Equipment for Living with Hyperobjects : Proverbs in Ronsard’s Franciade

Abstract

In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with This chapter calls attention to the proverbs that punctuate Ronsard’s unfinished epic poem La Franciade. It proposes that, as literary forms, the proverbs share the massively distributed, viscous and non-local qualities of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects. In Ronsard’s 1572 epic the significance of the aftermath of the Trojan war turns out to have extended far beyond Virgil’s Aeneid and the foundation of Rome, to the foundation of Paris and a yet-to-be-realized early modern French empire. La Franciade’s proverbs challenge their readers to perceive and respond to these vastly expanded relations, even as they progress through apparently local narrative time., On this basis, they might also equip their readers to engage with the dissonant scales of ongoing global ecological crisis.