From mascarade to tragedy: the rhetoric of Apologia in Jodelle's 'Recueil des inscriptions.'

On Thursday, 17 February 1558, King Henri II was to come to the Paris Hotel de Ville with Francois de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and have dinner with the municipal council.(1) This was on rather short notice (the king had signified his intention on 8 February); but then, it was not supposed to be a solemn entree, only a banquet. In addition to the hearty pleasures of a Jeudi Gras, there was a lot to celebrate, most notably the recent (8 January) capture of Calais and the fort of Guignes by the duke, which had put an end to over four centuries of English presence on French soil. The banquet in the decorated Grande Salle was supposed to be the main event, but the aldermen wanted more. And so, only four days before the royal visit they asked Etienne Jodelle if he had something ready, like a comedy or a tragedy, that could be recited to the king. The municipality, no doubt, remembered the triumph that had taken place exactly five years before, in February 1553, at the Hotel de Reims, where Jodelle's Cleopatre captive, the first French tragedy a l'Antique, was performed as a tribute to the same king and duke who had just defeated an imperial army at the siege of Metz. In a matter of hours the 21-year-old Jodelle had become a hero to the young generation of poets and had been introduced to the king, who had enjoyed the show and given the author an unforgettable 500 ecus.(2) Even though in the years that followed this master stroke Jodelle did not publish a thing of significance, he was still famous and seen as Ronsard's most serious rival in the rising generation. He was known to write at incredible speed and improvise in the heat of inspiration, and he carefully nursed his reputation as a genius - "ce Daemon de Jodelle," in the words of Du Bellay.(3)

Although according to what he tells us in Le Recueil des inscriptions (74/227),(4) Jodelle had several unpublished, unperformed plays in his drawers, he felt that something lighter, a mascarade, an epideictic piece in the form of a musical mythological entertainment, would be more appropriate.(5) He actually composed two. The first one, based on the story of the Argonauts carrying their ship on their shoulders in the Libyan desert, was presented as a relative novelty,(6) in the sense that it included a rather long versified text: not only songs, but lengthy harangues to be delivered by characters such as Jason, Mopsus, Minerva, and the ship Argo, which was supposed to have come down from the sky in order to be carried again on the shoulders "des Argonautes mesmes"(7) and presented to the new Jason, the imperial hopeful Henri II. The second mascarade, in a more traditional fashion,(8) "ne parloit point." More of the ballet type, it featured three allegorical characters, Vertu, Victoire, and Mnemosyne, i.e., Memory, who were to distribute crowns made of different kinds of foliage to the king, the queen, the duke, and other members of the court before inviting them to dance. Jodelle says (and it may well be true) that he wrote, cast, directed, and rehearsed the whole thing in four days; he was playing the part of Jason, which he says he wrote - and, a common feat for him, instantly knew by heart - the very morning of the performance (118/ 250). During this time(9) he also designed the sumptuous ornamentation for the building (entrance and stairwell) and the reception room: that is, trompe-l'oeil architecture and other decorations a l'Antique, primarily paintings by Maistre Baptiste featuring inscriptions, short verse and devices in Latin (or Greek) that Jodelle, of course, had also composed on the spot. By the municipal council's account, the decorations were indeed impressive and worth the amount of money they had put in them. But one can doubt whether they were fully understood in all the complexity of Jodelle's iconographical program (masterfully analyzed by V. E. Graham and W. McAllister Johnson in their edition of the Recueil).(10) Even though the inscriptions were supposed to work within the structure of the space in which they were "inscribed" - the most obvious example of this being the word "gradatim," step by step, meaning the progressiveness of any human victory, repeated three or four times on the walls of the stairwell (8 1/231) - it is likely that most participants missed at least some of the poet's allusions, not to mention the intricacies of his symbolical design.

As for the performance, it was botched. There was too much noise in the crammed room, and the space that was supposed to be used as a stage remained packed with spectators. As a result, the audience saw little and heard even less. In fact, it seems that no one paid attention to what was going on. According to Jodelle, many details he had carefully planned either went wrong or could not be carried out, such as, in the second mascarade the distribution of personalized crowns and verse: they were to be taken from baskets held by three little Amours, i.e., Parisian children in the nude who ended up keeping their clothes on (123/254). The most famous incident involved the rocks which, in the first mascarade, were supposed to walk and sing on stage under the spell of Orpheus's song; the voices of the performers inside the rocks came out distorted in a ridiculous fashion, as if out of "clochers" instead of "rochers," to use Jodelle's sarcastic pun about it (117/249),(11) a perfect emblem for the whole episode, pointing to the trivial practical limits encountered by the myth of absolute poetic power over space, matter, and souls.

FROM ACTION (BACK) TO INVENTION

So it was a disaster, but in all likelihood not one of cosmic importance; the municipality's Registres, as consulted by Enea Balmas, Jodelle's modern biographer and editor,(12) show that the aldermen, while somewhat embarrassed about the "grande presse et confusion," not to mention some "argent perdu," certainly did not perceive the failed performance as the tragedy Jodelle's wounded ego made out of it and immortalized in what was to remain his only publication. The complete title is Le Recueil des inscriptions, figures, devises, et masquarades, ordonnees en l'hostel de rifle a Paris, le jeudi 17 de Fevrier 1558, with Autres Inscriptions en vers Heroiques Latins, pour les images des Princes de la Chrestiente, published in Paris by Andre Wechel, in June 1558. By his own admission, the poet refused to think that "ce desastre fust peu de chose"; in fact, he is aware that, starting at the very moment it occurred, he purposefully exaggerated the flop and its consequences: "je me le suis moymesmes agrandi" (120/252) - he made it bigger, in his own eyes, than it actually was. On the one hand, he tells us that it was indeed a mighty catastrophe; on the other hand, he insists that more of his initial program was actually carried out than alleged detractors, seizing upon the opportunity, would have us believe;(13) and that a mascarade, being only a "leger plaisir," is not a big deal anyway. So maybe it was not such a terrible failure after all. The goal of this explicitly seesaw reasoning is obvious. Both aspects of the poet's attitude attest to the same concept of personal greatness: the intensity, the very shrillness of his despair is a necessary complement to the unreasonable scale and minuteness of a project that, in the poet's opinion, went much beyond the hasty piece of entertainment it was supposed (and probably appeared) to be. Not only was Jodelle able to put together a complex and original spectacle in a couple of days - choosing, for instance, to expand the mascarade by adding text to a genre (supposedly) up to then mostly "muet" when it would have been much easier (and sensible), given the time allowed, to stick to well-tried practice - but he alone could fathom the awful gap between his "ordonnance" and the unfolding "execution," between his initial "invention" and "desir" and the final result. All this is best expressed in a paradox which Jodelle seems perfectly aware of: if a mascarade, contrary to more serious genres, is something to enjoy (and worry about) only "a l'heure presente" and then let go into oblivion, it is a bit strange to insist on remembering, of all things, not only a mascarade, but one which failed miserably, instead of seeking comfort from "la gloire de mes autres inventions."(14) It is not enough to say that the wound of failure transformed this poetic appetizer into something else entirely; one has to add that failure and its retrospective exploration will help to assert the inchoate value of a project so grandiose that maybe no "heure presente" could do it justice.

Jodelle tells us that, on his fatal stage, he endured, "me sentant autheur" (117/249), a sense of "authorship" that goes beyond moral responsibility to embrace demiurgic creation, from quick writing to splendid incarnation in new shapes, colors, and sounds, as well as its resounding collapse. The humiliated demiurge, under what he fantasized was the king's despising gaze, was left gasping, "furieus et demi mort," which only added to the trouble (indeed, he seems to have been vexed to the point of paralysis, as if "transforme en pierre par le regard de . . . Meduse" (75/228), petrified by some Medusa; he became unable to deliver his own part and gave up directing the others). This self-induced exaggeration of failure was the only way Jodelle could place what he produced on a par with his initial ambition, which had not been sufficiently recognized nor deciphered by others in the first place.

This experience (and the flurry of maneuvering and gossip which, predictably enough, ensued from Jodelle's rivals or enemies in the Court) resulted in an apologia pro se which he himself acknowledges goes much beyond "toutes les bornes de raison" (120/ 252). As the title indicates, the 48-folio book (devoid of any illustration) contains, in addition to the Recueil proper, 64 Icones, i.e., three-verse Latin laudative "inscriptions" dedicated to the king, various members of his family (starting with his father Francois I) and the court, and other European royalties, such as Philip II of Spain and Mary Tudor, whose particular inscriptions are all but vitriolic.(15) The Icones are preceded by two longer pieces in Latin: an elegy to Marguerite de Valois and a lengthy inscription advocating European peace. They are followed by another Latin elegy to Jodelle's friend Claude de Kerquefinen. The book ends with a beautiful chapitre, a long poem in French in the form of a soliloquy of the poet A sa Muse,(16) which itself ends on the famous line: "Jamais l'Opinion ne sera mon colier."(17)

The Recueil proper is a thorough description of the building and banquet hall decorations, featuring the text of all the mottoes and devices; a detailed account of the performance, costumes, machines and all, with the complete text of the first mascarade; and finally, a unique document about a failed sixteenth-century poet's state of mind, which is at the same time a small monument to that poet's sense of his own worth. It is more than the recuperation or even the restoration of poetic material which had not been properly communicated; it produces an altogether different kind of work, an unusual, even bizarre mode and mood for rhetorical prose, "blending together the epistolary, oratorical and historical styles."(18)

Jodelle, to be sure, does not seem too proud of this cocktail. What he wants to say in this passage of his liminary epistle is that he was forced to come up with a "chose legere et meslee," but he will some day produce something better in all three "genres escrire" instead of mixing them up under pressure. Yet, captatio notwithstanding, or rather captatio included, the Recueil is a remarkable piece of rhetoric, a dark, aggressive apology whose peculiar brand of whining has no equivalent in French sixteenth-century literature.(19) While the sentence just quoted is intended as an excuse, it also reveals a consciousness of the text's (and the poet's) rhetorical means and range, and could even be read as an implicit acknowledgment of its paradoxical virtuosity. Be this as it may, what we have here is a narrative whose ultimate effect is not, for all the exactness of the re-constitution, to cancel out the effect of failure, but to amplify it by providing a mutually enhancing account of a genius's high conceit and "desastre acoustume" (101/239), customary disaster or ill fate. As a small and equivocal piece, instead of the major work that the public had been expecting for five years, the Recueil is itself a perfect emblem of the poet's ordeal: it gets back to failure to show, with all the power and solemnity of an apologia, that it was not deserved. By doing so, it revives it: yet it also reveals the scope and depth of the poet's ambition. Yet again, it underscores, in contrast with this very ambition, its own limits as a morceau de circonstance, albeit an eloquent one. In a kind of perpetual anamorphosis, we can read the Recueil as an oratio which is too big, too loud for its trivial occasion or as a piece of patchwork which is too thin and circumstantial to fulfill its author's promise.

At first glance the Recueil is nonetheless an attempt to reconquer, in the past tense of a first-person narration, the fabulous moment and place the poet had designed to enrapture, along with Orpheus's rocks, a crowd which happened to include the king of France, cast m the role of a "Jason nouveau." One has to recognize the referential tension that pervades the piece. The narrative describes something which was supposed to be both unique and irresistibly performative. Using quotation and description, it tries to give a sense of time (or timing) and above all a sense of space, a space entirely organized and animated by poetic intention. To a certain extent, we have to visualize the Grande Salle, how it was or, rather, should have been; we have to see how the prince and the crowd were to proceed from inscription to inscription, units of dense, meaningful poetry organized in a rigorous succession; how the rocks or the boat should have moved, through the entrance door, through the audience, etc. About "l'appareil de la salle," for example, Jodelle boasts that "la description en deplaira aussi peu que l'ordonnance" (83/ 231), his description (of such a remarkable design) will be as enthralling as the design itself.

And yet, this is about a spectacle where to see (and read and hear) was supposedly to be seized, captured; more than persuaded - enchanted. What we "see" through the mimetic process of narration cannot pretend to reenact the magic of performative space, let alone enact it when it failed to happen in the first place. The printed imprese no longer impress through their pictorial and architectural disposition; the printed mascarade no longer strikes a spectator's eyes and ears. Jodelle's description is remarkably detailed, but it does not really rely on the power of enargeia or hypotyposis. The Recueil is not a "re-creation." Apart from the verse it reproduces, there is hardly a sentence in it that does not give, along with visual information, an account of the author's thought, either then or now. Two prominent devices destroy any sense of immediacy in this new access to the material: commentary and digression. The former relentlessly clarifies the meaning of each and every cited inscription and described ornament by referring them back to the poet's intention, as if there were no point any more in letting them signify on their own; the latter, paradoxically, represents the very heart of the Recueil, moments when the author's "cause," in the judicial sense, is actually defended against a catalogue of possible accusations (from incompetence to excessive ambition, from lack of concern to lack of self-control, and so on). Narration, description, citation, blended with gloss and a host of defensive arguments, produce this hybrid of "histoire" and "oraison" which is equally successful at showing the disaster, its radical unfairness and devastating effect on the poet's spirit, as it is at suggesting the quality of his projected "ordonnance."

Narration here doesn't fully compensate for a three-dimensional performativeness that did not deliver. The text cannot cancel failure through implicit rewriting and reiteration, the way Cicero did, for example, with the Pro Milone. The text has to be explicit about practical failure. It has to become the tale of a disaster, as much as it remains the description of a small masterpiece. The Recueil has also to anticipate suspicion about the difference between what it says and what actually took place, all the more so because it was published four months after the event.(20) Jodelle, in the face of potentially malicious witnesses, insists that he did not change a thing, with a caveat that will be discussed later. Finally, we have to realize that the very existence of the Recueil as a piece of printed literature is an anomaly. In the words of Graham and McAllister Johnson, "The album, simply because it is an apologia, is exceptionally rich in kind and in quantity of such details as would otherwise have been lost to posterity. We would never have possessed them had the events been an unqualified success in Jodelle's own eyes" (21). There is no question that the point of inscriptions and mascarades was to succeed hic et nunc, and that belated and exegetic publication, if anything, confirms initial failure and smacks of rechauffe - a supplement(21) if ever there was one. We should be careful, however, not to interpret the poet's drama in romantic terms; we should resist waxing pathetic about the "vanishing" of the book's referent. The apologia's pathos focuses on the original disaster, and its amplification in the poet's "desastre acoustume," not on the aporia of writing with respect to exterior or anterior "presence."(22) The Recueil, as therapy for both the author and his material,(23) succeeds in conveying, in addition to Jodelle's verse, the wealth of practical information modern editors are so happy about, while ruminating over the "desastre." Writing, as we shall see, is indeed painful, even "tragic," in that it supposes an initial wound that it cannot help reopening. The pen needs blood; in that sense the Recueil cannot hope to overcome the problem to which it owes its existence. Yet this tragedy does not feed on, say, the lack of adequation between the text and the oral/visual experience it reproduces, as if the latter were privileged. To the contrary, the exercise is more of the scripta manent kind; it has to be understood within the wider context of the Renaissance rhetoric of writing. Failure helped to transform an actual performance - visual and meant to impress but soon to vanish - into a written one - virtual and haunted but (hopefully) more durable. The instant performativeness of painted and pronounced poetry redeems itself, through brutal evidence of its own defeat, into a new, metaphorical, yet ultimately more efficient "performance," that of printed matter - oratio, tale, gloss, and defense - reaching out to a wider, more attentive audience, or at least asking us to wait for a still more impressive book (which, unfortunately, will never come). The rocks were not moved according to plan, but (maybe) present and future readers will be.(24)

This is where we have to consider the meaning of Jodelle's first mascarade. As we have seen, the genre was supposed to be light; one of the signals of such lightness was its emphasis on music, costume, and dance over words (let us bear, for the sake of interpretation, with the poet's somewhat stretched originality claim). Now: (a) Jodelle decides to add numerous, ponderous words; (b) even though he has no time to have them learned and performed properly; (c) these words begin with a reference to Orpheus and the power of song;(25) (d) their oral delivery, whether sung or spoken, is a disaster; (e) they are, nevertheless, going to survive, along with all the circumstances surrounding them, by being printed into a Recueil.

A first paradox is that words echoing the strength of orphic poetry are put in a situation where they only demonstrate their own weakness, their lack of inherent power over the crowd. The miracle of vocal rocks is ironically mirrored by the disaster of not so vocal props. The mascarade fails insofar as it purports to be an allegory of poetry which is supposed to reach a new level of performativeness. A second paradox, however, is that a new level is actually reached through failure, thanks to writing and printing: what could not be heard can be read. If we put these two paradoxes together, we find that the proper signified of orphic song is not its own performance on stage but its delayed "performance" in the pages of a book offering, not only the piece of doomed poetry, but a new kind of "oraison." It is in a book, and m writing, more than declaiming on stage, that the author hopes to be in control of his work - that is, to produce a rhetorical effect and to be recognized as the "autheur" of this effect.

The idea of rescuing, "recueillir," a piece of performance art is not an end in itself, even though the poet, of course, wants us to understand the value of what he had done. Or rather, "recueillir" does not mean to make it "happen" again the way it was supposed to. Thus, the right way to seek an effect of the "inscriptions" in the book is to elucidate them, not to offer them to unmediated reading as they were in situ. By the same token, there is no point (for Jodelle the great poet) in restoring a mascarade as such, granting the privilege of book-form to something too "light" to deserve it.(26) The fact that this particular piece deserves to be printed has to do with the reasons why it failed in the first place. What was too much for the stage is not too much for a book, especially the kind of book that carries self-promotion beyond the "bornes de raison." Orpheus finally finds a respondent, not in the indifferent or leisure-oriented spectator, nor in the ill-prepared actor, but in the wounded "je" of the poet himself, ever ready to complain and, explain.

What is true of the inserted, cited text (whether it be verse or mottoes), is true of narration in general: it is subordinate to the more intimate and urgent "recueil" of Jodelle's own poetic status. In oratorical narratio, to be sure, the power of mimesis is always instrumental to something else: the goal is persuasion, not so much about "facts" for their own sake as about what they mean for the judicial contest. Yet the point of narratio is to conceal, as far as possible, the orator's persona behind the cause and the argument behind the evidence of the tale; in that sense, it may rely on the figure of enargeia or evidentia, putting things and events "before one's eyes," so that they "speak" (and prove) by themselves.(27) This old idea could fit in with the hope to rescue or restore the oral/ visual power of a performance: even in the case of an apologia pro se (where the orator and the accused are one and the same), the narrator could prove his case by effacing himself behind the description/citation of his own creation (a strategy which would also build credit for a modest and virtuous ethos).(28) But clearly, this is not what Jodelle wants; by making his "propos" unusually long, he seeks to show "lapure verite du fait," thus producing a "longue confutation en une faute petite" (122/252). This confutatio is most explicit in the digressions we mentioned earlier. The point here is that narratio (which, traditionally, is supposed to be short) is mixed with a "long" refutation (contrary to orthodoxy), and the "verite du fait" must not be understood in terms of mimetic referentiality alone but primarily in terms of rhetorical proof.(29) Everything that seems to be described here for the sake of its own beauty or value serves as probatio with respect to the poet and his addressees,(30) the causa or hypothesis being that, even though the mascarade failed, Jodelle had properly conceived everything. In essence - as an "autheur" - he cannot be guilty of any wrongdoing.

This transitive function of narratio is helped by the fact that what is described is a temporary, artificial space, packed with intentions and significations, organized according to one mind's exclusive plan. Narration brings performance and decorations back to where they came from, the only place where they achieved true meaning, the poet's mind. What Jodelle describes is at once what happened, what should have happened if things had gone according to plan, and somehow what still happens in the mental kingdom of his art. This functions, so to speak, like an extension or a perversion of the dynamics of ars memoriae:(31) instead of constructing an imaginary space in order to remember organized ideas and words, the mind produces a written speech to "remember" an actual - if fragile - architecture, which was itself loaded with symbols and messages; yet the piece of "oraison" makes this ephemeral monument even more virtual and turns it into a kind of pretext to its own conception, while the "oraison" is itself a pretext to the announcement of future (but elusive) masterpieces.

It remains true that, measured against the rapture or sheer pleasure of actual scenery and performance, the narrative appears to be weak; the Recueil mourns what should have been a commanding and self-fulfilling "reality," an insignificant mascarade turned into the kind of simulated rite that Jodelle had experienced, for example, with the "Pompe du Bouc" that followed the triumph of his Cleopatre.(32) But it also makes us aware that such a "reality," in turn, is nothing but a projection, poetry turned into action, or, in rhetorical terms, inventio turned into actio. From the perspective of their common source, the poet's invention, the failed performance and the retrospective text are close to each other; together, they can produce a new rhetoric, a blend of styles which, so to speak, samples and advertises the poet's possibilities. Jodelle admits that he had to rewrite some inscriptions that he did not remember exactly;(33) he even tells us that he felt the urge to improve one of them, as though writing it down triggered a new "fantasie"; and he gives us the modified text along with the original one (91/234-3 5).(34) There we leave the waste land of what had been or should have been, to witness something that fundamentally is, albeit not necessarily translated into tangible "reality" from the reader's or the spectator's point of view: namely, the continuous flow of poetic inspiration, the only thing that Jodelle through all his travails seems to remain perfectly confident about. In any case, the only remedy to failure is to move back to the source, the sphere of inventio and ordonnance that somehow transcends all actualizations and execution. Thus, the Recueil's effect is less to carry readers back to a particular place and time than to admit them into a virtual a-temporal space, the ghost theater of intentionality, the private mascarade of authorship.

Still, authorship is then redefined in terms that include disaster; this particular realization of a text incorporates the failure of a previous one. Jodelle readily admits that his own ambition, exacerbated by the king's and the duke's presence, first stacked the deck and complicated what could have remained a rather simple task into something close to impossible; yet it had to be so in order to reap the "fruit" or "suc" instead of remaining at the easy level of "feuille" or "escorce" - which is, according to Jodelle, the "deffaut de nostre siecle" (116/249). Such traditional metaphors of invention (fruit and sap opposed to leaf and bark) are here to indicate the profound conformity of the poet's apparently excessive project with the logic and ethics of valuable poetry and rhetoric.(35) Even when describing the part that went best, the decorations, he insists that "la main des ouvriers ne peut suivre l'abondance de mes inventions" (88/232), the workers' hands could not keep up with the wealth of his inventions - which at once emphasizes the poet's genius and reminds us that this ornamentation job was at core, as is all true poetry, a matter of inventio, a matter of concept and design. The poet's excess needs to be understood within the frame of rhetorical theory; it doesn't go against it, as would the romantic theory of genius; rather, it divides it against itself. Inventio is a dominant category for Jodelle as it is for Ronsard and the poetics of the humanists in general.(36) Yet with Jodelle this domination becomes excessive and appears to threaten the crowning work of elocutio (hence a number of unfinished works left pending, "pendus au croc"), and above all actio, action or delivery, which we could expand to include, for example, the publication of a finished work. With Jodelle, invention, seen both as the impulse of an inspired mind(37) and as a rhetorical, ethical, and social duty, comes to perceive itself as inherently incapable of full realization - of "going public."

The case of the Recueil is all the more interesting when we consider that Jodelle's pattern - already visible and bitterly self-conscious in 1558 - consists in failing to finish and publish what he has written, or, in the case of plays, to have them performed. It is as though failure had been displaced, occurring at the level of initial composition and performance (collapsed into one single ordeal), thus allowing to lift the spell on publication, even though the resulting booklet amounts to little more than a ridiculus mus instead of the expected "mountain of gold."(38) Jodelle only manages to publish when he has already failed to deliver in another way. Failure thus becomes the main "imagination" and subject matter of the new work's inventio.

FROM LOCAL STAGE TO NATIONAL FABLE

Jodelle insists, as we have seen, that it is because he "[s]e sent[oit] autheur" that he could not face disaster with impassibility: he was doomed to lose moral and mental control. Here we see that the notion of authorship, grounded in the concept of inventio while experienced as a subjective feeling, disrupts the very ethical model which Jodelle judges himself (and others) against, namely Stoicism: "Now if you tell me . . . that I, for one, being the author, should have remained unshaken, thus somehow repairing, by my own composure, the others' mistakes, I answer two things: firstly, that it was impossible for me to do so; and secondly, that had I done so I would have done wrong."(39)

It would have been impossible because of the sheer accumulation of problems and intensity of the author's psychological investment (he drove himself sick, he tells us, just one hour before the performance): there was no human way he could have avoided wishing to die, "crever et desirer d'estre cent pies sous terre"; and it would have been inappropriate anyway because the audience would have been entitled to think that the author was not aware of his failure, or did not care about it. Thus, according to Jodelle's view, the impassible author in the eyes of others would have been an incompetent author; adequate moral control, in this unique case, would have implied inadequate poetic control, which has to prove itself at the very moment the production unravels, by exposing inordinate emotion instead of concealing it. So the poet's restlessness is vindicated, against all codes of acceptable behavior, by the particular conditions of esthetic reception. The true poet cannot remain wise, "constant," impassible in front of adversity: that would be proof that his poetry does not really matter to him and that he has relinquished what sets him apart, his genuine authority.(40)

On stage, that particular brand of emotion ran against the necessity of performance, the obligation or temptation to go on; but the poet's emotion and his original intention are reconciled in the book, that is, in the "confutation" delivered to counter attacks about which we only know what Jodelle tells us - not much; these attacks may well have originated in his own divided ethical self. The locus of argumentation is the poet's own "invention," or rather, as we have just seen, his at once strategic and emotional status as an author. And this is where the text manages to go further than recreating the scene of the original performance and disaster; it actually creates a new scene, beyond the Medusean encounter of the failed poet with his indifferent king. It organizes a new space for communication, which is both decidedly virtual and dramatically expanded: "By protracting my discourse, I dearly wanted to show the sheer truth of the matter, so that by using long refutation for a small fault, I could also force France herself to recognize her own customary fault, namely that, appearing at once ungrateful and envious, instead of supporting the worthy souls who strive to honor her, she sternly keeps an eye on their slightest flaws, while she remains totally blind to their virtues."(41)

We have come a long way from the humble tone of the captatio. The same idea furnishes the Recueil's conclusion: "I will only beg, with all my heart, the city I just mentioned, or rather, instead of the city, France herself to stop being so much her own enemy that one can rightly blame her for routinely abusing her finest souls . . . and if you ever cared about doing anything for yourself, O France, I beseech you again and again to grant our letters and our virtue the reward you yourself confessed they deserve."(42) The reenactment of failure allows the poet to create rhetorically a new space of his own, a public stand where his ego is permitted to "speak" directly to France about the mysteries and agony of poetic creation. The booklet describes the lost space of a staged fabula; but it also "performs," in its own virtual way, on a larger and freer stage where the poet can speak on his own behalf: an entire country that he holds responsible for his ill-fated endeavors.

France itself is envisioned from beyond its own borders, within the context of Christian Europe. In the short preface to the Icones section of the Recueil, Jodelle tells us (in Latin) that he decided to include his libellum of would-be "inscriptions" dedicated to the "heroes and heroines of our time," even though it is still unfinished, in order to blend Latin and French (contrary to the Pleiade's trumpeted practice), so that the Inscriptions "ad exteras nationes transire possint,"(43) may reach the foreign nations. The Icones may be considered unfinished in more than one sense: the 64 epigraphs do not seem to correspond, on the whole, to any actual series of portraits, nor even to established types, as Graham and McAllister Johnson have demonstrated.(44) In the absence of illustration, they can be read, so to speak, as the textual equivalent of the "printed portrait galleries of historical or contemporary figures"(45) that were popular throughout the century. As a result, instead of being merely a defining trait of the icon or device genre, the use of Latin appears to be part of a wider poetic strategy that needs to be appreciated in combination with the French verse and prose of the other parts of the Recueil. Again, an immediate "plastic" effect is transformed into a purely textual one; an actual, narrow space is displaced into a virtual, almost infinite one. Instead of being deciphered by onlookers with reference to surrounding painted figures, the Latin words (short inscriptions and long poems alike) are supposed to make Jodelle's work (and genius) accessible to the entire community of European readers.

This is the stage the "prince des poetes tragiques" is envisioning for himself. A national and even transnational "space" is created here as an alternative to the failed theatrical space, and as a necessary interlocutor or respondent, chambre d'echo to the fundamental poetic persona, the one behind all the circumstantial personae, the author as such, as master of his own "inventions," no matter how ill-produced they are.

In fact, this narcissistic space is activated, as the suitable place for both invention and failure (which in Jodelle's case become necessary to each other), well before the circumstances that will allow this particular textual staging. Jodelle tells us that when asked about a play to be recited during the banquet, he replied that he had indeed several tragedies and comedies ready, plays whose performances had been prevented by the troubled times, the "troubles du tens": "(I said) that I persisted in waiting for an opportunity better than this tumultuous and miserable time in order to have them performed on stage, adding this rather poetic dictum, that this year Fortune had already performed, on the great scaffold of Gaul, in too tragic a fashion for us to use false spectacles that would make real wounds bleed again."(46) As we saw, he sticks to this attitude and chooses to write a new and very different kind of piece, designed for entertainment while expressing in the character of Orpheus the concept of the power of poetry, and in the character of Jason the crucial link between the poet and the king. But let us investigate further the poet's declaration about the strange condition of his completed works. His ordeal, which preceded the February disaster, could not be more neatly defined: he writes tragedies and wants them performed but cannot have this wish fulfilled. Sincere or not, the alibi is what interests me here.

The representation of tragedy seems to require a period of historical calm, an end to, or at least an intermission in worldly tumult. Real "tragedies" and faked ones seem to compete for attention. But this structure of rivalry iS itself a poetical insight; it can only be expressed "poetically," in a fashion that the poet gives himself credit for, i.e., by constructing the metaphor that allows seeing history as a play, a "tragedy" performed on a national "stage," and capable of outperforming the poet's personal inventions. The poet is putting his own work at odds with history by poetically declaring that history is poetic, and more specifically tragic, in nature. He gives himself paradoxical credit for perceiving in the current work of Fortune a poetic quality which puts his own work in jeopardy. It takes the wit of an author to see and describe Fortune as an author, unfortunately a matchless one on the French scene. In a move that anticipates and mirrors the reverse procedure that I just described, Jodelle's poetic vision of a metaphoric national stage, the "grand echaufaut de la Gaule," provides the rationale for driving the literal, theatrical stage into nonexistence, leaving poetry, and the poet's ego, with the task of finding the words to express this very quandary, in lieu of fabulous, fictional inventions which, although allegedly written, must remain muted and are condemned to oblivion (let us remember that only three of Jodelle's plays were retrieved).

There is more to the "poetic" conceit by which Jodelle justifies his abstention. The competition between the tragedies of history and his own is ultimately stylized into an opposition between true and false, real and faked, that can be traced back to the old rhetorical opposition (best expressed in Quintilian's Institutio oratoria)(47) between historia and fabula. There seems to be no room left for the intermediate element, argumentum, nor for the concept which supports it, verisimilitude. Jodelle (and this remains a consistent trait throughout his writings) finds no comfort in this compromise idea, which was developed in French poetics by Peletier(48) and later Ronsard himself.(49) Poetic stories are either true or false, and this alternative often puts Jodelle at odds with the dominant inspiration of the Pleiade: on the one hand he makes, with decided opportunism, a large use of myth and fable; on the other hand, he expresses lingering ideological doubts and personal anger about it, repeatedly lashing out at "Grece menteresse," mendacious Greece, and praising attempts (such as Nicolas Denisot's) to resist Ronsard's neo-pagan, hedonistic modernism, and restore a national and/or Christian-oriented literature.(50)

This problem is apparent in the Recueil itself: Jodelle chooses to introduce his plans for the royal reception, which certainly can be considered, from a formal viewpoint, as a Triumph a l'Antique, with ambiguous qualms against the very idea of such a Triumph, which he opposes to the Christian concept of returning all the glory back to God. But the idea of the Paris municipality honoring the king and the duke of Guise with a mere banquet is even more repelling and disgustingly bourgeois: one has to imagine a more dignified and culturally advanced form of "passetens." The poet in fact, by his own admission, will follow "d'asses pres l'antiquite admiree d'un chacun, et aucunement recherchee par (luy)" (76/228), closely enough the antiquity that everybody admires and he himself somehow pursues, while peppering his "inventions" with subtle qualifiers and denials: the first two inscriptions, for example, make up an "excuse" for what is, after all, a "triomphe," by emphasizing that the person of the king is greater than his accomplishments, and that God is greater than the person of the king. The first words of the first inscription are "Non pompa," literally "this is not pomp," a rather paradoxical statement; what follows emphasizes the role of "Vicissitudo" and the importance of self-restraint. This of course pertained to the Roman triumph tradition (remember the "saxum Tarpeium"), yet here it is at once Christianized and adapted to the needs of a monarchy, in the sense that the source of "grandeur" is, beyond the occasional victories, the essential person of the king himself who in turn proceeds from God's will. Jodelle's purpose, at various levels, remains to introduce the seeds of a more transcendent truth in the "docte" reenactment of pagan festivities.

But in the passage just quoted, the dialectic of truth and falsehood takes one more turn. What prevents the "false" from being acted out is not the fact that it be "false" per se, i.e., unworthy of comparison with the "real," or even, in a Platonic fashion, that it might contaminate a righteous republic. The point is that the nation already exhibits "tumulte," its share of tragic trouble; reality itself is understood in poetic, theatrical terms; thus the performance of the false would add to the torments of the times, re-open the real wounds and make them bleed afresh. We are, in a sense, close to Plato's objection against poetry,(51) except that the republic is already wounded and tragedy has already been projected as a pertinent figure of the republic's condition, or so says, in a rather self-serving fashion, someone who is, precisely, a tragic poet wailing over his own fate. By the same token, we could not be further from Aristotelian katharsis,(52) the theory of which was discussed in Italy(53) and would soon be introduced to the French public (but not become really influential for quite some time).(54) Not only does performance not allow for distance from (and therefore enjoyment of) the horror of its own argument, but it actually creates a bridge between that argument, no matter how remote and fictitious, and the immediate horrors of reality. In fact, it collapses them together; it makes them one single bleeding wound.(55)

What is interesting here is the fact that Jodelle, in this 1558 self-serving witticism, anticipated what was to come: the horrors of civil war, which would only nurture what appears to be, in his case, a basic intuition - one that d'Aubigne,(56) I would argue, took from him and pushed much further: the idea of the tragic (emblematized in one substance, blood) as blurring safe distinctions between reality and representation, fabula and historia. Jodelle was ready to feed on the "tragedies" of his time and amplify his notion of "tragic" poetry as participating in the "real" bloodshed. The same metaphor, which pretends to be more than a metaphor insofar as it tries to point out the cruel complicity between "writing" and "reality," will reappear in the Discours de Jules Cesar,(57) a lengthy, incomplete, and of course never published meditation on the Roman dictator's, the king's, and the poet's similar confrontation (and temptation) with rebellion and "parricidal" violence. This text (most likely written in the early 1560s) shows the "highest Muse" eager to dip her pen in the blood of old stories that poetry prevents from ever healing. The daunting question is how to escape from the power and danger of "tels ecrits, par qui se rensanglante / Sans cesse leur renom,"(58) writings which literally bloody the famous kings' name and fame, again and again. History as a succession of events is made of good and bad moments, fortunes and misfortunes; but historia as text often appears to be made only of the latter because of what Jodelle describes as a perversion inherent in human memory and "Fame,"(59) Therefore historia all too readily qualifies as fabula or (tragic) poetry; it cuts out happy events - literally, non-events - and amplifies bad ones. History and fable thus tend to become one single record of "sound and fury." We can see that the hopeful distinction proposed as an excuse by the Recueil is no longer valid: it makes no sense to wait for happier times to perform tragedy because it would instantly make the times "tragic" again; it would make them bleed anyway.

The poet of the Discours de Jules Cesar desperately seeks a way out. Walking in Lucan's footsteps, he dreams of a still higher Muse who would transcend the tragic impasse and produce a "national" sound, at once historically truthful and poetically powerful, more so than the dark rumor of blood.(60) Again, we can say that Jodelle failed to go beyond the diagnosis that he made: it will be d'Aubigne's privilege to design the style, at once epic and Christian, capable of telling the "truth" while taking it through and beyond the fascination of the bloodbath.(61) But, to conclude with the Recueil des inscriptions, we can see that it may well have been the decisive step in Jodelle's disastrous career, by producing a circular, makeshift tragedy out of poetic invention itself.(62) For while the poet, in order not to add to the woes of his time, chose to perform a mascarade instead of a tragedy, the mascarade became a disaster; while he pretended to warn the king against "Vicissitudo," his own undertaking fell prey to vicissitude; and the poet was left with no choice but to write about it, which could very well, he tells us in his preface, "faire refreschir ma playe, par la seconde publication de ma faute" (65/221), revive his wound by the second publication of his fault. It took an extra measure of courage (and a total of four months) to "guerir la piquure du scorpion par le scorpion mesme," to cure the scorpion's sting by the scorpion itself, using once again "tous les instrumens de mes malheurs, qui sont les livres, les papiers, et les plumes" (66/221), all the tools of his misfortune: books, papers, and pens. Thus the metaphor was already complete: to write, whatever the current juncture, is to shed new blood from old sores; it is to make disaster customary.

Yet, as he will do later, the poet is seeking a way out: the Recueil, by exposing the "verite du fait," that is, invention together with failure, fabulous inventio impregnated with knowledge about its "desastre," was trying to find a new, higher road, producing unusual prose and poetry, a disappointing booklet which also happens to be a raging discours, at once French and Latin, rhetorical and truthful, oratorical and historical. But in a telling anticipation, Jodelle tells us that the "lecture entiere" of such a new piece of work will ultimately arouse "beaucoup plus d'envie que de pitie," much more envy than pity. Quite a fantasy, quite a katharsis: once the ideal "space" of poetic experience will have been expanded to the virtual dimensions of the whole reading and admiring nation, it will remain bitter and resound with envy or jealousy instead of the holy peace that is supposed to come after the tears of terror and compassion. Jodelle already knows that the virtual space of "immortal" communication, no matter how dramatically expanded, no matter how rhetorically mixed, remains locked in the private hell of the poet's own, unpublishable "inventions": the true nature of his "desastre acoustume" is that it "quasi ne me permet point d'estre connu d'autre que de moy" (66/222),(63) and the Recueil, given the comparative modesty of its own achievement,(64) only confirms that. Cultivating what we may call the Jeremiah or Cassandra complex, the very voice whose ambition is to announce, reflect, and maybe deflect the predicament of an entire nation knows that this desire and supposed ability stem, paradoxically, from its own personal tragedy, the fact that it is almost forbidden to make itself known, except to itself. Indeed, it is through the crack of this "quasi" that the Recueil manages to sketch its author's unique and tantalizing self-portrait and we are able to read whatever was recovered (recueilli) from Jodelle's orphaned poetry, "pauvres vers orphelins."(65)

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY 

1 For a detailed account of both the event and the circumstances of Jodelle's subsequent publication, see Enea Balmas, 348-429.

2 See E. Balmas's edition of Jodelle's OEuvres completes, 1965, 1:38.

3 See Les Regrets 156: 9-14. See also the "Jodelle" character (a strong advocate of "fureur poetique") in the dialogue "Ronsard, ou De la poesie" (1556) by Louis Le Caron.

4 Le Recueil des inscriptions, figures, devises, et masquarades, 1558, 3-3v. See Graham and Johnson. All quotations from the Recueil are taken from this edition; however, I give two references: the Graham-Johnson pagination, and the Balmas pagination from the edition of Jodelle's OEuvres completes (the main part of the Recueil appears in vol. 2, 1968, 217-56).

5 In the posthumous edition of his OEuvres (1587) Ronsard would suggest the same contrast in a sonnet prefacing the "Eclogues et Mascarades" section and referring to the Italian origin of the genre: "L'accort Italien quand il ne veut bastir / Un Theatre pompeux, un cousteux repentir, / La longue Tragedie en Mascarade change." (OEuvres completes, 1967, 241).

6 Jodelle notes that "coustumierement routes telles masquarades sont muetes" (120/ 252); yet, in a characteristically Janus-like fashion, he is at once willing to claim some credit for the innovation and to deflect criticism by arguing that the grace of his "invention," the very idea of bringing the ship Argo back to the king of France, would have survived even a traditional, "muete" performance - the complete vanishing of his text. As for the validity of his implicit novelty claim, let us remember that Mellin de Saint-Gelais, for one, throughout the 1550s (he was to die on 14 October 1558), had organized mascarades, some of them featuring long spoken addresses: see, for instance, the piece "Deux Nymphes de Fontaines au Roy," performed (outdoors) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 21 December 1557 (Saint-Gelais, 1:81). There are other examples. Some are analyzed by Molinier, 176-85 and 458-65. According to Molinier, the "Nymphes de Fontaines" piece was written in two days - a fact that helps put Jodelle's bragging into perspective. Saint-Gelais too was a very fast writer. The difference is the rhetorical treatment of virtuosity, the transformation of "natural" ease into high-wire drama.

7 "Jason" in his speech insists that he and his crew, "des long tens morts," would not be visible if it were not for Minerva's power; they appear on stage for the benefit of the spectators' "humaine veue," only to suggest an identification between the old and the new, the hero and the king, the ancient myth and the myth to come. In the masquerade genre, the visual is merely a way to have the mythical yield more completely to the allegorical; to watch Jason or Argon is to watch these powerful images surrender, under the authority of the poet (who plays Jason), to the authority of the king. Jodelle's "libretto" only makes this process more explicit.

8 The case of good (and fast) poets like Saint-Gelais notwithstanding, it remains true that in many mascarades the emphasis was more on music, costume, visual allegory, and dance than on words, except for inscriptions, short compliments, and written quatrains or epigrams to be distributed to the audience. On all this, see the examples analyzed m the collection edited by Jacquot; particularly by Dahlbaeck; Chastel; Anglo; Heartz.

9 To be fair, as Graham and Johnson put it, "it seems highly probable that the painters and other artisans had been working under [Jodelle's] direction" (5) since the day of the king's command (8 February). Jodelle must have been already involved when he was asked to come up with a performance.

10 See Graham and Johnson, 42-60.

11 Balmas showed, against Chamard and others, that the remark should not be taken literally (370-72). For all his woes, Jodelle did not have to deal on stage with actual "clochers." Yet, in her wonderful novel (192), Delay chose to stick to this apocryphal version, to a very funny effect.

12 See (Euvres completes, 2:463-64; and Balmas, 366-70.)

13 See for instance 75/228 and 120/252.

14 Mascarades continued to grow in importance and poetic sophistication in the 1560s, when courtly entertainment became a political and diplomatic tool in the hands of Catherine de Medicis. Menager showed the prominent role played by Ronsard in the evolution of the genre (323-54). Mascarades then - their versified parts, anyway - were considered worthy of a Recueil, as illustrated by Ronsard's Elegies, Mascarades et Bergerie (1565).

15 Icones 54 and 55, Graham and Johnson, 189-90.

16 These pieces, published in their original order by Graham and Johnson (129-206), appear in different sections of the Balmas edition: see the Icones in 1:185-202; the elegy Ad D. Margaritam Francicam, 1:166-69; the inscription Lugentis et Lacerae Europae, 1:202-03: the elegy Ad Claud. Kerquifinanum, Steph, Iodellii, in suas miserias, 1:26-28; the "chapitre," 2:287-89.

17 Line 64, 206/289.

18 Confondant . . . tout ensemble le style, et de l'epistre, et de l'oraison, et de l'histoire" ("Estiene Jodelle a ses amis," 67/222).

19 Maybe no equivalent before Rousseau, that is, until personal failure becomes the abyssal theme of successful works of art. The comparison, although anachronistic, is appealing (one also thinks of Celine), and certainly more justifiable than the retrospective (and all too common) use of the "poete maudit" mythology. Yet it should be used to stress, not blur, obvious differences, notably in the writers' conceptions of rhetoric and subjectivity.

20 Jodelle (66/221) blames the delay on about everything: anger, illness, Lent, a stay of the court in Fontainebleau, his own decision to add the Icones, and of course his "desastre acoustume" (see below).

21 See in Derrida (203 ff.) the famous deconstruction of Rousseau's "dangereux supplement." Again it is tempting, but potentially misleading, to see Jodelle in a "rousseauist" light. For an interesting "Derridian" reading of Jodelle's theater, see Garner, 1978.

22 For a discussion of Derrida's critique of "presence" with respect to Renaissance literature, see Defaux, 1987.

23 "Je commencay a me recueillir un peu moymesme, et vouloir faire un recueil de tout cela, par qui injustement je pensois m'estre perdu" (66/221).

24 These remarks on the Recueil do not mean to offer (nor to rely on) any general model or paradigm of the performance/text relationship. For one thing, they could not apply to Jodelle's own Cleopatre (which was a triumph on stage and remained unpublished until after its author's death) without major revisions; moreover, I believe that the accidental aspect of tire Recueil is crucial to its interpretation, which tries to outline Jodelle's personal rhetoric of failure. Yet I am indebted to Shaw's recent book on performance in the works of Mallarme, which provides a more conceptual investigation of the text/performance link while also underlining the need for case by case reasoning.

25 The rocks sing that they are "Raviz, abstraits, mourants d'ouir Orphee" (104/241). For a recent discussion of Jodelle's ideas on the power of verse, see Loskoutoff.

26 Saint-Gelais would not have bought such pathos, but he did not bother to publish his works anyway. However, Ronsard - the universal, all-encompassing poet, the versatile master of his own multi-layered OEuvres - will transform this condescending view of the genre into an asset. He can publish the verse of his mascarades in the appropriate section, further demonstrating that the "gloire" of his "inventions" is only enhanced by their amazing varietas.

27 See Quintilian, 4, 2, 123-27, and also the principle "Argumentabimur in narratione . . . numquam" (4, 2, 108).

28 See for example Cicero, 9, 32: narration works "Si probitas narrantis significabitur, si antiquitas, si memoria, si orationis veritas et vitae fides"; or Quintilian, 4, 2, 125.

29 Even though the treatises insist that the two parts should be separated for better effect, it remains clear that they share the same purpose. Cf. Quintilian, 4, 2, 79: "Narratio est probationis continua propositio, rursus probatio narrationi congruens confirmatio." Yet what Jodelle does here is invade narration with the authoritative rhetoric of refutation.

30 See, for a case in point, the discussion of the plans for the entry of the rocks and ship (118/250). Jodelle himself uses the word "proces" (117/249: "Je tien deja mon proces pour tout gaigne"), and one does not need much analysis to recognize the "Ciceronian" flavor of his apologia, albeit with a distinctly hysterical twist. The text, so to speak, builds its own Forum.

31 See Achard, 3, 28 ff., and Yates's classic study.

32 See Ronsard, 5:53-76.

33 "A ses amis," 65/221: "J'ay mieus aime sur le champ user du changement que du travail de les recouvrer."

34 Both inscriptions are variations on Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici," the second one adding a fourth word, "vinxi."

35 For a contemporary use of these metaphors, see for example Sebillet: "Ce qu'en Poesie est nomme art . . . n'est rien que la nue escorce de Poesie, qui couvre artificiele-ment sa naturele seve" (chap. 1, 10), and "Le rude et ignare populaire . . . a appelle les Poetes Francoys, rymeurs, s'arrestant a la nue escorce, et laissant la seve et le boys, qui sont l'invention et l'eloquence des Poetes" (chap. 2, 19-20).

36 See for example Ronsard, 14:12-13. The Pleiade's idea of the necessary relation between the "richesse d'invention" and the "propriete & splendeur de paroles" is very much indebted to Cicero's ideal orator.

37 In the words of Ronsard: "L'invention n'est autre chose que le bon naturel d'une imagination concevant les Idees & formes de routes choses qui se peuvent imaginer" (Abbrege, 13).

38 "A ses amis," 64/22. (Cf. Horace, De arte poetica, 139).

39 "Si l'on me dit . . . queje devois pour le moins moy qui estois l'autheur, demeurer constant, et en bien faisant reparer aucunement la faute des autres: je respondray deus choses, premierement qu'il estoit impossible que je le fisse, secondement, si je l'eusse fait, que j'eusse mal fait" (119/251).

40 On the problem of steadfastness and authority, see Bokoam's brief but illuminating study. I have also examined the problem of Jodelle's stoicism in an earlier essay (1987).

41 "J'ay bien voulu, en alongeant mon propos, montrer la pure verite du fait, affin qu'en usant de longue confutation en une faute petite, je face aussi reconnoistre a toute la France sa faute acoustumee, qui en ce siecle se montrant et ingrate et envieuse tout ensemble, au lieu de supporter les bons esprits qui l'honorent, ouvre les yeus le plus severement qu'elle peut sur leurs moindres vices, et s'aveugle incessamment en toutes leurs vertus" (121/252).

42 "Je supliray seullement de tout mon cueur ma ville dont je vien de parler, ou plus tost au lieu de ma ville toute la France, de n'estre plus tant ennemie de soy-mesme, qu'on lui puisse a bon droit reprocher qu'elle abuse ordinairement de tous ses meilleurs esprits . . . et si tu voulus jamais rien faire pour toy, O France, je te prie et reprie de rechef, que tu faces aus letres et a la vertu le traitement, dont toymesme tu les confesses estre dignes" (126/256).

43 Graham and Johnson, 127/OEuvres completes 1:185.

44 See 17 ff.

45 Ibid., 11. The authors refer, for example, to Andre Thevet's Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins, et payens, recueilliz de leurs tableaux, livres, medailles antiques et modernes. See also, for a more "specialized" example, Theodore de Beze's own Icones, id est veroe imagines virorum doctrina simul et pietate illustrium (Jean de Laon, 1580), or the French version provided by Goulart.

46 ". . . et que j'attendois tousjours une meilleure occasion que n'est ce tens tumultueus et miserable pour les faire metre sur le theatre, adjoustant ce petit mot asses poetiquement dit, que ceste annie la Fortune avoit crop tragiquement joue dedans ce grand echaufaut de la Gaule sans faire encore par les fauls spectacles reseigner les veritables playes" (74/227).

47 Quintilian, 24, 2. See also Achard, 1, 13; Cicero, De inventione, 1, 19, 27.

48 In L'Art poetique, book 1, chap. 3-4, and book 2, chap. 8.

49 See the posthumous (publ. 1587) Preface sur la Franciade, 16:336; and already the 1565 Abbrege, 14:13.

50 See the Ode au comte d'Alcinois (ed. Balmas, 1:78-83); also the "prologue" written for L'Eugene (2:11-13); cf. the commentary of the latter by Sankovitch, 11-23.

51 Cf. Republic, 3, 386-98.

52 Poetics, 6, 1449 b 28.

53 Bernard Weinberg has shown that katharsis was widely understood as a compromise concept, a way to deflect Plato's criticism by bringing the pleasure of "mimetic" poetry back to moral utility. For instance Vincenzo Maggi, in his commentary (In Aristotelis librum de poetica communes explanationes, 1550), writes that "since in the definition of tragedy (Aristotle) had said that it purges the disorder of the soul by means of pity and terror, purgation and not pleasure must be considered to be the end (of poetry)"; quoting (and translating) this, Weinberg adds that, for Maggi, "the cultivation of 'voluptas' is a fault of certain poets, not of art as a whole . . .; Aristotle specifically answers [Plato's] objection by assigning to the pleasure of tragedy an intermediary role in the achievement of purgation and hence of moral utility." (Weinberg, 409-10).

54 Scaliger's Poetices libri VII will be published three years later (Geneva and Lyons, 1561); they mark the passage of Aristotelian poetics from Italy to France. But, as Magnien notes in a rich introduction to his recent French translation of the Poetics (Aristotle, 1990, 66-68), Scaliger brings Aristotle back to the fold of Latin rhetoric and tends to dismiss the notion of katharsis entirely. Subsequent commentaries will continue to understand it in heavily moral terms.

55 With at best an added ironical dimension resulting from the awareness that it is a fiction which helped to hurt anew.

56 See the Vers funebres sur la mort d'Estienne Jodelle Parisien Prince des Poetes Tragiques, published in the Balmas edition (2:365-73): "Mon ode ensanglante tes doitz. . . ."

57 OEuvres completes, 2:293-351.

58 Discours, 320.

59 Ibid. As "pervers hommes," it is doubtful that we ever show an ability to use tragedy for moral improvement, as Aristotle (or, rather, his Renaissance commentators) would like to think. In Jodelle's opinion, what draws us to tragedy is nothing but our "jaloux naturel"; and if we feel pleasure, it is in a sadistic fashion.

60 Discours, 315-16: ". . . une ardeur et plus libre et plus saincte / Et plus aigre . . . quelque trompe de chasse, / Inusitee a tous . . . l'emboucher d'un gran art, / Plus bruyamment encor, qu'en mes scenes Tragiques / Je n'ay fait eclater mes grands cornets Bacchiques." Jodelle struggles to redefine (his) poetry as a discourse which purports to be historically accurate and ethically sound, while also being freer ("plus libre") than any other type of rhetoric. In Renaissance terms, these are contradictory goals. The author of the Discours is a monster, pretending to be free while shunning all fiction as "fable menteresse": indeed a new, aggravated Lucan, incapable of maintaining safe distinctions between poetry and history.

61 I am referring to the structure of the Tragiques, and its original hierarchy of styles; see especially book 5, "Les Fers," whose "style tragicque esleve" manages to look at the massacres from the anachronistic (or a-chronistic) perspective of Calvinist salvation. To confront the tragedy of his time, the "space" the author has to occupy is nothing less than heaven. See Lestringant, 72-85.

62 There is no question, however, that all the elements of such a "tragedy" are ready to use before the 1558 flop; they appear in virtually all the texts where Jodelle speaks of his work. I have studied one of them, the 1555 preface to Claude Colet's Histoire palladienne (essay to be published in Le roman a la Renaissance, proceedings of the Tours 1990 International Conference).

63 The formula finds its counterpart at the end of the Recueil proper, as follows: "Voila, comme je pense, tout ce qui se peut recueillir de tout le labeur que j'avois pris pour penser me montrer, en une si belle occasion, curieus de l'honneur de mon pais, et affectionne au service de mon prince." (124/254) ("This is, I should think, all that can be gathered up from all the hard work I had done in the hope to prove myself, in such a great circumstance, as caring for the honor of my country as passionate at serving my prince.") Again, we should be careful not to read this "moy" as a romantic category: Jodelle does not talk about "himself" as something that would be constituted before the text, and that the text as such would fail to express. He refers to the process through which "je" makes himself known (i.e., famous) as the "autheur" of whatever is communicated. There is no doubt in his mind that his material actually proved hint a patriot and the king's loyal servant, as far as it makes sense to envision such a material in and by itself, which is not much. The problem is not reference as such, but reference through communication; persuasion, that is, thanks to a "belle occasion," the rhetorical kairos. The problem is that the message, the "invention" did not go through. The golden opportunity was missed. The subject produces a body of rhetoric which somehow falls in, at a critical moment, without reaching out to a wider audience. The "je" as "autheur" is redefined (and acquires troubling, unwarranted depth) as (almost) the only receiver of his own "invention" and (consequently) the victim of a "desastre" which cannot be otherwise explained.

64 Yet Graham and Johnson (15) remind us that Ronsard and Du Bellay imitated the Icones (albeit in French) in their 1559 Inscriptions. In this, at least, Jodelle succeeded.

65 D'Aubigne, Vers funebres, 370.

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