Boileau's Nerve, or the Poetics of Masculinity

Boileau's Nerve, or the Poetics of Masculinity Jeffrey N. Peters BOILEAU'S RECASTING OF HORACE'S EPISTULA AD PISONES, or Ars poética, in the 1674 Art poétique reveals a peculiar absence. In Chant I of his notorious poem on the art of verse, Boileau sets out several of the work's basic premises, and not a few of the aphoristic imperatives that would bring him in the years following his death, and with debatable accuracy, the title of régent du Parnasse, for example "Aimez donc la Raison," "Soyez simple avec art," "Hastez-vous lentement." In many instances, Boileau's formulations are borrowed directly from Horace.1 But in the passage introduced by the line, "Souvent la peur d'un mal nous conduit dans un pire," a version of Horace's "Shunning a fault may lead to error, if there be lack of art" (in vitium ducit culpae fuga, si caret arte), there is a crucial difference.2 Addressing himself in the Ars poética to several men whose patrilineage is specifically emphasized ("O father and ye sons worthy of the father" [pater et iuvenes patre digni]), Horace demonstrates how the poet who desires to avoid stylistic deficiency often errs in other ways: "Striving to be brief, I become obscure. Aiming at smoothness, I fail in force and fire" (brevis esse laboro, / obscurus fio; sectantem levia nervi / deficiunt animique) (45253 ). The corresponding lines in Boileau's poem present a similar sequence of antitheses, while rejecting explicit reference to the Latin word nervus: "Un vers estoit trop foible, et vous le rendez dur. / J'évite d'estre long, et je deviens obscur. / L'un n'est point trop fardé, mais sa Muse est trop nue" (158). The absence of nervus in these lines is puzzling for a number of reasons. Translated in early modern Europe as "sinew" or "tendon," nervus epitomized an ancient rhetorical tradition that associated forceful style with vigorous masculinity . Horace's suggestion that fluid style may lack "sinews" (nervi I Deficiunt ) engages a contemporaneous anxiety about the threat posed by stylistic effeminacy and weakness to healthy speech.3 The word used by Tacitus in the Dialogus de oratoribus to characterize Cicero's "Asiatic" and "effeminate" style is enervis: enervated, weak, or flaccid, lacking sinews or vigor.4 Throughout antiquity, highly cosmetic, or ostensibly sophistic, speech, which Tacitus describes as characteristic of the prostitute and "scarce worthy even of a man," is opposed to a vital corporeal eloquence that is both virile and honest (300-1).5 Given the disdain everywhere manifested in the Art poétique for gratuitously florid style (perhaps best summarized by what Boileau elsewhere calls "Ie clin26 Fall 2003 Peters quant du Tasse" ["Satire IX," Œuvres complètes, 53]), the imposing example of Rabelais, Montaigne, and Ronsard, each of whom called explicitly upon the ancient trope of emasculated style in earlier treatments of rhetorical speech, as well as previous French translations of the Ars poética in which reference to the nervus was kept intact, readers might well have expected Boileau to maintain , if only for convenience, Horace's familiar image of masculine discourse.6 Instead, he translates around the nervus, leaving an apparently disembodied space between the polarities faible/dur, long)'obscur, fardelnuë. Of particular importance in Boileau's conception is the latter couple fardélnuë, for in the seventeenth century, fard (makeup, disguise) and its derivations are the metaphorical terms that most often describe stylistic excess. Like physical attire, le fard is attached to language as a kind of covering or decoration. In its various pejorative formulations, it is shown to obscure the simplicity of eloquent style, as well as the meaning that such style brings forth in language.7 This metaphorics of the cosmetic thus describes a conceptual linkage of rhetoric and fashion whereby eloquent expression, whether in poetry, conversation or formal oratory, is directly related to social self-presentation . In an aristocratic context where the technical requirements of art often overlap with discussions of social value—the mutual entailment of vraisemblance and bienséance, to cite one obvious example—and where, conversely , the art of social being is bound up with writing and literary culture (an association exemplified...