Text, Topos, and the Awareness of History in Frédéric Mistral’s Poème du Rhône

ABSTRACT

Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) transforms historical awareness and local historiographies into a literary answer to some of the fundamental challenges of the modern world. It is argued here that the particularities of Mistral’s ‘empaysement’—textual abundance, multiple narrative identities, intertextuality, and storytelling—reflect not only an effort to preserve a pre-industrial agrarian society, but also testify to a modern awareness of the present as a future past, which explicitly structures the Poème du Rhône (1897) and Mireille (1859).

KEYWORDS:

• Mistral
• local historiography
• regional literature
• toponyms in literature
• historical awareness
• spatial imageries

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on Contributor

Dominique Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium. She works on spatial imageries at the crossroads of literature, art and the built environment throughout the nineteenth century, with a focus on Belgium and regional literatures, as well as themes like the museum, the domestic interior and the city. She authored Beyond the Frame: Case Studies (Academic & Scientific Publishers, 2016) and Place-Text-Trace: The Fragility of the Spatial Image (Peeters, 2018), co-edited The Imagery of Interior Spaces (Punctum, 2019), and is the series editor of ‘Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective’ at Amsterdam University Press.

Notes

1 Mazon’s voyage significantly starts with the description of three rocks between Cruas and Teil that are part of ‘les débris d’un des des nombreux dikes basaltiques qui avoisinent Rochemaure,’ and of which the largest was exploited by the entrepreneurs of the railway to the extent that ‘sa disparition ne pouvait tarder longtemps.’ Unfortunately, since those three rocks do not belong to ‘quelque personnage influent et ami du pittoresque,’ ‘leur disparition ne semble pas devoir tarder bien longtemps’ (1866, 5–6).

2 As Claude Mauron notes in his biography of Mistral, the poet’s idea to establish a museum of Provençal culture displays the same vocabulary of loss as used by the skippers in the Poème du Rhône who search the shores for ‘quelques épaves’ after their boat crashes against the bridge at Pont-Saint-Esprit. In letters to Charles Mauras (8 October, 1900) and Émile Espérandieu (17 June 1898), Mistral writes that the Museon Arlaten is intended to save ‘les épaves de nos gloires et de nos traditions’ and to ‘sauver les vestiges de notre ancienne originalité nationale, car le monde se rue avec une rapidité vertigineuse vers l’horrible uniformité, la laideur et l’ennui’ (cited in Mauron 1993, 313). Mistral uses the same vocabulary of oubli and débris in his poem Li meissoun / Les moissons of early 1848, which refers to the decaying observance of Christmas traditions, formerly very central in Provençal culture: ‘little by little everything is lost and forgotten; / Of all that charms, only a little remains.’ Only ‘un brisoun’ remains, i.e. ‘petit débris, petite quantité, brin, tantet’ (Mistral 1979, 377) ‘Mai à cha pau tout se perd e s’oublido / D’aco galant n’en résto qu’un’ (Mistral 1966, 30–31).

3 According to Peter Fritzsche, it is ‘not the ruin, but the ruin of the ruin [that] is the hallmark of modernity’ (2004, 102).

4 Pierre Citron refers to the textual city as ‘une vue synoptique’ (1961, 256–57), a wholeness that Priscilla Ferguson interprets in terms of a whole in which fragments function metonymically (1997, 67).

5 I am referring to the notion of a Provençal renaissance and a fin-de-siècle Provençal literature, in which the ‘parole poétique’ of the Poème du Rhône lingers between ‘deux absences’—a dynamic that coincides with what my article calls ‘the present as future past,’ in which both the past and the present are ultimately absent (Gardy 2006, 150). Such matters have been broached in relation to Mireille (Forêt 2009; Gardy 2010), to psychoanalysis and the role of the absent father (Casanova 2004/2009/2016), and to the past city or the city-mirage (Gasiglia 2009).

6 Benoît de L’Estoile mentions that primitive and pre-modern societies were studied as the pre-historic past or childhood of the modern world, as in the example of Luigi Pigorini’s Museo Preistorico Etnografico. Pigorini brought together Italian prehistoric artefacts with artefacts from ‘non-civilised’ moderns to illuminate the former: ‘ainsi, les “sauvages” sont alors conçus non pas comme étant nos contemporains, mais plutôt comme nos ancêtres’ (L’Estoile 2010, 299–300). Regarding the case of the European pre-modern, a representative example is the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, where an exhibition of non-modern cultures was juxtaposed with the Salle de France created by co-conservator Armand Landry in the 1880s, who specialized in France’s pre-modernity. The Salle featured a number of mannequins that showed various pre-industrial ‘types’ of people from the provinces, representing what Daniel DeGroff calls ‘a French primitiveness being effaced by the progressive forces of modernity’ (2012, 122–23).

7 Concerning this strategy of derealisation, Gorceix comments that ‘la réalité pour Rodenbach ne peut être communiquée au lecteur, telle quelle, de façon immédiate. L’art a besoin […] de l’absence’ (1992, 40).

8 See my earlier note citing Claude Mauron. Jean-Claude Forêt connects the accumulation of details in Mireille with Mistral’s efforts to collect words in Le Trésor and objects in the Museon Arlaten (2009, 3).