The Fall Into Narrative: Negative Verticality In French Romantic Poetry

Lamartine's La Chute d'un ange, Vigny's "Eloa," and Hugo's visionary poetry all associate the movement from lyric to verse narrative with a fall away from grace, each time more explicitly until Hugo makes it clear, for instance, in "Pleurs dans la nuit," that he is not just writing about falling: writing is falling. But he finds a solution. Lamartine's attempt to narrativize ascension had drifted into a despairing pessimism; Vigny could depict ascension only by deifying the human intellect; but Hugo finds ways to turn the topos of inexpressibility inside-out, as it were, so that the end of one language can become the beginning of another, as at the conclusion of "Ce que dit la Bouche d'Ombre." (LMP)