“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.”
(Translated for Long Day's Journey Into Night by Arthur Symons)
Charles Baudelaire
Enivrez-vous (Paris Spleen, 1864)
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront: "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
Since the work of Baudelaire came up in my French class as well as this class last week, I decided to focus my blog post on Edmund's translation of Baudelaire's "Enivrez-Vous" (Be Drunken). I emboldened the parts of the passage that I found to be most significant, in French and in English. I was hoping to find some sort of discrepancy between the two, but as it turns out, Symon's English translation adheres pretty closely to Baudelaire's original poem.
Anyway, I think the poem speaks volumes to the situation of the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey Into Night. They're all trying to evade the passage of time. More precisely, the Tyrones try to avoid any sort of conscious awareness of time's passage. Mary, for example, cannot accept the fact that her past aspirations (to be a nun, to be a show pianist) are forever lost. So instead of living in the present and coping with her situation, Mary dopes herself up on morphine. She lives in world cloaked by a foggy, drug-induced haze.
Earlier in the play, in Act III, Mary speaks to Cathleen with regard to her hands: "See, Cathleen, how ugly they are! So maimed and crippled... I won't look at them. They're worse than the foghorn for reminding me... but even they can't touch me now... they're far away. I see them, but the pain is gone" (106). To this, Cathleen replies, "If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd a drop taken."
Mary uses the morphine to escape the physical and emotional pain of her present reality. Edmund, Jamie and Tyrone essentially do the same throughout the play with their whiskey. Someone mentioned last class that the whiskey is used not only to assuage the Tyrone men's sufferings, but also to impugn each other's actions. For example, Tyrone scolds Edmund for drinking, "I shouldn't have given you that drink" and then agrees with him moments later that drinking is the only way for them to forget the past.
The majority of Long Day's Journey Into Night is centered on substance abuse. Baudelaire urges people to be drunken always to avoid the burden of passing time; but of of course, Baudelaire speaks of drunkenness from virtue and from poetry, not just from mind-altering substances such as alcohol and morphine. The Tyrones are perhaps a bit overly-fixated on Baudelaires encouragement to be "drunken of wine." Why not try out poetry sometime, Mary?
-Kayla
No comments:
Post a Comment