Poetics and the Aesthetic State

2 To bring together any component of the arts and any version of public, social collectivity is to participate in a tradition with deep and enduring roots in classical antiquity and a powerful and problematic presence in modernity. In a broad sense, this tradition focuses on the notion of the aesthetic state charted so carefully and suggestively for "German Thought" by Josef Chytry. Whether in Germany or France, Britain or the United States or Canada, the aesthetic state points among other things to art as a strong signifier of three qualities to which polities (and certainly elites) usually aspire: namely, harmony, durability, and the comeliness that attracts and rewards a respectful if not a fully Burkean, reverential contemplation: "The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic [Horace], for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states: Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulca sunto. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely" (Burke, Reflections 172).

3 Such aspirations as Burke’s usually intensify, perhaps especially in conservative and moderate quarters, during times of political turmoil or uncertainty such as the French revolution, but such intensity can never achieve a full identity of politics and aesthetics, even in Shakespeare’s paean to social "degree" as the harmonic principle behind "The unity and married calm of states" in Troilus and Cressida (1.3.94-137; Findlay, "Valuing" 7-8). National unity was no more achievable during the Trojan War or the Napoleonic Wars than during the iraq War, while marriage, as Shakespeare’s comedies perhaps most vividly attest, is marked as often by turbulence as by "calm." Nor is seamless unity made available in adam Smith’s discovery in "the aesthetic disposition itself of the motor of the economy" (Guillory 311). Nor, for that matter, is Matthew arnold entirely convincing in his aestheticist distinction between culture and anarchy, and his promotion of poetry to suture the wounds of modernity. In each of these diversely canonical cases, desire for a captivating stability subscribes to the unappeasable imperatives of desire itself while revealing the rifts and fissures in any and every version of public culture or national consensus. It may well be that art is all about concealment — ars est celare artem — but when social and political impact and authority is claimed for art then it will always be shown to be hiding more than ‘just’ the imaginative labours of its creator.

4 As Chytry demonstrates, and as one can find as readily in Chateaubriand as in Burke (Findlay, "Genius"), the rise of the nation state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a recourse to art to dignify and help stabilize political entities new either in their territorial configurations or in their power bases, or in both. But revolutionary energies were not to be easily controlled and enlisted in the service of an unproblematic national project, whether the political appeal was to classical values of a Winckelmannian or Horatian sort or romantic values espoused by, say, a Schiller or alfieri, a Blake or a Percy Shelley. 1848 may be the year of revolutions, but instability began to accelerate a century earlier and continued until well into the twentieth century, complicated and increasingly fuelled by the acquisition and relinquishment of empires by the leading European powers. The "aesthetic alibi" (Jay) was available to moderates, reactionaries, and revolutionaries alike as they sought to validate and vivify their political programs, but always with at least a savour of the provocatively partisan.

5 Even in a state like the United Kingdom of Great Britain and ireland, challenges to established order continued well beyond 1848 and haunted the thinking of the poet, critic, and school inspector who most influenced the formation of English studies in Canada, namely Matthew arnold. Arnold’s use of alarmist juxtaposition (culture/ anarchy) combines with a social architectonics derived directly from his poetics. An aesthetic of noble unity and massive repose (a reworking of Winckelmann’s stille Grosse und edle Einheit ) requires forms of elite leadership and social subordination to encourage pursuit of the nation’s "best self." and arnold’s prose paean to the "free play of imagination" just happens to require a homeland-security coda. The apostle of culture must "strengthen against anarchy the trembling hands of our barbarian Home Secretaries, and the feeble knees of our Philistine alderman-Colonels" so that they can more effectively police (where they cannot simply prohibit) that "Thyesteän banquet of claptrap which English public life for these many years past has been" (182-85).

6 Not so long after arnold, but in a situation of much grimmer instability, Walter Benjamin was warning about Futurist and fascist attempts to ‘solve’ the non-coincidence of the public and technology through coercive versions of identity, and asserting with chilling pre-science that "all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (242). In light of the tragic Nazi phase in his nation’s history, systems theorist Niklas Luhmann shifts from the political to the social while looking for the bases of an "art of society" in "autopoiesis" and "operational closure" (9-10, etc.). But there are dangers here too. Fredric Jameson, for example, is able to esteem Luhmann’s work while seeing it "unmask itself as conventional free market rhetoric and the ideology of deregulation" (92), once again as in adam Smith showing the bogus mutuality of artistic and commercial freedoms. Eschewing all attempts to escape history or to co-opt the aesthetic, Jameson urges "a position that takes its lead from Marx’s description of capitalism, for which each national trajectory — including the central illustration, and the oldest one, of British capitalism as such— is uniquely overdeter-mined by the empirical specificities of the national culture, in such a way that — although in the abstraction there exists an inescapable and irreversible dynamic of the development of capitalism as such — there is no ‘basic’ historical paradigm, all the paths of capitalist development are unique and unrepeatable" (182).

7 The two key ideas I wish to draw from this galloping review of a massive and challenging archive are the following. First, when attempts were made to figure the nation in pre-Confederation Canada the process of aestheticizing the traditional, emergent, or conceivable state was already well established in Europe and in the United States. Second, and here is where Jameson is very useful, one way of reading the story of nation formation is to attend to the particularities of capital in that context. Canada can then be seen as coming into being as a strategically aestheticized entity where poetics and public culture play an important role. But poetics will not fuse with or ingest politics except in ways that are uniquely overdetermined and economically directed or inflected, even or especially in a linguistically constituted nation like Canada where publics continue to form around two "official" languages as preeminent bearers of culture and markers of legitimacy.

A Canadien Poetics

8 François-Xavier Garneau (1809-1866) is more celebrated as Québec’s "national historian" than as a poet, as evident for instance in the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to him by the National Library of Canada. He produced some thirty poems, twenty-seven of which were published between 1831 and 1841, ten of the most turbulent years in the evolution of Canada towards political independence. This modest body of work has been both highly praised and tepidly commended (see, e.g., Condemine 21-22 and Bisson 77), and the poem which I will deal with in detail here has suffered the neglect or dismissal to which so many poems on public occasions are subjected. Such neglect and dismissal betray a certain Euro-formalist hauteur, or cultural cringing on behalf of a ‘young’ proto-country (Chauveau xxx), or an empiricist impatience to be engaged with Garneau’s ‘real’ work as a historian of French Canada (Bergeron 104). However, there is much more to be learned from his poetry than has hitherto been conceded or affirmed, particularly as an expression of political acquiescence and resolve via an aestheticizing of the Canadian state as a place of honour and reconciliation for the Québécois nation in spite of the increasing racialization of the Canadian economy so offensively ratified in Lord Durham’s Report of February 1839 (2.36.).

9 The poem I will discuss appeared in Le Canadien no. 15, 8 June 1838, on a front page which regularly featured poems on political topics, some prudently anonymous and some not. The poem is followed by Garneau’s initials, indicating that he wants his voice to be recognized but feels his name is well known to readers of a publication that appeared every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon and whose masthead at this time read "Nos institutions, Notre Langue, et Nos Lois." The paper was founded in 1806 and was closed down during the crises of 1811. By the time of renewed political ferment in the 1830s it was associated with its indefatigable editor, Étienne Parent, whose support of the patriote cause had moderated in the run-up to the rebellions and who, in the first half of 1838, still held out some hope that the Union of the Canadas, and the consequent swamping of French Canadians, could be avoided (Falardeau 583). Le Canadien was still a prominent voice in the 1830s, despite the massive increase in newspaper publication, but it was no longer a bilingual voice, as the linguistic divide in Lower Canada deepened (Laurence). But let’s turn from context to the text itself for a moment.

10 This 110 line poem in rhyming couplets opens thus: A Lord Durham

Salut à toi, Durham, au caractère fort,
Et sois le bien-venu parmi les fils du Nord.
Toi qui marche toujours droit, grand dans la carrière;
Qui n’as jamais fléchi, ni regarde derrière;
D’un principe sacré, l’esperance et l’appui,
On te dit au Sénat aussi stable que lui.
Sur cette terre vierge où tu viens de descendre,
Les coeurs sont vifs, mais droits, et sauront te comprendre:
Le champ est vaste et noble, il est digne de toi.
Si l’orage, en passant, creusa dans un endroit,
Profondément le sol, objet de sa furie,
Ce malheur est commun à plus d’une patrie.
Quel pays n’a pas eu ses troubles, ses malheurs!
Les peuples comme l’homme ont leurs jours de douleurs! (1-14)

The poem contributes to a very public debate about what can be expected from "radical Jack" Lambton, a man with a reputation for politically progressive ideas but a man armed with unprecedented powers as Her Majesty’s High Commissioner in order to ensure that Canada did not go the way of the United States. Garneau was well placed to address this representative of the British Crown, because, as secretary to denis-Benjamin Viger in the early 1830s in London, he had helped compose memoranda to British ministers dealing with the malfeasance of James Stuart, Solicitor General of Lower Canada and compliant instrument of the Chateau Clique (Parizeau 61-62; Garneau, Voyage 42-45), a group who resisted responsible government as forcefully as did the Family Compact in Upper Canada. Garneau could draw on first-hand knowledge of British concerns about its Canadian colonies and the character of the British polity in the wake of the First reform act (1832). His command of English allowed him to follow intelligently the adventures of Lord Melbourne’s administration, the apprehensions that attended the ascent to the throne by the young Queen Victoria in June of 1837, and the stream of politicians who gained a Cabinet position via the revolving door of the Colonial Secretaryship (reid 2.141). And he knew that Durham had an excellent command of French, and would understand this poem if it were pointed out to him by his advisers, although, as we shall see, Durham and his entourage are not the only audience Garneau hopes to reach.

11 Garneau’s tone in addressing Durham is strategically respectful and expectant. In bidding Durham welcome he speaks as one of the "Sons of the North" rather than as one of the recently rebellious Sons of Liberty. He occupies a position of prior residency in and knowledge of Québec but not of explicit aspiration to political independence. Durham is offered a discreetly coercive, flattering version of his own character as honourable, fair-minded, and resolute, a reputation ratified by political peers as well as the general public. He is, moreover, portrayed as "hope and support" of a "sacred principle" invoked but not named. This reticence allows Garneau to bring in Liberty as incarnated in Durham rather than imported from a less reputable american or French source. Liberty, it is implied, is Durham’s idée maîtresse and not the insurgent’s idée fixe. The presumption that Durham will know which "sacred principle" is meant is a sign of trust which helps bring him closer to Canadiens who are indeed of the same heart as Durham (uprightness [droit] is ascribed to both). On this basis Durham "will be understood" by Canadiens if he acts now consistently with his values and reputation. Garneau then makes the first of several shifts from intimate address to general reflection and from exposition to impassioned exclamation. The land in its vastness and nobility is "worthy" of its new Governor, the appeal to nature and the analogy between peoples and individuals allowing Garneau to naturalize as inevitable but temporary the political "storm," the "days of misery," that led to Durham’s being sent here. In fourteen lines, the poet has established himself as respectful, informed, and constructive, his carefully controlled tone, vocabulary, and rhyming couplets evincing a poetics of political conciliation and moderation that will be refined and confirmed in the remainder of the poem.

12 On this basis Garneau shifts his appeal in lines 15 to 32 from Durham’s abstract virtues to their particular exercise in granting "pardon" to the rebels whose fate is still undecided. Clemency, the poet argues, will secure loyalty and collaboration from a people who feel abandoned by France and hopeful of a better future. He draws his thoughts together in a bold prophecy: Durham, l’avenir le verra,
Sur ce grand continent le Canadien sera
Le dernier combattant de la vieille angleterre.
Ensemble tous les deux tombés
Au milieu du fracas, le flot républicain
De leurs nobles débris ne voudraient laisser rien. (29-34)

Garneau comes close to hectoring his addressee here, and alienating the very person he seeks to reassure. But he implies this is worth the risk because he is speaking from intimate knowledge of the political terrain, and he once again invites Durham to draw a flattering inference. The "old England" impugned here has proven an engine of oppression in the wake of military conquest in New France, but Durham surely exemplifies a new, more generous and just England, and the poet and the High Commissioner surely share a common fear that the "republican flood" will profit ruthlessly from the perpetuation of traditional anglo-French antagonism. The poetics of moderation allows for vehemence only in deploring needless conflict and dangerous inattention to the agenda of extremists.

13 Garneau then shifts from this direct and intense warning to a more reflective register, using Biblical fratricide and the common ancestry of France and England to underscore the pointlessness of old ire. He draws on his reading of augustin Thierry’s Conquest of England (1825-26) to make another bold attempt at conciliation:C’est le pur sang Normand qui coule dans nos veines —
Des Talbots, des richards, de ces grands Capitaines
Qui parlèrent si loin la gloire des noms,
C’est ton sang le plus noble, ô toi, fière albion. (47-50)

This is a prescient, thoroughly overdetermined moment for the future historian of Canada. He tries to rehabilitate the embarrassing Norman Conquest and detested Norman Yoke as the basis of anglo-French harmony, and thus to prepare for a re-interpretation of the English conquest of Québec and its subsequent anglification as the prelude to a new era of anglo-French co-operation. Historical allusion in a brief, occasional poem cannot do justice to Thierry’s massive "epic of the defeated"1 nor to the freight of Canadien desires that it will help articulate in Garneau’s equally massive Histoire du Canada. Allusive economy prevents Garneau from making more of the potentially insensitive claim that England’s "most noble blood" is Norman French. However, it also prevents him from more fully rehearsing the critique of cultural oppression and ethnic cleansing that Thierry levels against the Normans and all who would extract maximum profit from military conquest (as, e.g., in Conquest 1.180-200, 247; 2.46-47, 93, 197-98).

14 This failure to manage the implications of allusion is succeeded by a more direct appeal to Durham to "Cimente l’union" (l. 51). But Garneau simply exchanges here one awkward overdetermination for another, one from the resonant past for one from the volatile present. The "union" he wishes Durham to bring about is not the union of Upper and Lower Canada that Durham would proceed to recommend in terms that would confirm Canadiens’ deepest fears: namely, the urging that they be swamped by waves of British immigrants and assimilated entirely to an anglophone future (Report 2. 307.). Garneau wants Durham to build rather on the cultural safeguards of the Constitution recently suspended, and to use his sweeping powers to eliminate hatred and prevent profiteering from the fog of accusation and counter-accusation that had followed the rebellion and made punishment and reparation such pressing but difficult issues. He reminds Durham of the ultimately futile severities of justice within the roman Empire and argues instead for a new Caesarism according to which Durham will champion the interests and needs of the colonists against the imperial centre. He urges Durham to "réforme les abus" (l. 75), using a term (reform) with a whole set of contemporary meanings from the revolutionary to the gradualist (Scrivener 32; New 376-68), but once again trusting Durham to know what his fellow moderate-progressive means by the term.

15 If "hatred blinds so completely" (l. 63), then Durham has urgent need of enhanced and compelling vision, and Garneau is happy to share his own with him: L’oeil exercé, d’abord en aperçoit les vices;
Et faits en ce moment, de sage sacrifices
Lui rendraient tout l’éclat d’un système parfait,
Où l’utile et le grand, tout se réunirait.
Moi, j’aime la beauté d’un souvenir antique;
J’aime à voir au Sénat un nom grand, historique;
Je crois voir les exploits de célèbres ayeux,
Et leur gloire renaître ainsi devant mes yeux.
Il faut laisser au coeur parler la poésie,
Que l’âme deviendrait sans elle rétrecis! (85-94)

Durham has the chance to shift the public mood from negative to positive, and make some prudent concessions which will make as brilliant an impression as would "a perfect system, / Where the useful and the great gather everyone" into a newly unified polity. Garneau then turns to things he "loves." He sees them as antidotes to hatred and conflict: historical empathy makes the past live for him inspiringly in the present and gain expression in that heartfelt poetry that alone can increase the receptivity of the human soul. This aesthetic meditation returns to the authority and transformative powers of the heart with which he began to build a bond with Durham. His reworking of the Horatian dulce et utile as "l’utile et le grand" prepared the way for him to identify poetry, whether "spoken" by the poet’s heart or his audience’s, as the producer of not only public culture but of harmony across difference in the aesthetic state currently being reviewed and reshaped. To underscore what he means by this aestheticizing he relives the "coldly calculating" approach of the likes of Bertrand Barère, who was reputed to have entered the Convention with two speeches in his pocket, one supporting robespierre and one attacking him, and waited to see how the wind was blowing before choosing which he would deliver. In that other republic, he imagines George Washington witnessing the vengefulness of the British as the Capitol burns. And, as he will do in one of his finest poems, "Le dernier Huron" (see Findlay, "Spectres"), he projects the plight of the Canadien into the fate of the indigene: "Je tremble pour le sort du peuple Séminole, / Car devant les pétris les faibles ne sont rien. / On sait qu’un parvenu est rarement humain" (ll. 95-100). Poetry produces a critical empathy that can elicit aversion as well as admiration or sympathy. Will Durham, then, act like a parvenu or like the inheritor of noble traditions?

16 Having done his best to persuade Durham of the virtues of the poetic state, both psychic and political, in the poem’s closing lines Garneau draws in the other main audience, his fellow Canadiens, while holding himself briefly at an anxious, apostrophic distance from them: O! vous chers Canadiens, quelle est la main habille —
Qui pourra gouverner votre barque fragile?
Craignez l’appât trompant d’un trop vaste océan,
L’ Union est pour vous une théâtre trop grand.
Notre langue, nos lois, pour nous c’est l’angleterre;
Nous perdrons langue et loi en perdant cette mère.
Elle a souvent juré de nous les conserver;
L’honneur et l’intérêt la ferent adherer
a ce serment sacré, resté loin de l’empire
Et que rien ici bas ne peut romper ou détruire. (101-10)

The note of vulnerability conveyed via the Seminoles intensifies in the following question about leadership and the repeating of notions of fear and vulnerability. The expanse of the atlantic is no protection against the long arm of empire, and so England as the mother country has to be held to its "solemn oath," and to the terms of the Constitutional act of 1791 which it has just suspended. The protections of French language and civil law must be restored to a potentially empathetic, forward-looking, composite polity. It is the practical as well as the honourable thing for England to do if it is to retain its long-distance hold on British North America. The final line is a defiant reprise of the legal and cultural tenacity of the Canadiens (and very much in the spirit of Thierry’s Conquest [as at 2.11, and 210]). In addition, Garneau’s stress on the importance of language picks up the crucial permission recommended above: "il faut laisser au coeur parler la poésie" (emphasis added). How can one give the heart permission? Can the imperialist dictate the activities of hearts of the conquered? Can hegemony ever fully extirpate resistance? Will the indigene vanish and thus prepare for the equally complete and irreversible disappearance of the Québécois?

Pathos in Search of Logos in Public Culture: A Canadien Poetics

17 In his remarkable work, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), Jacques Rancière makes the following provocative claim:In the aesthetic regime, artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, the power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself; a product identical with something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos, the intention of the unintentional, etc. This idea of a regime of the sensible that has become foreign to itself, the locus for a form of thought that has become foreign to itself, is the invariable core in the identifications of art that have configured the aesthetic mode of thought from the outset: Vico’s discovery of the ‘true Homer’ as a poet in spite of himself, Kantian ‘genius’ that is unaware of the law it produces, Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ that suspends both the activity of the understanding and sensible passivity, Schelling’s definition of art as the identity between a conscious process and an unconscious process. (22-23) Rancière’s is an even more compacted summary of political aesthetics than I offered earlier. But his idea of a highly abstracted "invariable core" combined with unique national expressions resonates suggestively with Jameson’s comments on the elusiveness yet distinctive ubiquity of capital as such. Garneau’s nationalist poem wants to use public affect or pathos to gain political effect or logos, mobilizing the pathos of the conquered to gain the heights of anglo-imperial reason. But for him logos and pathos are not so much fused in a foundational catachresis as arranged in a restorative sequence, and hence deradicalized. Garneau will move from poetry to history, from an appeal to the heart to an appeal to the head, through a marshalling of documents inspired by his own experience as a public servant and the archival labours of Thierry. Garneau’s admirer and prominent Canadien, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau (1820-1890), could claim in his biographical study of 1883 that Garneau was doubly patriotic, and that "ses poésies sont presque toutes de petites poèmes historiques, et que son Histoire du Canada est revêtue d’une teinte poétique qui lui donne un grand charme" (x). This comment, like Chauveau’s presidential address to the royal Society of Canada on 26 May 1883, where he reflects on the primacy of poetry in nation formation (65-66), sees pathos and logos as getting along together in an elegant, civilized arrangement that allowed Garneau and his disciples to pass with English Canada while insisting on the continuing importance of their traditions and the continuing dangers for the English of thinking and acting like conquerors.

18 Rancière and Jameson, however, would see such a strategy as regrettably bourgeois. And their work encourages me to suggest that pathos set in pursuit of logos does not produce "charm" and literary distinction so much as deep complicity with capital. Accordingly, I see Garneau’s exhortation to "laisser … parler" as an evasion of or distraction from the more directive permission of the hour (and of the century) granted or imposed by laissez-faire economics. Despite his reputation as a radical and his commitment to responsible government, Durham draws his fortune from the family coal mines in the north of England and his diplomatic inspiration from a desire to safeguard the economic interests of Britain across an empire once again on the increase (reid 2.145-55). Moreover, Durham comes to Canada at the very moment when French Canadian apprehensions about British capital were at their height, even on the front page of Le Canadien (as in "des Conquérants Commerciaux," 12 July, 1837), and when "we can clearly discern dominant elements in the francophone political class distancing themselves from any vestige of radical consciousness or any leadership of the popular classes" (Young 59). A particular moment in the racialized incursion of British capital and its transformation into Canadian capital is shared by an occasional poem that locates itself within francophone language, law, and culture while explicitly mentioning neither money nor religion. A discreet distancing from French Catholicism may raise hopes of secular progressiveness to be fulfilled only during the Quiet revolution more than a century later. Silence on the matter of money suggests contentment with the consolations of a distinctive public culture, a contentment that will also remain in play until the Quiet revolution ushers in a radical redistribution of opportunity and prosperity in Québec. In Garneau’s poetics of moderation, pathos is not also logos but the marker of its current absence and of its imminent but compromised presence within anglo-capitalist hegemony. Durham’s version of harmony and Garneau’s will soon be on a collision course. And the pathos of "a Lord Durham" will intensify after Durham’s Report triggers union of the two Canadas, responsible government, and then Confederation. However, all of this makes Garneau’s poems and poetics more rather than less interesting. They are early indicators of Canadian as well as Canadien challenges to that semiotic tyranny and colonial public culture so smug-ly reaffirmed by Governor General Vincent Massey when another young Queen ascended the British throne in 1953: "The Queen wears ‘the Sign which unites us all’" (qtd. In Massolin 237).