La Bataille de Pharsale and its Fragments

Abstract

One of the more popular literary clichés among French Romantic writers, ‘soleil noir’, recurs in modified form in the stanza from Valéry’s ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ serving as epigraph to the first part of La Bataille de Pharsale: ‘Ah! le soleil…. Quelle ombre de tortue’. The image is accompanied by two other contradictory locutions, ‘Qui vibre, vole et qui ne vole pas!’ and ‘Achille immobile à grands pas!’ which echo Zeno’s paradoxes depicting immobility through movement.¹ In one argument, Achilles is said to be incapable of overtaking the tortoise who begins the race with a headstart, since in order to catch up with him he must first cross each of the points reached by the tortoise. Although the distance between the two runners contracts, it remains ineradicable. According to the second paradox, an arrow can only occupy one place at any moment during its flight and is therefore motionless. Progression, seen in the light of this ‘reductio ad absurdum’ process of reasoning, is inhibited by spatio-temporal decomposition and division; movement is stifled in its very attempt. Valéry’s metaphor of the sun as the tortoise’s shadow blends the Romantic cliché with the narrative of Zeno’s conundrum, with the result that the paradoxical image, set within the context of the poem’s oscillation between movement and stasis, active life and contemplative death, now reflects the latter, the interstice of timeless immobility.

Why, again, have all the constellations, save only Orion with his sworded thigh, strayed from their courses to move unseen through the skies; and why does Orion blaze brighter than usual?

Lucan, Pharsalia