In the text, du Bellay calls for the renewal of French poetry as an enrichment and glorification of the French language. His proposals to this effect aligned quite well with the recent designation of French as the official language of matters of state: in the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539, François I had declared that French would replace Latin in this function. Du Bellay is supporting and extending this new status of French: by giving poetry the role of promoting the language, he ties the latter to its recent elevation. Hence, he is also contributing to the glorification of the state, which in the sixteenth century was expanding to the point of attaining imperial status. Throughout his treatise, du Bellay speaks of poetry and military action in the same terms: for example, one of the main words in his title, Deffence, has strong military connotations; in a key passage, he places the names of ancient Greek and Roman military leaders, including Pericles, Alcibiades, and Caesar, alongside those of Homer and Virgil; and the last chapter is titled “Exhortation to the French to Write in Their Language: With Praises of France.” That is, one of the main purposes of poetry is to celebrate the rising status of France and so to participate in its conquests. Also telling in this respect is the name that du Bellay and Ronsard used for their circle, “Brigade,” before opting in about 1556 for “Pléiade,” in commemoration of a third-century BCE group of Alexandrian poets who wrote in Greek.
The new name, “Pléiade,” signals the trait that in the Deffence du Bellay claims for the new poetry, the one that makes it part of a renaissance: French poets must write in imitation of their predecessors in Greek and Roman antiquity, with the goal of equaling and eventually surpassing them. Although French poets, as well as those of several other countries of western Europe, had long been aware of and borrowed from the legacy of antiquity, du Bellay’s innovation is to place the reverence for ancient poetry at the center of poetic practice. In fact, he goes so far as to say that French poetry is deficient for having so far failed to look to ancient verse as its principal model: he insists that French writers have not yet written outstanding poetry with a few rare exceptions—he names Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, two “old French poets” who, respectively, began and completed the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose). As for authors in his own century, du Bellay is particularly hard on Clément Marot, whom he unkindly offers as an exemplar of simplicity and ordinary language. He also omits his predecessor’s name, with evident dismissiveness, from a list of three exemplary elegists: Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius, all Romans who wrote in Latin. Du Bellay’s omission is part and parcel of his refusal to recognize the poetry of his time as equal to that of antiquity.
It was easy for his contemporaries to recognize the absence of Marot’s name as du Bellay’s response to the Art poëtique françois (The French Art of Poetry) by Thomas Sébillet, a widely read treatise that makes no bones about the superiority of French verse. Du Bellay’s regular belittling of Marot may be explained by this rivalry with Sébillet, which du Bellay carries out by affirming the superiority of his own approach to poetry, that of imitating the ancients. His jibes also stem from his rivalry with the recently deceased Marot himself. Part of du Bellay’s program, and also that of his fellow members of the Pléiade, was to make the fourteen-line sonnet the form of choice for French poetry: Marot was the first French popularizer of the sonnet, and he also translated the work of Petrarch, who in the mid-fourteenth century had established the sonnet form. Although du Bellay implicitly criticizes Marot for translating Petrarch (translation is an important topic in the Deffence—this subject will be treated more extensively below), du Bellay himself later wrote poems that suggest an interest in and even respect for this aspect of Marot’s work.
Indeed, in his very short career as a poet (he was active for about nine years before his untimely death in 1558), du Bellay broke several of the apparently important rules he lays down in the Deffence: not only did he translate poetry from Latin but he also wrote verse in Latin, against the principle signaled by the title of book 1, chapter 11: “That It Is Impossible to Equal the Ancients in Their Languages.” In addition, instead of following the prescription for the moderate use of archaisms, “a few antique words … that we have lost through our negligence,” which will adorn the language with a dignity comparable to that of religious relics, du Bellay wrote his poetry in a French that very much belonged to his time. Hence, instead of viewing du Bellay’s prescriptions as strict rules to be followed, it would be better to understand the Deffence as a positioning, a staking out of territory in the very competitive field of poetry, which in the sixteenth century was encouraged by the French state as an integral part of advancing its political interests both at home and abroad. What marks the Deffence from beginning to end is a series of rivalries: with recent and contemporary French poets, with the other national poetries that were taking shape in Europe, namely, in Italy and Spain, and also with the ancients, whose poetry and political status, according to du Bellay, France had a good chance of one day surpassing. The Deffence is charged with the notion that poetry goes hand-in-hand with military might and imperial expansion. In light of this close linkage of poetry and conquest, it is easy to understand Greek and Roman antiquity not only literally but also as stand-ins for contemporary political and cultural rivals. Du Bellay’s strategy is, first, to put French on an equal footing with the languages with which it is competing, and then to move it to the highest rank through his program of creative borrowing from other languages, which he terms “imitation.” That is, this renaissance of French poetry will come about through a confrontation with other national poetic traditions, one that takes from them what it needs in order to defeat them.
Because of du Bellay’s apparently self-contradictory position of arguing for the greatness of French poetry by putting down almost all of its current exemplars, the Deffence was immediately the target of critics. Among the first was Barthélemy Aneau, professor of rhetoric and principal of the Collège de la Trinité in Lyons (now the Collège-Lycée Ampère), who in 1550 or 1551 anonymously published a full-scale attack on the Deffence, the Quintil horatien (Horatian Quintilius), named for Quintilius Varus, a censor whom the Roman poet Horace calls a friend in his famous Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry). Thus invoking a parallel between Sébillet and Horace, Aneau responds as follows to du Bellay’s title: “Who accuses or who has accused the French language? Surely no one, at least not in writing.” In fact, du Bellay doesn’t get very specific about who the accusers are. Following his argumentative claims that all languages are equal in their origin, that French is, at least in its potential, just as good a language for poetry as Greek and Latin, though not yet as rich in its expressive power and turns of phrase as these two, he rather vaguely blames “those ambitious admirers of the Greek and Latin languages” for holding back the enrichment of French in their refusal to recognize its suitability to poetry. To this characterization Aneau replies, “You are one of them,” since du Bellay elevates Greek and Latin to such a high status, the threshold that French must attain by becoming like them. “And you call this defense and illustration, rather than offense and denigration?” continues Aneau. “For there is not in your whole book one single chapter, not one single sentence, showing some virtue, luster, ornament, or praise of our French language.”
Engaging in aggressive rivalry, Aneau is writing polemically, and like most polemicists he exaggerates. It is not true that French had not been “accused”: there were many in sixteenth-century France who insisted on the inherent superiority of the ancient languages, many who wrote poetry only or mainly in Latin, many who dismissed or ignored the thriving and long-standing tradition of writing in French. Du Bellay of course acknowledges this tradition with his praise of the authors of the Roman de la rose, as well as of Jean Lemaire de Belges, who, says du Bellay, “seems to me to have been the first to render illustrious both the Gauls and the French language.”2 But Aneau is quite right to signal, as this last sentence from the Deffence indicates, du B
ellay’s generally low regard for the tradition of French vernacular poetry, and also to call into question the younger poet’s depiction of French as a language in need of “enrichment.”
What du Bellay means by “enrichment” has, since Aneau’s remarks, been a subject of controversy among critics. Some have considered the text as also embodying an offensive strategy, especially since it borrows from both legal and military proceedings: du Bellay insists on aggressively confronting the poetry written in other languages and taking the best it has to offer in order to enhance French poetry. That is, he characterizes the French Renaissance as an event that asserts its presence on the international scene of his time, appealing to a standard by which all national literatures may be measured, the writings of antiquity that are the common currency of scholars and writers in Europe. Early in the book, to describe the process of enriching the French language, he offers the example of the Romans, whose language at the outset was, he makes quite clear, in need of enrichment. In his description, du Bellay pursues a rather elaborate agricultural metaphor that suggests domestication, improvement, and increased yield. The Romans, he writes, “like good farmers, first transplanted it [their language] from a wild to a cultivated site. Then, so that it might yield fruit better and more quickly, pruning away the useless branches, they replaced them with fine and cultivated branches, taken in masterly fashion from the Greek language, which were rapidly so well grafted to their trunk and made to resemble it that from that time on they have no longer appeared adopted but natural.”
According to this account, the Latin language needed attention, comparable to that which a farmer gives to domesticating plants, in order to be at home in Rome: it needed to be transplanted or moved from one place to another—from the wild place where it was born (as is the case for all languages, du Bellay affirms in his first chapter, “The Origin of Languages”) to the growing civilization of ancient Rome. In the terms of this metaphor of cultivation, the language that is original or natural to the Romans is the “trunk” of the tree. Borrowing these “fine and cultivated branches” from Greek models that ostensibly reached a high level of accomplishment, the Romans then graft them to the trunk. But as with any grafting procedure, as du Bellay recognizes, the result is a hybrid, and the original or natural condition of the trunk or language changes into something else, an admixture of elements from different sources. Although the trunk may remain recognizable as a version of what came first, it has changed in joining with the new grafts. It is therefore no longer what it was in its natural state. Its new parts, the grafts, are not part of the plant’s essence. Du Bellay suggests as much by saying that the grafts were “made to resemble” the trunk (they do so only through the skill of the cultivators) and that, finally, they “appeared” to be natural rather than adopted.
Du Bellay’s prescription is for French poets to follow this example. Hence, he not only locates the major source of French poetry outside France, in Rome, but he also indicates that the cultivation of a language is necessarily a multilingual, transnational process. But the implication is that, in borrowing from poetry in another language and from another culture in order to improve one’s own, one diminishes the stature of the poetic source: cutting the very best branches removes them from the place where they once thrived and consequently does damage to the trunks they grow on. That is, in considering a preceding or contemporary literature in another language, a rival literature, as great and thus worthy of serving as a model, the aim is to clear at least some of it away in order both to make room for and to fortify one’s own. As he continues his argument, du Bellay includes Greek, along with Latin and French, among the languages that at some point have been in need of cultivation: in order to enrich their language, the Greeks did the same to an unnamed predecessor. In this perspective, the ascendancy of national literatures is a cyclical process, involving poetic traditions that attack and attempt to supplant predecessors, only to undergo the same treatment in return. Of course, in du Bellay’s account it is evident that Greek in some fashion lasted through the borrowings that the Romans made from it, and that in the modernity of European humanist learning, in which both Greek and Roman literature are appreciated as relics from the past, they share the field in which they are held in high regard. At the end of book 1, chapter 3, du Bellay looks forward to the day when, in connection with the ascendancy of the French empire, writers in French take their place alongside their Greek and Roman forebears, equaling them.
In keeping with the idea that poetic achievement should come with and bolster military might, in introducing the idea of imitation he suggests that the multilingual, international field of literary achievement is akin to a bloody battlefield. In a strangely mixed metaphor, to describe the Roman imitation of Greek writers, he returns to his agricultural terms and also adds those of cannibalism, which would have been known in his time primarily through accounts, usually fictionalized, of some of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, who practiced it as a wartime victory ritual: “By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them, as I said earlier, and adapted them to their own language.” The grafting that du Bellay with apparent innocence slips in at the end has suddenly become something quite violent in its juxtaposition with the metaphor of cannibalism: according to the latter, authors tear apart and absorb the work of their predecessors, incorporating it into the body of their own. The writings of the earlier authors is not strictly speaking eradicated, since it persists as part of the new flesh that has grown stronger by eating the old—indeed, the new flesh must completely mix itself with the old through the process of transformation that du Bellay mentions.
Again, every rising national literature is a hybrid of the forerunning literatures from which it takes its models. Although du Bellay places particular emphasis on Greece and Rome, he also includes “Italians, Spaniards, and others” in his roster of authors whose work should be regarded as source material. Italy and Spain were rival European countries that were also developing national literatures in tandem with an increasing international presence, and du Bellay presents the new French poetry as in continual, adversarial dialogue with them. Of course, the aim of French poetry, in the defensive strategy that he advocates, is to treat the exchange as a competition to be won. Du Bellay proposes, in effect, that the old and new literatures be known and understood primarily in connection with their contribution to the new French literature. This notion reflects the reality of sixteenth-century France, in which the names of Roman and Greek poets, such as Vergil, Horace, Pindar, and Homer, as well as that of the Italian predecessor whom du Bellay holds in high regard, Petrarch, are most widely and popularly known through the French writers who address and rework them.
The central paradox of the Deffence, the notion that in order to become superior, French poetry must account for its own inferiority, leads to the particular character of du Bellay’s poetics: opposing treatments such as Sébillet’s that regard French poetry in relative isolation from other literature, and consequently rankling their partisans such as Aneau, du Bellay proposes that French poetry distinguish itself precisely by being hybrid, by building itself up on the basis of foreign literatures, and so by establishing itself as a kind of clearing house for them. Du Bellay develops the idea of a polyglot, transnational literature operating in continual dialogue with its counterparts through his notion of imitation. Yet to the frustration of many of his readers, he never provides a comprehensive definition of imitation, instead mentioning in circumstantial fashion several different practices. In addition, his terminological choice may seem odd to readers of the history of poetics: the word “imitation” has long been the standard translation of the Greek μίμησις (mimesis—in Latin, imit
atio), which in Aristotle’s Poetics is the very function of poetry. However, Aristotelian imitation is not supposed to be that of other poetry, but rather of reality, specifically the behavior of human beings and the depiction of the natural world. That is, as a copy, it has a clearly defined original. But when du Bellay speaks of the imitative function of poetry as bearing on other poetry, the latter in turn developed through imitation, the question arises as to just what the original of poetic imitation is. If poetry is to be judged, according to Aristotelian criteria, by the effectiveness of its imitation, then will a poem in du Bellay’s view be an achievement if it successfully imitates its model? What would such imitation involve? Borrowing specific segments of its text—words, phrases, entire passages? Capturing a broad sense of the qualities of an admired poem?
When he begins explaining imitation, du Bellay addresses both these notions. As to the first, he speaks of those writers who, “diverting themselves with the beauty of words, miss the force of things”; hence he suggests that it is ideas and perhaps also more general aspects of a literary work that should serve as a model. It is, however, important to note his constant emphasis on the centrality of language to poetic practice, by which he means something quite material: words, phrases, rhetorical figures, the expression of ideas in language, and the overall fine quality of a literary work. Because of his insistence on rhetorical elegance, he makes clear that imitation is not translation: early in the Deffence he states that translating the distinguished poems of Greece and Rome will yield inferior works and not contribute to enriching French as a literary language. Indeed, he goes so far as to lay down the rule that poetry should not be translated, comparing the practice to sacrilege: “O Apollo! O Muses! Thus to profane the sacred remains of antiquity!” (As mentioned above, somewhat later he himself violated this dictum.) He justifies his stance toward translation by saying that it is impossible to render a poem “with the same grace the author put into it,” since “each language has an indescribable something that belongs to it alone, so that if you strive to express its inborn quality in another language, abiding by the law of translation, which is never to stray beyond the bounds of the author, your diction will be constrained, cold, and graceless.” That is, trying to remain as close as possible to both the letter and meaning of a text only results in placing distance between the original text and the new one, as well as between the language of the new text and the natural quality of the language in which it is written. Imitation, on the other hand, since it involves transformation of one author into another and one text into another, abolishes any such distance. Du Bellay reserves translation for works that primarily convey knowledge, affirming that translators provide a valuable service in offering important learning to those without the resources to become fluent in foreign languages.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 18