The Environment and Marguerite Yourcenar

Aspects of Temporality in the Structure of Le Labyrinthe du monde

The discussion in the Preamble focused on the final paragraphs of Archives du Nord. Turning now to the beginning of that volume we find that Marguerite Yourcenar describes there her work in the following terms: ‘Dans un volume destiné à former avec celui-ci les deux panneaux d’un diptyque, …’¹ The image has already occurred early in the Chapter entitled La Tournée des châteaux in Souvenirs pieux where she remarked: ‘C’est là l’un des panneaux du diptyque.’² While a diptych is frequently understood as an artefact in a religious context, it has an earlier significant history. Often used for writing, in classical, mainly Roman times, it occasionally served this purpose among the Greeks as well. The Liddell and Scott Dictionary, for instance, cites the meaning as of two leaves folded with writing on.³ A triptych, which is a conscious development of the earlier form and more frequently found in the medieval period, is more exclusively religious in character and tends to pictorial representation. As Élène Cliche notes, in a letter referring to Quoi? L’Éternité Yourcenar remarks on ‘le troisème et dernier panneau de mon triptyque’.⁴ There was a measure of fluidity in the text on this matter – whether it would be two or three volumes in all – until it was eventually settled with the rapid posthumous publication of the final volume. One consequence which emerges from this structuring is that La Nuit des temps, the opening chapter of Archives du Nord, has a somewhat free-standing character and is central in the work as a whole. Whether the work is viewed as a diptych in its initial stages or as a triptych in its final form, this chapter lies at the centre of it. In this locational choice the theme of extended time, discussed below, is emphasised and it emerges as being of fundamental importance.

This opening chapter, La Nuit des temps, which falls into three distinct sections, is not to be confused with the three-volume triptych, that is to say, the complete work, though it may be not inappropriate to think of it as one on a considerably smaller scale topping the larger one, Le Labyrinthe, in its entirety. Unlike by far the majority of other sections in the first two volumes of Le Labyrinthe, these do not break down further into sub-divisions, largely untitled. Each of the three is roughly similar in length, approximately two thousand words apiece. In a fashion reminiscent of a camera winding increasingly rapidly in reverse through time Yourcenar skates first through the centuries, then through the millennia:

Décollons, pour ainsi dire, de ce coin du département du Nord qui fut précédemment une parcelle des Pays-Bas espagnols, puis, en remontant plus haut, un lopin du duché de Bourgogne, du comté de Flandre, du royaume de Neustrie et de la Gaule belgique. Survolons-le à une époque où il était encore sans habitants et sans nom.⁵

Lest she be taken too seriously or perhaps be accused of pomposity Yourcenar here pokes fun at herself by citing the mock-seriousness of Racine’s Intimé in Les Plaideurs: ‘“Avant la naissance du monde”, déclame pompeusement dans sa plaidoirie comique l’Intimé de Racine.’⁶

This approach leads to a repudiation of the mythic or the folkloristic, but rather to a consideration of the geologically attested submersions and recedings of seas aeons before, the consequence of which has been to reveal the seacoast with which we are familiar, reaching from Cap Gris-Nez to Zeeland in The Netherlands. What is being outlined here is a landscape which predates the arrival of man: ‘Les plus vieux de ces empiétements datent de bien avant l’homme.’⁷ The geographical focus then narrows, moving a little inland to the area lying between Arras and Ypres on the one hand and Gand (Ghent) and Bruges on the other, focusing finally on Mont Noir, well known to Yourcenar, for it is where she was brought up, thereby enabling the writer to see linkages between the earliest possible time and that of her own childhood.

In the second section of La Nuit des temps Yourcenar urges us to consider the region in a timescale roughly co-extensive with the arrival of man in North-West Europe at the end of the last ice-age. This time perspective is primal, for it is with the arrival of man upon the scene that history may be said to begin. This is that point in time, approximately twelve thousand years ago, which constitutes the starting point for all Yourcenar’s serious considerations of man in his natural environment insofar as it impacts on or serves to help understand the dynamics underlying the efforts of ‘trois cents générations’ to live and work in the region.⁸ This rough timescale receives further support in another phrase when she says: ‘[C]‌e fatras qui dans dix mille ans ne se distinguera plus des débris organiques et inorganiques que la mer a lentement pulvérisés en sable.’⁹ In geological terms this period is known as the Holocene, the current geological epoch. On its webpage the International Commission on Stratigraphy states in an article of 19 June 2018 that the Holocene Epoch is to be dated 11,700 years before the year 2000 CE.¹⁰ The Holocene Epoch, the more recent of the two which make up the Quaternary Period, is the time when, following the receding of the ice cover, agriculture is first recorded on the European landmass under discussion. Yourcenar marks this by referring to the fact that at this time Britain was still adjoined to the Continental mainland by an area then above sea-level and known to science as Doggerland. In this way she seeks to incorporate Britain from the earliest days into her overall view and the full extent of her vision. Referring to the low hills of which Mont Noir is one she says:

[L]‌eurs crêtes modestes sont des témoins. Ils datent d’un temps où le bassin de la Tamise se prolongeait vers la Hollande, où le cordon ombilical n’était pas encore coupé entre le continent et ce qui allait devenir l’Angleterre.¹¹

In an observable sequence the first of the three Sections of this opening Chapter of Archives du Nord focuses on the physical and temporal aspects as they emerge from the dark abyss of time, the second looks at the characteristic environment as the region was beginning to be slowly populated, while the third considers something of the identity, character and behaviour of the earliest inhabitants as they emerge into recorded history. In essence this last takes the form of an account of the struggles of the native inhabitants against the expanding Roman empire, primarily when under the command of Julius Caesar; the key text is the De Bello Gallico. Marguerite Yourcenar looks in outline at how these people gradually meshed with and integrated into a social complex which was to become the groundbase of the peoples of the region as it and they evolved into modern times. As may be concluded from this account, in considering the roots of her family on her father’s side, Yourcenar is willing to embrace perspectives which allow for an exceptionally broad ambiance in terms of space and time. In this way she is able to give an immensely wide-ranging context, both geographical and historical, which can accommodate shifts and changes while also allowing for influences and linkages, both political and cultural, all of which go into the make-up of the experience of what constituted living in the heart of it, here to be understood as French and Belgian Flanders along with Wallonia and the accompanying lowlands. The area may be considered the epicentre of the narrative. This set of choices reflects a development in her writing in which the focus moves from the Mediterranean in Mémoires d’Hadrien to Flanders in L’Œuvre au noir and which with Le Labyrinthe du monde is now resolutely located in the latter area.

It is at this point that it may be seen that Yourcenar is inviting the reader to regard the evolution of the region in a perspective of deep time. What this term can be held to mean will be further explained below. A number of strands and apperceptions come together at this point and serve to enrich the reading. Firstly, in view of its exceptional scope, locational and temporal, and using it to underscore the range and extent of what she considers to be relevant to the totality of her inheritance, Marguerite Yourcenar is here endowing her Mémoires with a form of cosmogony. The notion is even referred to by her in the course of the chapter. Commenting on the practice of the Continental Celts to repair to Britain for druidic training she says: ‘Ils ont appris par cœur les vastes poèmes cosmogoniques et généalogiques, réservoirs des sciences de la race.’¹² There is considerable affinity between this account and what she herself has in hand in relation to her own family history in the course of Le Labyrinthe where, as well as documentary evidence, she relies heavily on oral testimony, in particular that of her father.

Referring to a rosary which was suspended from her infant cradle Yourcenar cites the technical term ‘Pléistocène’ when speaking of the elephant whose ivory was given to the making of this ‘bibelot’.¹³ A further instance of a word used in this manner occurs when, speaking of her great-uncle Octave Pirmez, she raises the issue of whether he adhered to biblical literalism. The case against Octave is by no means clear, but the writer’s purpose seems to be to establish a bridgehead to take on board developments signalled by scientists such as Darwin and Lamarck:

Cet Octave ému par la grandiose mécanique céleste, à qui il arrivait de se rappeler que, pendant les quelques pas faits par lui de sa fenêtre à sa table de travail, la terre avait avancé sur son orbite de plus d’un millier de lieues, ne se rendait pas compte qu’au xvi^e siècle il eût été contre Copernic, comme au xix^e siècle il était contre Lamarck et Darwin.¹⁴

Yourcenar points to Teilhard de Chardin by way of contrast to Octave’s more staid view:

Octave Pirmez n’a pu prévoir Teilhard de Chardin, ni le moment où les esprits les plus avancés à l’intérieur de l’Église se rallieraient à la thèse évolutionniste au moment où celle-ci cesserait d’être pour la science un dogme monolithique.¹⁵

In sum, Marguerite Yourcenar is fully aware of geological, Paleolithic time as well as of the Pleistocene era, and is, furthermore, interested in palaeontology, yet she is at pains to clarify that while she is going back, and to a very early time, as far as historical accounts are concerned, she is drawing the line at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, that time when men began to inhabit North-Western Europe and turn it to farming as the ice receded. By ‘deep time’ here is meant the earlier geological period facing to modernity. As a term of scientific investigation, it entails a timescale of millions of years. The second, the Holocene or Holocenic time, which is on the timescale of thousands and hundreds of years, will be referred to in that fashion henceforth. It is important, all the same, to note that Yourcenar is well aware of geological deep time and avails of it as the setting for her narrative. It is now well understood that there was extensive human activity in what is now Europe before the Holocene period. Yourcenar shows she is aware of this too, for she refers to the art in the caves of Lascaux, work which considerably preceded the final ice-age melt. Her perspective, then, is one of beginnings rather than of origins, of history rather than of myth.

Having established the extensive scale of time as envisaged by Yourcenar, the question arises of what is meant by ‘nature’. The term is discussed by Timothy Morton:

One of the ideas inhibiting genuinely ecological politics, ethics, philosophy and art is the idea of nature itself. Nature, a transparent term in a material mask, stands at the end of a potentially infinite series of other terms that collapse into it, otherwise known as a metonymic list: fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love, soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets … Nature.¹⁶

He goes on, not surprisingly, to term the word ‘slippery’. One possible solution is to look at the term as discussed by conservation biologist, Anne-Caroline Prévot. In seeking a definition Prévot refers to the work of Frédéric Ducarme who points out that there is no word for the concept ‘Nature’ amongst many indigenous peoples across the globe. He suggests that the felt need for it only arose in societies which became urbanised, Greek, Roman, Arab and Chinese, for example. It is not, then, a universal term. At this juncture the present discussion follows Prévot who uses it in line with the sense expounded by the Inter-Governmental Social-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): ‘Dans ses travaux, l’IPBES définit la nature comme l’ensemble des entités vivantes non humaines et des interactions avec les autres entités physiques et processus, vivants et non vivant.’¹⁷ Prévot points out that this definition is a synonym for biodiversity in Western sciences.

The relationship between man and nature as defined above bears little relationship to the biblical story and it is likewise in Yourcenar’s portrait:

[N]‌ous sommes loin de la légende judéo-chrétienne pour laquelle l’homme originel erre en paix sous les ombrages d’un beau jardin, et plus loin encore, s’il se peut, de l’Adam de Michel-Ange s’éveillant dans sa perfection au contact du doigt de Dieu.¹⁸

Yourcenar’s disenchantment with the Renaissance vision of the human in contact with the sublime as seen here is striking, all the more so when it is considered that as early as 1931 she had written an essay, Sixtine, an exploration of male beauty, inspired by this very work of art.¹⁹ An altogether more credible picture, she states, is given by the comic strips and the manuals of popular science: ‘Les bandes dessinées et les manuels de science populaires’, when they show a hairy, club-bearing brute: ‘[N]‌ous montrent cet Adam sans gloire sous l’aspect d’une brute poilue brandissant un casse-tête.’²⁰ The account of human behaviour offered here in Le Labyrinthe du monde leads her to offer a succinct account of a human figure much more akin to a stereotypical caveman, possessed of fire, moving gradually through the phases of the Neolithic period in a line of slow progress to the nineteenth century. In addition to the instance above, Yourcenar uses the word ‘brute’ twice more. First is when she refers to the creature’s gradual acquisition of skills at developing primitive tools: ‘Brute certes, l’homme de la pierre éclatée et de la pierre polie.’²¹ Slowly the creature learns to identify the qualities of its vegetable diet and to recognise the repetitions of the movement of the stars it observes, identifying the seasons and the lunar movements from which it learns to navigate and plan its journeyings. At this juncture the writer states, ‘Ces brutes ont sans doute inventé le chant.’²² This crucial step, a talent all too often lost in contemporary man, she asserts, leads gradually to the recognition of a certain religious sentiment becoming recognisable in the urge, essentially artistic, to attend carefully to the manner of the burial of the dead. At this point Yourcenar finds affinity between the shamanistic rituals and the experiences of the Underworld evoked in Odysseus’s journey into that region as described in Book XI of the Odyssey or even more clearly in Dante’s writing.²³ The direction of drift of this account, which has been slowly building, is now about to reach the climax the writer has been working towards. This emerges as a two-part assertion. Firstly, the seriousness with which we should treat shamanism is something which has only emerged with anything like a proper understanding in recent times:

Depuis un siècle à peine que travaillent nos ethnologues, nous commençons à savoir qu’il existe une mystique, une sagesse primitives, et que les chamans s’aventurent sur des routes analogues à celles que prirent l’Ulysse d’Homère ou Dante à travers la nuit.²⁴

Secondly, Yourcenar vigorously remonstrates against a dismissive attitude to this activity on the grounds of its early occurrence in human experience. She states that it is all too typical of contemporary man’s arrogance to decline to see in the activities of these early people behaviour comparable to our own. When we look at cave paintings we should, making allowances for changes in character, see them as being equivalent to cathedrals in their own time, and capable of being understood as such. Equally, it is important not to be duped into seeing such cave paintings on the one hand as the expression of a utilitarian magic designed to produce favourable outcomes, what she terms ‘une magie utilitaire’, or on the other as the dutiful execution of a series of representations to entrench a rapacious priesthood: ‘comme une corvée imposée par une tyrannique et rapace prêtraille.’²⁵ Such notions, she holds, are to be left to the foreshortened perspectives of people such as Flaubert’s Homais: ‘Laissons à Homais ces simplifications.’²⁶ Yourcenar asserts here that we should see a direct equivalence between the religious ecstasy implicit in a cave painting’s representation of an animal slaughtered and the Christian image of the sacrificed Lamb:

C’est par l’effet de notre arrogance, qui sans cesse refuse aux hommes du passé des perceptions pareilles aux nôtres, que nous dédaignons de voir dans les fresques des cavernes autre chose que les produits d’une magie utilitaire : les rapports entre l’homme et la bête, d’une part, entre l’homme et son art, de l’autre, sont plus complexes et vont plus loin. […] Rien n’empêche de supposer que le sorcier de la préhistoire, devant l’image d’un bison percé de flèches, a ressenti à de certains moments la même angoisse et la même ferveur que tel chrétien devant l’Agneau sacrifié.²⁷

This clear statement of a deeply embedded human urge for religion in some form brings home that Yourcenar seeks here to operate at a level more explicit than that of metaphor: equivalence is asserted, human nature is constant in its capacity for worship and in its potential for an interanimate relationship between man and the world of living creatures. In the light of this the thread of quiet emphasis on creatures, dogs, horses, cattle, porpoises and so forth, which will be noted in the course of this discussion and which will be examined below, takes on a deeper significance.

It has been seen how Yourcenar renders the biblical Paradise supererogatory to her narrative, asserting that Man is in reality far removed from the divinely created pre-lapsarian figure of the biblical text; on the contrary he is a brute emerging from the abysm of time. There is arguably, however, a form of Paradise and that is nature itself, particularly when untrammelled and uncompromised by the presence of Man. Rather than the textual Garden of Eden, in this work it takes the form of the geographical location of the North-West European landmass, already referred to. This is a region where the oceans are not immobile or merely picture-pretty: ‘mais bougeant et changeant au cours des heures’. In this landscape the trees redden in Autumn while in Spring the needles of the pines display ‘une mince capsule brune’.²⁸ An important element is the silence; no sound is audible of men or of human tools. On the other hand, there is birdsong, including their alarm signals when they sight the approach of weasels or squirrels. This apprises us that we are not in a land of myth or make-believe, but the natural one with which we are familiar, at least in northern latitudes, one in which nature is a round of birth, death, predatory feeding and killing as part of the natural cycle. It is not a world of escapism. Here the sound of insects prevails and they are both predators and prey while bears root out beehives in search of honey and lynxes take down deer:

Baignons dans ce silence presque vierge de bruits de voix et d’outils humains, où s’entendent seuls les chants des oiseaux ou leur appel avertisseur quand un ennemi, belette ou écureuil, s’approche, le bourdonnement par myriades des moustiques, à la fois prédateurs et proies, le grondement d’un ours cherchant dans la fente d’un tronc un rayon de miel que défendent en vrombissant les abeilles, ou encore le râle d’un cerf mis en pièces par un loup-cervier.²⁹

The aural component continues to be emphasised. It is in this world of physical nature that we hear the dive of a duck, the sound of a swan as it takes to the air, the glide of a snake, the roll of porpoises. What is decidedly absent is the pollution occasioned by ‘la fumée d’aucune chaudière’.³⁰ The appeal to us is as follows: ‘[T]‌ournons avec la terre qui roule comme toujours inconsciente d’elle-même, belle planète au ciel.’³¹ By the time of writing pictures of the earth from space had commonly been witnessed.³² The praise here for the earth is unequivocal and this is followed by arguably the most telling detail of all: ‘Le soleil chauffe la mince croûte vivante.’³³ From the central role played by the sun in its life-giving relation to the thin crust on which we all depend, we move to the contribution of the rain, the snow and then to a consideration of the heavenly bodies, the moon and finally the stars, evoked as follows:

Et, quand la lumière de la lune ne les occulte pas, les étoiles luisent, à peu près placées comme elles le sont aujourd’hui, mais non encore reliées entre elles par nous en carrés, en polygones, en triangles imaginaires, et n’ayant pas encore reçu des noms de dieux et de monstres qui ne les concernent pas.³⁴

Yourcenar’s Paradise is the world we inhabit; perhaps the point is that what we have been given is in fact a Paradise, if only we could allow ourselves to see it. However, Yourcenar’s view of it is far from being a Romanticised one. Furthermore, man is a most dubious addition to this plenitude of natural wonder and a source of great threat to it. Man is in an uneasy symbiosis with the world in which he resides. His relationship to the externalised Other is restless, problematic and constantly tending to the negative.

Central to the Yourcenar thesis is the assertion that from the very moment he enters his world at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch Man is at odds with it; he is ‘le prédateur-roi, le bûcheron des bêtes et l’assassin des arbres’.³⁵ The cluster ‘l’homme-loup, l’homme-renard, l’homme-castor’ which immediately follows these words indicates a particular equivalence between man and nature; perhaps too it suggests a totemic relationship on man’s part as he learns from that nature and adopts qualities which enable him to master it to his own immediate advantage. The list which follows, of Man’s perpetrations against the world in which he finds himself, is considerable. To quite an extent Yourcenar sees the problematic lying in the distinctive quality man displays, his ability to choose:

L’homme avec ses pouvoirs qui, de quelque manière qu’on les évalue, constituent une anomalie dans l’ensemble des choses, avec son don redoutable d’aller plus avant dans le bien et dans le mal que le reste des espèces vivantes connues de nous, avec son horrible et sublime faculté de choix.³⁶

The determination here to be quite explicit with its emphasis on choice as a defining human quality makes it clear that Yourcenar does not accept a deterministic categorisation for the human being. The issue is in the tension between the ‘horrible’ and the ‘sublime’ – which will win out? Importantly, in the message of the Mémoires overall, the answer allows less and less for a margin of error as the capacity for self-destruction continues to grow.

From this point on through the evolution of society during the Holocene Epoch Yourcenar sees man as gradually coming to terms with his environment, developing social order, building villages, learning skills, crucially drawing from the natural world in which he finds himself. It is in character, nonetheless, that the first emerging group to whom she gives a name is Tollund Man, the social cluster in Denmark of the Iron Age and one which practised human sacrifice.³⁷ At the very first emergence into history in this region Man is seen as slaughtering not only nature, but his own. She raises the question as to what the grounds might have been for this death – a victim seen rightly or wrongly as being a traitor, a deserter, a sexual misfit? While we do not know the deity to whom the victim was sacrificed, whichever of these, if it was one of these, the surviving face is strikingly intelligent:

L’homme de Tollund, contemporain de l’âge du fer danois, momifié la corde au cou dans un marais où les citoyens bien-pensants de l’époque jetaient, paraît-il, leurs traîtres vrais ou faux, leurs déserteurs, leurs efféminés, en offrande à on ne sait quelle déesse, à l’un des visages les plus intelligents qui puissent être.³⁸

It seems not inappropriate to point out that Yourcenar’s argument expressed here has had strong confirmation from subsequent discoveries. Four years after her death the body of Ötzi the Iceman was recovered in South Tyrol. Dated in the period between 3,400 and 3,100 BCE, in their discussion of the find Shadbolt and Hampson state:

Ötzi the Iceman is perhaps the best known [example of natural mummification], discovered in an Austrian glacier complete with his hunting kit, and arrow and bludgeon wounds from fatal adversaries. He seems, from third and fourth party blood on his weapons, to have wounded his enemies, or worse, before they finally killed him.³⁹