3 - ‘When is a Meadow not a Meadow?’: Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.
Keywords: Ronsard, d’Aubigné, civil wars, intestines, analogy
‘I’ve been kicked in the biosphere’
Political and environmental discourse of the French Renaissance is triangulated through the often violent or medicalized bodily imagery used to describe both state and landscape. In Pierre de Ronsard's poetic reworkings of Age of Gold lore, foundational moments of agricultural ‘sin’ are brought into dialogue with the religious polemic surrounding France's civil wars; later in the sixteenth century, the ‘body’ of the French landscape, like the body politic, suffers the ravages of the continuing wars, as lamented by Agrippa d’Aubigné. Images of entrails return insistently; employed, twisting and turning, both to figure France's internal turmoil (as vipers erupting fatally from their mother's belly) and as the site of affect in the face of civil violence. These visceral preoccupations are the strange and anxious ancestors of the tragicomic refrain in Dark Ecology, in which Timothy Morton argues that at the core of human-inflicted ecological destruction lies a toxic pattern of ‘agrilogistic’ thought: ‘I’ve been kicked in the biosphere’. Morton summarizes what he calls the ‘agrilogistic algorithm’ underpinning religion—and with it the logic of ‘civilization’—as consisting of the following ‘subroutines’: ‘eliminate contradiction and anomaly, establish boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, maximize existence over and above any quality of existing’. A little later, he elaborates: ‘Agrilogistic space is a war against the accidental. Weeds and pests are nasty accidents to minimize or eliminate’. The broader intellectual tendency that results from this ‘algorithm’ is the ‘cut-along-the-dotted-line’ thinking of discrete, easily separated concepts.
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- Early Modern ÉcologiesBeyond English Ecocriticism, pp. 73 - 98Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020