When men go and gods come

The lecture resumes after a long break due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Mallarmé's poem " Salut " has a double, a twin where navigation becomes the theme instead of the comparant ; it is a tribute poem to Vasco de Gama, dated 1898, the year of Mallarmé's death. The poem is based on a parallel between the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape of Time. A technical term appears here, the " " : bearing is the horizontal angle formed by the longitudinal axis of a ship and the vector passing through the observed or located goal. In the poem, the bird announces the triumph of fame, the Cape of Good Hope being a metaphor for posterity, but the navigator scoffs at this announcement. Vasco da Gama continues to sail, and the bird advances with him ; the line " Nuit, désespoir et pierreries " recalls the line from the poem " Salut " : " Solitude, récif, étoile ". With this word from " pierreries ", we can't help but think of Valéry too and La Jeune Parque (1917) (" Who cries there, if not the simple wind, at this hour / Alone with extreme diamonds ?... But who weeps / So close to myself at the moment of weeping ? ") and to read this last poem as a disciple's homage to his master.

Keats's " planète nouvelle " thus has Mallarméan resonances, in an anticipatory plagiarism. These poems mention the new star in a resolutely modern way, without relating it to the great ancient library of new stars explored at the beginning of the lecture (Virgil, Lucain) ; it is an independent branch of the libraries of new stars that we find here, a branch inaugurated by the discovery of America : the American shelf of the library of new stars.

There is, however, a point of contact between the ancient thread and the American thread: an unexpected name here is that of Étienne de la Boétie, Montaigne's friend, the first, it seems, to have used the ancient commonplace of the " étoile autre ", the " étoile nouvelle ", precisely to designate America. This is the first of La Boétie's Latin poems in Montaigne's 1571 edition. The tone of the poem is sombre : it refers to the civil wars that ravaged the country between March 1562, the date of the Wassy massacre, and March 1563, the date of the Amboise edict of pacification. What is striking here is the similarity between this poem and Heredia's " Les Conquérants ". For La Boétie, France, devastated by the Wars of Religion, has become a " charnier natal ". The poet is therefore tempted to go into exile. La Boétie thus represents the missing link that unites ancient imagery with American reality, and enables us to move from ancient imagery to Heredia's poem. There's yet another link in the modern history of new star imagery. This is a poem in French by Jean-Jacques Ampère, " Le Nil ", published in 1868, a year before Heredia's, " Les Conquérants ". These texts are closely linked. All the tragedy of conquest, the rapacity of the conquerors who act as if these stars belonged to no one, is revealed. Such is the mobility of images. It's a story that's been unfolding since Latin poetry, and that has continued in a separate branch since the discovery of America, taking on new meanings.

There is also a theology of new stars. In the Gospel, the new star guides the Magi to Christ. In Jewish and Christian tradition, the star is in the singular because it corresponds to a monotheistic conception of the world : one God, hence one star. Talmudic tradition, on the other hand, refers to pagans as " lovers of the stars ", with stars in the plural.

A synthetic formula could sum up the library of new stars that has been browsed : new stars are always there when men leave or gods come ; they are the sign of a changing world, either when we move or when a divinity visits men, as is clear from the Chinese imperial tradition, which calls supernovae " guest stars ". We examine the example of the supernova of 1054, well documented in imperial archives.

This brings us to the end of a journey through the library of new stars, i.e. all the texts that mention this image, whatever their language, whatever their era. What such a journey demonstrates, as the opening lecture attempted to underline in January, is that the image may appear to be the same, but its meaning differs from text to text. While stars have a long history in human culture, literature functions as an ever-expanding repository of images and forms, whose meaning can be updated as circumstances dictate. It goes without saying that this library could be extended almost infinitely to many other languages. In the case of the other languages of Africa and America, investigation is made more difficult by the inequality between the cultures of the North and South, and by the differences in traditions and transmissions. More often than not, the natives of South America did not make the journey to Europe of their own free will ; they did not have the leisure to look at the sky. As a result, the library of new stars is incomplete ; half of it has never been written. So we must always ask ourselves this question : why do we have the texts we have ?

We can think of other ghost libraries : the library of lost works of antiquity, for example, since the loss of the library of ancient literature is enormous. Or the library of works that were not written : four hundred young French writers died in the First World War . What would French literature have looked like if they had lived ? Valéry and surrealism would probably have had less importance with them. The ghost library of French literature deserves to be explored. The same goes for the German and British libraries. The general problem of the constitution of libraries is thus posed, and will be developed in the following year's lecture.