La grammaire du silence: Une lecture de la poesie de Marguerite de Navarre.
Prescott, Anne Lake
Robert D. Cottrell. Trans. Jean-Pierre Coursodon. (Etudes et Essaies sur la Renaissance 10.) Paris: Honore Champion, 1995. 312 pp. FF 310. ISBN: n.a.
A friend once lamented to me that few Renaissance women had received New Critical attention of the sort paid Donne, for instance. Studied, positioned, put on line, women's texts are seldom seen as well-wrought urns. It would be only fair, he half joked, to invent for women a set of readings like those once given men. The Grammar of Silence, Robert Cottrell's 1986 study of Marguerite de Navarre's poetry, is hardly what my friend had in mind, not with its Lacanian mirrors and Riffaterrean ungrammaticalities; but it does take seriously Marguerite's thought on language and the ingenuity of her expression. Jean-Pierre Coursodon's French translation of this shapely and humane book is an opportunity to pay the original belated notice.
Cottrell begins by comparing Marguerite to Christ's contemplative hostess Mary, she who chooses a "better part" than bustling Martha. By the end, though, he has shown how Marguerite recognized the difficulty of being absorbed into divine silence while still in a world of absence, words, and flesh: Mary needs Martha. First identifying Marguerite's Augustinian poetics and noting the impact of Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, he shows how a dialogue with a dead niece, for example, gives a double perspective on hearing the Word in words and finding the self in Christ. A section on "iconic" texts examines the Miroir de l'ame pecheresse, a later mirror poem, and some plays. The third looks at Chansons spirituelles, at La Coche, with its lamenting ladies and declining sun (God, Francois I), and at Les Prisons, with its male speaker incarcerated by ambition, book collecting, and pride. Grammaire adds two essays, one offering further thoughts on La Coche, the other reading the Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifie in terms of Lacanian "regard," "presence," and "jouissance supplementaire of a text taken as a whole.
Cottrell pays particular attention to Marguerite's imagery: travel (the illusion of temporal and spatial narrative), dark and light, the garden and its fruits, mirrors (here he might do more with Augustine's postlapsarian "land of unlikeness," analogue of St. Paul's dark glass), and marriage. He can be dazzling, as when reading the "O" that opens the Miroir de l'ame pecheresse as looking-glass, Christ, all, and nothing. And he has empathy. For Pierre Jourda, writing in 1930, Marguerite shows "bad taste" in comparing rumbling Sinai to a woman in labor. For Cottrell, Jourda misses the point: the mountain does indeed give birth - to the written Word, "the incarnate form of Loy" (182).
Refreshingly, Cottrell's Marguerite is an inventive woman with a lively spirit, not a cultural symptom or construct, yet his tendency to neglect political and social context will trouble some readers. And his "reading" would be even fuller if taking more account of the maker of the Heptameron and the politician who could, for instance, laughingly tell the Duke of Norfolk that her brother would go to his mistress when needing sleep because his wife was so oversexed (see Norfolk's dispatch of 23 June 1533). A Christian can of course write about adultery and laugh with dukes, but it would be good to have Cottrell's thoughts on how the grammar of silence relates to that of diplomacy and sexual innuendo. Noting that some "Chansons spirituelles" were meant to be sung to hymn tunes, he ignores how the sixth, on hunting Christ, rewrites a funny poem on finding "venison" in a pubic forest (see Georges Dottin's 1971 edition). Sacred parody is an old story, but this example cries for comment.
This lovely book is a powerful lesson in how to read poetry too easily dismissed as pious effusion. English-speaking or Francophone, we owe Robert Cottrell thanks.
ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT Barnard College, Columbia University
