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On the Meter and Prosody of Frencii12-Syllable Verse

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On the Meter and Prosody of Frencii12-Syllable Verse EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF THE ARTS, Vol. 10(2) 157-181, 1992 ONTHE METER AND PROSODY OF FRENCII12-SYLLABLE VERSE MARC DOMINICY Linguist/que generale Un/verslte Libre de Bruxelles ABSTRACT This article provides the reader with a survey of the basic metrical and prosodic properties of the French classical and post-classical 12-syllable alexandrine line. It is argued that these features can be captured within a neo-Jakobsonian framework which maintains a clear distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic parallelisms. Metrical equivalence is accounted for by positing abstract "line designs" that are linked to "line instances" by a set of "matching rules." The versification of Racine, Hugo, and late Nineteenth-century poets of the Parnassian and post-Parnassian generations is studied in some details. This makes it possible to evaluate the adequacy of recent theorizing by Benoit de Cornulier and Paul Verluyten. THE ESSENTIALS OF FRENCH VERSIFICATION: MASCULINE AND FEMININE LINES One of the major insights of Roman Jakobson's poetics [1-2, 4-10] is, no doubt, the assumption that any well-founded theory of verse should be based on a general study of parallelism. By reformulating this basic principle, I show that it is possible to give a description of the fundamentals of French verse. In order to make this discussion less abstract, I will use as an example one of the French poems which has frequently been commented upon by poeticians (see [3]), Baudelaire's "Les Chats": Les amoureux fervents et les savants austeres Aiment egalement, dans leur mare saison, Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison, Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sedentaires, 157 CJ 1992, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: 10.2190/570B-ARK0-6MM7-JP7H http://baywood.com 158 I DOMINICY Amis de la science et de la volupte, Ils cherchent le silence et l'horreur des tenebres; L'~be les eOtpris pour ses coursiers funebres, S'ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierte. lis prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes Des grands sphinx allonges au fond des solitudes, Qui semblent s'endormir dans un reve sans fin; Leurs reins fcconds sont pieins d'etincelles magiques, Et des parcelles d'or, ainsi qu'un sable fin, Etollentvaguement leurs prunelles mystiques. The Schwa It is a well-known fact that, in French, polysyllabic words are stressed on their last syllable, unless it contains the vowel which is usually called "e muet," mute "e" or schwa. Consequently, the posttonic part of a polysyllabic word consists of at most one syllable. Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that any polysyllabic word can be divided into two and only two parts: the posttonic or "feminine" part, and the remaining "masculine" part. Let us assume, furthermore, that, except for two postverbal enclitics ("-je" and "-ce"), all monosyllabic words are "masculine" (i.e., they only contain a "masculine" part). Given such premises, borrowed in a simplified version from [11-15], we are able to describe the crucial features of the so-called "classical alexandrine" used in "Les Chats." The Hiatus Suppose we define the notion of "hiatus" in the following way. There exists a hiatus between two vowels VI and V2 occurring in that order if, and only if: (i) VI and V2 are separated by a word boundary-or a stronger (e.g., phrase or sentence) boundary; (ii) VI is not a schwa; (iii) the spelling of the word to which VI belongs does not end with a consonantal letter; (iv) the spelling of the word to which V2 belongs does not begin with the consonantal letter "h." (This definition is not totally adequate [11, 14, 16], but it will be sufficient for my purpose.) So, there is no hiatus in "beant" (condition (i}), "vraie et" (condition (ii)), "maison ou" (condition (iii)), "it hair" (condition (iv)), but there is a hiatus in "tu es." If we can tum back to "Les Chats," we observe that there are two cases of hiatus ("volupte, lis" and "fierte, Us"), and that in both cases the word boundary coincides with a line boundary. In fact, any French poem written according to the conventions of classical versification conforms to a very simple constraint which FRENCH 12·SYLlABLE VERSE I 159 prohibits line-internal hiatus, so that the occurrence of a hiatus becomes one of the marks of line division. Interestingly enough, this property already shows that the commutation of linguistically equivalent segments may lead to metrical ill­ formedness. Indeed, suppose we invert the syntagmatic order of the two preposi­ tional phrases of line 5: Amisde 18 volupteet de 18 science The resulting formula is linguistically perfect, but it happens to violate the con­ straint which prohibits line-internal hiatus. Syllable Countand Elision Another feature of French meter can be illustrated by a short comparison between lines 3, 4 and 5 of our poem. Assume we are able to count the syllables of any given (string ot) word(s). Assume, furthermore, that, whatever our own pronunciation, we are familiar with some additional conventions stipulating, for instance, that the word "science" of line 5 contains 3 syllables (sci-en-ce). Then, syllable count applied to lines 3, 4 and 5 will respectively yield 12, 15 and 13 syllables: 3 Les/chats!puis/sants!et/doux/or/gueiVde/la/mai/son 4 Qui/com!me/eux/sont/fri/leux/et/com!me/eux/s6/den!tai/res 5 Nmis/de/la/sci/en!ce/et/de/la/vo/lup/t6 Now, if we look at line 3, we observe that it does not contain any schwa separated from a subsequent vowel by a word boundary only (in "de la," the consonant "I" occurs between "e muet" and "a"). As for lines 4 and 5, they respectively contain 2 and 1 tokens of such a sequence: commeeux; commeeux; scienceet, Let us say that in "comme eux" and similar cases, we have an "e-V sequence." The reader can easily check that the following regularity holds for "Les Chats" (and for any poem written within the same metrical tradition): if a line x contains m syllables, with m-12 ~ 1, then: (i) if the last syllable of x is the feminine part of a word, x contains m-13 e-V sequences; (ii) if the last syllable of x belongs to the masculine part of a word, x contains m-12 e-V sequences. For instance, line 4 contains 15 syllables: since 15-12 = 3 and the syllable "-res" is the feminine part of "sedentaires," it follows that there are 15-13 = 2 e-V sequences; line 5 contains 13 syllables: since 13-12 = 1 and the syllable "-t6" belongs to the masculine part of "volupte," it follows that there is 13-12 =1 e-V sequence. An alternate way to capture this regularity consists in formulating a rule of "elision" which deletes any word-final "e muet" in the domain of an e-V sequence. We then get the following syllabic divisions for lines 4 and 5: 160 I DOMINICY Qui/comlmeux/sont/fri/1eux/et/comlmeux/~/denjtai/res Nmis/de/l8/sci/enjc et/de/la/vo/lup/tC More generally, syllable count will yield 12 for all "masculine" lines (whose last syllable belongs to the masculine part of a word), and 13 for all "feminine" lines (whose last syllable is the feminine part of a word). Again, this highly restrictive property blocks themutual commutation ofsegments which arelinguis­ tically equivalent. For instance, the interversion of thetwoadjectives of line 4: Quicomme eux sont ~dentaires et comme eux frileux wouldcreatea masculine lineof 13syllables, wheretheword-final consonant "s" prevents "s~dentaires et" from beingan e-V sequence. The prohibition of hiatus and the principles which underlie elision are not totally unrelated, since classical French versification rules out any (word-final) stringV-e unless it is situated at the endof theline or belongs to an e-V sequence [11, p. 105; 14]. So, in thefollowing twoseriesof examples: DanscettegrandeplaineOU l'autan froid se joue (a) DanscettegrandeplaineOU se joue l'autan (b) Si, parunenuitbleueet froide de decembre (a) Si, parunenuit froide et bleuede decembre (b) the (a)-line, quoted from Baudelaire's works, is well-formed, while the (b)-one is defmitely out. The deletion of "e muet" in "bleue et" does not create ill­ formedness because condition (ii)in thedefinition of hiatusappliesbeforeelision. Oncewe are able to assign the syllabic number 12or 13 to a line,we can label eachof itssyllables by using the integers 1, 2, ... , 12(13) in theirusualincreas­ ingorder; so wecan speakof,say,syllable 4 of line9. In theclassical alexandrine, syllables 6, 7 and12haveto meeta verysimple constraint: theymustbelongto the masculine part of a word. For instance, the following three lines are metrically ill-formed, even if they conform to the requisites concerning hiatus, elision, V-e sequences, andsyllabic number: Lessavants aus~res, les amoureux fervents Lesamoureux austeres, les savantsfervents Lesamoureux fervents, les savants austeres Moreover, syllables 6 and 7 cannot belong to the same word; this rules out a formula like: Lesausteres amoureux, les savants fervents in spiteof theperfectlinguistic coupling of its two nounphrases. FRENCH 12-SYLLA.BLE VERSE I 161 LINE DESIGN AND LINE INSTANCES In order to understand such a complex set of constraints, we have to tum back to the neo-Jakobsonian [4-8] insight that verse is a matter of non-linguistic parallelism. More precisely, we have to describe the autonomous grid which creates metrical equivalences between certain segments of an independently organized linguistic material. In the case at hand, we will posit what Jakobson [1, p. 34] would have called "the classical alexandrine line design," i.e., a pattern or model of the following kind: XXXXXXXXXXXX(X) In this abstract representation, each syllabic position (labelled "X") is either obligatory or optional: in fact, there is only one optional position (flanked by round parentheses) which corresponds to syllable 13 of feminine lines.
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