, because of fatigue and lassitude, or because he is actually asked to keep silent. More accustomed to not speaking than to speaking, he thinks: verbs such as se demander, penser, songer, imaginer, se dire, and se souvenir appear frequently. On the few occasions when Nathanaël does speak, he is timid or hesitant; his audience sometimes disbelieves or misunderstands him. Pointedly, his encounter with the philosopher Léo Belmonte constitutes not only the longest discourse in the novella; it is the only instance in which Nathanaël’s verbal skills and his opinions are taken seriously, even praised. Yet Nathanaël compares Belmonte’s use of words and mathematical signs to the cracks in a block of ice, to rotting flesh falling from a corpse, to clouds, and to banks of fog: all very baroque images of material evanescence suggesting that both the written word and the epistemologies they sustain are equally insubstantial and frequently misleading. To Nathanaël’s metaphors of the physical world, Belmonte responds with two metaphors of a fortress, which expose the very real gulf between the two men. But Belmonte concedes that his metaphysical and mathematical theories are perhaps only man-made pathways that lead to nothing: “Les passerelles des théorèmes et les ponts-levis des syllogismes ne mènent nulle part, et ce qu’ils rejoignent est peut-être Rien. Mais c’est beau” (OR 1011) (“The guardrails of theorems and the drawbridges of

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syllogisms lead nowhere, and what they connect is perhaps Nothing. Still, it’s beautiful”) (OM 85). Between Nathanaël’s silence and the unequivocal devalorization of the written and spoken Word, it appears that the author is truly questioning the value not just of all language, but also her own value as a writer: in other words, a profound crisis of representation seems to be at work here. True, Marguerite Yourcenar had already alluded to the potential for such a crisis in L’Œuvre au Noir in the passage, which I cite in Chapter 3, where Zénon bitterly refers to the “ruses de guerre” (“stratagems of war”) and “subterfuges” to which a writer must resort in order to avoid censorship (OR 640, A 107-08). More generally still, Zénon questions “les douteux produits de la pensée” (“the doubtful products of thought”) as he is undergoing his personal œuvre au noir (OR 686 and A 168). In Un homme obscur, however, Marguerite Yourcenar goes much further: were we to follow her denigration of language to its logical conclusion, which is an aporia, we would expect Yourcenar to have stopped writing (echoes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé!) after Un homme obscur, tacitly acknowledging the failure of the Word. She did not stop, as we know, but went on to write the last novella of the trilogy Comme l’eau qui coule, essays, and the incomplete Quoi? L’Eternité, the third and last part of her family memoirs. More importantly, the text in which she expressly rejects the invention of written and spoken language, as already mentioned, is completely uncontaminated by this apparent collapse of language. The base, dishonest, and futile applications of language—reflecting the baseness, dishonesty, and futility of the creature that invented it—may well be illustrated throughout the novella; and Nathanaël may well go his silent, solitary way, absorbing “la voix des choses”; still, the narrator has much to say on his behalf, and says it in the polished prose that we recognize as having remained unchanged. And in her “Postface d’Un homme obscur,” Marguerite Yourcenar acknowledges only the formal or technical difficulty of presenting “un individu à peu près inculte formulant silencieusement sa pensée sur le monde qui l’entoure, et quelquefois, très rarement . . . s’efforçant d’en communiquer à autrui au moins une parcelle” (OR 1069) (“an almost uneducated individual silently formulating his thoughts about the world around him and, at certain very rare moments, attempting . . . to communicate to someone else at least a portion of them”) (OM 225). What then, one might ask, is the author’s point in vicariously dismantling language? Un homme obscur, Marguerite Yourcenar had

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said, was not only the third panel of the triptych Mémoires d’HadrienL’Œuvre au Noir-Un homme obscur, but also her “testament,” what she wanted, at the end of a remarkable career, to be remembered for. These specifications place great importance in a text of some one hundred thirty pages and pay it extraordinary homage. Why? In an effort to find an answer, let us revisit Belmonte’s admission to Nathanaël vis-à-vis his metaphysical and mathematical speculations: “and what they connect is perhaps Nothing. Still, it’s beautiful.” In view of the author’s disdainful, ironic dismantling of language, one cannot help but wonder if Belmonte’s confession is not the author’s own in veiled form, in which case Belmonte’s metaphor of a fortress (“ponts-levis” and “passerelles”) is appropriate indeed. For we have repeatedly found Marguerite Yourcenar resort to Art— aesthetic strategies—as a protection from the abyss, or conversely as a cover permitting her to taste its forbidden pleasures, or, finally, as a means of subjugating the reader to the Master’s Discourse. Because, as I have endeavored to show in the previous chapters, her aesthetic virtuosity serves a function essentially unrelated to the narrative— whose own “purpose,” not surprisingly, one might also question—it appears to be gratuitous and as if detached from the text. Yet, if indeed we make the attempt to detach the tropes and other rhetorical conceits from the text, it frequently occurs that precious little remains: to paraphrase Léo Belmonte, “what [these tropes] connect is perhaps Nothing. Still, it’s beautiful.” “Rien,” “Nothing,” we note, is capitalized, giving it the paradoxical weight and presence of Western humanistic touchstones such as Truth or Reality; Nothing has value here. Since words have no meaning or value, moreover, a text is necessarily Nothing, but, as Belmonte observes, Nothing can still be beautiful. Belmonte’s admission in Un homme obscur thus constitutes an escape hatch from the aporia of language’s devaluation, enabling the writer to keep the text intact. Perhaps, too, it is Yourcenar’s ultimate blueprint for justifying all of her texts. For she demonstrates that it is possible to write the beautiful alone, and that meaning and aesthetics, substance and form, must not always go hand in hand, unlike classical writing in which, Barthes reminds us, “la forme était supposée au service du fond” (“form was assumed to be at the service of substance”).14 This has far-reaching consequences in linguistic terms, for it suggests that the signifier has the right to exist even when

__________________ 14

Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, 46.

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detached from the signified, whose “meaning” may in any case always be doubtful or even amount to Nothing. It likewise follows that Nathanaël is detached from his signifieds of protagonist and desiring subject. He is a persona with no substance, no narrative existence as such, and no agency. He is not driven, does not make things happen: rather, things happen to him, and he maintains a detached attitude vis-à-vis the results, even if they are momentarily disappointing. Cheated out of a peaceful existence in his home of Greenwich, England, because of a malentendu; cheated by the one woman for whom he experienced intense physical passion; cheated, finally, out of a long life because he has an incurable illness, Nathanaël is able to rationalize all of these events dispassionately. Detached, he cannot speak for the author, who is neither silent nor has abandoned her writing project: the author is still a desiring subject, as were the characters of her other texts, both fictional and nonfictional. The Buddhism or animism embodied by Nathanaël serves as a trompel’oeil that permits Yourcenar to carry an aesthetic compulsion to its ultimate, purified stage. It is as if, with Un homme obscur, the author concedes, and for the first time, the apparent fortuitousness of her literary production, which all the while had little to do with epistemologies (as Yourcenar’s fictional Spinoza, Léo Belmonte, reveals) and a great deal to do with artistic expression. As if to underscore both her acceptance of artifice and her open recognition of the retreat of an ultimate truth or reality, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote as her last fictional text a “coda” to Un homme obscur entitled Une belle matinée. In this short story, Lazare, Nathanaël’s reputed son, succumbs to the fascination of the theater and the theatrical profession after meeting the members of a traveling troupe of actors. The story offers this reflection: “Le petit Lazare était sans limites, et il avait beau sourire amicalement au reflet de lui-même que lui renvoyait un bout de miroir fiché entre deux poutres, il était sans forme: il avait mille formes” (OR 1059) (“Little Lazarus had no limits, and it was in vain that he gave a friendly smile to his own reflection, which came back to him from a bit of mirror stuck between two beams, for he had no specific shape. He possessed a thousand shapes”) (OM 147). Just as the theater would enable Lazare to wear different masks, be different personas, so writing provided Marguerite Yourcenar an alibi for trying on a variety of opaque aesthetic poses which collectively cast doubt on literary texts as conduits of meaning, unity, and transparency. It is not coincidence that the “Postface” of Un homme obscur ends with

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the blunt warning: “Il n’y a rien d’autre à dire sur Nathanaël” (OR 1070) (“There is nothing more to say about Nathanaël”) (OM 226), so similar to the last sentence of L’Œuvre au Noir: “Et c’est aussi loin qu’on peut aller dans la fin de Zénon” (OR 833) (“And this is as far as one can go in the death of Zeno”) (A 355).

Conclusion A Writer for the Millennium il était sans forme: il avait mille formes.1

Lazare, the character referred to in this epigraph, embodies the final stage of an aesthetic process Marguerite Yourcenar had begun some fifty years earlier. Armed with all of the attributes of the baroque hero of the baroque age, he is both “Circe” and the “paon” (peacock),2 both metamorphosis and ostentation, for he plays all roles on stage. Like this boy, for whom life is merely a series of masks and roles, Marguerite Yourcenar enjoyed displaying her aesthetic versatility and eluding categories by inhabiting diverse styles and forms throughout her long career. What remained unchanged is the ideal of Art, the aesthetic project: a factor that helps to explain the unsettling variety of her literary output. For when all is said and done, the contents of human existence are far too meager to derive much sense from them:3 “Individual life is short, the self is porous; to conjure up an image of the whole from such things smacks of pure illusion.”4 Everything in the cosmos, moreover, of which humans are an infinitesimal part, is in an eternal state of natural flux, which is as it should be. Each of the four fictional works examined in this essay suggests that the vision and forms of classical stability, coherence, and reason are not merely inadequate to represent modern life, but what is more, impossible, given the unnatural social, political, and aesthetic hierarchies such classical attributes impose and the powers they claim. Hence, in Anna, Soror... abjection, that most archaic and excentric of social forces, is victorious, as the siblings Anna and Miguel re-enact a sacred ceremony: the incestuous “philosophical marriage.” Marguerite Yourcenar employs a variety of stylistic devices ranging from the Gidean litote, to “painterly” digression, to allegory, in order to expose the inadequacy of classicism either as an ethos or as an aesthetic.

__________________ 1

See 156, supra. The title of Jean Rousset’s famous study of the baroque in French literature. 3 See the epigraph to the Introduction, infra. 4 See footnote 1, Introduction, infra. 2

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Denier du rêve’s borrowings from “fascistic” opera and theatricality permit the author to sample transgressive pleasures while claiming “political correctness” by exposing the fascist caricature of classical values. The excessively mannerist prose, moreover, recalling the overly ornate decoration of a baroque church façade, wraps the text’s raw cruelty and violence in a cloak of aesthetic virtuosity which almost succeeds in hiding the fact that Denier du rêve is a narrative about nothing and nothingness. Indeed, at the novel’s core is a void that challenges all ontological speculation. Finally, the characters are amorphous, tentative shadows, time and again dispelling the notion that any meaning or substance is to be found in the emotionally charged scenes and discourses. If there were any doubt that fascism was based less on ideology than on aesthetics, Denier du rêve dispels it. The metaphor of alchemy in L’Œuvre au Noir provides an aesthetic solution in which Western epistemologies and philosophical ideals can be completely dissolved. The protagonist Zénon exposes the utter failure of classical enlightenment’s program. A belief in knowledge, rational inquiry, and the essential dignity of man as thinking being collapses under the weight of universal chaos and absurdity. With their disintegration, the real performing subject, that is the author, emerges, both distracting and distancing her audience in a stunning display of erudition and linguistic virtuosity. Complex analogisms and syntactical structures cast an opaque mantle over meaning, while the use of certain conventions frequently associated with the historical novel encourage but ultimately deceive readers’ expectations of clarity and traditional narrative progression and resolution. Furthermore, the idealized vision of the Renaissance and of the Renaissance humanist, which began to be formed in the eighteenth century and which was fully popularized in the nineteenth century by historians such as Michelet and Burckhardt, is deconstructed in L’Œuvre au Noir. The excitement, the spirit of adventure and discovery, so closely associated in the popular imagination with “Renaissance” and which lend themselves to the expectations of the historical novel, are stifled not only by the author’s melancholy worldview, but also by a style and a project that discourage reader reception. Finally, in the work of fiction for which Yourcenar claimed she most wanted to be remembered, Un homme obscur, the protagonist Nathanaël hardly grazes the surface of existence before dissolving into its elements. His brief life serves meanwhile as an empty vessel into which the author pours her doubts about the efficacy of language. It

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thus comes as no surprise that Yourcenar concedes in this novella the futility of all knowledge and the impossibility of seeking, let alone finding, redemptive and unifying reality. Yet she could no more renounce the written word because of its futility than her baroque philosopher in Un homme obscur, Léo Belmonte, can abandon the intricate inventions of his mind. By her very incapacity to respond with silence to the novella’s apparent aporia, Yourcenar exposes indirectly but unequivocally the aesthetic foundations of her project. In Une belle matinee, Yourcenar’s coda to Un homme obscur, Nathanaël’s son Lazare joyfully validates that project as he embarks on a theatrical career in which he will have “no form, a thousand forms.” It is thus with a sure instinct for classical order and unity that Marguerite Yourcenar “closes the circle”5 of her fictional production with a reassuringly “classical” salute to form. Yet what is the nature of the form she validates? It certainly bears little resemblance to classical form, which seeks to achieve an overall effect of simplicity, proportion, and control. Instead, the “form” Lazare so joyfully embraces in the passage above is the form of spectacle and costume, in short, form as an end in itself. Yourcenar, the apparently traditional, neoclassical writer, never relinquishes the paradox, so fundamental to her vision and to this study. What might we learn thereby about Western culture’s ingrained assumptions regarding “form” and history, or “form” and politics? First, the classical tradition, in whose line Yourcenar is generally situated, tells us that form may neither stand alone nor dictate content; it should blend so unobtrusively with content as to be virtually invisible. While form should be at the service of content, content should never be subservient to form; the “art” behind the art must never be visible. Second, if a work’s content happens to be history, as in Yourcenar’s two most celebrated works of fiction, Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Œuvre au Noir, “form” is expected to fall in lockstep behind traditional history’s purported linearity and objectivity. Accordingly, critics have praised Marguerite Yourcenar both for her erudition and her “virile” prose style, automatically associating the latter with order, control, and unity. While those attributes obviously cannot be applied to her earlier fictional works such as Denier du rêve or Feux, it would be equally fallacious to apply unquestioningly the qualifiers “virile” and “classical” to the two works cited above.

__________________ 5

“Boucler la boucle” is one of the author’s recurrent expressions.

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In the case of Mémoires d’Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar consciously donned the “costume” of the ancient classical prose style of oratio togata to achieve a spectacular theatrical effect: re-creating the “voice” of a Roman Emperor. Moreover, she chose to resurrect a particularly “un-Roman” Roman citizen. An Iberian born in a historical entre-deux (between the death of paganism and the birth of JudeoChristianity), Hadrien preferred either barbarian civilizations or the “decadent” Greek culture to Rome; moreover, he was unkindly treated in traditional historical accounts because of his “weak,” strange obsession with his boy lover. Yourcenar’s protagonist thus exhibits not so much the signs of classical stability and unity as the centrifugal forces of difference and marginality. In L’Œuvre au Noir, Yourcenar depicts the age of northern European humanism as a dystopia: very few of the men and women who cross the protagonist’s path qualify as enlightened human beings, and even they are swallowed in violence and chaos. At first glance a traditional historical novel, this work exhibits an oblique prose style that derails or obscures meaning with complex syntax and frequent analogisms: a style more reminiscent, in fact, of Descartes and Galileo’s classical criticism of the medieval world’s analogisms that corrupted and obscured a text’s “natural” order and meaning.6 Finally, when Marguerite Yourcenar employs an excessively limpid or severe classical style in a novel or novella, she frequently has a particular purpose or is tactically engaged in a mannerist exercise in order to elude or divert (as we have seen in Anna, Soror...). These are so many diverse masks and costumes that defy qualifiers like “virile” and “classical.” Yet, Marguerite Yourcenar had an undeniable predilection for what is known as the historical novel or story. Besides the preconceived notions concerning proper “form” in such works, many Modernist writers, as postmodern literary theorist Linda Hutcheon points out, were “stubbornly resistant to all arguments for the possibility or utility of historical knowledge.”7 By merely going against the grain of that modernist tendency, Yourcenar would have

__________________ 6

See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage Publications, 1994) 134-35; and Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975) 79-83. 7 Linda Hutcheon quoting from David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) in A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 87.

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effortlessly but not necessarily intentionally established “classical” credentials in the eyes of critics. But such an initial judgment on their part would have ignored how she treated history. In a remark that reveals quite a lot about her own worldview, Yourcenar once told a journalist that the center is “wherever we are.” As Christine BuciGlucksmann writes in her essay Baroque Reason, in a baroque world, which claims neither a center nor a point of reference, there occurs a “regress towards a point that is always slipping away”: a regress towards or of history: since it cannot be totalized or mastered, history is acted or frustrated against a background of wars and absolute power. It presents itself as a catastrophe . . . the great disorder of the world, or the cosmic disaster of the end of the world so dear to baroque poets. . . .8 Judging from the four fictional works studied in the preceding chapters, it is quite clear that Yourcenar shared this baroque concept of history, on two levels: the political and the aesthetic. Politically speaking, history for Yourcenar is a concatenation of chance events, endemic violence, and human blindness; history makes no sense, in spite of our efforts to invest it with clarity and the order of cause and effect; it is always an abyss. Aesthetically, history provides the framework for Yourcenar’s “catastrophic” and liberating vision of a world without boundaries, whose ambiguity finds concrete expression in her works’ “poetic,” analogical style, their intricate syntax, and their transgressive personae. Thus, Marguerite Yourcenar uses the neoclassical domain of politics and history (especially ancient classical and Renaissance politics and history) to frame her fundamentally formalist aesthetic project. This singular mélange captures the ambivalence and inherent paradox of her work: they comprise a subversive entre-deux that the author cultivated and occupied for most of her career. In an essay published posthumously,9 Marguerite Yourcenar seeks to give her catastrophic vision a more contemporary cast. She offers a suitable metaphor of modernity’s own flawed vision of progress and arrogant belief in its dominion over cosmic forces in the

__________________ 8 9

Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, 134. “L’Italienne à Alger,” Le Tour de la prison (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1991) 39-40.

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“photo of the week” from an issue of Life magazine. Yourcenar sketches a vivid portrait of the photo’s overweight, fifty-something, middle-class American woman, carrying a handbag and clad in a dress and hat, gazing at the Pacific Ocean. A moment after the photograph was taken, Yourcenar tells us, the woman was swept away by a rogue wave emerging suddenly from the calm sea and in one split second obliterating all trace of her existence. There could be no starker, more disquieting image of impermanence and of the chaotic forces menacing our (and Yourcenar’s) fragile, gratuitous subjectivity than this description of the Life photograph. Nor, I would argue, is there an image that speaks more powerfully to the author’s fundamentally baroque worldview. Permanence cannot be found in us; if it is to be captured at all, it is only through aesthetic creation. The plastic image, the photograph, the words of the writer who “never overlooks the skillful craft,”10 are all that remain, finally. What we now understand is that Marguerite Yourcenar’s baroque vision is pervasive and deep-rooted. We have found evidence that her “classical” style is more a conceit than a commitment. We have observed the dichotomy between profound melancholy and violence and textual “play,” as figures of speech and analogisms both lend “substance” to her writing and form a protective seal over the apparent void of meaning that haunts her work. A “universalism” of oriental infinitude, having little in common with Western enlightenment’s Great Narratives, dwarfs classicism’s restrictive universalism. Ambiguity, theoretical uncertainty, and Promethean revolt in turn inhabit the text to challenge our epistemological and ontological assumptions. To acknowledge and to celebrate Marguerite Yourcenar’s “otherness” at the time of her centenary is to do service, I hope, to a writer who herself recognized that the “classical” label signaled a kind of literary mummification, and who consequently shunned it (as indeed she did all labels). Her personal notion of the baroque, certainly, was delimited, or so she claimed, to a historical period in the arts and literature;11 in interviews with journalists and critics, she associated it mainly with ostentation, the need to show that “one was all powerful,

__________________ 10

Saúl Yurkievich, “Baroque Fusions and Effusions (The Tumultuous Perception of the Emotions),” trans. Pedro Cuperman and Irene Vilar, Point of Contact 3.3 (April 1993): 111. 11 Marguerite Yourcenar. Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987) (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 317.

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very rich, that one was a prince or a cardinal.”12 Yet, tellingly, she continually drew upon the other facets of the baroque for her writing, turning repeatedly to its images and themes of transgression, metamorphosis, theatricality, and to its aura of melancholy. Always defensive in interviews and paratexts about revealing the profound forces motivating her art, however, she would have probably denied suggestions of the baroque’s personal appeal: to do so would have been an admission of inner turmoil and uncertainty. And she most certainly would have protested the suggestion that what sustains her work is a penchant for ostentation, virtuosity, and power—one of the significant indices of her neobaroque disposition that this essay has explored. That said, Yourcenar was vehemently outspoken about her antipathy toward the term “classical,” as already noted. How ironic, then, that this label has cast such a long shadow over her work—beginning with the international success of Mémoires d’Hadrien—in spite of so much in her writing and worldview that defies facile interpretation or convenient categories. Marguerite Yourcenar’s centennial commemoration provided an ideal moment to propose a reevaluation of her work-certainly not as anticlassical, but not as classical, either. Such a reassessment would recognize her first not as a revered member of the French Academy’s pantheon, but rather as a subversive, contemporary voice for the new millennium. By discarding her classical casier, I do not propose relabeling her, but rather relativizing those labels to shed more light on certain troubling aspects of her work: her fragile entre-deux and the recondite but dominant role which aesthetics play in her work. Yourcenar practices absolute relativity, an expression that captures an essential paradox of her writing. She cultivates a third way, one which makes ample space for our firmly rooted Western heritage but thereafter proceeds to dismantle its seductive image of order and rationalism. The new millennium presents us with the same irresolvable dichotomies that also prevent the author from declaring in her writings closure and unity and force her to seek an alternative in an aesthetic adventure. The time has come to stress more forcefully the relevance to the contemporary world of her skepticism, her rewriting of history, her personal and spiritual openness, and her rebelliousness. Yourcenar transformed her encyclopedic erudition and private obsessions into works of troubling beauty and subversive power that deserve to be liberated from the bonds of academic classicism.

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Portrait d’une voix, 208.

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Selected Works Cited and Consulted Works by Marguerite Yourcenar in French Conte bleu suivi de Le Premier soir et de Maléfice. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1993. La Couronne et la Lyre. Poèmes traduits du grec. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1979. Denier du rêve. 1st ed. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1934. Discours de réception de Mme Marguerite Yourcenar à l’Académie française et réponse de M. Jean d’Ormesson. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1981. En pèlerin et en étranger. Essais. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989. La Mort conduit l’attelage. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1933. Le Labyrinthe du monde. Souvenirs Pieux. Archives du Nord. Quoi? L’Eternité. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990. Les Charités d’Alcippe. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1984. Les Yeux ouverts. Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey. Paris: Editions Le Centurion, 1980. Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1983. Le Tour de la prison. Essais. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1991. Lettres aux amis et à quelques autres. Michèle Sarde and Joseph Brami, eds. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1995. Mishima ou la vision du vide. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1980. Œuvres romanesques. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1982. “Pierrot Pendu.” By permission of Editions Gallimard. Portrait d’une voix. Vingt-trois entretiens (1952-1987). Ed. Maurice Delcroix. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002. Sous bénéfice d’inventaire. Essais. Nouvelle edition. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1978.

Works by Marguerite Yourcenar in English A Coin in Nine Hands. Trans. Dori Katz in collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. Dreams and Destinies. Trans. Donald Flanell Friedman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

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Memoirs of Hadrian. Trans. Grace Frick in collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954. That Mighty Sculptor, Time. Trans. Walter Kaiser in collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. The Abyss. Trans. Grace Frick in collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984. Two Lives and a Dream. Trans. Walter Kaiser in collaboration with the author. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. With Open Eyes. Conversations with Matthieu Galey. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.

Works about Marguerite Yourcenar and Her Works Allamand, Carole. Marguerite Yourcenar ou l’écriture en mal de mère. Paris: Imago, 2004. Biondi, Carminella. “Mourir à Münster: L’envers d’une Utopie religieuse dans L’Œuvre au Noir de Marguerite Yourcenar.” Requiem pour l’Utopie? Tendances autodestructives du paradigme utopique. Ed. Carmelina Imbroscio. Pisa: Editrice Libreria Goliardica, 1986. __________ and C. Rosso, eds. Voyages et Connaissance dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Pisa: Editrice Libreria Goliardica, 1988. Blot, Jean. Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris: Seghers, 1980. Boussuges, Madeleine. Marguerite Yourcenar. Sagesse et mystique. Grenoble: Editions des Cahiers de l’Alpe, 1987. Brignoli, Laura. Marguerite Yourcenar et l’esprit d’analogie. L’image dans les romans des années trente. Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1997. Carlston, Erin. Thinking Fascism. Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity [in the works of Djuna Barnes, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Virginia Woolf]. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Castellani J.-P., and R. Poignault, eds. Marguerite Yourcenar et l’art. L’art de Marguerite Yourcenar. Tours: S.I.E.Y., 1990. Course, Didier. “Le Temps ou la mort en mouvement: étude d’une obsession baroque dans Anna, Soror....” Les visages de la mort dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque international tenu à l’Université de Minnesota,

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Morris, 7-10 juillet 1992. Ed. C. Frederick Farrell, Jr., Edith R. Farrell, Joan E. Howard, André Maindron. Morris: University of Minnesota, The Division of the Humanities, 1993. 116-22. Doré, Pascale. Yourcenar ou le féminin insoutenable. Geneva: Droz, 1999. Goslar, Michèle. Yourcenar. Biographie. “Qu’il eût été fade d’être heureux.” Brussels: Editions Racine, 1998. Harris, Nadia. Marguerite Yourcenar. Vers la rive d’une Ithaque intérieure. Saratoga, CA: Anima Libri, 1994. Horn, Pierre. Marguerite Yourcenar. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. Jacquemin, Georges. Marguerite Yourcenar. Qui suis-je? Lyon: La Manufacture, 1985. Julien, Anne-Yvonne, ed. Marguerite Yourcenar, du Mont-Noir aux Monts-Déserts. Hommage pour un centenaire. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2003. Ledesma, Manuela. “Quelques images du vide dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar.” Marguerite Yourcenar: Ecriture, réécriture, traduction: actes du colloque international de Tours, 20-22 novembre 1997. Ed. R. Poignault and JeanPierre Castellani. Tours: S.I.E.Y., 2000. Parga, Maria-José Vasquez de. “Mort alchimique: Anna, Soror...à la lumière de Fulcanelli.” Les visages de la mort dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar. Actes d’un colloque international tenu à l’Université de Minnesota, Morris, 7-10 juillet 1992. Ed. C. Frederick Farrell, Jr., Edith R. Farrell, Joan E. Howard, André Maindron. Morris: University of Minnesota, The Division of the Humanities, 1993. 123-33. Rosbo, Patrick de. Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris: Mercure de France, 1972. Sarde, Michèle. Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar. La passion et ses masques. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995. Savigneau, Josyane. Marguerite Yourcenar. L’Invention d’une vie. Paris: Editions Gallimard NRF, 1990. __________. “Marguerite Yourcenar pour mémoire.” Le Monde 6 June 2003, Littératures III. Shurr, Georgia Hooks. Marguerite Yourcenar. A Reader’s Guide. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987.

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Tritsmans, Bruno. “Voix du savoir dans Un homme obscur. De Caillois à Yourcenar.” Bulletin de la Société internationale d’Etudes Yourcenariennes 12 (décembre 1993): 99-108.

Other Works Consulted Aldridge, A. Owen. “Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 76-87. Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. 1953 Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss. (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1992). Benjamin, Walter. Origine du drame baroque allemand. Trans. Sibylle Muller. Paris: Flammarion, 1985. Berghaus, Günter, ed. Fascism and Theatre. Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 19251945. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996. Booker, M. Keith. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. White Plains, NY: Longman Publishers USA, 1996. Bornhofen, Patricia Lynn. “Cosmography and Chaography: Baroque to Neobaroque. A Study in Poetics and Cultural Logic.” Diss. U of Wisconsin, 1995. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason. The Aesthetics of Modernity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Sage Publications, 1994. __________, ed. Puissance du baroque. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1996. Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque. A Sign of the Times. Trans. Charles Lambert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. __________. Caos e bellezza. Immagini del neobarocco. Milan: Domus Academy Edizioni, 1991. “Caravaggio.” Microsoft Encarta Reference Library. 2002. Caron, S., and S. Hutin. Les alchimistes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959. Castagno, Paul C. The Early commedia dell’arte (1550-1621). The Mannerist Context. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

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Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd ed. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992 [1967]. Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988. D’Ors, Eugenio. Du Baroque. Trans. Agathe Rouart-Valéry. 1935. Paris: Editions Gallimard, illustrated version, 1968. Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Le Baroque. Profondeurs de l’apparence. Paris: Larousse Université, 1973. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. 2 nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. “El Greco.” Microsoft Encarta Reference Library. 2002. Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible. The Origins and Structures of Alchemy. Trans. Stephen Corrin. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Erikson, Erik H. Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980. Evola, Julius. The Hermetic Tradition. Symbols & Teachings of the Royal Art. Trans. E. E. Rehmus. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995. __________. Le Yoga tantrique. Sa métaphysique. Ses pratiques. Trans. Gabrielle Robinet. Paris: Fayard, 1971. Faris, Wendy B. Labyrinths of Language. Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Feinstein, Blossom. “Hermeticism.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 431-34. Flamand, Elie-Charles. Erotique de l’alchimie. Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1970. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. Vols. XIII, XIV, and XVII. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1958.

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Friedrich, Carl J. The Age of the Baroque. 1610-1660. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1962. Genette, Gérard. Figures I. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. __________. Figures II. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969. Gide, André. Essais critiques. Ed. Pierre Masson. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999. Golsan, Richard J., ed. Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992. Hawcroft, Michael. Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Hay, Denys. “Idea of Renaissance.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. IV. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 126-28. Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: MJF Books, 1951. Hewitt, Nicholas. ‘Les Maladies du Siècle’: The Image of Malaise in French Fiction and Thought in the Inter-war Years. Hull: Hull University Press, 1988. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera. Desire Disease Death. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. James, William. “Mysticism.” The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2002. 413-68. Jencks, Charles. What Is Post-Modernism? London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R. F. C. Hull.: Princeton University Press, 1968. __________. The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung. Ed. Violet S. de Laszlo. New York: The Modern Library, 1959. Kaps, Helen Karen. “Baroque or Classic?” Ed. John D. Lyons, MarieMadeleine de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves. Contempoary Reactions Criticism. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. 65-88. Reprinted by permission from Helen Karen Kaps. Moral Perspective in La Princesse de Clèves. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Books, 1968. 65-88. Koyré, Alexandre. Mystiques, spirituals, alchimistes du XVIe siècle allemand. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. __________. Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1987. Lukács, Georg. Der historishe Roman und die Krise des bürgerlichen Realismus. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955. Lust, Annette. “The Origins and Development of the Art of Mime.” http://www.mime.info/library.html. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mahaffey, Vicki. “Modernist Theory and Criticism.” Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 512-14. Maiorino, Giancarlo. “Postmodernism and the Used-Upness of Titles: A Neo-Baroque Dilemma.” Rivista di Studi Italiani XV.1 (June 1997: 99-120. Marshall, Jon. Jung, Alchemy and History. A Critical Exposition of Jung’s Theory of Alchemy. Glasgow: Hermetic Research Series, 2002. McNeill, Tony. “Les Chemins du savoir.” http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/ ~os0tmc/chemin/bovrien.htm Moi, Toril. Sexual Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985. Nakamura, Hajime. “Buddhism.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 247-57. Nicolich, Robert N. “Mannerism and Baroque: Further Notes on Problems in the Transfer of These Concepts from the Visual Arts to Literature.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 19 (1983): 441-57. Oxtoby, Willard G., ed. World Religions: Eastern Traditions. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996. Passannanti, Erminia. “Neo-baroque?” http://www.transference.org.uk/ neo-baroque.htm. Patrides, C. A. “Hierarchy and Order.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 434-49.

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Perrot, Jean. “Du baroque, des Antilles au Maghreb.” Littératures des Immigrations. Ed. Charles Bonn. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. 135-47. Plato. “Symposium.” Great Dialogues of Plato. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Ed. Eric H. Warmington and Philip G. Rouse. New York: Mentor, 1956. 69-117. Plazenet, Laurence. La littérature baroque. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1968 [1956]. Ravetto, Kriss. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 231-32. Raymond, Marcel. Baroque & renaissance poétique. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1955. Rojat, Paul-Henry. Littérature baroque et littérature classique au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Editions Ellipses, 1996. Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France. Circé et le paon. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1954. __________. Dernier regard sur le Baroque. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1998. Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Trans. Jacques Henric and Severo Sarduy. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975. __________. “The Baroque and the Neobaroque.” Trans. Mary G. Berg. Ed. Ivan A. Schulman. Latin America in Its Literature. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980. 115-32. Shaw, Donald L. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Sim, Stuart, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 2001. Souiller, Didier. La littérature baroque en Europe. Paris: PUF, 1988. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Swietlicki, Catherine Connor. “Toward a New Socio-Cultural Theory of Baroque Theater.” A. Robert Lauer and Henry W. Sullivan, eds. Hispanic Essays in Honor of Frank P. Casa. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 1997. 375-87. Tapié, Victor-L. Baroque et classicisme Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1980.

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Tashiro, Tom. “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 48-60. Tortel, Jean, ed. Le préclassicisme français. Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1952. Van Reijen, Willem, “Labyrinth and Ruin: The Return of the Baroque in Postmodernity,” Theory, Culture & Society, 9.4 (November 1992): 1-26. Wellek, René. “Baroque in Literature.” Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribers’ Sons, 1973. 18895. __________. “Classicism in Literature.” Ibid. 449-56. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. Trans. Kathrin Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964. Wollen, Peter. “Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the Age of the Spectacle.” Point of Contact 3.3 (April 1993): 9-21. Yurkievich, Saúl. “Baroque Fusions and Effusions (The Tumultuous Perception of the Emotions).” Trans. Pedro Cuperman and Irene Vilare. Ibid.: 110-13.

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Index of Proper Names

Aldridge, A. Owen: 32n. Allamand, Carole: 13n. Barnes, Djuna: 13n. Barth, John: 50 Barthes, Roland: 18, 150, 154n. Baudelaire, Charles: 12 Benjamin, Walter: 72, 90 Bernini: 74 Borchgrave, Louise de: 22 Borges, Jorge Luis: 23 Brandt, Per Aage: 124n. Brignoli, Laura: 13n. Bruno, Giordano: 38 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine: 51n., 65n., 73, 126, 136n., 160n., 161 Calabrese, Omar: 33, 43n. Calderón: 54n., 56 Calvin, Jean: 133 Caravaggio: 61-62, 84 Carlston, Erin: 13n., 86, 88n., 89n. Castagno, Paul C.: 85n., 86 Cicero: 40 Cixous, Hélène: 19, 117n. Cocteau, Jean: 35, 36, 81 Course, Didier: 52n., 55n., 73n. Crayencour, Fernande de: 87 Crayencour, Michel de: 20-21, 87-88 Dante: 32 Debord, Guy: 38 Deburau, Jean Gaspard: 12 Deleuze, Gilles: 46n., 49 Descartes, René: 44 Doré, Pascale: 13n., 103, 120n.

D’Ors, Eugenio: 38, 43, 44 Dubois, C.-G.: 44n., 50n. Eco, Umberto: 50, 12n., 129n., 134 Einstein, Albert: 44 El Greco: 61, 74, 84 Eliade, Mircea: 124n. Eliot, T. S.: 35n. Embiricos, André: 26 Erasmus of Rotterdam: 112 Euclid: 44 Faris, Wendy B.: 120n. Flaubert, Gustave: 13, 40, 83n., 98 Fraigneau, André: 25-26 Freud, Sigmund: 57, 58n., 66n. Frick, Grace: 21-23, 113, 145 Friedman, Donald F.: 26 Galey, Matthieu: 17n., 78n., 103, 107n., 112n., 140 Gauthier, Théophile: 12 Germain, Gabriel: 126 Gide, André: 13, 25, 34-35, 36, 52, 81 Giraudoux, Jean: 35, 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: 33 Goslar, Michèle: 20n. Grey, Thomas: 94n. Hay, Denys: 31n. Hesse, Hermann: 113 Hewitt, Andrew: 90n. Homer: 32 Hulme, T. E.: 35n. Hutcheon, Linda: 18n., 29n., 41n., 83n., 160 Hutcheon, Michael: 83n.

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Iser, Wolfgang: 129, 138 James, Henry: 26 Jencks, Charles: 49, 50n. Joyce, James: 32 Jung, Carl-Gustav: 71-72, 108n., 114n., 118n., 119, 125n., 127n. Kaps, Helen Karen: 52n. Koyré, Alexandre: 125, 126n. Kristeva, Julia: 51, 63n., 64, 65n., 66n., 117n. Lafayette, Madame de: 52 Ledesma: Manuela: 115n., 116n., 146n. Louis XIV: 32 Lukács, George: 98 Lust, Annette: 12n. Luther, Martin: 133 Lyotard, Jean-François: 18n., 123 Mahaffey, Vicki: 32n., 35n. Mann, Klaus: 80 Mann, Thomas: 54, 80, 105n. Marcus Aurelius: 113 Marguerite de Navarre: 144n. Martin du Gard, Roger: 54 Maurras, Charles: 34 Mazzolani, Lidia Storoni: 77n. McNeill, Tony: 83n. Michelangelo: 46 Moi, Toril: 19n., 117n. Montaigne, Michel de: 79 Mussolini, Benito: 36, 59, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87 Nerval, Gérard de: 149 Newton, Isaac: 44 Nicolich, Robert N.: 84n. Nietzsche, Friedrich: 75n., 94n. Nordau, Max: 94n. Nourissier, François: 20, 41, 42n.

Orwell, George: 80 Pascal, Blaise: 44 Passananti, Erminia: 40n., 43n. Patrides, C. A.: 32n. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista: 48 Planck, Max: 44 Plato: 70, 71n. Plazenet, Laurence: 34 Praz, Mario: 91 Rabelais, François: 31-32, 38 Rank, Otto: 58 Ravetto, Kriss: 97-98 Raymond, Marcel: 62 n. Reijen, Willem van: 46n., 72, 75n. Richard, Jean-Pierre: 48, 49n. Rosbo, Patrick de: 112n. Rostand, Jean: 44 Rousset, Jean: 43, 124, 157n. Sarde, Michèle: 20n., 108, 113 Sarduy, Severo: 45n., 46-47, 149 Sarraute, Nathalie: 18 Savigneau, Josyane: 13, 14, 17n. 20n., 26, 88n., 112n., 115n., 116n., 117n., 141n. Schnapp, Jeffrey T.: 77n., 88n., 90n. Schopenhauer, Arthur: 92 Seneca: 40 Servet, Michel: 133 Shikubu, Mourasaki: 146 Shurr, Georgia Hooks: 48, 80, 117n. Souiller, Didier: 54n., 56n., 85, 126n., 127n. Spackman, Barbara: 83n. Tagore, Rabindranath: 146 Tashiro, Tom: 32n. Tolstoy, Leo: 94n. Tritsmans, Bruno: 148n., 149n.

Index of Proper Names Valéry, Paul: 35, 36, 81 Vasa, King (of Sweden): 133 Vasquez de Parga, Maria-José: 70n. Vico, Giambattista: 32, 38 Vietinghoff, Jeanne de: 25 Wagner, Richard: 94n. Wellek, René: 31n., 34n., 35n., 36n. Wilson, Jerry: 23, 112 Wölfflin, Heinrich: 43, 124n. Woolf, Virginia: 13n., 26 Yurkievich, Saúl: 55n., 73n., 102n., 162n.

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