Narrative Transformation from l'Astree to le Berger extravagent (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, V. 24)

NARRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS FROM L’ASTRÉE TO LE BERGER EXTRAVAGANT

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures Editorial Board Floyd Merrell, Series Editor Jeanette Beer Paul B. Dixon

Howard Mancing Allen G. Wood

Associate Editors French

Spanish and Spanish American

Paul Benhamou Willard Bohn Gerard J. Brault Mary Ann Caws Gérard Defaux Milorad R. Margitic; Glyn P. Norton Allan H. Pasco Gerald Prince David Lee Rubin Roseann Runte English Showalter Ursula Tidd

Maryellen Bieder Catherine Connor Ivy A. Corfis Frederick A. de Armas Edward Friedman Charles Ganelin David T. Gies Roberto González Echevarría Patricia Hart David K. Herzberger Emily Hicks Djelal Kadir Amy Kaminsky Lucille Kerr Alberto Moreiras Randolph D. Pope Francisco Ruiz Ramón Elzæbieta Sk¬odowska Mario Valdés Howard Young

Italian Fiora A. Bassanese Peter Carravetta Benjamin Lawton Franco Masciandaro Anthony Julian Tamburri

Luso-Brazilian Fred M. Clark Marta Peixoto Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg

volume 24

NARRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS FROM L’ASTRÉE TO LE BERGER EXTRAVAGANT

Leonard Hinds

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright ©2002 by Purdue Research Foundation. All rights reserved. 06

05

04

03

02

5

4

3

2

1

∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Design by Anita Noble Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hinds, Leonard, 1966– Narrative transformations from L’Astrée to Le berger extravagant / Leonard Hinds. p. cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55753-235-4 (alk. paper) 1. Urfé, Honoré d’, 1567–1625. Astrée. 2. Sorel, Charles, 1602?– 1674. Berger extravagant. I. Title. II. Series. PQ1707.U7 A6234 2001 843'.409—dc21

2001048529

To my parents, Lillian and David

This page intentionally left blank

Contents ix Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 14 Chapter One Echoes of Desire and Intention: The Mirroring of Utterances in Romance and Antiromance 16 The Distortion of Voice in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée 19 Sorel’s Voices in Le berger extravagant 22 D’Urfé’s Echo 27 Sorel Echoes d’Urfé 35 Chapter Two Verbal Travesty and Disguise: Parody and Citation of Typified Languages 36 D’Urfé’s Clowns 42 Verbal Disguises in L’Astrée 46 Verbal Travesty and Disguise in Le berger extravagant 47 Sorel’s Clowns 58 Chapter Three Debates of Convention and Debates on Convention 59 Debates of Convention in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée 64 Debates of Convention and on Convention in Le berger extravagant 80 Chapter Four Experiments with Multiple Agency and Intention through Emblematics 81 D’Urfé, Sorel, and the Emblematic Tradition 84 Emblems in L’Astrée 92 Sorel’s and Crispin de Passe’s Emblematic Portrait 100 Chapter Five Transvestism and Specularity: Transformations and Travesties of the Self 103 Specularity and Physical Disguise in L’Astrée 115 Narcissistic Cross-Dressing as Parody in Le berger extravagant vii

Contents 126 Chapter Six D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs: The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature 131 D’Urfé’s Tombs 138 Sorel’s Tombeau des romans 148 Conclusion Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal 161 Appendix of Images 165 Notes 181 Bibliography 195 Index

viii

Acknowledgments I would first of all like to thank Dalia Judovitz for her guidance and friendship since the very beginning of this project. She inspired me to study early modern fictions, and continued to encourage me beyond graduate studies. I am very grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University for the Summer Faculty Fellowship that allowed me to continue research on the literary tomb. I am also very grateful to the Department of French and Italian of Indiana University for financial support for production expenses. I would like to express warm thanks to Kathleen Wine for a careful reading of the manuscript and for sharing her most recent work with me. I would also like to thank Amy Wygant of the University of Glasgow for her assistance in my study of emblems. The discussion of emblems in chapter four is taken from an article entitled “From Emblem to Portrait: Early Modern Notions of Selfhood in Novels by Honoré d’Urfé and Charles Sorel,” which I contributed to Glasgow Emblem Studies. I thank Alison Adams and Amy Wygant, editors of the journal, for their permission to use material from my article. The illustrations in the Appendix are reprinted with permission. I am grateful to the Newberry Library, and especially John Powell, for allowing me to reproduce the Alciato emblem. Thanks are also due the Bibliothèque nationale de France for permission to reproduce Crispin de Passe’s engraving entitled Le portrait de Charite. Many thanks go to Karen Atkins of University Information Technology Services for her prompt help during computer emergencies. I thank Allen G. Wood and Floyd Merrell of Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures for their patience and careful consideration of my manuscript. I also thank Susan Y. Clawson, the production editor of Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, for her meticulous care and attention during the production of this book. Greatest thanks to George E. Barker, my life partner, without whose love, support, and optimism this book would never have been possible.

ix

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Va livre, tu n’es que trop beau Pour être né dans le tombeau Duquel mon exil te délivre; Seul pour nous deux je veux périr: Commence, mon enfant, à vivre Quand ton père s’en va mourir. Agrippa d’Aubigné “Préface: L’auteur à son livre” Les tragiques Death, entombment, and renewal serve as apt metaphors to explain the role played by Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–28) and Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant (1627–28) in the development of the novel in seventeenth-century France. The two works imitate moribund literary traditions: ancient and Renaissance pastoral, medieval chivalric and courtly scenarios, Neoplatonist and Neo-Petrarchist verse. Like tombs, they enshrine and commemorate dying literary conventions at the end of an era. Yet they do promise rebirth and renewal at the dawn of the century. They can be called transformational narratives, for they change and refresh previous literary techniques and modes of thought. The metaphors that characterize the relationship between these works and literary tradition are not arbitrary. Both d’Urfé and Sorel use the figure of the tomb to open their narratives. Yet although they employ the same image, they have different ends in sight. In d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the tomb appears as a monument signaling the death of the authorial figure and the survival of his romance: “Le Ciel…te [Astrée / L’Astrée] donne un si bon Genie, que tu me survives autant de siecles que le 1

Introduction sujet qui t’a fait naistre me survivra en m’accompagnant au cercueil” (“L’autheur à la bergère Astrée,” I.8).1 As in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s “Préface,” the tomb figures the imminent death of the author and the birth of his work. It marks an end and announces a beginning. Furthermore, this tomb memorializes an author born in the sixteenth century, the era of La Pléiade, Italian epic, and Spanish pastoral. In the opening of Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, the tomb is invoked in a manner apparently contrary to d’Urfé’s. Instead of broadcasting the disappearance of the author, it serves as the comic epithet of the whole narrative—a riposte or threat to literary conventions, some of which d’Urfé embodies and memorializes: “…le desir que j’ay de travailler pour l’utilité publique, m’a fait prendre le dessein de composer un livre qui se moquast des autres, & qui fust comme le tombeau des Romans, & des absurditez de la Poësie” (preface, 15).2 This metaphoric epithet serves as the overreaching emblem for a literary and critical experiment—the first French antiromance.3 The tomb introduces here the theme of death that is present both on the narrative level of the protagonist’s demise and on the metanarrative, critical level of the fate of literary tradition. These levels overlap in the figure of Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd, who embodies different modes of literary representation by imitating pastoral, chivalric, and sentimental fictions, much like Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This representative of literary traditions encounters exhaustion, impending destruction, and entombment at the hands of critically oriented characters, the narrator, and the authorial figure. These critical agents conduct a trial of literature, much like the inquisition of romances conducted by the curate and the barber in chapter 6 of the first part of Don Quixote.4 Sorel’s antiromance is therefore the tomb enclosing the incarnation of moribund, literary discourse. This study examines the relationship between the romance and antiromance by giving a detailed account of the transformations that the constitutive conventions of the first text undergo in the second. Such an examination gives us a glimpse of the transition between the romance and the seventeenth-century novel, which the antiromance anticipates and to some extent makes possible. Following Northrop Frye, the romance is an aristocratic mode of fiction relying on idealization, archetypal

2

Introduction characterization, and moral allegory; it frequently involves a quest in a setting of innocence (33, 136–37, 151, 186–87, 195, 304–06). More recently, Erica Harth and Thomas Di Piero have characterized L’Astrée as an aristocratic, reactionary text that celebrated the values and modes of expression dear to a social class whose prerogatives were in decline. They maintain that a counterpoint to this aristocratic idealism and nostalgia was a bourgeois parody, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, which challenged the ideals of pastoral novels with competing, middleclass values of verisimilitude and plausibility (Harth 18–23, 34–67; Di Piero 34–59). However, an even more focused study on the impact of these values on changing literary conventions may reveal that the aristocratic romance involves self-parodying elements, and that the bourgeois response tends to lionize normative esthetic criteria. Although limiting the comparison of romance and antiromance to L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant, this study does not claim that the former is the only text parodied by the latter. That fact that Sorel intends to mock and criticize a wide variety of romances is evident in his explanation of the title of Le berger’s second edition: “…ce Livre est encore appellé l’AntiRoman à cause de ses Remarques qui font voir les sottises des Romans…” (Sorel, L’anti-roman 1: 107). Criticism concerning Le berger has consistently shown that Sorel’s targets are multiple. For instance, Maurice Magendie finds that it parodies Sidney’s Arcadia, and Gustave Reynier discovers that Sorel takes issue with everyone, from Homer to Ronsard, from Longus and Heliodorus to d’Audiguier (Magendie, Le Roman français 71; Reynier, Le roman réaliste 184–85). Nevertheless, critics such as André Le Breton, Antoine Adam, Henri Coulet, Harth, and Di Piero argue that Sorel borrowed heavily from and responded to L’Astrée, because it was the representative par excellence of the pastoral genre at the time (Le Breton 34, 36, 45; Coulet 198; Adam, Histoire 1: 159; Harth 34–35, 50– 51; Di Piero 51). Because of L’Astrée’s representative status as a masterpiece of pastoral fiction, we have restricted our sampling to conventions and themes common to d’Urfé’s romance and Sorel’s antiromance. To understand better the relationship between the romance and the antiromance, one must keep in mind the ancient notion

3

Introduction of parody. According to its etymology, parw/diva originally meant an ode or song written beside or concerning another ode or song; it was therefore a subsidiary ode or commentary on an original piece. This is very much the case in Sorel’s Le berger, because the author imitates specific episodes from d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and he clarifies his narrative’s relationship with the original text through a detailed commentary on all his episodes and their sources: Les remarques. Parw/diva came to mean in Aristotle “a song or poem in which serious words become burlesque.”5 Following J. A. Cuddon, parody is an imitation that renders its original ridiculous with both derisive and corrective aims. In this light, the antiromance would have an edifying purpose for readers and authors, which is what Sorel means by saying that he works for “l’utilité publique.” Furthermore, inherent to its definition is textual transformation: “Parody is difficult to accomplish well. There has to be a subtle balance between close resemblance to the ‘original’ and a deliberate distortion of its principal characteristics” (Cuddon 483). The antiromance would therefore change certain elements of the original romance without losing resemblance to it. But what would be the nature of this distortion of words and meanings? Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Julia Kristeva’s theories of discourse elucidate well the relationship between literary genres and their parodies. Bakhtin argues that multiple discourses exist in dialogue, heteroglossia, which is the driving force behind the development of the novel and the antinovel. According to Bakhtin, almost any utterance, literary or extraliterary, has as its basis an embedded structure of signification insofar as it evinces both the presence of previous utterances conditioning it and that of the subsequent utterances it anticipates. The utterance is therefore not autonomous in the chain of expressions impacting the articulation of its intention, for it must account for them by responding to them or by expecting their response.6 Robin Howells notices one aspect of this linguistic phenomenon in Le berger: “…present language contains the ‘memory,’ a sort of secret dictionary, of past usage” (88). Bakhtin also expands his theory of the inclusion of other intentions within the single utterance to the dialogic competition of discourses within narrative, which he calls a “social heteroglossia.” Namely, this is the co-presence of conflicting, socially

4

Introduction typified speech genres, esthetic forms of expression, and various discourses of knowledge (historical, philosophical, theological, moral, etc.) that carry with them predetermined intentions and that receive new meanings in their novelistic context.7 Both Howells and Hervé Béchade concur that such speech genres compete in Le berger (Howells 80).8 In light of Bakhtin’s theory, romance and antiromance would necessarily enforce the transformation of previous topoi, for both present different modes of expression and thought in a polemical structure. Bakhtin’s notion of the encoding of intention in discourse and its re-encoding in tension with other speech genres in narrative is recast by Kristeva as intertextuality: that is, the imbrication of previous texts in the present instance of narrative or poetic expression. In her analysis of ambivalence in literature, she emphasizes the mutually transformational force that the citation and the framing narrative exert on one another. Such force works to diversify subjective positions in the hidden interior polemic inherent to romance and antiromance. Both the romance and its parody may therefore encode a whole series of conflicting intentions representing various subjective positions in a relationship of dialogic tension.9 A careful examination of the intertexts from romance in the antiromance will reveal the various critical assessments made through parody. These critical appraisals of romance in the antiromance are rightfully called “various” and “multiple,” for as Richard Hodgson has shown, Sorel’s critical comments cannot be organized into one, coherent system or philosophy of literature.10 This diversification of conflicting critical statements is in a large part due to the polyphonic notion of authorial identity at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries in France. For example, Terence Cave considers the “cornucopian movement” in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais to be a means to disrupt reference to the singular, unified self through the textual generation of word-things: “The self which the Essais aim to portray, although a particularly privileged res, shares [the] conditioning [by word-things] and that of nature; the word-self is a topic which, as it draws all the other topics into its orbit, displaces the natural self presumed to be outside the text” (302). In addition, this word-self in the Essais also

5

Introduction shifts on the textual level to yield to a multiplicity of wordselves that refuse identification with one writing subject and with a singular intention: “je,” “moy,” and an “autre moymesme.”11 Cave’s image of the “orbit” of topics around the word-self in Renaissance writing appears more complex when one places it in the context of the Baroque, Keplerian cosmology articulated by Severo Sarduy and invoked by Martine Debaisieux: “…à présent, la figure maîtresse n’est plus le cercle, de centre unique, rayonnant, lumineux, paternel, mais l’ellipse, qui oppose à ce foyer visible un autre foyer également actif, également réel, mais obturé, mort, nocturne, centre aveugle….”12 Sarduy uses this elliptical vision of the cosmos to explain the concealment of alternate subjective positions within the semantic field plotted by Baroque language. First, the Baroque use of language excludes the possibility of a central, unitary subject who masters and orients discourse, for such discourse includes multiple citations and voices. Second, the Baroque use of language allows for the exposure of “sa propre organisation conventionnelle de la représentation,” since it involves a “retour sur lui-même, mise en évidence de son propre reflet, mise en scène de sa machinerie” (Sarduy 83). Sorel himself makes a metanarrative comment concerning shifting authorial positions and critical appraisals in his Remarques on Le berger: “Tout cecy est un exercice d’esprit, où par des propos ambigus il semble que je blasme ce que je loüe, et que je loüe ce que je blasme quelquefois. Toutes ces diverses pieces raportees feront connoistre mon intention aux bons esprits” (565). Sorel therefore has the freedom to present multiple opinions about literature, to hide behind several authorial masks, and to comment on this very technique of authorial shifts. In both d’Urfé’s romance and Sorel’s antiromance, the self, as a rhetorical or figurative representation in the text, divides to become several representations of selves, some of which appear on the surface as the authorial figure, the narrator, or characters, and some of which are embedded in the interplay of borrowed discourses. The only way to tease them out will be a detailed analysis of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s borrowings. These selves, as multiple positions of subjectivity through the use of language, engage one another in dialogic relationships, in

6

Introduction which they subvert one another, generate critiques, and occupy equally valid positions in their claims to truth. Didier Souiller brings into focus the Baroque use of language through rhetorical and poetic figures that inform the representation of identity and intention. Baroque writers have a certain fascination for the ludic deployment of linguistic signs, which began with the Grands Rhétoriqueurs and Renaissance authors in France. In both Baroque poetry and Baroque narrative, as this study will demonstrate, verbal puzzles abound in the form of equivocation and poetic echoes. D’Urfé and Sorel use such techniques to question the univocity of the linguistic sign, for they use the techniques in the ambiguous expression of the identities and intentions of characters and the authorial figure. On the levels of the word, the utterance, and the figurative articulation of language, multiple positions of subjectivity may be expressed or implied (Souiller 206–20). D’Urfé and Sorel very often use these figures of rhetoric in the service of a larger project of allegory. Yves Hersant briefly documents instances of allegory with moral, political, and religious aims in L’Astrée (“Mythe” 29–46). Dalia Judovitz takes this investigation even further by applying Walter Benjamin’s theory of Baroque allegory, based on fragment, convention, the narrative depiction of different orders of representation, and “an emblematic worldview,” to unveil the imbricated structure of the visual and the verbal in d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narratives.13 Her analysis is the first to uncover the allegorical, emblematic relationship between strictly verbal signs and those signifying the nonverbal: namely, a mutual relationship of encoding and decoding, of representation and interpretation. Such an approach explains the historical esthetic barriers to these works’ legibility, for it reveals Baroque allegory’s resistance to a classical, Romantic or post-Romantic hermeneutics that attempts to reduce allegory’s economy of signification to the one-to-one correspondence of the symbol or to recurrent archetypal categories of myth.14 For instance, Sorel’s antiromance presents a character embodying literary and intellectual commonplaces and subjects him to the varied critical commentary of characters, the narrator, and the authorial figure. Understood as an allegory of literary criticism, Le berger falls into the tradition of the allegorized commentary on esthetics by the likes of

7

Introduction Blaise de Vigenère, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, and later Antoine Furetière, Pierre Corneille, and Gabriel Guéret.15 The present study sets out to apply a technique of allegorical reading, or allegoresis, in an effort to document d’Urfé’s experiment of transforming literary conventions and modes of thought, and Sorel’s of critiquing these transformations. Both authors test past literary and rhetorical conventions in the depiction of desire, intention, and elusive identity. The term experiment is warranted, for d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s responses to previous literary techniques and conceptual models give rise to esthetic effects not seen before. Modes of thought and expression from the past—such as Neo-Petrarchist poetry, courtly discourse, emblematic representation, and even Neoplatonic systems—become the very themes of narrative in an allegory of literary creation. For instance, Céladon, the hero of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, comes to embody the Neoplatonist notion of the lover who dies to be reborn as the beloved, and he does so by crossdressing as a woman and later disguising himself as his love object, Astrée. Yet his beloved does not recognize him as a man, but as the female Alexis, who is unable to engage in sexual intercourse because to do so would reveal his true identity and interrupt his intimacy with Astré. D’Urfé thus literalizes an abstract principle to push it to an extreme in the characterization of a subject caught between his own desire and the impossibility of satisfying it. Sorel literally mirrors the allegorical embodiment by coupling narratives of transvestism and specularity. In a scene parodying d’Urfé’s Céladon, Sorel’s Extravagant Shepherd disguises himself as Amarylle, sits before a mirror, and engages in narcissistic play. Lysis-Amarylle is both the subject and the object of his/her own desire. The conflicted pastoral hero becomes the self-satisfying pastoral clown. The resolution of a psychological and philosophical bind is in its parodic fulfillment. Once the ideal finds its problematic materialization in the Urfeian pastoral self-parody, Sorel literalizes and parodies it even further, until it clashes with emergent norms of literary representation—such as verisimilitude and plausibility—and new notions of social reality and ontology— such as mercantilism, contemporary historiography, and philosophies of skepticism.

8

Introduction Such narrative transformations are ample proof that d’Urfé’s romance and Sorel’s antiromance are storehouses of the literary and philosophical past. Furthermore, Sorel’s metanarrative criticism and parodic gestures envisage the future development of prose narrative and theater. Similar to d’Urfé’s and d’Aubigné’s authors born in the sixteenth-century who enter the tomb in the seventeenth, L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant are narratives marking the transition between eras. In Gérard Genette’s words, L’Astrée is “l’étroit goulet par où tout l’ancien se déverse, se renverse dans tout le moderne.” 16 D’Urfé’s work, having borrowed and altered narrative techniques from ancient Greek romance, Sannazzaro’s L’Arcadia (1502), Montemayor’s La Diana (1559), and Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585), provided material for heroic novels by Gomberville, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry, La Calprenède, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Latour Hotman, and Casseneuve, to mention just a few.17 Urfeian topoi can later be seen in Corneille’s theater, in Paul Scarron’s Roman comique, and in nouvelles and histoires by Mme de Villedieu and l’abbé de Choisy.18 Sorel’s antiromance plays an analogous role in the history of comic fictions. Sorel adapts Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the Urfeian setting to create Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd—the reader who consciously imitates pastoral conventions in an effort to live them (Bardon 1: 107–45; Roy 120, 130). Anna Lia Franchetti shows that in the Histoire comique de Francion, Sorel had already used the theme of imitative folly resulting from reading imaginative fiction before he fully developed it in Le berger (Franchetti, “Du bon” 79–88). Then in turn, Francion’s and Le berger’s representation of literary folly directly inspired Du Verdier’s Le chevalier hypocondriaque (1632), Du Bail’s Le gascon extravagant (1637), and Thomas Corneille’s play Le berger extravagant (1653) (Verdier 62; Bardon 1: 147). Furthermore, Le berger set into motion developments of parody until the end of the eighteenth century, for it inaugurated the use of metanarrative commentary in comic novels, such as Scarron’s Roman comique (1651, 1657), Furetière’s Roman bourgeois (1666), Marivaux’s Pharsamon, ou Les nouvelles folies romanesques (1737), and Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste

9

Introduction (1796).19 In addition, Le berger was known for the significance of its critical commentaries, Les remarques. In 1735, JeanPierre Nicéron writes concerning Le berger “c’est une espece de critique du Roman de l’Astrée, où il y a un petit nombre d’endroits passables, parmi beaucoup d’autres, les remarques sont ce qu’il y a de meilleur” (Nicéron 31: 394). The critical debates and the allegory of literary criticism in Le berger’s narrative and metanarrative anticipate La Querelle du Cid and the criticism of Daniel Huet, Du Plaisir, and Nicolas LengletDufresnoy. Genette’s statement above may therefore apply to both L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant, for they stand at the beginning of the seventeenth century as monuments to literary and intellectual traditions, and by transforming cultural and textual commonplaces, they informed subsequent literary production in France. As d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s uses of the tomb suggest, L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant announce the obsolescence of some conventions and subgenres while they make possible the renewal of others. This is not to say that before L’Astrée and Le berger, Renaissance works such as Rabelais’s narratives and Marguerite de Navarre’s L’heptaméron did not serve as tombs of previous literary scenarios from antiquity and medieval oral traditions of storytelling. Yet Coulet points out that after L’Astrée there were no original pastoral romances. Videl’s Mélante (1624), Du Verdier’s La Diane françoise (1624), Du Broquart’s Bellaure triomphante (1630–33), and La Haye’s Nouvelle Amarante (1633) are no more than poor imitations of d’Urfé’s masterpiece (153). Although the pastoral novel was on the decline, O.-C. Reure lists no fewer than thirty-five pastoral plays whose plots and characters were borrowed from d’Urfé’s romance (275–301). Therefore, given L’Astrée’s impact on heroic romances, nouvelles, and pastoral theater and Le berger’s influence on histoires comiques and literary criticism, the romance and antiromance heralded the death as well as the renewal and rebirth of literary traditions for decades to come.

*** This study documents a series of literary conventions and themes shared by L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant, and its

10

Introduction analyses chart their transformation between their origins and the pastoral romance, and between the pastoral romance and the antiromance. The first chapter examines episodes of echoing verse so as to pose the question of the mutability of previous literary sources when repeated in new narrative contexts. The discourse theories of Bakhtin and Kristeva serve as starting points for our reflection on the transformation of poetic utterances. How does d’Urfé alter these rimes couronnées, and how does Sorel generate their critique by restaging d’Urfé’s use of them? This study of echoing between texts models the exploration of repetition, imitation, and transformation of other conventions in the romance and antiromance. The second chapter studies the transformation of quotations within a single narrative and of citation between texts. Both d’Urfé and Sorel have characters don verbal disguises and enforce the changes of original sources. Both employ galimatias, or gibberish, to create a travesty of utterances. Again Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s notions of literary citation and transformation elucidate the effects of such verbal disguises and travesties. At issue is d’Urfé’s use of the servant Fleurial to echo and alter the authorial figure’s own discourse. The transformational impact of Phillis’s and Silvandre’s verbal disguise on real affect is also studied. We then turn to Sorel’s use of buffoons who change the quotation of traditional literary sources. How does Sorel employ such pícaros to unwittingly create a critique of master discourses present in the pastoral romance? Conventional debates and debates on convention are the focus of chapter 3. In d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, debates concerning love interests echo ancient, medieval, and Renaissance rhetorical formats. Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s notions of embedded intention serve well to explain the failure of characters, such as Thamire, Calidon, and Célidée, to express desires unequivocally. Sorel, however, transforms the debate of convention into a debate on literary conventionality. He demonstrates the uselessness of love debates to adjudicate conflicts in a judicial scene between Anselme, Montenor, and Lysis. He then continues to apply such polemical formats to the open-ended discussion of literary conventions. Sorel thereby succeeds in multiplying perspectives on esthetic values, the usefulness of

11

Introduction romances, and the relationship between the social and the literary imaginary. This study again poses the question of multiple agency and intention in chapter 4’s examination of emblematic, mythological, and allegorical elements. Both d’Urfé and Sorel borrow from the emblematic tradition to depict their characters’ desires. In L’Astrée’s intercalated story of Célidée, the heroine appropriates mythic and emblematic representation to assert her intentions in rhetorical debate. At question is the success or failure of her efforts to express herself unequivocally. Sorel uses the emblem as a device to criticize poetic metaphor and allegory in his and Crispin de Passe’s Portrait de Charite. This episode depicts both the rejection and reinvestment of such conventions in the protagonist’s affective life. This examination of the application of verbal and visual elements serves as a logical transition to the study of the verbal description of visual experience in scenes of specularity and physical transvestism in the next chapter. We treat the themes of specularity and transvestism together in chapter 5, since both d’Urfé and Sorel use them to depict the elusive identities of characters. D’Urfé transforms Ovid’s primal scene of narcissism into a device of enchantment, the Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour, in which one sees the other in oneself. Furthermore, for d’Urfé, the mirroring of Céladon anticipates this character’s transformation by means of transvestism. In contrast, Sorel prefers to collapse the two scenarios into one where the drag queens Lysis and Fontenay realize their desires through simultaneous cross-dressing and self-contemplation. Sorel exploits the mind-body divide to undermine d’Urfé’s incarnation of Neoplatonist ideals. He further questions this materialization of the abstract in his metanarrative commentaries in L’anti-roman. As a result of Sorel’s critique, the theme of transvestism will be divorced from that of metamorphosis in theater and novels to come. Chapter 6 turns to the figure of the tomb and the motif of death in L’Astrée and Le berger. We study them in light of the cultural research of Philippe Ariès and the tradition of literary pamphlets titled tombeaux. The tomb exerts a transformational force on the implied author and the characters in L’Astrée. D’Urfé uses the crypt to figure the death of the author and the

12

Introduction closure of his romance to biographical interpretation. In L’Astrée, the tomb also marks the death of Céladon’s first identity and the emergence of a second one as Alexis. In a critical gesture, Sorel adapts the tomb and the motif of death in his very characterization of the antiromance. “The tomb of novels and of the absurdities of poetry” separates old convention from the new by generating criticism and suggesting innovation. In an allegory of literary appraisal, the moribund shepherd Lysis first embodies literary conventions by imitating them, and then listens to their critique from other characters. Sorel uses this episode to highlight esthetic distinctions, such as idealism versus realism, the comic versus the tragic, the shepherd versus the pícaro, and fiction versus history and biography. Through the allegory of literary imitation and the definition of these esthetic oppositions, Sorel’s text-crypt functions like an echo chamber of literary technique and a compendium of critical appraisal meant to improve future fictions. The conclusion documents the innovation of themes and the new application of esthetic criteria to them in the development of the novel, theater, and narrative theory. Considering L’Astrée as a representative text, as a standard of novelistic convention, we briefly recapitulate the transformation of cross-dressing in Sorel’s antiromance and in literature to follow. This theme, meant in the romance to fulfill an ideal of love and to represent the self, is debased as a conventional strategy for characters who lead a more realistic or verisimilar existence in the world of the antiromance. We also trace the resonance of Sorel’s articulations of novelistic criteria—such as pleasure and edification, didacticism directed toward women, verisimilitude, and les bienséances—in his later criticism and in that of his contemporaries. This survey demonstrates Sorel’s role in a chorus of critical voices shaping the seventeenth-century French novel and theater.

13

Chapter One

Echoes of Desire and Intention The Mirroring of Utterances in Romance and Antiromance

Both d’Urfé and Sorel transform conventions that ancient, medieval, and Renaissance writers employed to express intention and desire in language: echoes, galimatias, and rhetorical citations. In the following analyses, we will witness the transformation of literary convention on the basic level of the utterance in a study of a long-standing mode of poetic expression: the echo, or rime couronnée. As experimenters, these authors go far beyond the simple stockpiling and redeployment of rhetorical and poetic figures; both writers put to the test the operation of linguistic signs by exploring their hidden meanings. They show that verbal signs, by virtue of their polysemic nature, suggest several intentions and motivations to characters in romance and antiromance.1 It at first seems paradoxical that d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s texts openly illustrate the presence of conflicting meanings in poetic figures, while they also stage this problem from the standpoint of a unified subject: that of the author engaged in a deliberate project of experimentation. This paradox specifically concerning verbal expression situates their works between Renaissance and neoclassical modes of rhetorical expression—the former being occupied with and drawing attention to the variation and amplification of its figures (Cave 3–34), and the latter hiding its own linguistic operations for the benefit of an illusionistic representation of abstract truth or social normativity (Lyons and Nichols 14–15; Barthes, Le degré zéro 42–43). By virtue of their paradoxical approaches to speech, d’Urfé and Sorel participate in a Baroque esthetics of linguistic expression. According to Sarduy, while the Baroque use of language refers to the object of its representation, it also refers to its own operations: 14

Echoes of Desire and Intention …retour sur lui-même, mise en évidence de son propre reflet, mise en scène de sa machinerie. La somme des citations et les émissions multiples de voix réfutent l’existence d’un centre émetteur un et naturel: en faisant semblant de nommer, le baroque siffle ce qu’il dénote, il l’annule: son sens, c’est l’insistance de son jeu. (83)

Never do d’Urfé and Sorel deny the constructed nature of subjective positions in the depiction of vocal performance. Indeed, they use scenes of echoing to explore the encoding of multiple, divergent subjective positions in language. Although d’Urfé and Sorel build their narratives from many of the same linguistic conventions, their approaches and ends contrast sharply. In L’Astrée, d’Urfé presents these writing practices as oral genres through which the characters strive regularly to express their affective lives. Some critics have wondered why Urfeian characters speak so much text that this conversational format makes up most of the action of the narrative (Ehrmann 35; York 16). This study proposes the following explanation: these characters recast or echo the speech of others with the purpose of appropriating it to express their own affect and intentions without interpreting the meanings and intentions already encoded within it. Because they are unwittingly at odds with the problem of loaded language distorting their own intentions, they are condemned to live a long series of psychological mystifications and misinterpretations. As a principle cause of their misfortunes, Urfeian characters do not recognize the artificial nature of their speech performance, for the narrator-authorial figure brings this constructedness and intertextual referencing only to the attention of the reader (Macary 29–39). In contrast, Sorel in his Berger extravagant makes the artifice and embedment of literary and rhetorical expression the conscious object of exploration for his characters, his narrator, his authorial figure, and his intended reader. For Sorel, psychological dynamics are reduced to the interactions between characters, who in an allegory of literary imitation embody different rhetorical and poetic devices, discourses of knowledge, and critical positions on the subject of literature itself. Sorelian characters consciously focus on their socially constructed roles as well as on their literary ones borrowed from scripted verbal 15

Chapter One performance and fictive playacting. These characters therefore speak on the closely overlapping levels of narrative and metanarrative in a conscious effort both to represent conventional speech and to interpret it. The result is a symphony of critical perspectives on the very linguistic devices that constitute the text. However, while this competition of critical appraisals reveals the meanings and intentions previously encoded in verbal expression, it denies any single, predominant critical appraisal of literary tradition. As a result, Sorel’s Le berger decodes pointed examples of hermetic verbal expression and simultaneously conceals the author’s overall intention in constructing an allegory of literary criticism. This chapter sets out to maintain and nuance the distinction between the pastoral romance’s inextricable inscription of subjective positions in language and the antiromance’s concurrent decoding of verbal convention and encoding of authorial intention. It proposes to highlight the approaches of each author’s narrative presentation of echoes. It will first examine the authorial figures’ comments concerning the problem of speech in the novelistic context. Then, beginning from the hypothesis that oral expression is no guarantee of the representation of a unified, monological subject because of its inclusion of other subjective positions, this study will explore the ramifications of such an assumption in the thematics of speech in the narratives.

The Distortion of Voice in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée D’Urfé finds a distorting function in the depiction of characters’ voices in L’Astrée. The representation of the voice can promise neither a mimetic rendering of a character’s social role, nor the constitution of a character’s fundamental identity. In the prefatory letter to the first part of L’Astrée, the authorial figure contrasts his title character’s language with that of real social referents: “Que si vos conceptions et paroles estoient veritablement telles que celles des bergers ordinaires, ils [les lecteurs] auroient aussi peu de plaisir de vous escouter, que vous aurez beaucoup de honte à les redire” (“L’autheur à la bergère Astrée,” I.7). The mere mimetic representation of real speech would conflict with the characterization of Astrée, and

16

Echoes of Desire and Intention would displease her readership. According to Harth, d’Urfé follows the tradition of elevated, aristocratic speech genres from the pastoral romance and theater, which are necessary for characterization in the self-referential, idyllic world of Forez (35– 48). Therefore, Astrée’s ideas and expression must be noble, and consequently different from those of lower-class speakers. By citing Torquato Tasso’s dramatic pastoral Aminta (performed 1573), d’Urfé proceeds to explain the force that transforms characterization through speech (Gaume 78). D’Urfé quotes the preface of Aminta where the god of Love describes his influence on the speech of pastoral characters: …la pluspart de la trouppe est remplie d’Amour, qui dans l’Aminte fait bien paroistre qu’il change et le langage et les conceptions, quand il dit: Queste selve hoggi raggionar d’Amore Sudranno in nova guisa, e ben parrassi Che la mia deità sia qui presente In se medesma, non ne suoi ministri Spireró nobil senzi à rozi petti Radolciró de la lor lingue il suono. (“L’autheur…,” I.7) Today these forests will hear Love reason In a new fashion, and one will clearly see That my divinity appears here In its own person, and not in that of its ministers. I shall breathe noble feelings into rustic hearts. I shall sweeten the sound of their tongues. (My translation)

D’Urfé announces that the transformational force of his characters’ wills and words is Love, who here seems to be an amalgamation of the allegorical personification of the emotion and the Greco-Roman god. This allegorical and mythological figure exists outside the hearts and minds of fictional characters, yet exerts an influence upon their ideas, feelings, and speech. As an outside influence and a reference to previous literary convention, this figure inspires in them feelings and voices that were not originally theirs, and thus, it mentally and linguistically transforms them.

17

Chapter One The prerequisite for speech becomes a possession by an ulterior consciousness, Love, who is the personification of a fundamentally transformational force. The characters’ thoughts, feelings, and voices become those of an “other” speaking through them, and as stated before, these new attributes thus differentiate them from the referents of real shepherds and shepherdesses, for their hearts become ennobled (“nobil senzi”). In another respect, their tongues become those of another agent (“lingue”) and this linguistic conflict between their original tongues and the tongue of another bars the fictional agents from psychological or subjective unification. This obstacle to the fictional character’s unification as a subject initiates the action of the novel itself. In the very opening page of L’Astrée, Love, as a god and allegorical figure, appears as a force that divides the characters against themselves in the assertion of his tyrannical rule: Et croi qu’ils n’eussent deu envier le contentement du premier siecle, si Amour leur eust aussi bien permis de conserver leur felicité, que le Ciel leur en avoit esté veritablement prodigue. Mais endormis en leur repos ils se sousmirent à ce flatteur, qui tost apres changea son authorité en tyrannie. (I.i.9)

In their state of somnolence (“endormis”), the characters take for granted the peace of their pastoral state, for they listen to the sound of this other consciousness, Love. As a flatterer, his eloquence prevents them from conserving a sense of self, and the desire he inspires fundamentally divides them (Judovitz, “Emblematic” 45–46). In the narrative scenes portraying speech acts, d’Urfé thematizes the problem of the embedment of other meanings and intentions in language and of the transformative impact it has on agents of enunciation. Silvandre consults an echo in a search for advice in his amorous exploits as if it were an interlocutor. The narrator, however, makes it clear that this illusionistic doubling of speech permits the shepherd to hear an alterity in his own words (II.i.9–11). This narrative sequence underlines the otherness in characters’ speech and shows how some manage to claim it as an accurate representation of their affective lives. 18

Echoes of Desire and Intention

Sorel’s Voices in Le berger extravagant Like d’Urfé, Sorel stages the problem of the subjectively destabilizing phenomenon of vocal expression. However, unlike d’Urfé, he presents an authorial figure in Le berger extravagant who explicitly announces that he subsumes a multiplicity of speech genres and tones under the control of his voice. Whereas d’Urfé presents the characters’ voices as divided and therefore resistant to particularization and individuation, Sorel claims to assign speech styles to social and novelistic archetypes in order to particularize them and employ them in his critical enterprise: [F]aut-il preferer de vaines paroles à de vives raisons? Et puis quel langage monstrueux est celuy que nos ignorans admirent? Je ne voudrois pas m’en servir que par mocquerie, & s’ils s’imaginent que le mien est bas & rampant; vrayment voyla de beaux esprits pour le connoistre; ce seroit bien à eux que je m’en voudrois rapporter. Qu’ils apprennent qu’outre mon stile general il y a plus de vingt stiles particuliers dedans mon histoire lesquels j’accommode aux divers personnages que je fay parler. (Rems., 749)

The authorial figure defends his style by saying that it employs reason instead of empty speech to make its point. He claims to subsume figurative language and narrative topoi under an overarching, general style for the sole purpose of transforming literary convention and generating its critique. In a seemingly self-conceited tone, the authorial voice in this passage presents itself as irreproachable, for it mocks the flawed judgment of its critics by mimicking their monstrous style. This voice establishes its own authority, by refusing to confer with possible respondents, that is, by delegitimizing concurrent voices outside the text. Nevertheless, the figure of the author in this passage allows for the presence of other styles, which it assigns as voices to characters representative of social types and literary roles. Sorel overtly intends to create a compilation of actions and utterances from previous literary and extraliterary sources and to subject them to critical appraisal both in the narrative itself and in the Remarques he appends to it. He strives to incite a polemic concerning the representative capacities of previous literary 19

Chapter One models by incorporating them in the imitative character of Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd: Au reste je me mocqueray de ceux qui diront qu’en blasmant les Romans, j’ay fait un autre Roman. Je respondray qu’il n’y a rien icy de fabuleux, & qu’outre que mon Berger represente en beaucoup d’endroits de certains personnages qui ont fait des extravagances semblables aux siennes, il ne luy arrive point d’avantures qui ne soient veritablement dans les autres Autheurs: tellement que par un miracle estrange, de plusieurs fables ramassees, j’ay fait une Histoire veritable. (Preface, Berger 15)

Similar to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the protagonist Lysis is deemed mad by the other characters, for he consciously imitates actions and speeches from other literary texts in order to live them as a social reality. Indeed, in agreement with Maurice Bardon (1: 107–45), Susan Mayfield considers Le berger to be a continuation of Don Quixote: Lysis, the protagonist of the novel, is based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote…. Since Don Quixote turned to an imitation of the pastoral life after renouncing the role of knight errant, and before his death-bed repentance, Lysis appears to take over where Quixote left off in his adventures. (164)

Although Lysis seems to continue Don Quixote’s last ambition to live an exclusively pastoral lifestyle, he also fashions his actions and casts his perceptions according to epic, sentimental, and poetic genres (Cervantes, Don Quijote 1544–51). For this very reason, the authorial figure calls his book a “recueil extraordinaire” and an “Histoire veritable” of other literary models, for it contains the topoi that truly exist in other fictions and poetry. Yet how does this narrative staging of themes that were commonplace for the early seventeenth-century readership constitute a critical history of literature? Sorel’s pretension to control and orchestrate styles of speech and literary discourse resembles what Bakhtin calls social heteroglossia in the Western European novel: that is, socially, professionally, and generically typified languages through which the author refracts his/her intentions (Dialogic Imagination 288–300). This gesture constitutes what Andrew Suozzo,

20

Echoes of Desire and Intention Jr., and Gabrielle Verdier consider the intertextual import of Sorel’s fiction (Suozzo 16, 130; Verdier, Sorel 62–64). Indeed, Kristeva’s reformulation of Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia as intertextuality is revealing of Sorel’s novelistic strategies. According to Kristeva, the introduction in the novel of an utterance from another text performs a set of distinct functions. First, utterances, which seem unequivocal in another literary context or in an extraliterary one, become ambivalent in the novel, for they then belong to two different realms of signification. Second, the author can then exploit the utterance of another subject for his/her own ends, for he/she renders its meaning relative. For Kristeva, the author creates a parody, if he/she introduces a meaning different from or opposed to that of the original utterance. However, if the utterance of the “other” alters the meaning of the borrowing author’s expression, this results in a “polémique intérieure cachée” (Shmeiwtikh; 93–94; Le texte 67–69, 90). Yet, the concept of intertextuality and its concomitant categories of linguistic ambivalence fall short of fully explaining the complexity of Sorel’s antiromance. In the case of Sorel’s Le berger, it is not clear whether the authorial figure can fully control the diverse styles of speech he musters in service of his polemic with literary tradition. The claim from the aforementioned Remarque is problematic in this respect: “…il y a plus de vingt stiles particuliers dedans mon histoire lesquels j’accommode aux divers personnages que je fay parler” (Rems., 749). Although his story contains these styles and he makes the characters speak, he must accommodate these utterances to the characters. Sorel’s implied author presents the agents of speech as subjects existing before the composition of the antiromance. He seems to grant his characters a certain autonomy as social and literary archetypes, for his assignation and transformation of their voices must be predicated on their traditional status as characters: “…en des narrations comiques, il faut faire parler chaque personnage selon sa portee” (Rems., 556). In assuming all styles under his general style as the subject of enunciation, this authorial figure is therefore torn between altering the speech of others and altering it for others. The authorial voice’s recognition of the freedom of characters within their archetypal limits plays a destabilizing role in its self-deployment in narration and critical

21

Chapter One commentary.2 It would then be arguable that the author’s voice, as well as the voices of the fictional characters, undergoes transformation of intention. Therefore Sorel’s work fits both of Kristeva’s categories of linguistic ambiguity resulting from intertextual play: namely, between parody and polemic. In this respect, Sorel’s antiromance anticipates what Bakhtin sees as polyphony in Dostoevsky’s novels, where the author-narrator is just one character among many who manifest a great degree of free choice in their espousal of ideas and whose thought thereby escapes finalization (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 5–100). In the larger narrative of Le berger, Sorel repeatedly stages the double problem of linguistic transformation through the deployment of many of the same themes present in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. In book I, Sorel re-enacts the scene of the prophetic echo from L’Astrée to demonstrate the discovery of the altering function of speech as a literary convention, for it requires the positive existence of an authorial voice to master and deploy the homonymic qualities of utterances.

D’Urfé’s Echo Both d’Urfé and Sorel write their novels at the end of a long poetic tradition that exploited the inherent ambiguity of echoed utterances. The echo of voices in verse dates back to pastoral poetry in the Greek Anthology (compiled circa 925 A.D.) and Ovid’s narrative poem of the myth of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses (Cuddon 209), and it appears in the medieval French tradition as early as the thirteenth century.3 Erasmus put it to the service of philosophical dialogue in the early-sixteenth century (De Juvenis et Echo), and it was assimilated as a conventional rhyme scheme by French Renaissance poets, such as Clément Marot, Joachim Du Bellay, Thomas Sébillet, and Estienne Tabourot, Seigneur des Accords.4 It was first codified as a verse pattern for love lyric by Gracien Du Pont in 1539 (Art et science de rhétorique métrifiée), and it was soon experimented with by the Moderns of the time. In the course of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the innovation of rhymes in echo, or rimes couronnées as they were called, were so overwrought with ludic manipulations that their

22

Echoes of Desire and Intention multiple echoes became hermetic. For instance, Tabourot and Sébillet both cite the following stanza as an example of poetic sens caché: En grand remords mort mords Ceux qui parfaicts faix faicts Ont par effort fort fort Des clers tous frais rez rais. (Tabourot 1: 161; Sébillet 152)

The amplification of homonymic signifiers results in a polysemic text that verges on the exhaustion of its meaning. Its audible and scriptural components prevent the emergence of a unified, lyric voice, for it challenges rules of semantic, grammatical cohesion and glories in the permutation of different, irreconcilable signifieds generated by a transforming signifier. The multiplicity of intentions and meanings was already inherent to the form by the time d’Urfé and Sorel composed their novels. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, echoing rhyme schemes were on the brink of death in the history of French lyric poetry.5 However, from the 1580s to the 1660s, they abound in English poetry, such as that of Sir Philip Sidney and George Herbert (Cuddon 209), and in Italian and French pastoral theater, where they accumulate a wider thematic and narrative significance. For example, in Guarini’s Pastor fido (1590), as an instrument of the god of Love, the echo has the oracular capacity to suggest to characters their unknown desires, which at first appear as unfounded illusions and then become reality. In Blanbeausault’s Instabilité des félicités amoureuses (Rouen: Le Villain, 1605), the echo also serves as a comic device to undermine characters’ assumptions of affect and identity, when a trickster hides to form the responses (Dalla Valle 193–94). D’Urfé innovated the use of the Guarini theme and Sorel that of Blanbeausault by adapting them to their novelistic contexts. In their explorations of the altering of language in its thematization as echo, both novelists preserved, monumentalized, and problematized a dying, poetic convention.6 In d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the shepherd Silvandre consults the nymph Echo with the belief that she will report Diane’s testimony of her true feelings for him. Silvandre says, “Echo qui 23

Chapter One habite en ce rocher, si nous l’en enquerons, nous en dira bien ce qu’elle a ouy de la bouche mesme de ma bergere, qui est l’oracle le plus certain que je puisse consulter” (II.i.9). At the outset, Silvandre’s comment reveals the initial presence of at least three sources of speech other than his own. First, the nymph Echo, “Fille de l’Air,” represents the mythological figure from Ovid. Second, Echo will deliver a report of the words of Silvandre’s beloved. Third, Silvandre’s initial subjective position is unclear, for he does not even pose as a unified subject of discourse—“je.” Instead, he employs the rhetorical “nous,” which either aligns the subject with a concept of modesty or majesty, or with an unidentified, thus far silent, subject, “non-je” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 41, 232). Even before the instance of discourse in the Echo scene, Silvandre embeds his position as a speaking subject in the presence of other silent and speaking agents. Using the poetic convention of echoing, d’Urfé has Silvandre project his voice and receive the audible reflection of his own speech. As implied in Sarduy’s notion of the function of Baroque language already mentioned, discourse reflects itself; in its return, this reverberation renders a semantic alteration and sometimes undergoes a phonetic distortion. On the level of versification, the poem contains its own response and therefore constitutes a dialogue with the first agent of enunciation, Silvandre: V C’est bien ta voix qui frappe mes oreilles: Mais ce secret, nymphe qui me conseilles, L’as-tu, dy moy, de ma Diane ouy? … VII Heureux cent fois aymé de ceste belle: Mais d’où sçais-tu que son cœur genereux Sera vaincu, si je luy suis fidelle?

Ouy.

D’elle. (II.i.10, 11)

Although the verse structure contributes to the illusion of an interlocutor—the nymph Echo reporting Diane’s utterances— the possibility of interlocution is inherent to the monologue of

24

Echoes of Desire and Intention the character. Yet Silvandre feels that he must respond to the echo, just as the author’s inclusion of such a convention responds to an established literary convention. Since Silvandre’s speech carries all the marks of a previous literary convention, of previous utterances of the beloved, and of the virtual responses to his inquiry, it does not come from him as the original subject or source of speech.7 Moreover, the inherent alterity in both poetic convention and speech enables them to embody their own contradiction, and it thus forecloses any possibility of positing truth outside of their illusion. The responses to Silvandre’s utterances exceed his expectations by negating his impressions of the beloved and the echo’s very pretension to oracular truth: II Que feroit donc cet œil qui me desarme Par sa douceur de toute sorte d’arme, Et qui promet m’aymer infiniment? … IV

Il ment.

Nymphe, qui sens dedans ces roches creuses Quel est le mal des peines amoureuses, N’auray-je donc jamais allegements? Je ments. Comment, Echo, n’est-ce point un blasmpheme De t’accuser et dire que tu ments? Ce que j’entens est-ce bien ta voix mesme? Ayme. (II.i.10)

First, the response to Silvandre’s inquiry concerning his credulity as to the visual impression of his beloved negates the credibility of sight to discern the truth of her feelings: “…cet œil qui me desarme / …Il ment.” Speech contradicts visual experience as a source of illusion, and disappoints the character’s anticipation of a confirmation of his desire. Then, the echoed utterance denies all its other oracular pronouncements: “Je ments.” All meaning generated in the act of enunciation has the potential to become different on the level of sound and contradictory on the level of semantics. The dialogue within a monologue, taken as a whole, appears ambivalent to the character, for he begins to question the unity of Echo’s subjective stance: “Ce que j’entens est-ce bien ta voix

25

Chapter One mesme?” Silvandre here questions whether it is the “very” voice of Echo as well as whether the voice is always “the same.” The character begins to suspect consciously the multiplicity of subjective positions presented by the reverberation. Nevertheless, this momentary perception of alterity in the responses succumbs to the pleasurable effect it eventually has on Silvandre. Echo commands the shepherd to love— “Ayme”—and then links his love to the desire of his beloved: “L’as-tu, dy moy, de ma Diane ouy?…Ouy.” Silvandre finds his beloved’s desire and his own confirmed in the illusion of communication with an interlocutor, since he believes the Echo gives him her benediction and prophecy: “Amant secret comme amant valeureux.…Heureux” (II.i.11). In the course of this scene, Silvandre finds himself in the problematic position of first being aware of the fundamental ambiguity in this illusionistic exchange and of then being pleased with giving credence to the illusion. Silvandre finds the most satisfying articulation of his desire in the enunciation of an illusionistic, mythological “other” (Judovitz, “Emblematic” 39). In an antithetical description of Silvandre’s thoughts, the narrator emphasizes the character’s contradictory stance on the illusion of communication: Encore que le berger n’ignorast point que c’estoit luymesme qui se respondoit, et que l’air frappé par sa voix rencontrant les concavitez de la roche, estoit repoussé à ses oreilles, si ne laissoit-il de ressentir une grande consolation des bonnes responces qu’il avoit receues, luy semblant que rien n’estant conduit par le hazard, mais tout par une tressage providence, ces paroles que le rocher luy avoit renvoyées aux oreilles n’avoient esté prononcées par luy à dessein, mais tout par une secrette intelligence du demon qui l’aymoit, et qui les luy avoit mises dans la bouche. (II.i.11)

All the while he is aware of the physical phenomenon of echoing, the character believes in the existence of an ulterior consciousness that places utterances in his mouth. The demon—“le Genie de ce rocher”—plays the allegorical role of a protective spirit destined to satisfy the desires of its ward.8 In the allegorical structure and pastoral thematics of d’Urfé’s text, the demon fulfills the fundamentally transformational force that

26

Echoes of Desire and Intention Love exerts on affect and speech, as in the author’s excerpt from Tasso’s Aminta. However, whereas the fictional character overlooks the contradictory structure of ambivalent utterances and favors the idea of an “other” consciousness guiding his desire and speech, the narrator underscores the illusionistic status of the character’s experience as a borrowed convention (“prononcées par luy à dessein”). In other words, the character is unaware that he is borrowing utterances from previous literary models and chooses to ignore that his speech is altered by reverberation; concurrently, the authorial figure consciously borrows the convention and recasts its elements to accommodate his plot and to explore the problem of ambiguity in literary language. By recasting the poetic and dramatic convention of echoes in his novel, d’Urfé invents the verbal equivalent of Baroque themes of visual figuration: namely, doubled characters and reflective pools, which reverse stable concepts of identity and the universe (Rousset 24–28, 61–65, 142–57, 161–64). Genette, in his analysis of these themes in Saint Amant’s Moyse sauvé, remarks their central importance for understanding Baroque poetics; since the writer always constructs his/her scenes with a “conscience aiguë de l’alterité” (Figures I 20), his/her characters are unable to conceive of identity in any manner other than through the mediation of otherness. Just as reflective fountains double the visual features of a character, the echo doubles Silvandre’s utterances, hopes, and desires without inspiring anxiety or alienation in him (Dalla Valle 195). D’Urfé is all the more original in having Silvandre consistently use the verbal illusion of texts and utterances of others to express his own deepest desires: for example, when the character locates his affect in letters written by others and when he woos his beloved through borrowed codes of courtly discourse. Let it suffice to say that d’Urfé was one of the first novelists to use poetic and dramatic conventions of echoing as a Baroque theme in a conscious experiment with alterity in language.9

Sorel Echoes d’Urfé When Sorel takes up the same literary convention and its mythological subtext in Le berger extravagant, he undermines

27

Chapter One its serious prophetic use in d’Urfé through comic, linguistic transformations, and literalizes the presence of two voices in one by having another character play the role of the interlocutor. Sorel’s narrator introduces the scene with textual and mythological references to emphasize the protagonist’s imitative madness: Lysis poursuivant tousjours son chemin arriva vers un costé de la montagne, & se souvenant que dans les livres qu’il avoit leu [sic], les bergers interrogeoient l’Echo en de pareils lieux que cestui-cy, il fut d’avis de les imiter, & de consulter cét oracle qu’il croyoit aussi infaillible que celuy de Delphe. (I.30)

This mise en scène both anchors the sequence in the tradition of literary echoes and establishes a clear link between Lysis and Don Quixote, both of whom organize their concepts of social reality according to literary models through imitation. Sorel further specifies the pastoral, novelistic model of imitation—d’Urfé’s L’Astrée—by citing examples of the echo in the Silvandre scene: Nymphe langoureuse, ce dit-il [Lysis] d’une voix éclatante, j’ay conté tantost mon tourment à tous ces deserts, l’as-tu bien ouy? [ECHO.] Ouy. … Hé pourquoy? tu dis que je m’en aille, & tu me promets de grands allegemens. ECHO. Je mens. Je pense que tu es folle; tu m’as asseuré de mon bien par un propos assez frequent. ECHO. Quand? (I.30, 31)

By citing d’Urfé, Sorel borrows the same linguistic embedment inherent to the rebounding utterance: the reflected report of the words of characters, the capacity of speech to deny the credibility of its own claims, and the first speaker’s surprise in encountering the negation present in his own enunciation. Moreover, both Silvandre and Lysis strive to locate their desire in the reverberation by suppressing their knowledge of the physical phenomenon. Yet Silvandre ignores the echo’s literary import, whereas Lysis fully entertains the notion that he is imitating (echoing) romances, poetry, and drama.

28

Echoes of Desire and Intention Sorel further reinvents d’Urfé’s scene by replacing utterances concerning spiritualized love with frank evocations of sexual desire. As a comic device reminiscent of carnivalesque images of the body so popular in the sixteenth century, the echo’s responses, full of sexual innuendo and derision, subvert Lysis’s use of Neo-Petrarchist figures and Neoplatonist notions of spiritual union in love: …ne raillons point, Nymphe mamie, de quelle sorte faut-il que je prenne ma maistresse pour faire que ma flamme diminuë? ECHO, Demy-nue, Que feray-je si je voy son teton descouvert? Le toucheray-je, veu qu’elle se faschera si je l’entrepren? ECHO, Pren. … Tout à cette heure, Bouffonne, l’as-tu oublié, & ne croys-tu plus que le cœur de Charite & le mien doivent estre estreints d’un mesme chaisnon? ECHO. Non. Ta prophetie est fausse: ma maistresse te fera mentir, & se moquera de toy. ECHO. De toy. De moy, je ne le pense pas…. (I.30, 31)

The character’s utterances, conventional to the traditions of elevated lyric and idealized pastoral, are vilified by the festive and burlesque images evoked by the echo. The euphemistic flame of love, so common to the works of Petrarch and La Pléiade (“ma flame diminuë”), turns into the desire for nakedness (“demy-nue”), and the enterprise of courtly wooing (“je l’entrepren”) becomes sexual ravishment (“pren”). Lysis is sensitive to the mockery of his conventional language and images, for he finds his idealized love frustrated by its linguistic and figurative opposite, lust. Through the poetic device of the echo and its inherent, linguistic transformations, Sorel stages the collision of the folkloric and popular with the Neo-Petrarchist love lyric, both of which were prevalent in the previous century.10 By the end of this scene, Sorel puts his character Lysis in a position of awareness quite different from that of d’Urfé’s Silvandre. When Lysis encounters the real producer of the echo, Anselme, he admits his surprise at the comic potential in the literary convention all the while he continues to believe in the illusion: 29

Chapter One Hé! quelle plaisante Echo est-ce icy? dit-il aussi tost: Elle ne repete pas mes dernieres syllabes, elle en dit d’autres. Comme il achevoit ces mots, Anselme sortant de derriere une longue muraille où il s’estoit caché, se vint monstrer à luy. C’estoit luy qui avoit tousjours fait l’Echo, mais il ne luy en confessa rien, encore qu’il en eust beaucoup de soupçon, & qu’il s’en enquist par plusieurs fois, tellement que Lysis, facile à persuader, lui dit que si ce n’estoit point luy, qui luy avoit respondu, il avoit veritablement trouvé un lieu où Echo se monstroit bien joviale, & que dans tous les livres de Bergeries, il n’avoit point veu qu’elle fust de si bonne humeur. (I.31)

In Anselme, Sorel presents a real interlocutor, who guides the use of the convention in much the same way an author would compose such a passage. Anselme thus poses as the agent consciously locating semantic otherness within utterances in order to parody the traditional pastoral. Even more importantly, Anselme maintains the illusion of the echo convention by not revealing to Lysis that he is the source of its alterity. Lysis consequently shares the belief of d’Urfé’s Silvandre that another consciousness must be responding, and like Silvandre he locates it in some mythological figure. In contrast to Silvandre, however, Lysis begins to learn of the self-parodying potential within literary devices of the pastoral tradition. Unlike Silvandre, who attributes the alteration of his own speech to the génie’s dictation, Lysis locates the transformation in the consciousness of Echo herself: N’est-ce point qu’elle en est devenuë folle, & que maintenant elle s’extravague? Je le croy pour moy, ou bien il faut qu’elle se soit enyvree. Asseurement c’est cela, dit Anselme en riant, la Nymphe Echo vient de faire collation au cabaret du Heaume, où elle a trop beu de vin de Suresne. (I.31)

Lysis finds that Echo is possessed by madness and that she departs from her usual course—and discourse (“elle s’extravague”).11 Inebriation causes her speech to depart from her archetypal and mythological characterization in pastoral literature and love lyric. In her authorial capacity to recast utterances, she is not only the consciousness that alters, but also the representative of altered consciousness. Lysis himself draws

30

Echoes of Desire and Intention the connection between the traditional, pastoral enterprise12 —a return to a Golden Age—and the Rabelaisian tendency to revel in wine and conviviality, which harbors no nostalgia for the prelapsarian world.13 Intoxication undermines Echo’s consciousness, which in turn undermines Lysis’s speech by confronting his statements of spiritualized love with images of the material body and sexual activity. Through the strategic evocation of folkloric, carnivalesque images of drunkenness, madness, and lower-body strata, Sorel travesties the master discourse of the pastoral. By “master discourse,” we mean a primary textual practice or speech genre that is expected to inform the plot within narrative and to represent predominant political ideologies and epistemological systems outside it.14 By echoing d’Urfé’s verses, Sorel’s antiromance both reflects its predecessor and subverts its storehouse of prepared speeches. Sorel’s subversion of the source of ulterior consciousness in echoing speech opens up the space in Le berger for a whole series of stagings and critiques of this pastoral convention: that is, a dialogic commentary that will echo throughout the rest of the narrative. In book II, Lysis and Anselme prepare for departure for Brie, which the shepherd takes for Forez, the real geographic setting of d’Urfé’s fiction. Anselme plays into Lysis’s madness when he announces that he has captured the nymph Echo in a box and plans to take her with them: “Sçachez que des hier me doutant bien que vous seriez fort aise d’avoir un semblable Oracle au païs ou nous irons, je l’ay voulu prendre pour l’y transporter…. Elle est maintenant enfermee dedans une boëte…” (II.94). As in the previous scene, Anselme plays the role of an authorial figure who manipulates the pastoral convention to create a comic myth. Although he convinced Lysis that Echo was a voice, now he convinces him that she can be manipulated like an object, which is transportable between fictional and real spaces; from the literary realms of pastoral poetry, drama, and romances, she can circulate between Brie, Saint Cloud, and Paris. More importantly, Anselme contravenes the Ovidian myth by containing her in a body; therefore, what was invisible as only an audible voice in a previous text becomes a visible figure in Sorel’s.15 Even more importantly, as a visible figure and an embodiment of voice, the Echo undergoes a process of emboîtement. This encasement

31

Chapter One figures her initial significance in the Urfeian text as a voice containing other subjective positions, her intertextual transportation into the Sorelian text, and her inherently disruptive function of decoding the grotesque in the elevated pastoral. Sorel thus has Lysis and Anselme alter the poetic devices and narrative themes constitutive of Echo in service of a project of literary transformation that demystifies the source of this prophetic speech. For Sorel as for d’Urfé (as opposed to his characters), the echo is neither an oracle, nor a nymph; instead it is a literary convention consciously manipulated by an author hiding behind the illusion.16 Sorel’s narrator reveals in another episode of poetic creation Lysis’s fundamentally duplicitous approach to echoing devices in particular and to literary conventions in general. In book IV, the shepherd recites a complaint in verse, “Plainte de Lysis,” which he himself supposedly composed and in which he includes the echo of his beloved’s name, “Charite, Charite, Charite.” His audience feigns admiration, except Montenor to whom Lysis defends his creation. The narrator states that Lysis chooses not to reveal the source of his invention: “…Lysis n’avoit garde de descouvrir que cette invention venoit de Clarimond” (IV.145). For Lysis to enjoy the praise of “his” writing, he must suppress the fact that he is not the original author. The narrator indicates the otherness that speaks through Lysis in the form of plagiarism and citation. The shepherd, however, must suppress all indications of such alterity in order to believe in the illusion of his original authorship. This problem parallels (echoes) Lysis’s use of the conventional, poetic echo, for he only repeats the beloved’s name. Since the repetitive refrain always designates the same referent, it neglects the differential function specific to homonymic wordplay. Just as Lysis’s echoing complaint suppresses semantic difference in its rhyme scheme, his approach to authorship seeks to hide ulterior subjectivity in writing. Lysis therefore accepts the encoding of others’ intentions and desires in his borrowed literary devices and utterances, but fears that anyone should decode the presence of alterity in his discourse. As much as Lysis may evince an “anxiety of influence,” the other characters, the narrator, and the authorial figure glory in influences, for they wel-

32

Echoes of Desire and Intention come a multiplicity of critical appraisals and authorial intentions in their metanarrative discussions. In book VI, the narrator presents the last scene of Echo and echoing verse. Anselme entrusts Lysis with the box containing the Echo of Saint Cloud, yet out of curiosity, the Extravagant Shepherd opens it and a bird escapes. He believes that he has lost the nymph (VI.242). The narrator then points out Lysis’s care to hide his deliberation, that is, his intentional manipulation of convention in his poetic creation of the echo: “…je seray quite pour dire qu’outre que le hazard dominoit beaucoup en cette affaire là, Lysis finissoit alors ses periodes par de certains mots qu’il avoit chosis [sic] dés longtemps” (VI.243). In order to eliminate sounds and meanings that would interfere with the inscription of his desire, Lysis has to script the echo. In all truth, Lysis feigns the role of the pastoral Don Quixote, because based on his care to master his own text, we know that he is conscious of the artificial nature of literary convention. Furthermore, the narrator’s observations put Lysis at odds with his own project. So that the character can pretend to take the illusion of the echo for a reality, he must suppress its constructed, scripted nature. While d’Urfé’s Silvandre believes that the source of authorship is a consciousness other than his own and forgets the echo’s illusionistic status, Sorel’s Lysis dissimulates his awareness of calculated authorship and conventionality. They also differ in the sense that Silvandre temporarily manages to situate his own desire in his imagining a demon or génie; in contrast, Lysis’s efforts to depict his own desire as expressed by another fail, for the very mechanism of the Echo/echo fiction escapes his mastery. Lysis is only left with a critique of his imitation of a poetic technique.

*** Both d’Urfé and Sorel revive the myth of Echo and manipulate it as a literary device. Nevertheless, this analysis of Echo/echo serves to draw a significant distinction between the novelistic worlds each author constructs. In Forez, d’Urfé’s characters encounter the ambiguity and alterity of speech as an illusory transparency: despite his knowledge to the contrary, Silvandre

33

Chapter One believes the Echo has given him a certain prophecy of the eventual realization of mutual love between himself and Diane. However, Urfeian characters find that modes of verbal expression, which once seemed transparent, become irresolvably ambiguous and mysterious (Macary 34–35). As we shall see in the following chapter, while intending to articulate the clearest expression of love, Silvandre and Diane must engage in a feint of courtship, which gives birth to false impressions and endless verbal games. D’Urfé’s characters, therefore, never free themselves from the doubts of linguistic illusion. Although Sorel’s fictional universe relies on d’Urfé’s adaptation of rhetorical and poetic practices to a Baroque thematics, it is split between literary and extraliterary discourses. The narrator and characters, such as Anselme, Montenor, and Clarimond, undermine Lysis with critiques of his imitation of conventions. Their actions and perceptions are based on literary representation as well as on received notions of social reality and the world current in early-seventeenth-century France. They engage Lysis in a dialogue with ancient literary criticism, Scholastic logic, natural sciences, world history, and political philosophy. They go so far as to recognize the coexistence of contingency and calculation in the production of fictions and poetry; they put the very mechanics of literary conventions in paradoxical relationships, which Lysis refuses to recognize because of his imaginary investment in a fictional world. Sorel, therefore, places his characters in a series of dialogic relationships with the apparent goal of curing the Extravagant Shepherd of his delusion. While d’Urfé’s L’Astrée is endlessly preoccupied with its own linguistic ambiguities in a selfreferential manner, Sorel’s Le berger refers to verbal conventions in literature with the ostensible intention of resolving their ambiguities.

34

Chapter Two

Verbal Travesty and Disguise Parody and Citation of Typified Languages

Two other devices employed by d’Urfé and Sorel to explore the problem of transforming literary language are verbal travesty and disguise. As in the use made by the two authors of echoing and discursive practices from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, their respective approaches to the use of verbal travesty and disguise differ widely. By recasting galimatias, rhetorical citations, and courtly codes of verbal expression, d’Urfé and Sorel have them reflect one another, much like echoes, to unleash the parodying and self-parodying powers specific to their narrative experiments. However, Le berger extravagant seems to cite discursive sources with the goals of explicit parody and criticism in the narrative and metanarrative. In contrast, L’Astrée allows the presence of literary and philosophical sources for two seemingly contradictory purposes: comic, self-parodying interludes and tragic complications in the extended plot. Similarly, while Sorel creates an antiromance in which characters are fully aware of borrowing speech genres from specifically literary traditions as disguises for critical scrutiny, d’Urfé never provides his characters with such an awareness, for they use verbal illusions as their sole means of personal expression in life. In other words, Sorelian characters constantly switch between encoding and decoding their borrowed utterances, whereas Urfeian characters are condemned to live in function of a series of hermetic verbal disguises whose decoding is constantly postponed. Both d’Urfé and Sorel introduce buffoons who transform their masters’ speech by citing it and discovering its comic potential. Both create episodes reminiscent of a long tradition of narratives of master-jester couples: the medieval dialogues

35

Chapter Two of Solomon and Morolf, the Renaissance chronicles of Pantagruel and Panurge, and the Golden Age novel of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Bakhtin, Rabelais 20; Genette, Palimpsestes 164–70). Like Lysis’s Echo of Saint Cloud, these clowns transform their social superiors’ utterances and texts, which are elevated and spiritual, so as to make them material and erotic. This travesty locates the converse of noble discourse in the original utterance in such a way that it produces a witty commentary on traditional master discourses. In the specific context of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narratives, these clowning travesties of master discourses work by means of linguistic transformation, narrative disorganization, and conceptual vulgarization and literalization.

D’Urfé’s Clowns D’Urfé presents clownish characters who transform the utterances of their masters by all these means, without excluding the pronouncements of the authorial figure himself. For instance, Fleurial, the nymph Galathée’s servant, acts as a gobetween for his mistress and Lindamor; but unfortunately because of his advanced age, he has a poor memory of his superiors’ messages and an even poorer ability for rhetorical disposition. He relates to the nymph Léonide and the shepherdesses of Forez a report from Lindamor: Je croy, Fleurial, me dit-il, (car il sçavoit mon nom, m’ayant veu bien souvent dans les jardins de Montbrison et dans le logis mesme de son maistre, lors que vous m’y envoyez) que tu as ouy dire les batailles qui ont esté gagnées sur les Neustriens par le roy, avec l’assistance toutesfois de Clidaman et de mon maistre. Je m’asseure aussi que tu as ouy parler d’une dame (il me la nomma bien, dit-il, s’addressant à Leonide, mais j’en ay oublié le nom) qui, s’habillant en homme, avoit suivy, d’un pays qui est de là la mer, un Neustrien qu’elle aymoit, et qui ressembloit tant à Ligdamon, qu’estant pris pour luy, il mourut, ne voulant point espouser une femme pour qui celuy-là s’estoit abattu, et avoit tué un homme, pour le meurtre duquel estant banny, il s’enfuit en ce pays que je ne sçay nommer, et depuis revenant, fut pris par un parent du mort. Et sans ceste dame dont

36

Verbal Travesty and Disguise je te parle, il eust esté entre les mains de la justice, mais elle combatit pour luy, et se mit en prison pour l’en sortir. Ce discours embrouillé de Fleurial fit rire les nymphes […]. (II.x.423)

D’Urfé borrows the name and figure of Fleurial from both literary and historical contexts: Fevrial or Le Fleurial served as the court jester under Louis XII and Francis I, and according to Helene Iswolsky, Rabelais patterned the character Triboullet the fool after him (Rabelais 504–10, 531–36; Bakhtin, Rabelais 8n3). It is clear from the fragments of direct discourse that Lindamor addressed Fleurial with tu, thus marking the servant’s inferior social position to nymphs and knights. Fleurial interrupts the flow of direct discourse with parenthetical remarks that fragment the master’s message. Moreover, his forgetfulness of names and confused use of pronouns scramble the identities of the subjects of his report. Fleurial also uses excessive subordination that jumbles the order of narration. All of these features suggest the comic technique of galimatias, or gibberish—a parody of rhetorical oration that dates from the medieval farces held during the Feast of Fools and that reappears in Rabelais as a comic version of Ciceronian narratio (Rabelais 256–70; Chambers 317). D’Urfé incorporates this comic form for a variety of reasons. First, it provides the nymphs and shepherdesses with a counterpoint to their youth, beauty, and eloquence; the young representing the Golden Age mock the infirmities of aging. Second, in the midst of tense political and amorous intrigue, the characters find distraction and amusement in the process of communication, which so often takes on an urgent and tragic tone. They find relief in knowing that a member of their class is safe and sound, yet the specific linguistic vehicle of such news seems trivial. Third, and most importantly, d’Urfé’s text has a space to parody its own rhetorical and narrative complications (Hersant, “L’Astrée” 8). Much of Fleurial’s style represents a hyperbolic version of the narrator’s, which relies on abundant pronominalization, subordination, and interruption. Not only does Baroque language have the capacity of self-reflection, as Sarduy suggests (Barroco 83), but it can also parody itself; it can subvert its own means of linguistic expression in a display

37

Chapter Two of their complexities and problems. D’Urfé thus reveals that the fool’s speech places narrative discourse on the brink of galimatias, that is, hermetism. D’Urfé does not limit the parodic space of his novel to a reflection on style and narrative technique; by having Hylas the Inconstant Shepherd recast philosophical precepts, he expands it to include a critique of ideas. Nevertheless, the author’s characterization of Hylas contrasts with that of Fleurial in two important respects. First, Hylas’s alternative, or libertine, discourse aims at what has been seen as the very conceptual core of the work: the aristocratic, Renaissance Neoplatonist code of love. Hylas therefore strikes at the very basis of the romance’s discursive and figurative modes of representation, that is, the conceptual script patterning the allegory of love and desire in L’Astrée. Second, Hylas speaks on equal footing with his cohorts and from that position parodies their verbal expression and reasoning; in contrast, Fleurial dialogues with his social superiors and thus fits better the archetypal role of the court jester. On par with Silvandre, Tircis, and Céladon, Hylas masters rhetorical forms of debate, handles and debunks complex theoretical concepts with ease, and even manages to apply his philosophy of pleasure-seeking more consistently and concretely than his counterparts, who translate their abstract doctrines of love into life with much difficulty. According to Louise Horowitz, Hylas’s principles of inconstancy seem more tightly integrated in the narrative as destabilizing factors than spiritual love and faithfulness, the mainstays of Neo-Petrarchism and Neoplatonism (84–86, 94–95). D’Urfé borrows the master discourse of spiritualized love that Hylas parodies from Italian Neoplatonist philosophers and writers: Leone Ebreo, Marsilio Ficino, Annibal Romei, Benedetto Varchi, and Pico della Mirandola.1 The foundational idea of Neoplatonic love—that the lover transforms himself into the beloved through spiritual death and rebirth in the other—was argued in philosophical tracts and thematized in love lyric in the course of two centuries before d’Urfé composed his romance. In L’Astrée, this abstract concept is re-articulated by numerous characters in poetry and philosophical debate throughout the narrative and by the authorial figure in the preface to part III.2

38

Verbal Travesty and Disguise As the proponent par excellence of the Neoplatonist concept of love, Silvandre proposes an argument based on the assumption of the separability of body and soul: Sçachez donc qu’il y a deux parties en l’homme: l’une, ce corps que nous voyons, et que nous touchons, et l’autre, l’ame qui ne se voit ny ne se touche point.… Or le corps ne voit ny n’entend, mais c’est l’ame qui faict toutes ces choses; de sorte que, quand nous aymons, ce n’est pas le corps qui ayme, mais l’ame, et ainsi ce n’est que l’ame qui se transforme en la chose aymée et non pas le corps. (II.vi.263–64)

Despite the difference in narrative levels, it seems that the authorial figure echoes the character Silvandre’s espousal of the Neoplatonist maxim of spiritualized love. According to the figure of the author: ...Aymer que nos vieux et tres-sages peres disoient Amer, qu’est-ce autre chose qu’abreger le mot d’animer, c’est à dire, faire la propre action de l’ame. Aussi les plus sçavans ont dit, il y a long-temps, qu’elle vit plustost dans le corps qu’elle ayme, que dans celuy qu’elle anime. (“L’autheur à la riviere de Lignon,” III.7; d’Urfé’s emphasis)

The implied author and the fictional character differ on this point in at least two respects. First, the authorial figure uses a false etymology to demonstrate his point, whereas Silvandre employs a syllogism. Second, the figure of the author explains the maxim as a transfer of souls between lover and beloved; yet the shepherd explains it as a spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, their arguments have the same conclusion: the possession of the body by another soul. In a majority of the evocations of Neoplatonic love in d’Urfé’s romance, the same conclusion is reached, though the rhetorical means to reach it are constantly reformulated. These permutations of Neoplatonist discourse have led critics of L’Astrée to explain the cases of physical transvestism, verbal disguises, and courtly love in function of this one conceptual base (Magendie, L’Astrée 95–105; Charron 3–13). The shepherds and shepherdesses of Forez find the written expression of Neoplatonist and courtly tenets in the form of

39

Chapter Two laws. In their search for Céladon, they come across his “Temple de la déesse Astrée,” filled with inscriptions, prayers, a portrait of the goddess, and an emblem. The emblem is composed of a motto, a painting of two Cupids, and a list of laws, “Les Douze Tables des Loix d’Amour,” inscribed by Céladon (II.v.181–83). They prescribe the courtly roles of the parfait amant and the dominant beloved (Première and Deuxième Tables), and they express the Neo-Petrarchist notions of the lover’s self-sacrifice (Troisième, Quatrième, and Cinquième Tables), and of his desire, which keeps him on the brink of life and death (Huitième Table). Silvandre echoes his own and the implied author’s espousal of Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonist ideal of love, as he reads aloud the “Neufiesme Table”: Mesprisant son propre sejour, Son ame aille vivre d’amour Au sein de celle qu’il adore, Et qu’en elle ainsi transformé Tout ce qu’elle aime et qu’elle honore, Soit aussi de luy bien aymé. (II.v.182–83)

As Ficino himself states in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium: Quotiens duo aliqui mutua se benevolentia complectuntur, iste in illo, ille in isto vivit. Vicissim huiusmodi homines se commutant et seipsum uterque utrique tribuit, ut accipiat alterum. (Ficin 156–57) Every time two beings surround one another with mutual kindness, one lives in the other and the other in the one. Such men alter themselves entirely in turn and each gives himself to one in order to receive the other. (My translation)

The sextet recapitulates Ficino’s notion of a transfer of souls: the soul of the lover leaves its “sejour,” the body, and goes to reside in the beloved in order to enter into identity with hers (“en elle ainsi transformé”). The last two lines of the law rephrase the concept of the emblem’s motto mentioned above: “NOS VOLONTEZ DE MESME NE SONT QU’UNE” (II.v.179). The

40

Verbal Travesty and Disguise lover’s will and desire become those of the beloved as a result of this spiritual exchange. Here the characters encounter another echo of the spiritual transfer and transformation expressed by the implied author and Silvandre, informed by Ficino. Hylas manages to transgress such a code not only because of his inconstant nature and resulting disbelief in parfait amour, but also through his treatment of it as a text susceptible to rhetorical transformation. He sneaks into the Temple, comes across the “Loix d’Amour,” and begins changing some lines, which in turn shed a different light on those he leaves unaltered: Estimant son propre sejour, Son ame en soy vive d’amour, Et non en celle qu’il adore, Sans qu’en elle estant transformé, Tout ce qu’elle ayme et qu’elle honore, Soit aussi de luy bien aymé. (II.v.196–97)

Privileging an empirical approach over abstract metaphysics in the first four lines, Hylas questions the Neoplatonist idea of a transference and transformation of souls. Hylas subverts the code by replacing certain terms with their opposites (“Estimant” for “Mesprisant”) and simple negations (“non” and “Sans qu’”). In accordance with his doctrine of self-interest, both love and the soul reside in the self.3 Although the last two lines remain the same as Céladon’s, their connotation changes in light of the four previous lines. Given that love and desire are relocated in the lover as a “self-determining subject,” to use the language of James Hembree, what the beloved loves becomes a series of objects of the lover’s desire. The transformation of the self-abnegating love into libidinal investment reflects well Hylas’s pleasure-seeking approach to courtship. Hylas’s parodic discourse, however, does not limit its impact only to Silvandre’s and Céladon’s philosophical articulations, for it puts into question those of the implied author as well. According to Horowitz, d’Urfé as the writer outside the text “maintains an authorial vacuum” (85), that is, in view of our argument, a distance in respect to the representation of the authorial figure itself. Furthermore, this distance allows for a

41

Chapter Two dialogic relationship between characters and the implied author depicting them. Hylas therefore does not serve as an incidental exception to courtly values and to the Neoplatonist theme of love in narrative.4 Instead, Hylas’s comments bridge the gap between antitheses: on the one hand, Neoplatonist philosophy, and on the other, its empirical, materialist, and libertine counterparts, which privilege experience over abstraction, in the Baroque allegorical narrative of verbal and physical disguise.

Verbal Disguises in L’Astrée In d’Urfé’s romance, characters adhering to courtly values and philosophical precepts also wear verbal disguises. Yet their principal intention is not travesty, but self-expression. Since their conventional means of expression lend themselves to feint as well as to sincere communication, characters misrepresent their innermost feelings in spite of themselves. They also find themselves subject to spiritual and emotional metamorphoses imposed by conventional speech. Silvandre, the “desdaigneux” and “insensible” Neoplatonist (I.vii.241; III.ix.499), does not expect that the disguise of courtly discourse will transform him spiritually and make him a lover. In the intermittent narrative of the “gageure,” he and Phillis bet that they can win the love of Diane by pretending to woo her in the medieval courtly tradition (I.vii.242–45). Soon, however, the pretense that Silvandre constructs in part I of L’Astrée incites a change of heart and soul.5 Silvandre finds that his apparently superficial appropriation of courtly speech and behavior mocks his own principles, according to which the soul is the self-determining source of all transformations. Silvandre’s essentialism fails once he dons a verbal disguise, for outward expression comes to transform his interior disposition and essence. The appropriation of the courtly register by Phillis also constitutes a disguise, for in presenting her friendship of Diane as love, she enacts a verbal gender reversal: “…depuis ce temps, Phillis fait si bien la passionnée qu’il n’y a berger qui s’en sceut mieux acquitter” (II.vii.293; my emphasis). The language of courtship allows Phillis to transform the friendship between

42

Verbal Travesty and Disguise females into love on a par with that between members of the opposite sex: …je veux croire que vous ne serez pas demeurée sans estonnement de voir Phillis, qui est bergere, la serve comme si elle estoit un berger, et use envers elle des mesmes paroles et des mesmes actions que les plus ardentes passions peuvent faire produire dans le cœur d’un amant le plus affectionné, parce que ce n’est pas la coustume de voir une fille servir avec de semblables soings une autre fille. (III.ix.499)

Phillis transforms the courtly code from an opposite-sex expression of affect to one between members of the same sex. Léonide’s comments above illustrate how d’Urfé transgresses the social and sexual presuppositions of the medieval tradition. Phillis’s appropriation of the language of courtly love is contrary to her original character, because in the context of the social norms of sexual difference in Forez, it is contrary to her gender. Other characters undergo transformations of affect or identity by means of verbal disguise, as they engage in conversations using the language of courtly love. Just before the first scene of the gageure, Diane told the story of her exclusive love for Filandre: this shepherd disguised himself as a shepherdess to be close to Diane and, to woo his beloved, verbally disguised him/herself as a male courtly lover (I.vi.196–236). Diane has already destined herself to love a deceased character: she herself says that she “aimera jusques au cercueil son cher Filandre” (I.vi.236). However, the similarity in names of the past and future lovers—Filandre and Silvandre—suggests Diane’s transfer of affection in a new series of disguises (Horowitz, 103–04). The superficial feint of courtship also transforms the affective disposition of Diane. She soon finds herself in the same situation as Silvandre: “…depuis la mort de Filandre, elle n’avoit jamais eu ressentiment de bonne volonté, que pour ce berger [Silvandre]” (III.i.18). Moreover, Diane learns the sincerity behind Silvandre’s verbal disguise: “Tels estoient leurs [d’Astrée et de Silvandre] discours, par lesquels Diane cognoissoit que veritablement elle estoit aimée” (II.iii.90).

43

Chapter Two However, for purely social considerations, Diane refuses to recognize openly Silvandre’s verbal illusion as evidence of a sincere expression of affection. She reasons to herself: Est-il raisonnable que Diane qui a tousjours esté en consideration parmy les bergers de cette contrée, espouse un berger inconnu, et qui n’a rien que son corps, et ce que sa conduitte luy peut acquerir?… Et cette consideration est cause que je suis entierement resolue de souffrir sa recherche et son affection, tant que je pourray feindre de ne la croire. (II.vi.271)6

While alliance according to rank and privilege seems to be Diane’s ostensible reason for maintaining the fiction, her selfimage as faithful to one (Filandre) and cold to all others (Silvandre) motivates her to prolong Silvandre’s linguistic playacting (II.vii.293) and her own (“feindre de ne la croire”). Yet the deferral of the decoding of this collaborative verbal disguise only leads to the production of other illusions, that is, other instances where Silvandre’s words are thought to include meanings and desires that are not his own. Linguistic disguise escapes the mastery of the characters, for they find themselves transformed by it despite their original identities, and the verbal feint, once public, generates false impressions. The linguistic devices of courtly discourse, which traditionally work to address affect to a single object, direct it to several people. Lycidas interprets Silvandre’s attentions to Diane as directed to his own beloved, Phillis, because the three characters are so often together (II.vii.293–94). Only much later does Lycidas recognize his misinterpretation of Phillis and Silvandre’s pretense when he surprises them in a hostile conversation (II.xi.457–64). Linguistic encoding therefore exceeds the original intentions of its authors, for it is subject to its own self-generative differences in meaning and to the erroneous decoding by the social group. Despite their efforts to make courtly discourse an unequivocal disguise, Diane, Silvandre, and Phillis unleash its fundamental ambiguities, that is, its capacities to express a multiplicity of intentions and to inspire a variety of real affective states. Even at the point of supposed demystification of affect, Diane’s words fail to resolve linguistic ambiguity. When the

44

Verbal Travesty and Disguise characters made the gageure, they chose Diane to judge which suitor performed best. After listening to arguments from Phillis and Silvandre (III.ix.501–19), Diane gives her evaluation: “…veritablement Phillis est plus aymable que Silvandre, et que Silvandre se sçait mieux faire aymer que Phillis” (III.ix.520). While the pastoral community expects that Diane will decide who feigns the best, Phillis and Silvandre anticipate her choice of the most sincere, most “real” lover. In other words, the two competitors wait for her to express her clear intention, her unequivocal desire; of course, Diane’s judgment is couched in ambiguity. Although Diane says that she wants to “ne laisser personne en doute de nostre intention” (III: ix, 520), that is exactly what her words do. The declaration of her intention and what her judgment describes are contradictory. This ambiguity forces the characters to debate the intention of her words, while she refuses to break her silence (III.x.521–35). Instead of expressing her desire—a contravention of the dictates of courtly love—Diane simply allows Silvandre to feign feigning, to wear the mask of verbal disguise, in his continued pretense of declaring his love for her (III.x.537, 572–73), even though both Diane and Silvandre know that he really loves her. Because of its capacity to create real affects and to generate multiple layers of fiction, verbal disguise will continue to escape the mastery of these characters. This problem is also largely due to the characters’ contradictory approaches to the feint: they use disguise as a means of disclosure through encoding and decoding. Silvandre believes that as long as he can continue this way, he can hide his true feelings from society, while he unequivocally discloses them to Diane. Diane believes that as long as she engages in this dialogue with Silvandre, she can accept his clear expression of desire as real, while she hides from both society and Silvandre her pleasure in hearing it. They both fail in their enterprises, for they use the language of courtship at cross-purposes, which results in a long series of ambiguously encoded messages, misinterpretations, and misunderstandings.7 In these examples of verbal travesty and disguise, d’Urfé suggests a number of perspectives on the nature of typified languages in his own text. First, he uses Fleurial’s speech to provide an exaggerated reflection of his own writing style and

45

Chapter Two narrative technique. In doing so, d’Urfé illustrates how he produces rich ambiguities in the representation of action, identity, and intentionality. Second, d’Urfé has Hylas rewrite the chivalric and Neoplatonist code of love by putting him in a dialogic relationship with the philosophically minded characters and the implied author. Hylas wittily reveals the reversibility of concepts by rhetorical transformation and the comic connotations of official discourses in light of such manipulations. Third, Diane and Silvandre’s story dramatizes the dysfunction of the abstract in the face of intersubjective experience through language: it is not a spiritual transformation that causes a verbal disguise, but it is the disguise itself that effects a real metamorphosis of the soul. In all of these examples, d’Urfé not only depicts the richly encoded nature of language apt for transformations, but he also underscores its self-reflective and reifying functions in the fictional world of his romance. Nevertheless, one can draw a clear distinction between the buffoons’ verbal travesties and the lovers’ linguistic disguises. On the one hand, Fleurial’s speech has no direct, explicit impact on the plot; it intervenes momentarily to offer a perspective on the discursive practices in the narrative. On the other hand, the feigned, courtly speech of Diane and Silvandre leads to a series of catastrophes that span the whole course of the plot and thus resist resolution or demystification. Consequently, d’Urfé’s treatment of verbal travesty and disguise creates a difference in tone: the comic versus the sentimental and tragic. Furthermore, L’Astrée’s diversity in tones suggests the tension between narrative and nascent metanarrative; even though the comic characters circulate in the same narrative as their melancholic, sentimental counterparts, they begin to set themselves at a critical distance from the official discourses that represent their world. The lovers cannot achieve this critical distance from courtly codes, echoing oracles, and verbal masks, because they are condemned to live these illusions.

Verbal Travesty and Disguise in Le berger extravagant In Le berger extravagant, Sorel uses verbal disguise and travesty to generate a more continuous, more fully developed metanarration; and unlike d’Urfé, he puts these themes to the

46

Verbal Travesty and Disguise sole task of parody. Sorel strategically presents ambiguous speech as the perfect occasion for critical commentaries on literary expression. At one extreme, Lysis feigns to take no critical distance either to the texts he reads or to the utterances he cites in his effort to live their illusions.8 At the other extreme, characters such as Clarimond, Anselme, and Philiris explicitly display a critical distance in relation to literature as an illusion. Nonetheless, these critically minded characters do differ in that they do not agree on the role literature plays in the social imaginary (Mayfield 164–90). In between these two extremes, we find Carmelin, Lysis’s valet, who imitates his master imitating literature and who unwittingly reveals the fundamental ambiguity and comic substrate of the protagonist’s utterances. In the grand scheme of Sorel’s antiromance, the narrator, the characters, and even the figure of the author consciously imitate conventions of speech from literary and extraliterary sources, which are explicated and evaluated by the implied author in the metanarrative, or Remarques. It is in this running commentary that Sorel unlocks problems of linguistic ambiguity and considers them as a social as well as an esthetic phenomenon. In this respect, almost all the linguistic disguises in Le berger become travesties of language. All the characters cite texts and socially typified speech genres; and in their act of citation and reformulation of these utterances, they are often contradicted and mocked when other characters comically transform their words or refute their ideas.9 Lysis’s disguise of elevated literary language and its inadvertent travesty by Carmelin serve as the best examples of comic, linguistic transformation. However, characters critical of literary convention, such as Clarimond, make much more deliberate attempts at parody.

Sorel’s Clowns Sorel’s Carmelin appears as an amalgamation of Cervantes’s Sancho Panza and d’Urfé’s Fleurial. When Lysis first meets him in book IV, Carmelin is a wandering peasant, a pícaro of sorts. In between jobs, he thinks of his stomach first and foremost; he thus jumps at the opportunity of Lysis’s promise to live a life of ease in the pastoral, fictional world. Moreover,

47

Chapter Two just like Sancho, Carmelin does not understand his master’s literary references. All he has learned are lieux communs from anthologies: …Carmelin estalla le plus beau de son sçavoir, & discourut sur la temperance. Il estoit aisé à connoistre à tout le monde excepté à Lysis, qu’il parloit comme un parroquet, & qu’il sçavoit par coeur des choses qu’il n’entendoit pas: car il prononçoit mal les mots, ne s’arrestoit point au bout d’une période, & ne haulsoit ny ne baissoit sa voix. (IV.166)

Sorel has created a composite character of Cervantes’s Sancho and d’Urfé’s Fleurial. The continuous flow of speech resembles that of Fleurial: a logorrhée or galimatias that does not stop at the end of one thought, but pours into the next. Just as Sancho cites and unwittingly transforms proverbs, Carmelin does the same to commonplace quotes. In the tradition of carnivalesque humor, both Cervantes and Sorel have their clownish characters inadvertently locate equivocal suggestions in official discourses through homonymic and anagrammatical changes (Bakhtin, Rabelais 86). Furthermore, neither Sancho nor Carmelin fully understands the meaning of the original text and the import of its semantic mutilation. The figure of the author considers this curious mixture of wit and linguistic incompetence the definitive aspect of Carmelin’s personality: Si l’on considere qu’il [Carmelin] faisoit tousjours des aequivoques, qu’il attendoit sa consolation d’une collation, & qu’il prenoit des grottes pour des crottes, l’on ne s’estonnera pas s’il prend encore icy beaucoup de mots les uns pour les autres, c’est pour monstrer qu’il est tousjours luy mesme. (Rems., 608)

Carmelin is consistent in his citation and comic reformulation of official discourses; he is able to take an utterance from an elevated register and translate it to lower body stratum. In the whole course of Le berger, he locates grotesque otherness in the humanist canon of the Renaissance as well as in the contemporary corpus of literature in the vernacular: lyric poetry, drama, and chivalric, sentimental, and pastoral romances.

48

Verbal Travesty and Disguise Carmelin repeatedly performs these comic reformulations through the imitation of his master’s discourse. Sometimes the valet of the mad shepherd finds a simple homonymic suggestion in the repetition of a phrase; sometimes he translates a whole narration in comic terms, which counters his master’s imaginary investment of experience. Just as Fleurial and Sancho Panza have difficulty relaying messages from their masters because of their forgetfulness of the original utterance, Carmelin forgets the script of amorous compliments written and borrowed for him by Lysis. Lysis attempts to teach his valet the language of courtship and writes down the phrase for him to recite. Carmelin first manages to repeat it word for word: Belle Bergere, puis qu’un bien heureux sort m’a icy amené, & que vos yeux semblent ne me vouloir blesser qu’avec des coups delectables, il faut que je vous manifeste que j’ay esté surpris dans tous vos attraits qui se font bien sentir malgré que l’on en aye. (VI.227)

Like an acting coach or a teacher of rhetoric, Lysis has him imitate postures and gestures to be performed during the speech. Carmelin, however, fails to imitate and assemble all the elements of this artifice, and thus emphasizes its fundamental ridiculousness: Belle Bergere, puis qu’un bien heureux sot m’a icy amené, & que vos yeux semblent ne me vouloir laisser qu’avec des fous detestables, il faut que je vous manie les fesses: car j’ay esté surpris dans les trous de vos retraits qui se font bien sentir, malgré qu’on en aye. (VI.228)

Carmelin is not immediately aware of the reversal of meaning his repetition accomplishes: a compliment for the beloved is now addressed both to her (“fesses,” “les trous de vos retraits qui se font bien sentir,” “qu’on” = “con”) and to his instructor (“un sot,” “des fous detestables”). He is, however, somewhat conscious of the source of his verbal travesty: “…je songe si fort à la grace du geste que je pers la memoire du discours. La ressemblance des paroles me fait prendre les unes pour les autres” (VI.228). His effort to reconcile action with speech

49

Chapter Two makes him focus on one to the detriment of the other. More importantly, Carmelin accidentally finds differences in meaning through the homonymic resemblance of words. Sorel thus demonstrates the impossibility of linguistic imitation without semantic distortion; that is to say, in Carmelin’s attempt to copy Lysis’s script, instead of reproducing it, he transforms it and decodes its homonymic resonance. Indeed, the elevated expression of love and admiration in metaphoric terms becomes, through transformation and decoding, its opposite: an expression of sexual desire and insult. Lysis’s hostile response to Carmelin’s verbal travesty is very revealing of the fragile, illusory roles the feigned shepherd constructs for himself: a reader, an imitative writer, and a teacher. As a reader, Lysis is not sensitive to the semantic differences encoded within phonetic resemblance. As in the initial scene of the Echo of Saint Cloud, he pretends to believe that if a difference in meaning arises through homonymic or anagrammatical resemblance, it must be attributed to a consciousness other than his own. As an imitative writer, he presupposes that the copy or repetition of a word guarantees the singular identity of sound, meaning, and register. As a teacher, he holds that language is a transparent, unequivocal medium, through which knowledge passes unhindered, and that all gestures of indication designate a single referent. If a misunderstanding arises in the pedagogical scene, it must be the fault of the student (again, a consciousness other than his own). Lysis therefore interprets Carmelin’s inadvertent response as a deliberate travesty of his words and mockery of his beliefs. It is the critique of citations and of literary mimicry that Lysis must suppress in order to live the illusion of the pastoral world. In other instances, Carmelin’s unintentional subversions through comic, linguistic transformation and decoding aim beyond the level of citations to comment on Lysis’s physical imitation of previous narratives. When Lysis is spurned by his beloved, Charite, he believes himself to be transformed into a weeping willow in the tradition of Ovid. Carmelin responds to his master’s imitation by reporting the comments of the critical characters: …je vous asseure que ces Messieurs qui viennent de partir d’icy, & qui sont fort vos amis, s’en moquent tout à fait, &

50

Verbal Travesty and Disguise vous l’avez bien apperceu. Pour moy je leur ay ouy dire que vous vous imaginiez estre encore au temps des Payens, qui tenoient pour article de leur foy toutes vos metaphorimoses, (je ne sçay comment vous apellez ces engins là) & que c’est de là que vient tout vostre mal. (V.191)

Carmelin plays the explicit role of a messenger of critique, for he reports the words of other characters. He is the origin of critical commentary insofar as he recasts terms for literary devices and themes in his own language: “metaphorimoses” = metaphor + metamorphoses. Through this comic verbal combination, Carmelin unwittingly reveals to his master the mechanisms of artifice subtending the literary imitation: the change in physical appearance corresponds to a metaphoric relationship made by an author. In this instance, the forms of the weeping willow and the sorrowful lover find their relationship in the act of crying. Sorel here uses Carmelin as an echo both of the internal mechanisms of Lysis’s imitations and of the detractors of source texts. Commenting on Lysis’s transformation into a tree, the authorial figure explains Carmelin’s verbal game and Lysis’s responses as a spoken form of supplement to the texts of literary tradition: Carmelin fait des equivoques rustiques, & tient des propos vulgaires; comme par exemple il dit à son maistre qu’en trois de ses mots, il y en a tousjours quatre que l’on ne peut comprendre. L’on prendroit cela pour une niayserie fondee sur une chose impossible, ce qui neantmoins seroit pardonné à un tel homme: mais il vaut mieux conserver sa reputation, & luy faire accroire qu’il entendoit que Lysis ayant dit trois mots en langage inconu [sic], n’estoit pas si tost prié de les expliquer, qu’il en disoit quatre, voire dix autres moins intelligibles. (Rems., 606)

This comment suggests a multiplicity of observations on the encoded nature of supplement and its sources. Carmelin’s misapprehension of Lysis’s imitative utterances and actions provokes questions from the valet and explanations from the feigned shepherd. However, Lysis responds with either threats or references to the literary corpus, to which Carmelin is not privy. Since Lysis’s spoken comments constitute an unintelligible

51

Chapter Two supplement that further encodes and complicates his imitations, all Carmelin can do is forge new words from Lysis’s language to form a supplement of his own in order to decode his master’s models. What is surprising is that Carmelin the wordsmith explains Lysis’s models of imitation better than Lysis himself! Indeed, the implied author, the narrator, and the other characters also generate this supplement of decoding, which constitutes a metanarrative—a combination of literary and extraliterary discourses summoned alternatively for the defense and the indictment of literary conventions. Again, Lysis proves to be the catalyst of supplementarity and decoding, for he is the object in relation to which other agents take a critical and interpretive stance. Clarimond’s comic portrayal of the mythological figure of Jason in a dramatization of The Story of the Golden Fleece, serves as proof for the global use of verbal disguise and travesty by other characters and the mechanism of critical supplementarity it produces. Typified as the enemy and satirist of literature, Clarimond is ridiculed and silenced by the other characters, while he is in the midst of a harangue against poets and their literary devices (IX.341–42). Thwarted in his effort to pronounce explicitly his criticism, Clarimond proposes that the characters write and stage a play in which each actor will embody a style of speech, both literary and extraliterary: allusions, equivocations, metaphor, hyperbole, galimatias, antitheses, pedantry, etc. (IX.350–51). Because social convention temporarily prevents Clarimond from communicating his critique of literature, he must accomplish it from within the confines of literary conventions themselves, that is, through an act of encoding a critique to be decoded later by the implied author in the Remarques. Like Carmelin’s verbal travesty, Clarimond echoes and distorts heroic fictions by transforming the linguistic devices representing them. By contrast, Clarimond consciously constructs his and the other characters’ comic speeches by scripting them. Similar to d’Urfé’s Fleurial, the critic selects as his style of choice galimatias—a speech of redundancy and antitheses whose contradictions decompose intelligible meaning: …Belle ame de mon ame, desir de mon desir, sejour de mes conceptions, ne faut il pas que vous croyez que ma fran-

52

Verbal Travesty and Disguise chise s’est immolee sur l’Autel de voz beautez? Depuis que je vous connoy je suis merveilleusement amoureux d’une si amoureuse merveille, & je ne cherche plus qu’a mourir pour vous d’une vivante mort qui vale mieux qu’une mourante vie. Que si vostre attrayante douceur, se change en une cruauté si cruelle que vous me mesprisiez cruellement, & que le pouvoir par qui vous pouvez me guerir trouve de l’impossibilité dans sa puissance, je ne doute pas que mon infortune amoureuse & mon amour infortunee ne me precipitent precipitamment dans un precipice. (IX.363)

In the format of galimatias, Clarimond uses a series of poetic and rhetorical devices: personification (“ma franchise s’est immolee”), metaphor (“immolee sur l’Autel de voz beautez”), antitheses (“vivante mort,” “mourante vie”), and pleonasm (“pouvoir,” “puissance”). To mock the language of courtship, Clarimond motivates his role Jason to exhaust the meaning of this speech; the dramatic figure pronounces antitheses that negate meaning through contradiction and repeats words whose meaning is lost in tautology. Clarimond’s speech echoes its own devices until they no longer express genuine affect. All they signify is their own linguistic game.10 The critic even evacuates the amalgamation of courtly discourse and Neoplatonist concepts by reproducing it as a repetitive cliché: “Belle ame de mon ame, desir de mon desir.…” Since his amorous declaration only negates its traditional intention, it presents no evidence of affect and makes no positive impact on the interlocutor: “Tous ces beaux mots dont vous enharnachez vostre discours, (respondit metaphoriquement la sorciere Medee) ne peuvent verser dans mon esprit la croyance de vostre amour” (IX.363). Having scripted the speech of all the actors, Clarimond has metaphor (Medea) indicate the ineffectiveness of galimatias (Jason) to signify anything but its own exhaustion. The authorial figure supplements and decodes the critique Clarimond embeds in the play. He broadens it beyond a travesty of courtly language or mythological figures, for he applies it to the conventions and circulation of sentimental romances and lyric poetry at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In his appraisal of galimatias, Sorel’s authorial figure plays the role of literary historian and contemporary satirist. He first refers to gibberish as a medieval, farcical writing style, which

53

Chapter Two was still used in his day at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and was intentionally meant to disrupt the production of meaning: “…le premier qui a usé de ce mot [galimatias] est le Comedien Bruscambille, qui l’a donné pour tiltre à quelques uns de ses Prologues qui ont esté faits pour n’avoir point de sens…” (Rems., 660).11 The implied author then refers to the novels and poetry of the court writers Nervèze and des Escuteaux, whose texts “de verité ont bien esté faits pour avoir du sens, mais qui n’en ont guere neantmoins” (Rems., 660–61). Although Nervèze and des Escuteaux strove to represent genuine sentiment through amorous speech, the overabundance of figures counters their intention, for their speech delegitimizes the expression of affect in its preoccupation with ludic language. Sorel thus parodies these ornate monologues by exaggerating their rhetorical figures to the point of galimatias, or incomprehensibility in such a way as to amplify their inherent insincerity and hermetism. The authorial figure then focuses, not on literary conventions, but on social ones. Because of the writings of Nervèze and des Escuteaux, the fashion of flowery, overabundant language in literature becomes a speech genre at court: “…il y a douze ans que nos Courtisans s’imaginoient tous que ce langage estoit le meilleur du monde, tellement que les petits Secretaires de la Cour s’en escrimoient à qui mieux mieux” (Rems., 661). Literary convention patterns social convention at court. The figure of the author indicates, however, the disparity between the illusion of social ritual and the reality of literary production. These impromptu compliments are really scripted fictions. Literature thus enters the social imaginary as a mode of life. Similar to Don Quixote, Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd, resembles the eloquent courtiers: both employ fiction as the pattern or script of their social reality.

*** D’Urfé and Sorel use echoes, verbal disguise, and travesty to explore the conventional modes of verbal expression current in French novelistic practice at the beginning of the seventeenth century. They not only construct their fictions through the narrative deployment of these conventions, but also situate them

54

Verbal Travesty and Disguise in a polemic with their use in previous literary texts. Yet they do differ in their approaches. The degree of awareness of discursive imitation seems to be the best differential factor between Urfeian and Sorelian characters. According to Kathleen Wine, d’Urfé’s characters are unaware that they are borrowing intertexts from ancient, medieval, and Renaissance sources (13–14, 16–17, 146). When they speak, another consciousness inevitably speaks through them and transforms their intentions and their words without their knowledge of its textual origin. Fleurial and Hylas are examples of this limited knowledge. Fleurial is aware that he transmits the speech of his social superiors, but he cannot master its details and supplements with his own linguistic techniques to get the message across. Fleurial, however, is not conscious of his imitation of the romance’s style or of his clownish predecessors in the history of literature. Similarly, Hylas consciously recasts the speech of other characters within the romance, and unconsciously imitates that of previous literary models, such as Gauvain of the Round Table cycle and Ordóñez de Montalvo’s Galaor (Bouchet 58). More importantly, through such characters, d’Urfé represents, interprets, and transforms literary and philosophical sources, and then redeploys them to inform the plot’s development. Sorelian characters and the authorial figure, by contrast, are in general conscious of the literary and extraliterary origins of their modes of verbal expression and thought. Their imitations and critical positioning only differ to the extent that they disagree on the relationship between the literary and social imaginary. For example, Lysis always manages to inform his interpretation of social exchange with textual models; whereas the other characters distance themselves critically from literary expression with the belief that it has only a limited influence or no influence at all in patterning notions of social reality. Sorel thus rethematizes verbal disguise and travesty to target them as literary conventions in an explicit polemic on narrative and metanarrative levels. In this respect, Sorel’s project surpasses parody, in which characters unconsciously imitate previous models of expression; instead, he constructs an antiromance, in which agents of enunciation evince a full awareness of the texts and speech genres informing their

55

Chapter Two mimicry (Genette, Palimpsestes 164–75). Lysis is perhaps the most complex example, for in his feint of literary madness, he consciously dons the disguise of Don Quixote, and then puts on another mask of pastoral fiction. This multilayered disguise provides rich material for travesty by Carmelin, for criticism from the other characters, and for decoding by the narrator and implied author. These conclusions concerning the specific distinctions between verbal disguise and travesty in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger extravagant also suggest some general conclusions concerning intentionality in verbal expression. While d’Urfé’s hidden polemic entails the unwilling transformation of characters’ speech and intentions by the competition of divergent meanings present in the utterance, Sorel’s explicit polemic involves the deliberate transformation of speech and the decoding of intention by characters conscious of literary and social conventionality. Because d’Urfé situates his characters in a self-referential world that does not explicitly reveal to them the textual sources of its verbal artifice, the characters are only aware of their thwarted efforts to master speech and to express accurately their own intentions. In their attempts to master what they believe to be their own discourse, they find themselves unwittingly entrapped within it. The narrative results are the constant deferral of the realization of personal desire, desperation, and melancholic reflections on death as an escape from illusion. In contrast, Sorel ostensibly presents most verbal expression as deliberate and masterful because of the characters’ playfulness in their conscious imitation and critique of literary models. The critically oriented characters and the authorial figure find pleasure in disguising their speech, echoing other texts, and travestying Lysis’s discourse by highlighting the conflicting meanings encoded within it. They are only bound to live verbal artifice insofar as they believe Lysis’s feint of madness and play along with him. From their stance, they distance themselves from these illusions. Thus far, Lysis seems to be the only character who is frustrated in his verbal mimicry and lapses into melancholic reflections, when other agents reverse his words and exploit their ambiguity. Nonetheless, he does succeed in reincorporating other characters’ critiques both in

56

Verbal Travesty and Disguise an understanding of the operations of literary conventions and in his imaginative reenactment of them. Since he adapts, rephrases, and reinvests commentary in his literary imitation, could he also be trying to decode, demystify, and appraise these conventions? These movements of encoding and decoding, of representing and interpreting, merit a comparison with a similar movement inherent to rhetorical forms of debate. The purpose of the next chapter will be the analysis of polemics as a practice of encoding and decoding that appears in d’Urfé as a means to develop amorous intrigue and in Sorel as a forum for the trial of literature.

57

Chapter Three

Debates of Convention and Debates on Convention

Instances of debate pervade d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger extravagant. Both authors borrow components of ancient rhetoric, medieval amorous debate, and the Renaissance revival of Ciceronian and Senecan oration to inform plot. Yet the epistemological status of polemics within the Baroque allegorical narrative is very problematic, for it is difficult to discern whether justice is served in the characters’ emotional trials in the pastoral romance or whether a critical consensus is reached in polemic and rhetorical deliberation in the antiromance. Most of the court cases in L’Astrée only come to a point of temporary adjudication, for the ambiguity of their verdicts and their ultimate failure to resolve affective crises advance new action in the plot with an even more mystifying level of complexity and conflict. Moreover, Urfeian characters are left to work out their emotional differences with rhetorical and poetic figures, which because of their encoding of multiple forms of agency do not permit a clear, unified expression of desire or intent in argumentation. In Le berger, this layering of intentions contributes to ambiguous critical appraisal. While the Sorelian characters’ debates strictly concerning love are often decided beforehand and tend toward the demystification of emotional intrigue, competing arguments concerning literary conventions and their esthetic, social value complicate overall authorial intention and the critical import of the whole work. Although the problem of the encoding of multiple subjective positions appears in both d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s texts, the construction of debate, its placement in the narrative framework, and its ostensible subject matter differ. The two authors struc-

58

Debates of and on Convention ture polemic interlocution differently. D’Urfé prefers complex scenes of polemic, in which there are at least three cases for argument and a judge (Chouinard, “L’Astrée et la rhétorique” 42–43), whereas Sorel presents two opposing cases, sometimes argued by several orators and reviewed by a judge. Furthermore, d’Urfé will present multiple agency within the words of one character, while Sorel will spread it throughout a whole scene by bringing into conflict characters who each embody one critical position. Yet Sorel has several conflicting, critical intentions coincide in individuals who are supposed to be the most decisive in novelistic debate: the judge, the narrator, and the authorial figure. Thus, the complication of intention in forensics appears on the level of d’Urfé’s narrative, while it emerges most clearly in Sorel’s metanarrative, namely, in the conclusions of episodes, in the prefaces, and in the Remarques. Lastly, the primary subject matter of L’Astrée’s debates is love; in contrast, love serves as a mere subtopic in Le berger, for literary conventionality and its relationship with the social imaginary are the chief points of dissension.

Debates of Convention in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée In L’Astrée, d’Urfé stages the fundamental impossibility of judicial rhetoric to resolve conflicts in the amorous experiences of the characters. He patterns these scenes after a long tradition of love debate from the medieval jeux partys to sentimental romances, such as Martial d’Auvergne’s Les arrests d’amour.1 Although d’Urfé retains from this tradition the heavy apparatus of judicial rhetoric, he abandons the traditional frivolity of the cases for a more urgent, if not tragic tone. He inherits this tone and the treatment of love in theoretical, philosophical terms from the Spanish pastoral masterpieces, Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana and Miguel de Cervantes’s La Galatea, which sharply contrast with the light, gallant tones of their French contemporaries (Gaume 548–52). In some instances in L’Astrée, the outcome of these debates can be a matter of misery or happiness, of life or death for the characters. A case in point is the conflict between Célidée, Calidon, and Thamire. Having supervised the upbringing of both Calidon and Célidée, Thamire wants all Célidée’s love and desire

59

Chapter Three directed to himself. She rejects him because of his advanced age. Spurned by Célidée, Thamire sacrifices her to his rival Calidon. However, Célidée detests Calidon too and prefers death to marriage; she is “resolue d’espouser plustost le cercueil, que Calidon” (II.i.40). Thamire’s account takes the form of ancient rhetorical narratio, that is, an “exposition of the facts of the matter,” which fits traditionally within the structure of debate (Curtius 70–71). However, to accommodate the protocol of narration, d’Urfé situates Thamire’s story (narratio) before all other deliberative movements: exordium (introduction), argumentatio (display of evidence to support an argument), refutatio (refutation of opposing opinions), and peroratio or epilogus (closing remarks). The placement of narratio before exordium contravenes the traditional succession of the five parts of ancient oration; yet it fulfills some other prerequisites for the episode. It first serves to designate the plaintiffs and the judge, Léonide. It then sets the technique of debate to follow: one agent of enunciation will pronounce the utterances of other characters in direct and indirect discourse. However, this rhetorical practice ultimately serves to obscure characters’ arguments. In the debate that ensues after Thamire’s narration, each character must present his/her case: why should Thamire have Célidée, why should Calidon have her, and why should Célidée spurn them both? Yet to prove their own arguments, all three plaintiffs evoke agents of enunciation other than themselves in their own speech. Calidon, Célidée, and Thamire hypothesize and pronounce one another’s objections to prove their respective positions. Therefore, instead of speaking for themselves, the characters choose to encode their own intentions in one another’s speech in order to convince the judge of their own case. Here, d’Urfé has his characters adapt the ancient rhetorical exercise of suasoria, which was revived by Renaissance pedagogues: namely, the imaginative reproduction of the speech of another (traditionally a mythological or historical figure) in a given situation.2 This approach to polemics puts the characters in a position of conflict between the expression of their own intention and that of other voices speaking through them. In the exordium of his harangue, Calidon calls on the god of Love as an authority for his argument: 60

Debates of and on Convention Amour, grand dieu…m’inspire de sorte les paroles et les raisons, que tu m’as si souvent representées…. J’entens, ô grande nymphe [Léonide], ceste divinité que j’ay reclamée, qui me promet son assistance, non seulement en guidant ma langue, mais en gravant mes paroles en vos cœurs, avec la pointe de ses meilleurs traits. (II.ii.47)

Calidon prepares himself to receive and to repeat the words of an ulterior consciousness, the god of Love. However, unlike the unmediated intervention of Muses, who inspire the creation of an epic poet, the god of Love represents utterances and logical forms to the character. Here, d’Urfé has the character proclaim the presence of a screen of representation that patterns speech; yet he does not give the character an awareness of the transformational force the encoded other will exert on his argument. Moreover, like the god of Love in d’Urfé’s quotation of Aminta in the preface to the novel’s first part, this god informs and directs speech: “en guidant ma langue.” However, he transforms hearts, desires, and intentions through a mode of verbal representation, writing: “en gravant mes paroles en vos cœurs, avec la pointe de ses meilleurs traits” (II.ii.47). Calidon seems to believe that once speech is transcribed as text, it has persuasive force. In other words, the god of Love’s transcription is meant to consolidate his own desire with Calidon’s, and this coincidence of divine and human intention is supposed to have the force of truth.3 However, Calidon does not take into account the ramifications of his summons: once one abandons the power of enunciation to another agent, the origin of intention becomes inextricably encoded in a competition between multiple agents. Calidon compounds the problem of intentionality when he puts himself in the position of Thamire and Célidée by speaking on their behalf. The dialogue he pronounces contains arguments for his own desire and a refutation of it. He begins with an argument for his own love in the words of Thamire, and then refutes it in those of Célidée: …joignez-vous [Thamire] avecque moy, et advouez les paroles que je vay dire de vostre part à Celidée; et vous bergere, escoutez-les comme si elles estoient proferées de sa bouche. Comment, ma belle fille, vous dit-il, est-il possible, puis que les merites de Calidon et son affection, de qui la grandeur ne vous peut estre incogneue, n’ont peu

61

Chapter Three obtenir de vous cette grace de le vous faire aimer, qu’au moins la priere et l’estroitte recommandation que je vous en ay faite soit demeurée morte en vos oreilles, et sans effet en vostre ame? … Mais, direz-vous [Célidée] peut-estre, c’est vous que j’ayme, Thamire, et n’en puis aymer un autre, c’est à vous seul que je me suis donnée, c’est à vous que j’ay laissé toute puissance sur moy, hors mis celle de donner ma volonté à quelque autre. (II.ii.54; my emphasis)

In the Senecan tradition of suasoria, Calidon’s speech is an exhortation from someone else’s perspective. In requesting Thamire to join with him and declare his intentions, Calidon acts as the overreaching agent of enunciation, who subsumes all other agents in his speech. He therefore tries to convince his interlocutors, Léonide and Célidée, of the coincidence of his desire with that of Thamire. He even assumes the possible evidence that Célidée herself would present to refute Thamire’s claims. This monologue encasing a dialogue appears even more complex in light of Calidon’s evocation of the god of Love in his exordium. According to this sequence of linguistic agency, the divinity speaks through Calidon to speak through Thamire, who in turn refutes the virtual objections of Célidée. This framing of linguistic agents culminates in the conclusion of Calidon’s argument. He expresses himself in a manner detrimental to the unequivocal communication of his desire: Aymez donc Calidon, si jamais vous avez aymé Thamire, recevez-le pour Thamire, et faictes vous paroistre en une seule affection, et amante, et religieuse envers les dieux, qui sans doute ne m’eussent point donné la liberté de me dépouiller de vous contre mon vouloir, s’ils ne l’avoient ainsi resolu dans leurs destins infaillibles. (II.ii.55; my emphasis)

The conclusion of this harangue contains many ambiguities in the origin of enunciation and its intention. Although the addressee is clearly Célidée, it is impossible to identify the agent of enunciation. The objectification of Thamire, Calidon, and the gods obscures the identity of the speaking subject “me.” The origin of the commands (“recevez-le,” “faictes vous

62

Debates of and on Convention paroistre”) is lost. The shift to “me” could designate Thamire, for it makes sense in the economy of the narrative; yet it presents his desire as divided: “contre mon vouloir.” Thamire’s desire speaks through Calidon’s speech and subverts Calidon’s argument, since Calidon gives this desire a voice through suasoria. This illogicality parallels another: the investment of Célidée’s desire in Calidon as Thamire’s replacement. What Calidon presents as Célidée’s “seule affection” is really double, for she is supposed to love two men in one. Calidon’s voicing of Thamire’s desire obscures his intention and his expectations of Célidée. First, his effort to validate his desire as the only one worthy of the beloved admits the desire of the rival. Second, his effort to destine Célidée’s desire to a unique lover divides it between two. Third, Célidée’s singular destiny becomes plural, for it is determined by a plurality of divine wills, a multiplicity of fates: “leurs destins infaillibles.” Calidon, in effect, is asking Célidée to live a contradiction. Calidon claims that the infallibility of his argument is the divine authority subtending it. Yet he does not expect Love to be a tyrant, as the narrator initially explained: “Amour…ce flatteur, qui tost apres changea son authorité en tyrannie” (I.i.9). To pretend that divine will determines one’s own desire, places one in a position of servitude to this arbitrary authority in the romance. Moreover, to assume the utterances and intentions of other agents in one’s discourse fails to unify the intention of the speaker; instead, this assumption only divides intention through the encoding of one subject of enunciation among others. Even though the judge of this affair, Léonide, decides in favor of the coupling of Thamire and Célidée (II.ii.72–73), this verdict fails to resolve the conflict among the three characters. Calidon unwittingly falls victim to the tyrannical god of Love, because his affection for Célidée persists in tormenting him after Léonide’s judgment: “Toutesfois ceste consideration n’eut guieres de force en luy [Calidon]…, parce que les premiers mouvements furent trop grands en luy, se voyant tout à coup descheu de ses premieres esperances” (II.ii.73). Despite Léonide’s efforts to decrypt the mixed voices in the characters’ testimonies, she can neither clarify their confused rhetoric nor resolve their mixed affective states. This results in a series of near fatal disasters in the “Suitte de l’histoire de Célidée”:

63

Chapter Three Calidon is so devastated by Léonide’s verdict that he falls into a comalike state (II.xi.438–39), and in running to his aid, Thamire trips and nearly kills himself (II.xi.440). It is only by assimilating a verbal emblem of monstrosity into her physical appearance that Célidée will rival Love’s affective transformational powers, since she converts Calidon’s desire to indifference and Thamire’s unwelcome love to “amitié.” In this scene of debate and its “Suitte,” d’Urfé thematizes the problem of unifying agency through the given rhetorical structures of his time. While the characters believe that they are engaged in a debate over love, the author engages them in a hidden polemic concerning the very conventions of debate. D’Urfé succeeds in problematizing the unification of the subject through language by inserting the dialogic structure of the medieval jeu-party within the monologic format of classical suasoria. Once so common in Montemayor’s La Diana and Nicolas de Montreux’s Les bergeries de Juliette, this amalgamation of classical rhetoric and medieval poetics ceases to serve its traditional purpose in L’Astrée: namely, to render a final judgment in amorous relations so as to pair off and to marry shepherds and shepherdesses in the conventional denouement of pastoral (Gaume 71).

Debates of Convention and on Convention in Le berger extravagant In Le berger extravagant, Sorel transforms the Urfeian subjective encoding of characters’ desires into the encoding of critical appraisal by various agents of enunciation, including the narrator and the authorial figure. Following this technique of transformation, Sorel disperses the explicit discussion of literary conventions in the preface, the whole narrative, and the final Remarques. Like the components of emblems, instances of forensics switch novelistic discourse between levels of narration and metanarration, between representation and interpretation. Critics have treated Sorel’s antinovelistic structure exclusively in terms of rhetorical disposition. For example, Elizabeth Meier Tilton argues that in both Sorel’s Le berger extravagant (1627–28) and its rewrite L’anti-roman (1633–34), the preface corresponds to an exordium of ancient rhetorical

64

Debates of and on Convention argument and the beginning of book I constitutes a narratio (Tilton 77–78). While these categories summarily explain the global division between metanarrative and narrative in Le berger, they ignore the small shifts in rhetorical development within the prefaces, the narrative episodes, and the Remarques. Much of Sorel’s prefaces are preoccupied with the rhetorical movement of refutatio, that is, a refutation of opposing opinions (Curtius 70). Sorel uses refutation within his prefaces to anticipate the objections from his virtual readership. Later, so as to construct an explicit metanarrative within the narrative, he has his critical characters comment on the literary conventions Lysis imitates. In Le berger, all debates of convention therefore ultimately become debates on convention. Furthermore, the polemic episodes concerning conventions include as their subject matter rhetorical devices of debate as well as many pastoral literary commonplaces. In the preface to Le berger, Sorel’s authorial figure includes refutations (refutatio) in the frame of the exordium. For instance, the authorial figure anticipates his detractors’ response to his use of satiric style: Je pense bien qu’il y en aura [des lecteurs et des écrivains] qui me voudront reprendre d’avoir mis icy des bouffonneries, & qui me diront que la verité est si venerable, que son party doit estre soustenu avec des raisons serieuses: mais où est-ce qu’ils me pourront trouver un meilleur stile que le Satyrique, pour faire hayr les mauvaises choses, & en rendre mesme la censure agreable à ceux qui y sont interessez, & ne seroit-ce pas faire trop d’honneur à des sottises, que d’en parler autrement qu’avec des railleries? (Preface, 16)

The authorial figure incorporates the objections of his critics and refutes them with a question containing his objection to their critique. Employing indirect discourse, the voice of the author admits the presence of other voices and thus renders the monologic exordium dialogic. The Sorelian authorial voice allows for the presence of differing opinions concerning his narrative strategies and masterfully manipulates them here through shifts in tone and modality. By qualifying the entire antiromance’s tone as “satyrique, bouffonnerie, raillerie,” the authorial figure gives another clue

65

Chapter Three to the polemic strategies in Le berger. He opposes these qualities to “des raisons serieuses,” which is the predominant tone in amorous debate in L’Astrée and in the rhetorical practices of judicial oratory. The Sorelian authorial figure does not posit evidence and follow logical categories definitive of serious debate; rather, he juxtaposes a multiplicity of voices from diverse critical positions on literary conventions, all of whom deride each other mutually in their polemic competition. In light of this analysis, the authorial figure’s use of debate constitutes an antidebate. While he may use judicial language (“reprendre,” “son party soustenu avec des raisons serieuses,” etc.) and rhetorical developments (exordium, refutatio), he colors them with a satirical tone (“le Satyrique”) in conflict with their traditional purpose: the display of evidence and the formation of coherent, logical argument in all seriousness. If everything the authorial figure pronounces is in jest, how can his statements be taken seriously? Whether debate is used by characters or by the authorial figure, its purpose in Le berger is more ludic and hermetic than informative, for the weight of evidence and the expression of intentions shift constantly. In L’anti-roman, the authorial figure presents narrative and metanarrative as a game, a rhetorical exercise: “Cecy est un exercice d’esprit, où par des propos ambigus il semble que je blasme ce que je louë, & il semble aussi que je louë ce que je blasme quelquefois” (1: 163). No one character, including the authorial figure, is therefore representative of the author’s intention; instead, debate structures in the narrative and metanarrative foster the emergence of a multiplicity of perspectives on literature.4 Given the satirical, ludic use of deliberative rhetoric, it would be untenable to say, as several critics have, that Le berger constitutes the dismissal of all literature.5 In Le berger’s debates of convention and on convention, Sorel employs the rhetoric of amorous trials proper to the pastoral novel to put the novelistic tradition itself on trial. He does this in two ways. First, debates concerning amorous matters are subject to the commentary of critical characters. In this case, a polemic concerning love becomes an opportunity to critique it as a narrative convention. Second, Sorel has his characters use rhetorical development to debate the shortfalls and merits of epic, lyric poetry, and romances. This pro-con format

66

Debates of and on Convention permits the characters (and the reader) to witness the refutation and confirmation of the social and esthetic value of literature.6 It is interesting to note that this dialectic on literary history and technique does not unequivocally confirm the thesis that Le berger condemns literature to oblivion. Indeed, the debate on convention within the narrative challenges the claims of the authorial figure in the preface. Again, narrated polemics on convention become antidebates on the metanarrative level, for they break with the traditional purposes of rhetoric: they neither fall into dualistic, confrontational structures nor tend toward a point of final adjudication. In book II of Le berger, Sorel stages a trial of amorous matters in order to examine the effectiveness of rhetoric to resolve affective conflicts. Anselme and Lysis encounter Montenor, who delivers a message from Anselme’s former beloved, Genèvre. Lysis, the feigned shepherd, takes Anselme’s disillusionment in love for misogyny, which contravenes the courtly and pastoral convention of the adoration of women (II.57–60). The three characters decide to put the matter on trial in the fashion of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée: Lysis is the judge, Anselme is the defendant arguing for his contempt of Genèvre, and Montenor represents the spurned plaintiff. Montenor gives his case for complaint (II.61–62), and Anselme delivers his narratio of their affair as argument for his defense (II.63–68). After Montenor reproaches Anselme for his position (reprehensio) and Anselme confirms it in response (confirmatio), Lysis gives his judgment in the form of galimatias (II.68–70). In the end, Lysis decides that Anselme is justified in abandoning Genèvre because of her coquetry. While the explicit point of debate is whether Anselme should still love Genèvre, the implicit point is whether literary conventions can be applied to resolve problems of individual affectivity and conflicts in the social sphere. In the first place, Anselme convinces Lysis that he has a valid case for violating the traditional narrative development of pastoral; his argument favoring rupture prevails over Montenor’s favoring union. In the second place, Anselme reveals to Montenor that the case was fully decided in advance, since he has a new love interest, Angélique (II.71). Although imported from fiction and applied to affective experience in society, amorous debate resolves

67

Chapter Three nothing in the minds of Anselme and Montenor, for the case was decided from the very beginning. For the purposes of narrative, the whole process only serves as a pretext for Anselme to play into Lysis’s imitation of fictions and to display his own ability to manipulate rhetorical forms. For metanarrative purposes, it gives the narrator the opportunity to present amorous debate as a verbal disguise and motivate it to display differences in tone: “gausserie” (II.71) versus seriousness. Sorel thus demonstrates that the ostensibly serious tone of rhetorical speech may mask a derisory standpoint on the convention itself. Sorel’s critique also lies in the staging of the imitative game that the characters play. For example, when Montenor first agrees to participate in the debate, Lysis perplexes him with contrived speech, references to literary models, and requests to set the pastoral scene. The shepherd asks to have a pastoral painting hung behind him during the trial (II.60–61) and insists on holding his shepherd’s staff while passing judgment (II.69). From the start, Montenor “ne sçavoit encore si Lysis estoit fou, ou s’il faisoit le plaisant…” (I.61). In Montenor’s perspective, if Lysis insincerely imitates literary speech and settings, he just does it as a joke: that is, as a game emphasizing the disparity between literary conventions and social practices. However, if Lysis imitates the rhetoric of amorous debate in earnest, he appears mad to Montenor. In this case, Lysis’s imitation appears undecided to critical characters, for they cannot ascertain whether his literary folly is real or another pretense. Montenor’s dilemma has a global significance for Sorel’s whole project in Le berger; the irresolvability of rhetorical tone encodes the author’s intention in the preface, the narrative, and even in the authorial figure’s Remarques. Indeed, Sorel undermines the guarantee of the sincere expression of intention in polemics, for he constantly plays with rhetorical tone and the narrative contract in a game of masks and feints, quite similar to those of Lysis. Sorel uses this ambiguity to demonstrate the capacity of rhetoric to condemn as well as defend the cause of literature. In the final debate over literary history and convention in book XIII, this strategy succeeds in generating a multiplicity of perspectives without privileging one over another. At the end of book XII, all the characters decide to hold a debate on the shortcomings and merits of poetic and prosaic fictions as an 68

Debates of and on Convention after-dinner parlor game. Clarimond will present reasons against literature, Musardan the poet will defend it, and Anselme will judge whose argument is the most convincing (XII.481–82). Sorel here borrows the fictional context for debate—the banquet—from Plato’s Symposium and from more contemporary comic adaptations, such as Béroalde de Verville’s Le moyen de parvenir (1610).7 As a setting common to philosophy and literature, the banquet permits the polemic convergence of literary and extraliterary viewpoints. Sorel gives this metanarrative symposium on literature a satirical twist; though the poet Musardan would seem to be the best defender of literature, given his archetypal status and his namesake (“ardent Muse”), he turns out to be the worst. When it is Musardan’s turn to speak, he refuses to do so. Philiris and a feigned shepherdess, Amarylle, come to the defense of literature (XIII.511, 524–25).8 As a social satirist, Sorel clearly debunks the poet’s ability to substantiate the value of his productions in impromptu speech.9 The consumers of literary texts prove better orators than the producers, for the latter must script their speech before they pronounce it. As Musardan says, “si j’ay l’honneur de vous voir à Paris dans quelque temps, je vous montreray un livre que je compose lequel vaudra mieux que tout cela [l’oraison de Clarimond]” (XIII.511). The development of this debate itself parallels the ambivalence of Sorel’s position. Roughly stated, Clarimond reprimands literature, while Philiris and Amarylle confirm its social and esthetic value. To add to this ambivalence, Sorel has Anselme, the judge, deliver an ambiguous, noncommittal verdict, and has the audience praise both sides in the debate. So what purpose does this whole exercise of debate serve? It refuses to validate any one critical perspective in order to give all of them a voice. It dismisses the social, esthetic value and epistemological claims of fictions only to recover them. It challenges the representative powers of literary discourse, and then projects the possible benefits of such representation for readers. The following analysis will summarize the general outline of this debate, and then focus on its conclusion in relation to its role in the narrative and critical economy in Le berger. The polemic exchange in book XIII can be reduced to three general areas of concern: (1) the nature of the historical development of literature; (2) the relationship between history and 69

Chapter Three literature; and (3) the relationship between the literary and the social imaginary. In the first case, Clarimond charges authors with the servile, unimaginative, and unoriginal imitation of their predecessors. According to him, literature is plagued with triteness of expression and the repetition of the faults of preceding texts (XIII.487, 494, 496–98, 501–02, 505). Philiris rebuts by saying that authors do transform the narrative circumstances and poetic devices of their predecessors by borrowing them and adapting them. Authors do not unreflectively imitate previous models; they diversify and refresh them (XIII.523). In the second case, Clarimond repeatedly states his preference of history to fiction, for he argues that the former is the accurate, coherent representation of real human events, while the latter is the incoherent representation of imaginary scenarios (XIII.510). He assumes a clear distinction between notions of social reality as unmediated truth and imaginative narratives as the flawed (if not completely false) representation of human experience. According to Clarimond, even if literature incorporates historical details, it reverses their order, introduces illogicality, and corrupts their status as truth (XIII.487, 498, 509). Because he holds literature to the standard of what is instead of what could be, he reads literature as if it were history: that is, as if literature should make ontological claims like history and epistemological claims like philosophy or political theory (XIII.494, 502–03, 506–07, 509). Philiris counters Clarimond’s basic assumptions. He argues that literature does not intend to make claims to historical truth, for it addresses itself solely to the literary imaginary through esthetic effect. For example, ekphrasis in Homer and Virgil does not pretend to render human experience in an unmediated manner, since it focuses on the very means of discursive representation (XIII.516). Philiris seriously questions Clarimond’s reading of narrative poetry and the novel as histories; they do not follow the same esthetic rules and thus do not represent the same things (XIII.518). For instance, d’Urfé’s L’Astrée does not represent what was in the past, but what could have been or what should have been given varying social circumstances (XIII.521, 524). Literature therefore does not conform to values of truth or verifiability, but to verisimilitude and hypothetical ethical notions (XIII.522).

70

Debates of and on Convention Although the points of distinction between the two first areas of dispute seem quite clear, the third, dealing with the literary and the social, becomes increasingly ambiguous in Sorel’s project. While Philiris and Amarylle clearly oppose themselves to Clarimond in this matter, the authorial figure’s position proves to be indecisive in both the narrative outcome and the Remarques. Clarimond states that literature should not be imitated in social practice, because its object of representation belongs to the realm of the impossible and the hypothetical: Il y à des jeunes gens qui les ayant leus [les romans], & voyant que tout arrive à souhait aux avanturiers dont ils traitent, ont desir de mener une semblable vie, & quitent par ce moyen la vacation qui leur estoit propre. D’ailleurs tous les hommes ont beaucoup de sujet de former des plaintes contre de tels livres, veu qu’il n’y à si petite bourgeoise à Paris ni autre part qui ne les veuille avoir, & qui en ayant leu trois ou quatre pages ne s’imagine estre capable de nous faire la leçon. C’est cette lecture qui leur aprend à toutes à devenir si coquettes, & qui nous oste le moyen de faire l’amour avec innocence. (XIII.510–11)

In an indirect criticism of Lysis’s and the other characters’ pastoral feint, Clarimond attempts to draw a clear distinction between his notions of social reality (“la vacation qui leur estoit propre”) and of the literary imaginary (“tout arrive à souhait”). The imitation of literature in life constitutes a disruption of the social order. Clarimond ostensibly illustrates how human activity in literature clashes with social typology and gender identity: young men try to experience desires only possible in fiction, and young women try to instruct men! He mentions only furtively how the social incorporation of literary models thwarts his own desire: “cette lecture…nous oste le moyen de faire l’amour avec innocence.” Philiris’s rebuttal is summary, but to the point. Imaginative literature informs the social imaginary in its capacity to please and instruct: L’on sçait bien qu’estans faits à plaisir, & ne gardans pas les fascheuses loix de l’histoire, l’on y peut mettre tout ce que l’on veut, tellement que l’on y void tous les exemples de vertu que l’on se peut imaginer. C’est là que l’on peut

71

Chapter Three trouver du plaisir et du proffit tout ensemble, & que les femmes mesmes aprennent de la civilité & de la courtoisie. (XIII.524)

Philiris reformulates the Horatian maxim concerning the social purpose of literature: to please and instruct.10 Furthermore, literature does not represent human behavior as it was in the past, which is the task of history, but as it could be in the future and as it should be in social practice. The novel and narrative poetry describe the imaginary investment of social values and prescribe their virtual application in life. Instead of being a source of social disruption, literature may inform social belief and organization. Philiris’s perspective reflects the epistemological value of literature at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries: it gives its readership the knowledge of modes of affective experience and expression with a moral basis (Reynier, Roman sentimental 252–62; Ratner 24–27). Amarylle amplifies Philiris’s rebuttal by extending his notion of the power of literature to impact notions of social reality and human experience: Nous autres femmes qui n’allons point au college, & qui n’avons point de precepteurs comme les hommes pour nous aprendre les diverses choses qui se passent au monde, c’est seulement dans les Romans que nous avons le moyen de nous rendre sçavantes. Si l’on nous les oste l’on nous rendra toutes stupides & toutes sauvages: car nos esprits n’estans pas propres aux livres de Philosophie n’y aux autres ouvrages serieux, ce n’est pas la que nous pouvons aprendre ny la vertu ny l’Eloquence. Qui plus est l’on nous fera un grand tort, pource que nos Amans & nos marys ne s’adonnant plus aussi à cette agreable lecture, mettront en oubly toutes les gentillesses de l’amour, tellement que nous ne serons plus servies avecque passion, & que nous n’aurons plus d’avantures qui donnent matiere d’escrire aux Autheurs du siecle. (XIII.524–25)

Amarylle restates Philiris’s objections to Clarimond’s argument: literature informs the social imaginary and social practices, and it serves as a carrier of moral values. However, she significantly expands his points of contention. She indicates the

72

Debates of and on Convention social limitations placed on women that force them to cull their knowledge from an imaginary representation.11 Furthermore, novels not only describe fictive, affective experience, but they also inspire real emotions in their readers: “nous ne serons plus servies avec passion.” Moreover, once literary representation is invested in social imagination and practice, it reinforms the production of other texts: “nous n’aurons plus d’avantures qui donnent matiere d’escrire aux Autheurs du siecle.” Amarylle goes beyond the idea that art imitates life and life imitates art to say that what is commonly held to be social and psychological reality has its very foundation in the imaginary. As compelling as these perspectives on literature may be, Anselme judges the affair by suspending judgment, and he entrusts the readers of literature with the job of critical appraisal: “d’autant que Clarimond à blasmé des livres qui ne meritent pas de l’estre tant, & que Philiris en a loüé aussi qui ne sont pas dignes de ses loüanges, les bons esprits aviseront par cy apres à juger sans passion des divers ouvrages qui se presenteront” (XIII.525). He delegates critical responsibility to individual readers, and even the narrator shares his approach, for universal consensus on the issue is not reached, nor should it be: Anselme leur remonstra encore qu’il n’y avoit rien en cela contre la raison, & que les Romans estant des choses qui ne servoient que pour le plaisir, …l’on ne se devoit point estonner si les uns estoient estimez, & si les autres ne l’estoient point, pource que ce n’estoit pas comme les choses necessaires qui doivent estre generalement aprouvees. (XIII.525)

Though the narrator ostensibly takes a noncommittal position, he does inject his own opinion in trivializing the whole purpose of putting literature on trial. Since literature is only meant for pleasure, it is not so necessary to human experience that it be universally judged. The narrator thus deflates the importance of the scene as the decisive debate in determining the final word on literature. Again, debate becomes an antidebate, because the decision for indecision was predetermined on the level of narration, and all the more because the final adjudication of the case is deferred to a virtual readership outside the text.

73

Chapter Three In the Remarques at the end of Le berger, even the authorial figure seems to share this noncommittal position, for he approves of the discursive practices and arguments of all three debaters: “Elle [Amarylle] qui n’est pas faiseuse de livres, parle aussi à propos que Philiris & Clarimond…” (Rems., 730). Like the narrator, the authorial figure contradicts what he posits and thus deflates what has been considered the predominant purpose of all parts of Le berger: the condemnation of narrative poetry and prose. Although he gives ample explanation and development to Clarimond’s arguments in order to advocate them in appearance, he also recognizes the merits and espouses the rebuttals of Philiris and Amarylle. The figure of the author agrees with Philiris’s application of the Horatian view of literature’s purpose: “…mais il faut considerer que si dans les histoires veritables, l’on se contente des succes tels qu’ils soient, il n’en est pas de mesme dans les livres fabuleux, où le principal but estant de donner du plaisir & du proffit tout ensemble…” (Rems., 708). The authorial figure thus contradicts his own espousal of Clarimond’s argument against literature with a case that favors it; he seems to undermine many of the fictional character’s presuppositions concerning the standards of historiography applied to fiction and the separation between the literary and the social imaginary. Sorel’s authorial figure intermittently recovers the literary practices, projects, and goals, which he ostensibly challenges, by envisaging their positive capacity to instruct and inform. The figure of the author follows through the alternatives of rhetorical reprehension and confirmation to the very end of his own argument, where he expands and develops Amarylle’s reasoning: the social imaginary is patterned on the literary. By recounting an anecdote from Aesop’s fables (narratio), the authorial figure builds an argument for the power of literature to change social and gender typology: …j’ay veu dans une Apologie faite pour leur sexe, que comme il y a dans les fables d’Esope, qu’un Lyon voyant la statuë d’un homme qui mettoit le pied sur la gorge à un animal de sa sorte, il dit que si les Lyons estoient bons peintres ou bons sculpteurs, ils se representeroient aussi eux mesmes avec un pareil avantage sur les hommes; Ainsi si les femmes se mesloient de faire des livres, elles feroient des

74

Debates of and on Convention discours contre ces hommes qui les mesprisent, & monstreroient qu’elles sont d’un sexe plus noble que le leur.… [Amarylle] craignoit que si les femmes estoient privees de cette lecture, elles ne perdissent beaucoup de leur credit, & qu’elles n’eussent encore moins d’autorité sur les hommes qu’elles n’avoient. (Rems., 730)

The figure of the author argues for the instrumental role of literary production and consumption to impact notions of social reality. Indeed, his promotion of Philiris’s and Amarylle’s arguments not only valorizes this potential, but also projects the esthetic strategies of Preciosity that will have a great role in France’s literary and social circles in the 1640s and 1650s.12 Sorel thus deploys the authorial figure to generate a productive critique of literature by using him to suggest further routes of experimentation that will go well beyond the writing practices of the day to inform social beliefs and literary esthetics in the future. This increasingly ambivalent movement of debate sheds light on both the narrative and critical significance of Sorel’s Berger. In its narrative function, the antiromance apparently derides the literal imitation of literary conventions in social practice. Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd, serves as the ostensible object of mockery by the social circle, for he reproduces the actions and speech of imaginary beings from other texts. The arguments from the other characters and the authorial figure, however, do promote another manner of literary imitation in the social sphere. The ethical values and ideological claims, which first appear in literature, come to inform social values and practices, for they both have their basis in the imaginary. The more critical agents in Sorel’s antiromance therefore modify its conceit—the mental disorder of a character imitating the literary on the level of actions and speech—so that it becomes a possible instrument of social and ideological order on the level of ideas and values. The narrated debate evaluates the significance of literary imitation in society and thus undermines its own initial narrative purpose: the complete dismissal of literature meant to make Lysis cease his madness. The noncommittal conclusion of the first debate and its revalorization of literature require another debate to complete the narrative purpose of the novel. Nevertheless, the novel’s very 75

Chapter Three conclusion calls into doubt the success of Clarimond’s rhetoric. In book XIV, believing Lysis is truly insane, Clarimond undertakes another harangue to attack Lysis’s personal investment of fictions in order to cure him (XIV.530–46). Indeed, Lysis abandons the physical and linguistic disguises of the pastoral, marries his beloved Charite, remains in Brie under the surveillance of Clarimond, and leads the life of a “gentilhomme champestre” (XIV.548). Although he ceases to imitate pastoral fiction, he picks a new textual model to emulate: moral philosophy: Il s’esgaroit aussi fort souvent dedans les bois en lisant quelque livre: mais ce n’estoit plus aux livres d’amour qu’il s’attachoit: il n’avoit plus que des livres de Philosophie morale. Toutesfois Clarimond voyant que son esprit recevoit toute sorte d’impressions avec trop de vehemence, craignoit qu’il ne tombast dans quelque nouvelle follie, & qu’il ne voulust faire par tout le Philosophe Stoique ou le Philosophe Cynique. (XIV.548)

The narrator then recounts Lysis’s efforts to practice Charron’s advice concerning sexual reproduction; he admits that Lysis had “des avantures assez plaisantes depuis son mariage, mais ses amys particuliers en ont esté les seuls tesmoins…” (XIV.548). The narrator still presents Lysis as an imitative character. On the one hand, the feigned madman is cured insofar as he has abandoned literary imitation. On the other hand, he is not cured to the extent that he selects new texts to mediate his notions of social and domestic practices, and he continues to mimic the physical embodiment of moral principle. Lysis is still pretending, for he amalgamates Philiris’s, Amarylle’s, and Clarimond’s lines of debate into a new form of servile, textual imitation. All the narrative instances of debate impact the plot in an ambivalent manner, which would seem to indicate that they were for the sake of encoding and thus complicating the overall critical argument. Although the conclusions of the characters’ and authorial figure’s debates do not constitute a final dismissal of literature, they do encapsulate a variety of critical perspectives on the production of imaginative fictions at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Sorel presents his Berger as a compendium of

76

Debates of and on Convention literary conventions, a document of their critical appraisal, and a testimony to their perfectibility: Neantmoins je m’asseure bien qu’en me moquant des Poëtes, je les ay obligez malgré qu’ils en ayent, & leur ay fait la leçon. Outre que je leur ay monstré le moyen qu’ils devoient suivre pour esclaircir toutes leurs fictions, je me suis servy de leurs pointes & de leurs pensees, & en ay plus fait dire en un seul discours à mon Berger Extravagant, qu’ils n’en sçauroient mettre en quatre tomes…. (Preface, 16) Pour moy je ne repren que les mauvais desseins des ouvrages & les fautes de jugement, dont les hommes ont tousjours esté tenus de se garder pour monstrer qu’ils ont une ame raisonnable. Que si je l’ay fait sans erreur & sans passion, ceux mesme de qui je parle se contenteroient de ce que je leur aurois faict connoistre leurs fautes…. (Rems., 753)

Despite his deprecatory tone, the authorial figure presupposes the benevolence of Le berger’s virtual readers and the indebtedness of writers to its critical import. It is interesting to note that the authorial figure’s self-righteous tone clashes with its intentionality in the final Remarque. While he seems to denigrate other authors’ oversights, he claims to preserve the dignity of their mental judgment: writers have the potential to improve their fictions.13 The disparity between the authorial figure’s declamatory tone and his descriptions adds to his flexibility to adopt a series of contradictory postures in relation to literary tradition. The undecidability of Le berger’s global intention and tone is perhaps its most productive feature, for it invites authors to learn from criticism. Sorel’s antiromance does not aim to vilify and dismiss literary conventions; instead it gives authors critical responses to their texts and many ways to innovate hackneyed literary techniques. Therefore, in the narrative conclusion of Le berger and the metanarrative conclusion of the Remarques, one sees neither the entombment of literary conventions nor the cure of the imitative character as such. One does see the layering of critical intentionality in the ludic modulations of tone and in the indecisive outcome of forensics. Both Lysis by virtue of his

77

Chapter Three imitations and the critical characters by virtue of their interpretations recover these commonplaces and project their esthetic possibilities. Such a recovery of imitation and its critical decipherment can be attributed to the textual mirroring so central to debate and narrative structure in Baroque allegory. Yet when the authorial figure comments on Lysis’s behavior and on the critical positions confronting it, he entertains a diversity of contradictory perspectives and thus seems to push the text to a hermetic limit. While the reader of Le berger may not be able to discern Sorel’s overall critical position from this pattern of debate, one can understand the didactic thrust of this framework. By orchestrating the representation and interpretation of literary conventions, Sorel is able to inform subsequent texts and project future possibilities for the novelistic genre. In light of this analysis, the significance of the antiromance as detrimental to or merely derivative of the romance is unthinkable, for with its reflective movement and pointed didactic function it proves to be one of the kernels of the modern novel to come.

*** Both d’Urfé and Sorel inform their literary experiments with rhetorical formats of debate. While d’Urfé rearranges ancient polemics to problematize the expression of desire and intention in his narrative structure, Sorel uses it to layer tone and critical appraisal in his metanarrative. D’Urfé employs Senecan suasoria so that other voices speak through characters and transform their intentions, thus complicating their case. D’Urfé’s experiment with intentionality carries over into Sorel’s games with critical intention. Over the encoding of multiple intentions by several voices speaking through a single voice, Sorel’s authorial figure chooses manipulations of tone, and his characters opt for verbal disguise and travesty, all to diversify a set of critical perspectives. A case in point is his approach to the distribution of several critical positions on literary conventions, their innovation, and their imaginary investment by society. This creation of metanarration through debate and the resulting diversification of perspectives on literary creation anticipate debates that will continue through the end of the sev-

78

Debates of and on Convention enteenth century in France. The ancient Horatian pair of the pleasure and the usefulness of literature will be brought to bear on the development of the novel by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Madelaine de Scudéry, and Du Plaisir in the seventeenth century, and by Desfontaines, Lenglet-Dufresnoy, and Desmolets in the eighteenth (Ratner 24–27, 64, 80–81).14 The opposition of history versus fiction, and how one informs the other, will be discussed by Valincour, l’abbé de Charnes, and again by Sorel himself (Ratner 50–51). The imposition of esthetic criteria, such as verisimilitude, les bienséances, and their amalgamation into plausibility will be a principal point of contention for Corneille’s theater, La Mesnardière, La Querelle du Cid, and Boileau’s L’art poétique. 15 The arguments made by Philiris, Amarylle, and the implied author in the Remarques point to the emergence of texts about women, for women, and by women as a mode of self-representation, the transmission of knowledge, and discursive empowerment. D’Urfé and Sorel thus open a series of esthetic discussions that will continue for decades after them.

79

Chapter Four

Experiments with Multiple Agency and Intention through Emblematics

An examination of the representation of characters’ affects and authors’ intentions through the mixed media of the emblem will further the study of the use of literary tradition by the two authors. While emblems are simply described in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, they appear as both image and text in Sorel’s Le berger extravagant. The emblem’s combination of verbal and visual elements brings into play problems of multiple agency and intention similar to those posed by verbal travesty, disguise, and debate. Because the emblem interrelates representation and interpretation, allegory and allegorical hermeneutics (allegoresis),1 it both encodes and decodes divergent intentions in various orders of representation: engravings, epigrams, commentaries, mythological narratives, and Neo-Petrarchist discourse. Furthermore, the emblem may also function as an epistemological “worldview” and overreaching framework that impacts narrative organization, characterization, and the rhetorical formats informing them (Judovitz, “Emblematic” 31– 33; Hinds 59–76). A few scholars have studied early narratives in light of the emblem and of the other verbal and visual traditions informing it, such as myths, enigmas, blazons, and devices. John Heckman has demonstrated the emblem’s compositional role in the seventeenth-century German novel.2 Peter M. Daly saw the emblem on levels beyond narrative structure, for he locates its influence in imagery, episodes, and frontispieces, and takes this multiple influence as evidence for an “emblematic world-view” (Daly 168–84). Daniel Russell adopts part of this approach in his remarks on emblematic imagery and the organization of moral commentary in Marguerite de Navarre’s L’heptaméron

80

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics

(Emblematic 221–25, 233). Kurt Weinberg is perhaps the first to find devices and emblems hidden in the first seventeenthcentury French novel, Mme de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, where they constitute “a symbolic discourse, esoterically concealed with the discourse” of a society privy to such cultural topoi.3 Following Weinberg’s approach, we will examine the emblem, emblematic commentary, and the myths informing them as sources in wide cultural circulation, available to authors as well as readers. We also propose to view emblems, commentary, and myth as the switching devices permitting descriptions of characters’ verbal expression and visual appearance to reflect each other in both representational and interpretive modes. Nevertheless, we will address a series of questions: namely, do emblems proper and their description play an informative or hermetic role in the Baroque romance and antiromance? Do emblems serve to communicate clearly one meaning or a set of meanings through allegorical depiction and interpretation? Do emblems rather entail a fragmentary, incongruous series of representations and interpretations of characters’ affective states and authorial figures’ intentions? If so, do multiple agency and intention render these narratives completely hermetic? In more subtle terms, do emblematic elements grant characters a momentary opportunity to express masterfully their desires? Likewise, do they afford authorial figures the occasion to convey clearly a multiplicity of possible perspectives on their own works and on previous ones?

D’Urfé, Sorel, and the Emblematic Tradition The two authors write in the wake of the late-Renaissance and Baroque tradition of literary and visual emblematics. French writers and emblem-makers debated about the distinction between the emblem and the device, and their definitions of emblème varied from the end of the sixteenth and into the first half of the seventeenth century (Russell, The Emblem 142–60). For the purposes of this study, and based on textual evidence in d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narratives, we will consider the emblem as consisting of three parts: a motto, a visual image, and some form of commentary, whether it be an epigram, an explanatory

81

Chapter Four discourse, or a narrative. Recent scholars find the origins of the emblem proper in a variety of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance modes of visual and linguistic representation: the Greek epigram, classical mythology, medieval nature symbolism, heraldry, impresa, Renaissance collections of textual commonplaces, and humanist theories of hieroglyphic symbolism (Daly 9–36). Both the formal composition and the historical origins of emblems attest to their joint visual-linguistic nature. Moreover, it was this juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal that appealed to the esthetics of Baroque allegory, whose representational tendency Walter Benjamin characterizes as the encroachment of the borders separating plastic and rhetorical arts (176–77). In theory, the emblem serves to translate the abstract, such as moral or theological concepts, into the figurative realm of linguistic metaphor and visual image. It is precisely this translation of the abstract into the esthetic that makes the emblem an apt means of expression and interpretation in Baroque allegory. Emblems thus privilege a certain notion of ut pictura poesis, that is, a picture is silent poetry and a poem is a speaking picture.4 The visual and verbal components of the emblem lend one another their representational and interpretive capacities, for the epigram can suggest a mental image as well as the picture can represent a linguistic conceit. What particularizes emblems at the time of their emergence, in the 1530s and 1540s, are their complex functions. They do not only involve the encoding, representation, and communication of knowledge, but also its decoding or interpretation. As Albrecht Schöne explains: The dual function of representation and interpretation, description and explanation, which the tripartite construction of the emblem assumes, is based upon the fact that that which is depicted means more than it portrays. The res picta of the emblem is endowed with the power to refer beyond itself; it is a res significans.5

Schöne’s analysis implies three more significant relationships between Baroque allegory and emblematics, as theorized by Benjamin. First, the figurative, imaging capacity of the emblem’s visual and verbal components not only represents a thing, person, or landscape, but also refers to the signified’s 82

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics meaning in a larger economy of cultural circulation: mythology, ethics, theology, history, philosophy, mysticism, etc. This can be best described as the polysemic power of emblematic elements, both in their specific compositional context and in the intellectual and ideological context of the readership. Second, the visual and verbal elements of emblems cannot fulfill their representational and interpretive capacities independently of one another; otherwise, they simply function as fragments, as incomplete purveyors of knowledge. Third, in the context of Baroque allegory, the emblem’s excess of signification disrupts the cohesion of all elements into one didactic message, and thus leads to a plurality of ambiguous meanings. In Benjamin’s view, the emblem of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries represents and interprets the experience of the world as fragments, as piecemeal figurative embodiments of knowledge so characteristic of Baroque allegory.6 Indeed, it is both the richness in meaning and the fragmentary operation of emblematic representation and interpretation that d’Urfé and Sorel exploit in the creation of their fictions. Both d’Urfé and Sorel incorporate elements of emblem books in their narratives. Both authors use figurative language to describe a visual image that receives commentary and that refers beyond its literal object of representation. They construct these images through systems of intertextual reference to the emblematic tradition, and they thus explore the representative and interpretive capacities of literary and speech genres in the service of visual figuration. In addition, they both use the description of emblems to refer to other episodes in their own texts that treat problems of verbal expression and visual appearance. Both also examine the polysemic, fragmentary, and allegorical import of emblematic elements in their experiments with language. Yet all similarities end here. While d’Urfé has his characters depict emblematic images through figurative language as a rhetorical strategy, Sorel’s characters put poetic metaphor to the test of visual translation in the form of emblematic portraiture. D’Urfé relies solely on the figurative capacities of language to depict emblematic imagery in his text, whereas Sorel includes an engraving, an emblematic portrait, which literalizes the linguistic figures informing it. They also situate commentary about the emblem

83

Chapter Four on different levels of narration. D’Urfé’s characters are partially aware of being engaged in an interior polemic because of the transformational and equivocal force that this mode of representation has on their own speech and experience. Yet Sorel’s characters are very aware of their imitation of literary, emblematic models as conventions, and they are actively involved in the discussion of their representational and interpretive capabilities. The following analysis will demonstrate these differences in the context of the Baroque pastoral romance, which maintains a hidden, interior polemic concerning emblematics, and in its antiromance, which approaches this tradition critically.

Emblems in L’Astrée D’Urfé’s allusions to the emblematic tradition may seem furtive, for his narrator never uses the term emblème, and his characters do not recognize the import of emblematic images they encounter or of words they utter.7 Yet a closer examination of the construction of images described by the narrator leaves few doubts about d’Urfé’s intertextual references to emblems and their commentary. D’Urfé also allows for a pattern of cultural references beyond the inter-relatedness of texts. Moreover, the constitutive elements of a given emblem may be concentrated in one scene, but they frequently impact the characters’ affective experience and even their figurative representation throughout the narrative. D’Urfé’s verbal emblems therefore give a self-referential dimension to the romance by pointing to issues in the larger narrative. Returning to our discussion of the Temple of the Goddess Astrée (above, chap. 2), we remember that the shepherds and shepherdesses encounter a painting representing two Cupids in a tug-of-war and two torches with united flames (II.v.178–79). The painting also includes a “mot”: “NOS VOLONTEZ DE MESME NE SONT QU’UNE” (II.v.179). At the bottom of the image are written the Twelve Tables of the Laws of Love (II.v.181–83). Unmistakably, the tripartite construction of this tablet mimics that of the emblem proper. Silvandre spontaneously comments on this tripartite representation with a Neoplatonist interpretation: the lover and the beloved participate in a spiritual and psy-

84

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics chological unity (II.v.179–80). In light of his allegorical interpretation, all three parts are mutually representative and interpretive of this principle, and they therefore serve a philosophical and moral didactic purpose. It is only through the supplement of allegoresis that the viewer can comprehend the didactic message of the whole: “Cette troupe eust demeuré long temps sans entendre cette peinture, si le berger Silvandre…ne la leur eust declarée” (II.v.179). It is necessary to repeat that Hylas alters the text of the law to locate disparities immanent to the emblematic structure and he thus fragments its unity (II.v.194–97). In short, the original text of the law informs emblematic representation and interpretation, but its transformation by Hylas uncovers meanings that contradict its ostensible meaning as a whole. D’Urfé therefore situates the emblem in the context of Baroque allegory in order to problematize the didactic cohesiveness of all its elements; he thereby offers a counterpoint to the abstract concepts it represents. This scene of the emblem has multiple significance in the narrative for the following reasons. First, it reinforces the ongoing debate between the characters Silvandre and Hylas, who represent concurrent, conflicting ideas: spiritualized love versus its material translation. Second, it serves to underline the emblem’s susceptibility to transformation and contradiction through supplemental commentary. The emblem clearly communicates a message of spiritualized love only to be brought into conflict with its material opposite. The unfolding narrative thus gives new significance to the emblem of the two Cupids: in a broad sense, it is a text subject to modification and commentary so as to refer to larger issues of theme, differing modes of thought, and the transformational forces of rhetorical disposition. D’Urfé again brings the problem of affective presence to bear on emblematic representation and interpretation in the sentimental narrative of Célidée, Calidon, and Thamire (II.i.27–44). Here, the heroine’s invocation of a myth informing an emblem and her unconscious reference to its commentary are not meant to memorialize an amorous relationship, as in Céladon’s case. Instead, d’Urfé has Célidée express her desire and her identity through an allusion to a myth informing one of Alciato’s emblems in order to argue against her

85

Chapter Four emotional death, which in her case would be marriage to someone she does not love. By the time all three characters meet the nymphs and shepherds in Forez, they are in an inextricable state of rupture with one another and they seek some resolution to their conflict in a debate concerning unrequited love. Célidée sets out to argue against alliance with either suitor, which she considers to be the foreclosure of the possibility to experience love for someone other than them and thus an emotional death. In the exordium of her response to Calidon’s harangue, Célidée finds herself at a loss for words. She rejects both her suitors, since they second-guess her contempt for them both. She admits her disempowered position, because she lacks prerogative and rhetorical expertise: Mais par où commenceray-je? et qu’est-ce qu’en premier lieu je dois alleguer, ou à quelle divine puissance faut-il que je recoure pour estre assistée en ce perilleux combat où je suis attaquée, non par l’amour, mais par ces monstres d’amour? Perilleux combat veritablement le puis-je nommer, puis que tout mon heur et mon malheur en dependent, et monstres d’amour sont-ils bien, puis qu’ils se veulent faire aymer par force, et contraindre d’aimer et de hayr à leur volonté. (II.ii.56–57; my emphasis)

Horowitz argues that Célidée finds herself in a degraded position in the love triangle as a result of the oppressive role of “socially powerful male[s]” (72). Yet where is the seat of their power? Célidée finds it in “la trop grande eloquence” (II.ii.56): namely, an overpowering, rhetorical virtuosity. They attempt to use the persuasive force of juridical rhetoric to transform her will into theirs. How does love transform Calidon and Thamire into monsters? Here the god of Love appears at the height of his tyranny, as the authorial figure and general narrator suggest in the opening pages of L’Astrée, for he transforms Calidon’s speech into an agglomeration of several voices and intentions: those of Thamire, Célidée, and the god of Love himself. All of these subjective positions are rallied to contest Célidée’s personal freedom, and their presence in Calidon’s discourse makes him a composite of agents teaming up to subjugate Célidée in a transformation of her will. Calidon is therefore a hybrid character—a monstrous agent formed from the pieces of other agents.8 86

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics By rejecting the prospect of voluntary servitude to this monster of language, Célidée resists Calidon’s efforts to transform her desire into his. Although she may be his beloved, she refuses to become his lover. She does not identify her will with his. Célidée serves as a counter-example to the Neoplatonist views espoused by the majority of male characters: the loss of self through identification with the desire of another. What recourse has she in the rhetorical power play with Calidon and Thamire? She chooses a champion of eloquence for her cause, the Gallic Hercules: J’ay ouy dire à nos sages druides que ce grand Hercules que nous voyons eslevé sur nos autels avec la massue en la main, l’espaule chargée de la peau du lyon, et avec tant de chaisne d’or qui luy sortoient de la bouche, qui tiennent tant d’hommes attachez par les aureilles, fut jadis un grand heros, qui par sa force et valeur dontoit les monstres, et par son bien dire attiroit chacun à la verité. (II.ii.57)

Célidée depicts the figure of a hero with a set of concrete attributes: the club, the lion skin, and chains extending from his mouth to the ears of men. She cites a doctrinaire source, the Druids, who give this figure significance beyond its ancient traditional representation. This figure has apparent iconographic significance, for it represents first and foremost a god, a divine force. It also has mythological significance, as the name Hercules and the epithet “Great Hero” attest. Yet in this figurative arrangement, what is the relationship between physical strength and linguistic virtuosity? Here d’Urfé specifically alludes to two sources, both of which are present in Alciato’s Emblemata, which was the first large collection of emblems to appear and whose first commented edition was published in France in 1571 (Russell, The Emblem 84–85). D’Urfé’s points of reference are Lucian’s Heracles in PROLALIA H HRAKLHS as well as Claude Mignault’s Latin translation of Lucian and commentary, which accompany Alciato’s “emblema CLXXX” (Alciati 580). Given Hercules’s concrete attributes (“massue,” “peau de lyon,” “chaisnes d’or”) and his persuasive eloquence, one can say that he resembles the Celtic Heracles depicted in Lucian’s text (Lucien 59–62). At first glance, it is not altogether clear

87

Chapter Four whether d’Urfé learned of this figure directly from Lucian’s text, from Annius de Viterbe’s Antiquités, or from other Renaissance sources, such as emblem books, as Arthur Henkel, Schöne, and Daly have documented them (Henkel and Schöne cols. 1651–52), or from mythographies and histories of the Druids by such as Noël Taillepied, du Choul, and Jean Picard de Toutry (Gaume 106–09). However, if we consider the fictional context of the evocation, and compare its terms to emblem commentary, the theme of monstrosity leads us to another specific source. Let us keep in mind that Célidée chooses the Gallic Hercules for his success in taming monsters (“dontoit les monstres”), and she depends on his “bien dire” to defend herself against the monstrous rhetoric, and desires, of Calidon and Thamire, the “monstres d’amour” (II.i.57). Here d’Urfé specifically alludes to Mignault’s commentary on Alciato’s “emblema CLXXX” and his translation of Lucian. In contrast to Erasmus’s more common Latin translation of Lucian, Mignault’s shows his originality by introducing monstrosity in the picture.9 Mignault does not designate the Gauls as enemies or monsters overcome by Hercules: it is Hercules himself who is the monster. Mignault translates Lucian’s term ajllovkotov, which properly means of “unusual nature, form” (Liddell and Scott 38), as “monstrous and absurd”: “Herculem Galli Ogmion lingua propria nominant: eius autem Dei simulacrum monstrosum & absurdum repraesentant” (“Gauls call Hercules ‘Ogmios’ in their language: however, they represent the simulacrum of their god as monstrous and absurd”) (Alciati 582; my translation). Mignault’s commentary qualifies the entire figurative representation of the Gallic Hercules as monstrous, for he is a composite of traditionally mythological attributes and others in conflict with them. Yet to understand better Mignault’s commentary and translation, we must also examine the emblem. Alciato’s emblem has the traditional ternary structure of motto, picture, and epigram. The motto—“Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior”—sets the abstract concept of the emblem. The image under the motto depicts Hercules with a club in his right hand, a bow in his left, the lion skin on his back, and chains extending from the tip of his tongue, to the ears of the

88

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics Gauls (fig. 1. Alciato’s “emblema CLXXX”). The epigram verbally represents the picture, and through interpretation links it to the motto. The epigram represents the mythological hero, for its words refer to figurative details in the image (“clavam,” “arcum,” “Nemees…leo,” “lingua…trajecta catenis”). It also interprets these attributes by organizing them in a narrative and giving them moral significance: Hercules of the Gauls brought law (“iura”) through speech (“eloquio”) in order to transform the people’s hearts by persuasion. As this interpretation illustrates, the classical text that Alciato and d’Urfé refer to as a source to create their literary and visual emblems is fundamentally ambiguous, for its figurative details may signify heroic qualities (physical strength, monster-killing) as well as their opposites (feebleness, monstrosity). The commentary thus scrutinizes the visual representation in the emblem and its mythological subtext to emphasize the divergent meanings in this cultural reference to myth. D’Urfé’s Célidée thus inherits a verbal emblem that carries contradictory meanings and presents a disfigured hero in its allegorical deployment of the mythological text. How will she be able to negotiate the emblem’s empowering, heroic import and its monstrous, oppressive contrary? At this point, Célidée only sees the invocation of the god as a first step toward liberation from her predicament: C’est donc à luy que je recourray, à fin qu’il domte ces esprits monstrueux, et qu’il delie de sorte ma langue, que je puisse vous déduire mes raisons, ou plustost qu’il les vous die luy-mesme avec ma voix. Par ta valeur doncques, je te prie, et par la belle Galathée, nostre princesse, ô grand Hercule, je te conjure que tu me delivres des ces monstrueuses amours […afin] que j’en puisse recevoir un juste et favorable jugement. (II.ii.57; my emphasis)

In order to overcome the monstrosity of her rivals’ thinking (“esprits monstrueux”) and of their desires (“monstrueuses amours”), Célidée interprets and applies the Hercules emblem in her speech. She brings together two sources of verbal agency—her own and that of Hercules—in the hope that they will collaborate to argue her case in a battle of words, the

89

Chapter Four amorous trial.10 D’Urfé thus presents his character in a complex struggle between the mastery of rhetoric and the abandonment of personal agency to it. Unfortunately for Célidée, the contradictory meanings in the emblem undermine the collaboration of dual agency in language, for its invocation distorts her intention and she loses her case. Léonide decides in favor of giving Célidée to Thamire (II.ii.72–73). Célidée’s attempt to empower her speech through expropriation and thus to liberate herself only results in her disempowerment and enslavement to a man. Her affective disposition does not have an accurate, just representation.11 As Hercules’s rhetoric subjects her to a tyrannical monster, and as it deforms—that is, monster—her words and intentions, the mythological and emblematic embodiment of rhetoric appears as a monstrous figure in d’Urfé’s narrative. However, Célidée’s efforts to free herself from unwanted suitors do not end here. In the “Suitte de l’histoire de Célidée,” the verbal emblem of the Gallic Hercules meets its interpretive reflection in the description of the heroine’s voluntary disfigurement. In the trial of love just treated, d’Urfé staged the failure of Célidée’s argument to reconcile the divergent meanings encoded within rhetorical and emblematic reference. However, in the following scene of the character’s reprisal, he dramatizes her masterful interpretation and accommodation of these meanings in her project to assert her intention, that is, her desire. As she says before sacrificing herself: “Faisons-nous paraître telle que nous désirons être crue” (II.xi.448). Célidée does so by physically embodying the monstrous figuration in Lucian’s myth, Alciato’s emblem, and Mignault’s commentary. Frustrated by the devastating effects of the love triangle, Célidée decides to eliminate the one thing that spurs her suitors’ desires: her beauty. She comes across the Druid Cléontine’s diamond ring, whose stone can leave an indelible mark on human flesh. She disfigures her own face by a “genereuse action” and with a “main genereuse” (II.xi.448). The narrator’s description of the incident closely parallels the moral portrait of Hercules in Adamas’s home: “…il attira les Gaulois à la civilité, et à la generosité par son exemple” (III.iii.81). The personal qualities of “généreux” and “générosité” that Hercules and Célidée share are traditionally assigned to heroic, aristo-

90

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics cratic characters and historical figures, as in Cornelian tragedy, and they denote “bravery,” “courage,” and “moral nobility.”12 D’Urfé’s narrator emphasizes her courage, “qui en a eu le courage?” (II.xi.448), and the author portrays the triumph of Célidée’s moral superiority in transforming Calidon’s desire into indifference and Thamire’s into “amitié.”13 Because her verbal emblem of Hercules does not succeed as a rhetorical strategy, Célidée makes it into a self-figurative form and self-interpretive device to prove the legitimacy of her desires. This self-assertion of her wishes—her preference to maintain a relationship of “amitié” with her husband, Thamire—persists throughout the next two parts of L’Astrée written by d’Urfé.14 When the shepherd Damon tells her that he knows a Carthaginian doctor who can cure her wounds, she is reluctant to seek help to recover her “beauté méprisée” (III.xi.583). Furthermore, when Thamire prepares for the voyage to seek the doctor, she makes every effort to dissuade him: “O dieux, s’escria Celidée, faut-il que ce dommageable don de la nature, qu’on nomme beauté, soit cause, ô Thamire, que nous soyons separez si longuement? N’es-tu pas content de m’avoir telle que je suis?” (IV.xi.706). Célidée maintains her state of disfigurement, because her physical, emblematic incorporation and its personal significance now accurately communicate her intention to her suitors, introduce civility in her relationship with them, protect them from melancholy and suicide, and release her from the tomb of affective death. D’Urfé thus supplements rhetorical argument and the physical description of his characters with mythological, emblematic imagery and interpretation to elucidate characters’ personal motivations and the romance’s hidden polemic concerning the problem of speech. In the case of Célidée, the figurative capacities of emblems and the interpretive capacities of their commentaries are literalized to resolve affective conflicts. As tragic as disfigurement may seem, it signifies Célidée’s triumph over the tyranny of male desire. Her personal incorporation of emblematic figuration succeeds where rhetorical strategies fail, for it decodes, reconciles, and clearly communicates meanings that were immured in a conflictive relationship in rhetoric. When rhetorical devices fail by themselves, imaginative language and emblematic representation compensate to bring

91

Chapter Four narrative resolution. As Judovitz argues, d’Urfé’s “emblematic legacy” is manifest in “the interplay between word and image,” for “neither speech, nor images function as the exclusive purveyors of meaning” (“Emblematic” 32). Célidée finally succeeds in her search for an empowering mode of representation and interpretation that calls into play the word and the image: the myth, the emblem, and its commentary. Through the distribution of emblematic elements throughout the novel, d’Urfé presents the emblem as a pattern for her heroism and “a symbol of unlimited freedom” of expression traditionally reserved for men (Horowitz 35). Célidée thus emerges as the master of the representation, interpretation, and communication of her intention, for she fully exploits the figurative and literal components of speech and the emblematic tradition. D’Urfé here clearly breaks with a whole series of literary and cultural conventions: the passivity and powerlessness of women in the courtly tradition, the imperative of beauty for the innamorata in pastoral literature, the role of men as the sole masters of language, and the inextricable layering of meaning in the Baroque emblem.15

Sorel’s and Crispin de Passe’s Emblematic Portrait In the episodes in Le berger extravagant involving the “portrait de Charite,” Sorel at first seems to translate verbal description into physical portrayal of the individual for a purpose similar to d’Urfé’s: that is, the representation and interpretation of characters’ desires through monstrous, emblematic figuration. Yet in contrast with d’Urfé, Sorel explicitly refers to the tradition of emblems proper by including an engraving, Crispin de Passe’s Le portrait de Charite (fig. 2).16 This portrait fits the paradigm of emblematic representation and interpretation insofar as it contains a label and image, and it constitutes a commentary on poetic figures. Conversely, the portrait is itself subject to commentary, first in the narrative, and then in the metanarrative Remarques at the end of Le berger. Therefore, quite unlike d’Urfé, Sorel generates divergent critiques of the conventionality of poetic and emblematic representation on both narrative and metanarrative levels. In the episode of the “portrait de Charite,” Lysis’s conventional, poetic manner of describing his beloved collides with 92

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics emblematic representation and interpretation for two purposes. First, Sorel demonstrates the incompatible elements within metaphor, allegory, and specifically within the blason, all of which appear monstrous once they are translated into another medium. Second, he shows the discrepancy between Lysis’s manner and intention in representing his desire, which comes to transform the beloved into a monster. In other words, every time Lysis uses discursive figures to create relationships of resemblance, another character challenges those relationships by locating irreconcilable differences and disparities within them. Sorel has Lysis describe his beloved Charite in poetic figures, that is, metaphors, similes, and analogies relying on imaginative comparisons of images in the manner of a poetic catalogue of traits or blason.17 In a pretense of imitating characters in pastoral and sentimental romances, Lysis wants a portrait of his beloved Charite, which Anselme volunteers to create (I.23–24, 35, 37). In the manner of blasonneurs of the Pléiade, Lysis gives him the following instructions: Fay luy moy ces beaux filets d’or qui parent sa teste, ces inevitables rets, ces ameçons, ces apas, & ces chaisnes qui surprennent les cœurs. Apres cela depein moy ce front uny où l’amour est assis comme en son tribunal: au bas mets ces deux arcs d’ebeine, & au dessous ces deux Soleils qui jettent incessamment des traits & des flammes.… Tu les feras ces mignardes jouës parsemees de lys et de roses: & puis cette petite bouche dont les deux lévres sont des branches de corail. Que s’il estoit decent de les laisser entr’ouvertes, tu ferois ses dents qui sont deux rangs de perles fines: mais contente toy de cecy, & fay seulement apres son col & son beau sein de neige. (I.38)

Although Lysis depicts his beloved through the comparison of elements that have no relationship outside poetic representation, he expects Anselme to decode relationships of resemblance so as to arrive at a visual representation different from the terms of his description. Lysis wants Anselme to reconstitute a semblance of Charite and thus capture her specificity in human form. For instance, “beaux filets d’or” signifies the mental image of golden threads, which in turn resembles the mental image of blond hair, signified by the term blond hair or by its pictorial image. 93

Chapter Four Nevertheless, Anselme chooses not to follow this schema and thus contradicts Lysis’s intention. When Anselme finally unveils his engraving of Charite, Lysis looks at it in confusion and declares: “Mais comment entendez vous cecy…je voy là des chaisnes, des Soleils, & des fleurs. Ce n’est pas un visage” (II.55). The shepherd notices that he and Anselme do not practice the same interpretive method, for he expected the artist to decipher his poetic comparisons and to construct a “visage” with recognizably human traits. Anselme does depict a face, but not as Lysis expects it to appear, since it is a human form composed of metaphoric fragments and inhuman traits: …il avoit depeint un visage qui au lieu d’estre de couleur de chair, avoit un teint blanc comme neige. Il y avoit deux branches de corail à l’ouverture de la bouche, & à chaque jouë un lys & une rose croisez l’un sur l’autre. En la place où devoient estre les yeux on n’y voyoit ny blanc ny prunelle. Il y avoit deux Soleils qui jettoient des rayons parmy lesquels on remarquoit quelques flames & quelques dards.… Quelques uns [des cheveux] estoient faits comme des…lignes, avecque l’hameçon au bout, fourny d’apast pour attirer la proye. Il y avoit quantité de cœurs qui estoient pris à l’amorce, & entre autres un plus gros que ses compagnons, qui alloit justement au dessous de la jouë gauche, tellement qu’il sembloit qu’il servist de pendant d’oreille à cette rare beauté. (II.55–56)

Anselme has followed Lysis’s instructions à la lettre, for he has represented the object of literary portraiture neither in her individuality, nor in her difference from figures of speech. Instead, he has rendered Lysis’s verbal code in visual terms and has shown how such a code deforms the individual. Anselme created “un portraict par Metaphore” (II.56) by reversing the allegorical conventions constitutive of the emblem. Allegorical personification consists of the attribution of human traits to the inhuman, as when Lucian and Alciato have Hercules of the Gauls embody the abstract concept of eloquence. Instead, Anselme’s portrait situates predominantly inhuman traits in the human figure. Anthropomorphism interpreted against the grain becomes the decomposition of human form. Therefore, Sorel has his artistic and critical character reverse the order of allegorical, emblematic representation and thus subvert Lysis’s literary portrait. 94

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics Furthermore, this episode and its accompanying engraving by Crispin de Passe (fig. 2) undergo interpretations in the narrative and metanarrative. This movement from the image (pictura) and identifying motto (inscriptio) “La Belle Charite” to commentary (subscriptio) mirrors the reading of an emblem (Daly 38). In addition, this interpretive movement points to the portrait’s monstrous assemblage of formal disparities. Both Lysis in the narrative and the authorial figure in the Remarques at the end of the antiromance comment on the portrait, much in the same way an epigram comments on a picture in an emblem: specifically, they interpret its visual semblance as monstrosity. In a moment of metanarrative commentary, Lysis admits that he took “ce visage pour un monstre” (II.56). The implied author in the Remarques amplifies Lysis’s comment: “J’avois raison de dire que ce portrait estoit un monstre, car de verité si les beautez estoient telles que les Poëtes les descrivent, elles seroient monstrueuses, & l’on peut dire que nostre Charite est si belle qu’elle en est laide” (Rems., 566). The authorial figure presupposes that visual portraiture can guarantee semblance to the individual subject, and that literary portraiture, in the form of blasons or emblems, only promises dissimilarity and internal incoherence. With this presupposition in mind, the authorial figure explains that literary description of the physical, meant to capture semblance to the individual in an illustrious, coherent composition, only renders the subject unrecognizable and ugly. The Horatian notion of ut pictura poesis breaks down once discourse and image work at cross-purposes; the beauty of one cannot stand up to the requirements of beauty for the other. As far as the implied author is concerned, discourse and visible image simply function according to different criteria of imitation and resemblance.18 Lysis’s adoption of the conflation of the two, meant to preserve the beauty and particularity of the subject, produces opposite effects: loss of the individual human figure in a mass of disparate components, that is, hideousness and monstrosity. Nevertheless, continuing in his quixotic feint, the Extravagant Shepherd quickly reabsorbs the critique of literary conceit into a fictional pattern for understanding the world and his own emotions. Although Lysis first considered Anselme’s painting to be a deformation of his speech, he later takes it for the best representation of his love.19 Lysis finds that he can 95

Chapter Four locate his affect in the portrait and thus reclaim it as an accurate representation of self: Voyla mon cœur, s’escria Lysis en le voyant, je le reconnoy. Ha! qu’il est judicieusement placé en cét endroit! estant si proche de l’oreille de Charite, il luy contera incessamment mes peines. (II.56)

Lysis finally comes to approve of Anselme’s visual representation of his poetic expression, for the artist has supplemented a detail—a heart—that the shepherd interprets as the best personification of his emotion. He wants to be close to his beloved, just as his heart accompanies her in the image. Moreover, Lysis projects his capacity of speech in this visual detail; he gives it the significance of an allegorical personification through prosopopoeia, the granting of human speech to the inhuman.20 In light of his allegorical interpretation of the portrait, its visual figures not only represent a part standing in for the whole, but also a part speaking for the whole. Lysis thus reclaims Anselme’s visual anti-blason by commenting on it in such a way as to transform it once again into an allegorical emblem. Lysis further comments on the portrait to make it a personalized emblem representing his love. In book X, he gives instructions to his newly chosen biographer, Philiris, in how to narrate the scene of the “portrait de Charite.” Lysis bids Philiris to reclaim the visual representation to the realm of verbal signs and rhetorical figures of comparison: “Je suis d’avis que tu te serves de plusieurs figures diverses de Rhetorique, & que premierement raportant à mes affections les couleurs du tableau & tout ce qui le concerne, tu faces une chose spirituelle d’une chose corporelle” (X.401). In his lengthy monologue, Lysis himself performs this transposition just as an epigram accompanying an emblem recaps and interprets its terms. He does so through three interpretive strategies possible in allegoresis: (1) color codes proper to medieval heraldry: Le cuivre du tableau, diras-tu, est un rude metail qui est fait avec l’aspreté de la souffrance de Lysis. L’or ducat qui y reluit est sa fidelité; le blanc est sa pureté & son innocence.…

96

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics (2) the material concretizing of affective experience, similar to that of Le roman de la rose: Le depart & l’absence font les eloignements & la perspective: mais il y a fort peu d’ombrage, pource que la jalousie qui les doit faire, n’a pas esté trouvée fort grande. Toutes ses couleurs ont esté destrempees avec l’huyle de la douceur de mille attraicts & d’autant d’œillades, & l’on les à broyees sur le marbre de la constance.…

(3) the mythological reinvestment of abstract thought: Il y en a qui disent que le siecle de cuivre a laissé de quoy faire la planche du tableau, & que Lysis l’a pris voulant quitter le siecle de fer, & remonter petit à petit jusqu’au siecle d’or. (X.401–02)

Sorel has his character radically immure every detail of the visible image and the process of portraiture into his affective life. Yet these verbal descriptions and allegorical interpretations will serve an interesting double purpose in the virtual biography. They will depict both the interpretive process of allegoresis and the material process of constructing the representation subject to interpretation. Therefore, like the epigrammatic commentary in an emblem, Lysis’s interpretation inscribes many levels of signification within the image, one of which serves his imaginary investment of affective experience in literary terms, and another which exposes the representational-interpretive process underlying such an illusion.

*** In their fictions, both d’Urfé and Sorel integrate well a subtext of emblems and the traditions informing them, such as myth, allegory, blason, and Renaissance cultural references. The most striking difference, however, is the level of awareness of each author’s characters. D’Urfé’s Célidée may be conscious of the Gallic Hercules myth and its figurative arrangement, but she is not privy to its emblematic incarnation, accompanying commentary, and cultural reference to military and political dominance. Nonetheless, d’Urfé’s readership can see these references

97

Chapter Four and understand them as informing the plot with allegory and symbol, such as the episode of the heroine’s self-disfigurement. D’Urfé also makes the emblem the site of rhetorical transformation, as when Hylas modifies Céladon’s sestets listed below the image of the two Cupids. In the pastoral romance, the emblem and emblematic image are subject to narrative commentary, which consequently suggests their redeployment in new amorous scenarios, in other physical descriptions, and in the expression of various philosophical positions. In his antiromance, by contrast, Sorel grants his characters and implied author a heightened awareness of emblems, blasons, and figures of speech necessary for their creation. Lysis appears the least aware, for Anselme, by crossing the border between verbal and visual representation, surprises the shepherd’s expectation of mimesis with the presentation of a monstrous portrait. Nevertheless, Lysis may also be the most imaginative character, because he manages to find his emotion in the engraving and he chooses to interpret its creation to be an allegory of his relationship with Charite. Unlike d’Urfé’s episodes, Sorel’s do not escape explicit metanarrative commentary, revealing that the portrait transposes the tropes of blasons. To the extent that the portrait represents and is represented, and that it interprets and is interpreted, it and its elements strongly suggest an emblematic structure, if not the movement of reading an emblem. The portrait also participates in the transposition of the verbal into the visual, just as emblematic images translate mottoes of moral principles and myths recorded by ancient authors and Renaissance humanists. It is important to note that this verbal-visual transposition influences episodes other than those of Célidée’s self-mutilation and Hylas’s rewrites. To a great degree, d’Urfé will employ the transposition of the verbal into the visual in his experiments with themes of specularity and transvestism. While he will literalize Ficino’s notion of spiritual transformation through love in his Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour, he will use Hylas’s materialist, mercantile vulgarizations of the same principle to suggest, in jest of course, the physical metamorphosis of lovers by cross-dressing. Yet keeping true to the serious tone of d’Urfé’s romance, the joke symbolically informs the amorous conflict of Céladon disguised as Alexis, a female Druid. Furthermore,

98

Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics in his L’anti-roman, Le berger’s second edition, Sorel will not allow this transposition of the Neoplatonist maxim into the cross-dressed lover to go uncommented. Similar to the emblem’s verbal commentary on the visual, Sorel will subject the visual manifestation of a verbal conceit to metanarrative commentary and analysis. He will evaluate such a representation of identity to the standards of verisimilitude and plausibility, which are characteristic of his nascent realism.

99

Chapter Five

Transvestism and Specularity Transformations and Travesties of the Self

D’Urfé and Sorel do not arbitrarily couple the themes of mirroring and transvestism. Both themes involve the perception of a physical appearance meant to designate an identity, a self. These two themes of figuring the self have been commonplaces in Western literature since Apollodorus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Petronius’s Satyricon. D’Urfé and Sorel employ these themes to put language and narrative to the test of representing the visual perception of the self, whether it be through painting, in a reflection, or by a character’s physical appearance. In L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant, depictions of transvestism and mirroring temporarily fix identity only to transform it again, as if by metamorphosis, and they hide as well as reveal aspects of the self and personal intention, as if they functioned like masks. Admittedly, the difference between the transformation of the self and its masking in its visual presentation is great; however, as we will learn from the study of Sorel’s transvestites, the mask can at times enforce a transformation of the imagination, the mental image of the self. Some twentieth-century literary critics have articulated a notion, or series of notions, of Baroque esthetics in writing, and they have based their arguments upon the very problem of the ambiguity of sight, or visual appearance, first in the plastic and pictorial arts, and then in literature. Jean Rousset and Marcel Raymond relied primarily on Wölfflin’s categories of the formal characteristics of the artistic and architectural Baroque to articulate a set of literary themes specific to the period. These literary critics translated the historical characterization of Baroque art as evincing chaotic movement, open form, and irregular distribution of ornament into literary motifs of insta-

100

Transvestism and Specularity bility, mobility, metamorphosis, and emphasis on appearances, such as façades, masks, and disguises.1 This translation of artistic features into literary themes may shed some light on the representational status of transvestism and specularity in d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narratives. Characters cannot acquire any knowledge of themselves or their world outside the terms of representation, for they must remain within the modes of artifice themselves. Rousset’s summary analysis of pastoral drama—“…on n’atteint au vrai qu’en prenant le détour de l’artifice…”—could be extended to suggest that fictional characters are never sure whether the visual image of the self represents the truth (33). This is generally the case for the representation of visual appearance in French literature of the time, since the visible in its contemporary sense permitted what seemed false to become the truth, and vice versa. According to Françoise Siguret, literary projects exploited the “effet illusioniste de représentation,” and the readership felt no anxiety about the epistemological irresolvability of representations of visual appearance.2 What distinguishes d’Urfé and Sorel in their treatment of the ambiguity of visual appearance, whether it be reflected or cross-dressed? What are their individual approaches to these themes as literary conventions? What kinds of transformations do mirroring and cross-dressing enforce in the depiction of character identity? In L’Astrée, d’Urfé privileges the illusionistic power of appearances and the reflected image to form public opinion and, most importantly, fundamental, individual identity. He specifically builds scenes of visual reflection and opposite-gender costumes on rhetorical articulations, either through his stylistics, or through phrases recast in debates on Neoplatonist and materialist love. He closely follows the convention of disguise as mask when he has characters take on a costume in order to enter forbidden social spaces or to trick and evade their enemies—conventional purposes in pastoral drama and novels (Forestier 25, 30–31).3 Others engage in the illusion of visible disguise so as to become literally another character, that is, to undergo a fundamental metamorphosis of identity. In these cases that we will study, d’Urfé imports the ancient mythological theme of metamorphosis from Ovid and resituates it in the Baroque world of the pastoral romance

101

Chapter Five where visual appearance and identity fuse. Rousset characterizes this technique in his comment on Baroque pastoral theater, where “les vêtements ou les voiles composent les corps, les masques se confondent avec les visages” (33). In Le berger extravagant, Sorel at first glance seems to parallel d’Urfé in his depictions of the ludic irresolvability of characters’ visual appearance and in his playful techniques of encoding it with representations of speech and action. Let us not forget Carmelin calls them métaphorimoses (V.191). Similarly, Sorel seems to explore this problem through the use of the same conventional literary themes: transvestism, metamorphosis, and specularity. The similarities, however, stop here. Sorel’s protagonist, in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, consciously imitates these literary conventions in an effort to pattern his concepts of self and social reality according to them. Moreover, Sorel has his transvestite-narcissist encounter antagonists who have the critical distance to call into question the character’s imitations. The authorial figure in the preface inaugurates the antiromance as a narrative and metanarrative project that stages and questions its own conventional themes of metamorphosis and cross-dressing: Que s’ils [les lecteurs] l’estiment [Lysis] foû de parler avec extravagance comme il fait, & de s’estre deguisé en fille, ou d’avoir crû estre metamorphosé en arbre, il faudra donc qu’ils avouent aussi que ceux qu’il imite en tout cela, ont esté encore moins sages, car ce sont eux qui en ont parlé les premiers, & ils ne devoient pas escrire des choses qui ne sçauroient estre, ny celles que l’on ne doit pas faire. (Preface, 15–16)

The authorial figure first seems to qualify Lysis as extravagant and mad in his imitation of characters from the pastoral and mythological poetry of Theocritus, Callimachus, Virgil, and Ovid, the epic and chivalric romances of Heliodorus and Ariosto, and the pastoral romances of Longus, Montemayor, Cervantes, and Olenix du Montsacré (Serroy 297). The protagonist’s efforts to adopt fictional roles as disguises appear insane only by virtue of their placement in a social context that maintains a distinction between literary representation and social reality. At second glance, however, those whom Lysis imitates are not only

102

Transvestism and Specularity fictional characters, but also writers who create them: “…eux qui en ont parlé les premiers, & ils ne devoient pas escrire des choses…etc.” The authorial figure qualifies other authors as credulous pretenders, like Lysis, who offer follies, such as transformations and disguises, as patterns for social reality and mores. Sorel defines this notion of literary madness as behavior and beliefs that fail to adhere to emergent, esthetic standards, such as verisimilitude and les bienséances (“[les choses] que l’on ne doit pas faire”), that in turn preclude representations of miraculousness and metamorphosis (“les choses qui ne sçauroient estre”).4 Sorel therefore uses the notion of literary madness to attack conventional narrative themes, his own antihero, and writers outside the antiromance that fail to adhere to these new esthetic criteria. Therefore, while d’Urfé in L’Astrée exploits the figurative capacity of the themes of transvestism and mirroring to give form to physical appearance and character identity, Sorel in Le berger extravagant emphasizes the comic discrepancy between the spectator’s knowledge of the object viewed and the disguised appearance of the object. Whereas the Urfeian characters manage to form and accept a fiction from physical appearances without questioning its status as truth or falsehood, the Sorelian characters (except for the title character, Lysis) systematically distinguish between false visions and assumed “facts” according to their collective judgment. Nevertheless, this cursory overview reduces the esthetic significance of disguise, transvestism, metamorphosis, and specularity to a simple question of the thematics of illusion. A preliminary distinction can be made and tested in the following analyses: while d’Urfé uses these conventions to represent subjective positions in their transformation, Sorel treats them as instances of literary masking that may transform the imaginary investment of the self, but never the fundamental subject.

Specularity and Physical Disguise in L’Astrée For the most part, mirroring appears independently of transvestism in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, yet both themes pose the problem of the self as other, whether it be the self as figured in a reflection other than itself, or as another sexual identity.

103

Chapter Five However, the self, once mirrored or cross-dressed, often risks some sort of subjective loss, whether it be in love or in vain self-concept. In the intercalated tale “Histoire de Silvie” (I.iii.75–100), d’Urfé uses a scene of specularity to present both the confirmation of the Neoplatonist maxim of subjective transformation in love and the mystifying obstacle to such selfconfirmation. Léonide, in her account of her fellow nymph’s resistance to love, presents the first scene, in which the Urfeian characters encounter the Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour. Guyemants and Clidaman, rivals for Silvie’s love, seek the confirmation of her attentions from a reflection in the fountain, which is expected to demystify the ambiguity of the true object of the beloved’s desire. An unnamed Druid guarding the fountain explains its function: Vous sçavez quelle est la propriété de ceste eau, et comme elle declare par force les pensées plus secrettes des amants; car celuy qui y regarde dedans, y voit sa maistresse, et s’il est aimé, il se voit aupres, et si elle en aime quelqu’autre, c’est la figure de celuy là qui s’y voit….tout ainsi que les autres eaux representent les corps qui luy sont devant, celle-cy represente les esprits. Or l’esprit qui n’est que la volonté, la memoire et le jugement, lors qu’il aime, se transforme en la chose aimée; et c’est pourquoy lors que vous vous presentez icy, elle reçoit la figure de vostre esprit, et non pas de vostre corps…. (I.iii.93)

The Druid priest explains the function of the fountain as the visual translation of the Neoplatonist script of spiritual love.5 Moreover, it substitutes two images for one; therefore, the structure of signification is triadic rather than binary. Depending on whether the viewer can identify him/herself in the image with the beloved, the doubled reflection may either satisfy or frustrate. Since it receives the figure of the soul of the beloved translated in the lover (“elle reçoit la figure de vostre esprit”) and in turn translates it visually, the fountain visibly reflects the spiritual presence of the other in oneself, which may or may not include the self. The fountain allows characters to perceive either the containment of the self within the other incorporated in the self, or the exclusion of the self in the other within the

104

Transvestism and Specularity self. The amorous exploration becomes a perception into the incorporation of the other’s desire within the self; such a visual translation of desire can therefore be both constitutive of and detrimental to selfhood. Nevertheless, the Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour is not the only reflective surface that announces the transformation and subsequent loss of self. The problem of identifying an image of self in visible reflection recurs in the narrative of Céladon. Having escaped from Galathée at the Palais d’Isoure, Céladon hides to lament the separation imposed by his beloved Astrée. She forbade him from showing himself to her, unless she ordered him to reappear (I.i.13). Arrested in the development of his unfolding desire, he spies himself in a fountain. He sees himself losing the physical, visible marks of his first identity to the point that he becomes almost unrecognizable: Ainsi alloit trainant sa vie ce triste berger qui en peu de temps se rendit si pasle et si deffait, qu’à peine l’eust-on peu recognoistre. Et luy mesme quelquefois allant boire à la proche fontaine, s’estonnoit quand il voyoit sa figure dans l’eau, comme estant reduit en tel estat il pouvoit vivre. La barbe ne le rendoit point affreux, car il n’en avoit point encores, mais les cheveux qui luy estoient fort creus, la maigreur qui luy avoit changé le tour du visage, et allongy le nez, et la tristesse qui avoit chassé de ses yeux ces vifs esclairs qui autrefois les rendoient si gracieux, l’avoient fait devenir tout autre qu’il ne souloit estre. (I.xii.487)

The narrator represents Céladon’s transformation by providing a comparative description of his past and present visible appearances. Although not having the properties of the surface of the magical fountain, the ordinary one suffices to reduce Céladon to an unrecognizable figure: “s’estonnoit quand il voyoit sa figure dans l’eau.” Along with his separation from Astrée comes a separation from himself. Indeed, he appears disheveled as well as undone (“deffait”)—as a subject in a state of transformation and decomposition. While he identifies with this visual experience of himself as a reflected image, it surprises him by its degree of alterity (“tout autre qu’il ne souloit estre”). The reflected image of Céladon’s self captures his identifying traits as well as the marks of otherness, which

105

Chapter Five contradict the identification. In fact, the reflection even serves to foreshadow the sexual transformation of Céladon into Alexis: “La barbe…il n’en avoit point encores.” D’Urfé develops the visual transformation of Céladon by investing it with new and more profound meanings in the course of the narrative. His solitude is intermittently interrupted by encounters with Léonide and Adamas, whom d’Urfé portrays as Céladon’s saviors: the former, because she fell in love with him during his stay at the Palais d’Isoure and helped him escape (I.iv.101–04), and the second, because according to the oracle of Cléontine, the tranquillity of his old age depends on his success in reuniting Céladon and Astrée (II.viii.313–14). Céladon interprets his transformation as his fading existence in the present. He explains it to Léonide as a mark of his future death: “Ce changement…que vous voyez en mon visage, n’est qu’une marque d’un prochain repos” (II.vii.308). This interpretation of visible appearance is accurate to the extent that he will disappear as Céladon to reappear as Alexis; in fact, the other characters, thinking that he has succeeded in his suicide, will construct a cenotaph, or empty tomb, to the memory of his former identity (II.viii.349–50). Yet as the following discussion will demonstrate, Céladon’s “repos” turns out to be purely symbolic, for an aspect of his male identity persists in the form of Alexis. Céladon’s first attempt at cross-dressing works as a convention of masking in order both to gain access to the forbidden and to evade capture. In the retrospective account “Histoire d’Astrée et Phillis” (I.iv.111–17), the title character of the romance relates how her suitor Céladon dresses as the female adolescent Orithie to play the role of a male mythological figure, Paris. Since this role should only be given to a young woman, all males cross-dressing to gain access to the nude beauty contest are stoned. Cross-dressed as Orithie and in turn as the Trojan prince Paris, Céladon reveals his true identity to Astrée and strikes a deal: if she allows him to be her courtly servant, he will award her the prize of the golden apple. Astrée halfheartedly agrees, the ruse succeeds, and Céladon escapes alive. Through his role-play of a woman feigning to be a man, Céladon manages to confess his affective experience to his beloved through a detour of artifice and to escape the ritual

106

Transvestism and Specularity alive. Therefore, Céladon’s initial layering of gender masks admits both intentions of cross-dressing traditional to Western literature: access and evasion. In the larger narrative, d’Urfé creates a multiperspectival depiction of Céladon based on careful word choice, and later on the rhetorical transformation of philosophical principles to suggest transvestism and metamorphosis. Céladon dons his second female disguise in order to escape the amorous designs of Galathée (I.x.382; I.xii.473–75). Aided by Léonide and Adamas, Céladon dresses as a nymph and slips past Galathée’s and Amasis’s surveillance. The narrator indicates two techniques necessary for the verbal description of visual, physical appearance in narrative. First, the narrator acknowledges the new name of Lucinde given to Céladon by the other characters, and then employs the feminine singular pronoun to designate him: Je dis Lucinde, parce que Céladon, comme je vous ay dit, portoit ce nom suivant la resolution que Galathée avoit faicte. Amasis qui ne la cognoissoit point, demanda qui elle estoit.… Lucinde, pour baiser les mains à Amasis, s’advança, et mettant un genouil en terre, luy baisa la main avec des façons si bien contrefaittes, qu’il n’y avoit celuy qui ne la prist pour fille. (I.xii.473; my emphasis)

The narrator’s first gesture points to his own discursive strategies to reassign gender: nominal and pronominal markers. The narrative voice seems to share the focalization of the deceived characters who think Céladon is female. Furthermore, his praise of the illusion of Céladon-Lucinde’s performance along with the qualification of its feigned nature (“façons si bien contrefaittes”) highlights the artificial status of both his narrative technique and the shepherd’s new, temporary identity. It is interesting to note that while d’Urfé marks his own gesture of marking, he presents the character’s sexual identity as if it were an obvious fact. This double gesture of presenting gender as if it were visibly evident and of pointing to the very rhetorical construction of such a presentation situates d’Urfé’s writing in between Renaissance and classical paradigms of representation. As characteristic of the self-referentiality of Renaissance texts, the deictic gesture on the level of narration indicates the

107

Chapter Five rhetorical gesture on the level of discourse: “…comme je vous ay dit….” As characteristic of the classical text, the narrator’s ostensible comment concerns the obviousness of the assignation of female gender in the context of previous action. As a technique specific to Baroque writing, this double movement brings to the forefront the verbal construction that informs what seems to be obvious in the narrative representation of visual experience.6 Perhaps more simply put, d’Urfé’s crossing of gestures reveals two levels of narrative construction: at the same time that the narrator proposes to represent a visual image perceptible to and assumed as obvious for the characters, it indicates the linguistic construction of this representation to the reader. According to Twyla Meding, d’Urfé does with linguistic signs what artists do with visual signs in anamorphosis: “Like an anamorphic painting, the text in its rotation exposes underlying layers, while blurring those accessible only by means of construzione legittima, viewed straight on—that is, the artificial construct which faces the naive shepherds and shepherdesses who believe in its veracity” (Jurgis Baltrusaitis 40, qtd. in Meding 324). Following this argument, the text adopts either the perspective of readers and characters privy to the artificial status of the cross-dressed personage, or that of the other characters who are convinced by the artifice. In some instances, this explains the shifting of narrative perspectives on visual appearance, for once Céladon removes his disguise or leaves the presence of other characters who gave it credence, name and pronoun realign themselves. This shift appears clearly in his flight from the Palais d’Isoure, where Galathée detained him: …Léonide, sans que l’on s’en apperceust, feignant de se vouloir preparer pour partir, sortit hors de sa chambre, et peu apres Lucinde, et s’estans trouvées au rendez-vous qu’elles s’estoient données, faignans d’aller se promener, sortirent du chasteau, ayant caché soubs leurs mantes chacune une partie des habits du berger. Et quand ils furent au fond du bois, le berger se deshabilla, et prenant l’habit accoutumé, remercia la nymphe du bon secours qu’elle luy avoit donné…. (I.xii.474; my emphasis)

108

Transvestism and Specularity The reappearance of the linguistic marks of masculine gender seems to indicate a clean break between a socially credible, visual perception of Céladon as Lucinde at Isoure, and a credible representation of the shepherd Céladon as Céladon alone with Léonide. In the light of the two examples above, Meding’s interpretation of shifts in narrative perspective seems to be substantiated, for the narrator seems to offer the reader a perception that is more legitimate than that experienced by the characters within the romance. However, it should be noted that this question of the legitimacy of perspective, and thus of true gender identity through verbal description, becomes more complex in Céladon’s third female manifestation: the Druid priestess Alexis. In this instance, d’Urfé uses another manner of linguistic patterning—the rhetorical transformation of philosophical discourse—to inform Céladon’s third persona. D’Urfé turns the whole theme around the question of specifically what aspect of the character changes in the experience of love. The implied author and the philosophically minded characters, such as Tircis, Adamas, and Silvandre, understand Ficino’s phrase “iste in illo, ille in isto vivit” to mean that lovers change spiritually into the beloved, and they thus transcend self to become other (Ficin 156). As a former student of philosophy who has adopted the condition, and disguise, of shepherd, Silvandre encapsulates well Ficino’s maxim: Sçavez-vous bien que c’est qu’aimer? c’est mourir en soy, pour revivre en autruy, c’est ne se point aimer que d’autant que l’on est agreable à la chose aimée, et bref, c’est une volonté de se transformer, s’il se peut entierement en elle. (I.viii.290)

Silvandre ostensibly speaks of the spiritual death of the self and its re-emergence in the other, for it relies on the will (volonté) to change one’s interior constitution (en soy, en autruy). Yet this pronouncement is couched in ambiguities. First, the spiritual transformation entails an agreeableness addressed to the beloved, which could only have its expression in social exchange. Second, this metamorphosis is entire (entièrement), implying that it may extend beyond the spiritual into the

109

Chapter Five material, that is, the body. Silvandre, however, is unaware of the ramifications of his statement, whose ambiguity will be exploited by a deft social creature, Hylas. D’Urfé uses Hylas to provide a riposte to this philosophical idealization of love by placing it in dialogue with a discourse extraneous to it: mercantile practice. In announcing his unfaithful amorous pursuits, Hylas gives a typifying picture of himself. He is the merchant of love: …je m’y gouverne tout ainsi qu’un marchand bien advisé: lors qu’il fait dessein d’acheter quelque chose, il regarde combien elle peut valoir, et puis amasse de tous costez l’argent qui luy est necessaire pour esgaler ce prix. J’en fais de mesme; car lors que j’entreprends d’aimer une dame, je regarde incontinent quelle est sa beauté, car….ce qui donne le prix aux femmes, ce n’est que la seule beauté….je fais un amas d’amour en mon ame, esgal au prix et à la valeur qui est en elle, et lors que j’ayme, je vay despendant cet amas d’amour, et quand je l’ay tout employé au service de celle pour qui je l’avois amassé, il ne m’en reste plus pour elle….en cela mon argent et mon amour se ressemblent bien fort. (III.vii.348)

As Hembree argues, Hylas evinces a materialist and specifically mercantile approach to choosing mates (“Paradigms” 140–49, 160). He places a spiritual, sentimental investment in the beloved in proportion to her perceived physical beauty. Hembree sees in Hylas a proto-Cartesian, self-determining subject, for the character seems to choose his love by its adequation to some measurement of the material. I would counter that Hylas is incapable of self-determination because of his infidelity, for he cannot regenerate funds at will once he has exhausted them, and he believes his love is subject to the fluctuating market values of physical attraction. In this respect, he passes from one relationship of sentimental-material resemblance to another, and thus his actions are driven by a series of sympathies, analogies, and similarities in an objectified, material economy. Of course, in his pastoral romance, d’Urfé does not present Hylas’s practice of material-spiritual adequation for its own sake. When d’Urfé pits Silvandre the philosopher of love against Hylas the merchant in scenes of debate, the characters gloss 110

Transvestism and Specularity one another’s words, like two components of an emblem. They generate commentary on one another’s speech by recasting and re-presenting it: La conclusion, dit Silvandre, n’est pas bonne, car vous ne l’aymez pas [Phillis], mais si vous disiez qu’en aymant Diane, je me transforme en elle, vous diriez fort bien. —Et quoy? dit Hylas, vous estes donc Diane? Et vostre chapeau aussi n’est-il point changé en sa coiffure, et vostre juppe en sa robe?…vous devriez donc vous habiller en fille, car il n’est pas raisonnable qu’une sage bergere comme vous estes, se desguise de cette sorte en homme. (II.vi.263)7

Hylas rejects Silvandre’s assumption of the mind-body divide. The Inconstant Shepherd reads à la lettre the philosophical character’s ambiguous claim of complete transformation (“se transformer…entièrement en elle” [I.viii.290]). As the practitioner of material-spiritual adequation, Hylas presupposes the co-extension of body and soul, and undermines his opponent’s arguments by translating their spiritual ramifications to the material realm. In a gesture of carnivalesque humor, Hylas reverses the spiritual-material hierarchy of the Neoplatonist by literalizing his abstract theory in concrete experience. Indeed, Hylas takes the equation of spiritual-corporeal adequation to the nth degree in the passage from cross-dressing (“vous habiller en fille”) to metamorphosis (“une sage bergere comme vous estes, se desguise de cette sorte en homme”). However, this uncrowning of the philosophical ideal is not conclusive, since “Il n’y eut personne de la troupe qui se peust empescher de rire des paroles de ce berger [Hylas], et Silvandre mesme en rit comme les autres” (II.vi.263). This double mockery therefore does not definitively privilege one position over another. Yet if both of these perspectives on love—the philosophical and the mercantile—stand as equally valid, contrary interpretations, where is their synthesis, their compromise? Could one expect to find the abstract principle physically embodied through some other kind of material adequation? This debate between philosophical and materialist (specifically mercantile) positions opens up a third possibility of amorous experience in L’Astrée. In the extended narrative, Céladon eventually embodies the Neoplatonist notion of

111

Chapter Five spiritual transformation through love as Alexis, its corporeal equivalent. Obeying Astrée’s commandment not to show himself to her unless she expressly bids him to do so (I.i.13), Céladon survives a suicide attempt, escapes the Palais d’Isoure as Lucinde, exiles himself, and lives in a melancholic state (I.xii.473–87). Because he is believed to have succeeded in drowning himself, Astrée and her entourage assume he is dead. They celebrate the memory of his dead identity by constructing a cenotaph (II.vii.349–50). At this point, the first stage of the Neoplatonic metamorphosis is complete: the lover has died in himself, as his monologue before his decomposing reflection attests (I.xii.487). He has also died as a public persona, as a socially recognized identity, for his body will never be found and he will be reborn into another persona. Céladon takes one step closer to being the material embodiment of a philosophical idea when he assumes a female identity in order to approach, and approximate, his beloved. After Céladon reads his own epitaph and acknowledges the death of his first public identity (II.x.396), Adamas notices that the shepherd resembles his daughter Alexis (II.x.397). In order to see Astrée without being seen and thus circumvent her interdiction, Céladon disguises himself as the female Druid Alexis (II.x.399). However, at this point, the material-spiritual adequation is not complete, for Céladon-Alexis merely shares the same gender with his/her beloved without being identical to her. Céladon-Alexis reaches full physical embodiment of the spiritual ideal only when he/she exchanges clothes and identities with Astrée (III.xi.593–97). It is finally in the tripartite combination of Céladon-Alexis-Astrée where Hylas’s mercantile interpretation of an abstract principle takes full shape. This composite characterization would seem to be the ultimate, material fulfillment of a philosophical ideal, and therefore a point of transcendence through love. However, Céladon-Alexis’s monologues do not point to the happy incarnation of spiritual love and carnal desire, like the fleshing out of some fortuitous synthesis in a dialectic of Neoplatonist principle and social practice. Céladon-Alexis represents the dilemma concerning his/her identity in a state of fusion between two genders and a further displacement in the feminine:

112

Transvestism and Specularity …Alexis, peux-tu avoir quelque bon-heur sans luy, ou quelque felicité sans toy? Non certes, se respondit-elle, mais il est vray que sa presence m’est bien aussi redoutable que desirable: desirable, puis que, sans Celadon, je n’auray jamais un contentement parfait, et redoutable, puis qu’il n’y a que luy qui me puisse faire perdre toutes mes esperances? Mais quand je veux rentrer en moy-mesme, qui suis-je, qui redoute et qui desire? Suis-je Alexis? Non, car que peut davantage desirer Alexis? Suis-je Celadon? Non, car que peut craindre celuy qui est parvenu au comble de tous les mal-heurs? Qui suis-je donc, qui desire et qui crains? Car il est certain que je ressens ces deux passions. Je suis sans doute un meslange, et d’Alexis et de Celadon; et aussi, comme Celadon, je desire recouvrer le bon-heur qui m’a esté tant injustement ravy, et, comme Alexis, je crains de perdre celuy que je possede. Je suis donc et Alexis et Celadon meslez ensemble; mais maintenant que je sçay qui je suis, que ne recherchons-nous un moyen de contenter Celadon, et d’assurer Alexis? (IV.v.252)

Céladon-Alexis’s soliloquy shows evidence of at least three subjective positions that cannot resolve themselves in a binary alternation between two instances of visible appearance, such as the anamorphic paradigm would suggest. Meding, though, quite accurately situates the subjective positioning of CéladonAlexis in Foucault’s tripartite model of signification characteristic of the Renaissance épistémè—of signifier, signified, and signature or “conjuncture” (Foucault 57–59; Meding 328, 331). While the composite character takes the position of an interlocutor in relation to the constitutive parts of him/herself, he/she experiences these components of identity as ciphers— fragments of the self who foreclose one another’s wish to realize desire. Céladon-Alexis’s figurative fusion does not resolve his/her affective and subjective division in what Meding calls “the apparent unicity of ressemblance” (331). Therefore, the soliloquy as a verbal mediation between Céladon, Alexis, and Céladon-Alexis can only represent subjective division; it cannot resolve it into a consolidation of three subjective positions into one coherent self. According to Judovitz, the Céladon component’s greatest desire is to have Astrée’s desire addressed to him, but this

113

Chapter Five fulfillment is impossible because Astrée destines it to the visual appearance of Alexis, his disguised self. He represents himself as containing an inextricable half of another identity: Alexis. Furthermore, this half of the self serves as an obstacle to his desire (Judovitz, “Emblematic” 46). Therefore, what the Neoplatonist principle suggests as a harmonious unity of wills, desires, and identities turns out to be the figurative and subjective cleaving of the self and its incomprehension of its own representative components. Furthermore, this subjective split lies at the origin of human nature, defined by d’Urfé himself in the Epistres morales as an animal raisonnable divided between mind and body, between reason and passion, between unbridled desire and restraint.8 Transvestism in d’Urfé never proposes to mend this division through passage to another appearance.9 In this survey of specularity and transvestism as physical depictions constitutive of identity in L’Astrée, d’Urfé’s use of descriptive techniques informing these themes seems much less conventional in its most extreme application. Although the writer derived some from previous literary models, he did not import them en vrac in an unquestioning redeployment within his romance. Instead, he brought the operation of linguistic markers of gender, name, and affective identity to the forefront of description, all the while formulating and reformulating the figurative illusion of identity. The narrator’s simultaneous indications of descriptive discursive technique and the resulting figurative illusion highlight the shifts in identity and desire that continually fragment the characters. Much like the reflection of spiritual states in the Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour, visible disguise both preserves aspects of the self and immures aspects of the other within the self to the point that the character’s identity is embedded with conflicting subjective positions. Far from being a narrative experiment solely preoccupied with representing elusive identity or conflicts within human nature, d’Urfé’s adaptation of rhetorical articulations of Neoplatonist ideas to themes of mirroring and cross-dressing constitutes an important novelistic experiment. D’Urfé deliberately exploits the tension between philosophical idealization and socioeconomic practice to set off an interior polemic that drives the plot and suggests literary innovations for subsequent narratives. Bernard Germa suggests that such a literary experi-

114

Transvestism and Specularity ment leads to romans réalistes, called histoires comiques in the seventeenth century: En insistant à dessein sur l’inconstance, en faisant intervenir Hylas dans toutes les discussions importantes, où il persifle sans pitié les élucubrations de ses interlocuteurs, d’Urfé veut nous montrer que la métamorphose amoureuse l’amuse, mais qu’il n’y croit pas plus qu’il ne faut, et il entr’ouvre lui-même la porte par où passeront les romanciers réalistes du XVIIe siècle. Sorel peut parodier l’Astrée; d’Urfé l’a mis en bonne voie, en se parodiant spirituellement lui-même. (Germa 80, qtd. in Ehrmann 48)

On the one hand, it is illogical to say that d’Urfé parodies himself by mocking concepts he does not believe in the first place. On the other hand, he does question his literary and philosophical sources, by having characters unconsciously cite them or even incarnate them, either in reflections or opposite-gender disguises, and by placing them in a series of dialogic relationships or conceptual conflicts. D’Urfé thus reuses and reformulates the esthetic conventions and belief systems of his predecessors, and he reabsorbs them in a pastoral romance of disastrous love. Yet what “door” has he opened for Sorel?

Narcissistic Cross-Dressing as Parody in Le berger extravagant Sorel, in Le berger extravagant, also treats the problem of the ambiguity of visual experience through the themes of specularity and transvestism. However, he couples them so as to echo in a visual manner the convention of cross-dressing. This permits him to draw the distinction between exterior physical appearance and its different imaginary investments. Unlike d’Urfé, who presents material and spiritual metamorphoses, Sorel does not exploit a notion of the coextension of body and mind. In fact, he stages transvestism as an activity of layering seemingly contradictory identities, such as the desiring subject and the object of desire. To clarify this treatment of cross-dressing, we shall first examine Sorel’s version of anamorphic painting, in which the layering of visual representations reveals personal, imaginary claims to social identity. One image

115

Chapter Five eventually supersedes another in the demystification of an imaginary construct of personal identity. Sorel presents painting as an exemplary medium in the constitution of character development of Le berger. In book VIII, Carmelin includes in his autobiography the story of one of his employers, a carpenter, who put portraiture to the task of aggrandizing and ennobling his public image (VIII.327–29). Carmelin presents him as conceited and blind to his own social worth. The carpenter employs a vengeful portraitist, who unbeknownst to him creates a double image in layers of paint. The resentful artist arranges for an unveiling and canvas cleaning of this portrait for his client’s closest associates. When they first encounter this portrait, they approach it as if it were an anamorphic image: “Il [le menuisier] les mena en sa chambre haute où estoit ce beau chef d’œuvre que chacun regarda de tous biais” (VIII.327). Carmelin’s account of subjective positioning suggests Béroalde de Verville’s conclusion of Le moyen de parvenir as an anamorphic narrative: “Lisez ce volume de son vrai biais: il est fait comme ces peintures qui montrent d’un, et puis d’autre.”10 As this reference suggests, similar to the premise of the alchemy narrative, the carpenter fancies himself as a parvenu. He intends to use the socially elevating quality of visual representation for his self-satisfaction, his own imaginary investment. His guests in their puzzlement, however, take subjective positions before the canvas as if in an effort to find a perspective that would place it as an image in a meaningful relationship with what they know of the subject it represents. Carmelin’s master himself treats it as an anamorphosis, since he judges that its perfection remains hidden and a good cleaning will give it “un autre lustre” (VIII.328). Once Carmelin finishes cleaning its surface, the first layer disappears to reveal a second representation. Carmelin compares the emergence of the second image to the literary metamorphoses imitated by Lysis: “N’estoit-ce point là une de ces metamorphoses dont nous parle si souvent le berger Lysis?” (VIII.328). The portrait resembles an anamorphosis in its substitution of one image for another; however, it differs to the extent that it does not require the viewer to change his/her point of view, for it unmasks a new image of the subject it represents. It functions as a metamorphosis in its transformation of

116

Transvestism and Specularity the form represented. It modifies the subject of its representation through the reattribution of visible traits: cuckold’s horns replace the feathers in his hat, a pair of compasses replaces the sword, and a plank and a plane replace the helmet and gauntlets on the table behind the subject. As in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, signs of human accomplishment appear on a table behind the subject whose self-conceit is subverted by a second, hidden image, which is antithetical to the first one. The glorifying, visual representation of self makes way for a vilifying one that demystifies, disappoints, and enrages the referent. The carpenter, having projected his self-image in the first portrait, can only read the second as a critique of the first. Furthermore, as Martine Debaisieux considers the pseudoanamorphosis as a visual analogy of Sorel’s discursive practices in his Histoire comique de Francion, it can be argued that a similar confrontation between elevated pastoral literature and low genres, such as the contes and fabliaux, contributes to the generation of critiques of narrative conventions within Le berger (Le procès 13–14). This dialectical movement between thesis and antithesis drives the series of comic deflations of pastoral, epic, and chivalric themes in the antiromance. One such convention literally put on trial in the person of Lysis is that of narcissism and transvestism. Similar to the carpenter who employs the painter to represent him visually, in book IV Lysis appeals to the feigned magician Hircan to change his visual appearance. In imitation of pastoral lovers donning a disguise of the opposite sex to have access to their beloved, Lysis intends to infiltrate Léonor’s household to be in the presence of Charite (IV.153). Despite Lysis’s fantasy to imitate Céladon-Alexis and thus fool his entourage into thinking he is a woman, the layers of his disguise are obvious to everyone. He does not have the body to fill out a dress: “Il sembloit qu’Amarylle fust un espouvantail de cheneviere” (IV.154). The narrator develops this image of thinness and lack of femininity: “…on luy voyoit un long dos aussi plat que si elle eust porté toute sa vie une hotte, & pour le sein il n’estoit pas plus rebondy qu’une assiette. Le reste estoit tout d’une venuë comme une quenoüille emmaillottee” (IV.154). The narrator and the other characters are quick to notice the disparity between Lysis’s imaginary identity as Amarylle and

117

Chapter Five his physical appearance, whose mediocrity reveals the bourgeois male underneath. The narrator and characters also remark that Lysis’s verbal disguise shows serious disparities between real social class and literary pretensions to aristocracy: “…elle ne contrefaisoit pas assez son langage, & qu’au lieu de parler en simple villageoise, elle parloit en docte Courtisane” (IV.155). Lysis-Amarylle also has difficulty adhering to one gender identity in grammatical references to him/herself: “Quelquefois elle ne se pouvoit empescher de parler de soy au genre masculin, au lieu de parler au feminin, neantmoins on faisoit semblant de n’y pas prendre garde” (IV.155). By slipping up so often, Lysis shows through his layers of disguise, for his appearance and his verbal mask reveal the imposter beneath, very much like the pseudo-anamorphic painting’s second, demystifying image. Nevertheless, believing both of Lysis’s costumes—that of literary madman and imitative transvestite—the characters decide to strip away the layers of his identity by playing within the terms of fictions. They condescend to performing the role of characters in ancient Greek romances (IV.156), such as Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story and Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophone, in which tyrants test the virginity of heroines by means of tortuous ordeals (Rems., Berger 596–97). Lysis’s skeptical entourage imitates a fiction and uses it to test a fiction of transvested identity. In what the narrator calls a staged “Comédie” (IV.157), Oronte accuses Lysis-Amarylle of debauching a valet, Marcel, and all judge that he/she must stand on the “platine sacrée.” If he/she burns, he/she is judged a debauchee and must be sentenced to death. The other characters try to scare Lysis-Amarylle out of his/her transvested role, but the imitator of fictions reassures him/herself of his/her guise: Pour Amarylle, disoit elle en soy mesme, je sçay bien qu’elle est chaste, mais pour Lysis je ne le sçay pas asseurement. Toutefois mes pieds ne seront pas bruslez, car c’est au corps & en l’exterieur que je suis Amarylle, & je ne suis Lysis qu’en l’ame, puis qu’un Magicien m’a fait changer de figure. (IV.159)

Lysis-Amarylle reveals himself here as the antihero of Céladon-Alexis, for he is neither divided by his passion, nor anxious about the division of identity inherent to d’Urfé’s 118

Transvestism and Specularity depiction of cross-dressed characters. In fact, he exploits the mind-body divide to dissociate feminine virtue from masculine desire. When Lysis-Amarylle survives the ordeal, everyone at the spectacle calls him/her a witch, mobs him/her, tears off the disguise, and prepares to burn him at the stake (IV.160). To subvert the antihero’s cross-dressing through intimidation, the collectivity imposes a new, vilifying role reminiscent of both the Greek epic romances and contemporary folklore of the supernatural. They treat the character as if he were constructed like the carpenter’s pseudo-anamorphic painting: a representation of layers to be stripped away. However, in Lysis’s imagination, this layering of identity is the very construct that allows him to enjoy his desire and his contemplation of an image of an “other” in a scene of comic narcissism. Moreover, other characters, such as Fontenay, participate in this narcissistic cross-dressing. The first instance takes place during the adventures of Lysis-Amarylle in book IV. The narrator concentrates elements of Ovidian myth, erotic pleasure, and vanity in a brief scenario: Quand elle [Lysis-Amarylle] se regardoit dans son miroir, il luy sembloit bien qu’elle estoit belle, & il ne s’en faloit guere qu’il ne luy avinst un mal aussi dangereux que celuy de Narcisse: car l’ame de Lysis aymoit ce visage d’Amarylle qu’elle voyoit. Cela faisoit qu’elle baisoit souvent la glace pour estre bouche à bouche avec cette Bergere. Bien qu’elle se mirast si souvent, il ne se faut pas pourtant imaginer qu’elle fust des mieux attiffees du monde. (IV.156)

By forgetting the reflective properties of the mirror, Lysis manages to direct his desire to an image, which he interprets as other than himself. The narrator, however, underlines the imaginary and fictional status of this construct in his use of the Urfeian convention of referring to the transvested character with the feminine pronoun. From the perspective of the narrator, Lysis as Amarylle sees herself as other and in so doing feels desire for that other, which is reminiscent of the early stages of Narcissus’s crisis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. By emphasizing the coincidence of Lysis, Amarylle, and the reflected image with the feminine pronoun, and by alluding to the disastrous consequence in the ancient myth, the narrator amalgamates

119

Chapter Five transvestism and specularity in a comic framework. Since Narcissus realizes that the ideal object of desire is an image of himself, and since his desire can never be enjoyed, he slowly dies: “Oh, I am it [the image]!” (Miller’s translation; “iste ego sum” [Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII 156]). The transvested Lysis, however, remains in Narcissus’s initial experience, when he was unaware that the image was a reflection of himself: “Unwittingly he desires himself” (Miller’s translation; “se cupit inprudens” [154–55]). Two perspectives seem to overlap in this narration, for the narrator sustains the identity of Lysis, Amarylle, and the image, all the while the fictional character enjoys this other in a total oblivion of the coincidence of his masculine desire and his female identity in one and the same person. Sorel uses imbricated perspectives as well as polysemic expressions to juxtapose two narrative levels: while the character feels desire for an image perceived to be beautiful (“il luy sembloit bien qu’elle estoit belle”), the narrator undermines the beautiful perception with a grotesque depiction of the transvestite (“il ne se faut pas pourtant imaginer qu’elle fust des mieux attiffees du monde” [IV.156]). The third-person-singular indirect object pronoun luy carries no mark of gender, and it is from this position that the image is received through perception (“il luy sembloit”). From this position open to both genders, Lysis-Amarylle can enjoy his/her desire before an image of alterity. Gender difference fails to divide the cross-dressed, composite character; indeed, the imaginary coincidence of both genders allows the character to enjoy his desire for himself as an objectified image of femininity. Furthermore, in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century French, the verb meaning to look at oneself in a mirror, se mirer,11 had connotations of pleasure as well as of vanity and loss of self in its proverbial articulation. According to Edmond Huguet, the term can mean se plaire, “to take pleasure in something or to please oneself” (Huguet 5: 280–81). Therefore, the narrator’s concession (“bien que”) admits that Lysis-Amarylle found pleasure in the act of self-reflection. According to Cotgrave’s Dictionarie (1611), the proverb “Dame qui trop se mire peu file” means “She that looks too much to herselfe looks too little to herselfe” (Cotgrave, “se mirer,” n.p.). The vain

120

Transvestism and Specularity woman who spends her time before the looking glass neglects her household chores. The narrator emphasizes the popular, proverbial resonance of the term, when he remarks: “Vous me direz que ses resveries amoureuses la rendoient negligente, mais il y avoit encore autre chose, c’estoit qu’elle n’entendoit pas à s’acommoder, & qu’elle ne se pouvoit pas faire si gentille comme Synope l’avoit renduë le premier jour” (IV.156). The narrator takes a critical position in regard to Lysis-Amarylle’s pleasure, because his/her vanity entails neglect to maintain the beauty of the image in the mirror. By dropping the layers of its illusion, transvestism deteriorates and exhausts its appeal as an image of beauty and an object of desire. The narrator thus underlines the conventionality and artificiality of the character’s fantasies (“resveries”), whose very constructed nature as a mode of representation in the antiromance undermines their imaginary appeal. Later in Le berger, Sorel amplifies the combined narrative of transvestism, specularity, and narcissism in the “Histoire de Fontenay.” Fontenay invents an autobiographical account in the pastoral mode to amuse the other characters and play to Lysis’s literary folly. He claims to have spied a nymph and to have fallen in love with her, but he failed to capture her to realize his sexual desires (VII.278). He consults a magician, Zenocrite, who promises to help him find the object of his desire through enchantment (VII.279). Zenocrite has Fontenay strip naked and close his eyes, while he dresses him in women’s clothing and places him at the edge of the pond where he first saw his beloved (VII.280). When he opens his eyes and looks down, he sees the image of a beautiful woman in the water and immediately wishes to make physical contact. Yet he soon realizes that it is only a reflection of himself and that Zenocrite cross-dressed him (VII.281). This realization, however, does not disappoint Fontenay in the least; he decides that he can enjoy his pleasure by being the desiring subject and the desired object wrapped into one! …y a-t-il rien de meilleur que d’estre Maistresse & serviteur tout ensemble? A toute heure je pourray voir la beauté dont je suis espris. Si je souspire, elle souspirera; si je ris, elle rira aussi; si je cherche des faveurs, elles seront aussi tost obtenuës que desirées; si je donne quelque chose à ma

121

Chapter Five Nymphe, il n’y aura rien de perdu, car je donneray tout à moy mesme. (VII.281)

Fontenay becomes both the addresser and the addressee of his own desire. Like Lysis-Amarylle, Fontenay-Nymph forgets the constructed nature of the artifice of transvestism and specularity to live a literary illusion. He reduces the Neoplatonist maxim—the lover dies in himself to be reborn in the beloved— by further literalizing it in physical appearance and vulgarizing it in service to erotic pleasure. He short-circuits the economy of the maxim by collapsing the subject-object positions into one another in order to occupy both simultaneously. He removes the presupposition of the death of the lover and the consequential foreclosure of erotic enjoyment, which in Céladon’s case correspond to the deterioration of unified subjectivity and the impossibility to enjoy masculine desire in the feminine identity. Fontenay promptly shuts himself up in his bedchamber, cross-dresses, and admires the image of him/herself in the mirror (VII.282–83). At first glance, Fontenay ostensibly assumes the image of female identity while maintaining his masculine desire by choosing one illusion of specularity over another: “…oubliant la beauté imaginaire de la Nayade, que je n’avois veuë clairement, je n’admiray plus que la mienne” (VII.282). However, with further consideration, one can say that Fontenay prefers an undifferentiated form of desire to masculine desire directed to a feminine object. The character addresses the mirror as if it were the container of a living being and the ideal subject-object of desire: “C’estoit en vous que je la voyois; c’estoit en vous que je me voyois aussi. Il sembloit que je fusse passé tout entier dedans vous, & il m’estoit avis pareillement que je vous comprenois tout en moy, tant ma pensée estoit remplie de vostre object” (VII.284). Through shifts of pronouns, Sorel employs two narrative levels to offer two perspectives in this scene. If the first two “vous” are addressed to the mirror and the following ones to the image therein, Fontenay’s narrative perspective is clear: the image is a visual translation of his sexually undifferentiated desire, for he loves the feminine in himself and himself in the feminine. However, if all the marks of interlocution are addressed to the mirror, the perspec-

122

Transvestism and Specularity tive of the narrator comes into focus: Fontenay incorporates the illusionistic mechanism of visual reflection in himself as the container of his ideal object of desire. In the end, Fontenay is freed from this illusion, once he is kidnapped and thus separated from his mirror (VII.284), and when he finally encounters feminine rivals for his self-desire (VII.287). By attraction to a woman other than himself, Fontenay recovers his masculine desire directed to the opposite sex and wakes from the erotic fantasy of specularity. The character finally decides to shatter the mirror and thus destroy the image. However, the enjoyment of a visual translation of undifferentiated desire is habit-forming, and Fontenay admits the difficulty of his period of readjustment to a masculine identity: “Il y avoit si longtemps que je n’avois esté habillé en garçon que j’eus de la peine à m’y accoustumer” (VII.287). The character finds masculine clothing strange, as if it does not correspond to his experience as a lover of him/herself in the beloved. This awkward feeling equally underlines the artificiality of Fontenay’s masculine, social appearance, as if it were an image of otherness imposed upon him. In the course of his account, the reader sees the manifold physical appearances to which the character can adapt, but which are all subtended by an imaginary elaboration either through social norms of gender or literary conventions of transvestism and specularity. Sorel, in his deployment of the literary themes of transvestism, specularity, and narcissism, has revealed their potential to represent forms of desire that defy social norms and binary definitions of gender. He also manages to remove the weight of subjective division in the identity of the transvested character, for he freely exploits the mind-body divide to depict a character enjoying the illusion. Sorel therefore refreshes the narrative commonplaces present in ancient literature and d’Urfé’s pastoral to present their illusionistic operations as well as their powerful capacity to generate subjective positions.

*** Both d’Urfé and Sorel treat the problem of the visual appearance of the self through the themes of specularity and

123

Chapter Five transvestism. While d’Urfé may use scenes of mirroring to portray identity in its decomposition and to adumbrate a new cross-dressed persona, Sorel couples the mirror with the transvestite in an effort to examine the theme as a convention as well as to stage a scene of individual imaginary investment. D’Urfé allows his disguised characters to maintain irreconcilable subjective divisions between male and female, animal and rational, unrestrained desire and affectionate friendship. Sorel’s use of the mirror and transvestism, in contrast, allows Lysis and Fontenay to bridge the gap between the libidinous subject and the desired object. Although he employs some of the same semantic tricks on the level of the sentence as d’Urfé to present his clownish, albeit self-satisfied drag queens, specular vision elides the necessity of an object of desire physically separate from the subject. Even though Sorel does not explicitly mention the Neoplatonist maxim in these episodes in Le berger, he collapses the two separate terms of lover and beloved into one person, and this imaginary union is only broken when a real, second term is introduced, as when Fontenay encounters rivals for his self-love. Sorel thus allows the mask of transvested identity to be removed in order to reveal a deeper layer of desire in this pseudo-anamorphosis. Sorel thus demystifies the subjective positions that d’Urfé leaves in ambiguous balance. The absence of the explicit invocation of Neoplatonist tenets would seem to point to another significant difference between d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s treatments of mirroring and crossdressing. On the one hand, d’Urfé informs these visual manifestations of the self with philosophical doctrine, whether in its pure articulation or in its rhetorical re-articulations by Hylas. While the Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour reflects a spiritual transformation through love, Céladon’s avatar Alexis is the byproduct of the dialogic tensions between abstract speculation and mercantile materialization. On the other, Sorel does not have his characters invoke Neoplatonist doctrine in conjunction with Lysis’s manifestation as Amarylle. The obviousness of the mediocrity of his imitation—the appearance of haphazard layering and peeling, revealing and concealing—undermines such a lofty reference. It is only in L’anti-roman that Lysis thinks of transforming into Charite in accordance with philosophical precepts: “Pleust à Dieu que la ressemblance fust encore plus grande, & que je 124

Transvestism and Specularity pûsse mesme estre changée en elle [Charite].… C’est le souverain degré de l’amour de se changer en ce qu’on aime, selon l’opinion des Philosophes” (2e partie, I: 2). This occurs to Lysis in book VIII of L’anti-roman; it is therefore an afterthought following his foray as Amarylle in book IV. The implied author in the Remarques dismisses quickly the possibility of physical metamorphosis based on philosophical principle: “Mais les plus subtils veulent que cette metamorphose ne se fasse qu’en l’esprit seulement, & il faut avoir recours là dessus aux imaginations des Platoniciens” (L’anti-roman, 2e partie, I: 106). Being just as aware of the philosophical source as the protagonist, the implied author sends the reader to the “imaginations” of Platonists. Spiritual metamorphosis escapes empirical verification; consequently, it only takes place in the imaginary, just as transvestite narcissism. Sorel thus relegates this theme of spiritual and physical metamorphosis to the imaginary; as an idealization, it loses its currency in seventeenth-century French society because of its impossibility in the material realm. In their depictions of cross-dressing and mirroring, d’Urfé and Sorel seem to construct dialogic relationships between ever-widening extremes: philosophical abstraction versus materialist pragmatism, imaginary investment versus empirical evidence, aristocratic fiction versus its bourgeois interpretation.12 This conclusion begs the question of how the tension between literary, philosophical language and extraliterary discourses continues to contribute to the development of the seventeenth-century novel in France. One could say in the manner of Germa that d’Urfé not only opens the door for Sorel and Furetière, who will demystify and deflate allegorical scenarios of desire, but also to Madeleine de Scudéry, who will maintain them as heroic and social idealizations.13 D’Urfé’s conflicted lovers anticipate the malfunction of heroic and social idealization in Mme de Lafayette’s fictions, and Sorel’s playful transvestites announce Mme de Villedieu’s pseudo-memoirs of Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, who chooses to exploit male disguises for survival as well as amusement (DeJean 132–34). Therefore, this dialogue between idealization and pragmatism will persist in the seventeenth-century novel for at least a century to come.

125

Chapter Six

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature

Tout ce qui branle ne tombe pas. La contexture d’un si grand corps tient à plus d’un clou. Il tient mesme par son antiquité; comme les vieux bastiments, ausquels l’aage a desrobé le pied, sans crouste et sans cyment, qui pourtant vivent et se soustiennent en leur propre poix, nec jam validis radicibus haerens, Pondere tuta suo est. Il ne tient plus par de solides racines; son propre poids le fixe au sol. Montaigne, quoting Lucan Both d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger extravagant restage novelistic conventions by rethematizing ancient, medieval, and Renaissance intellectual and literary traditions. These narratives raise specific questions regarding conventional modes of representation that inform narration: the difficulties of establishing identity through gender characterization, speech, love debate, and emblematic representation. In both works, the tomb serves as the figure of a retrospective account. The tomb in L’Astrée situates the deterioration, transformation, and rebirth of the author and fictional characters, who, as travestied bodies or disembodied voices, defy identification with a unified subjectivity. The tomb in Le berger becomes the antiromance itself: a locus where narratives, metanarratives, and explicit critical commentaries compete to exhaust the very traditions they ostensibly celebrate. Yet, in each case, how do the tomb and its accompanying motif of death function as allegorical figures and as literary strategies? 126

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs Both d’Urfé and Sorel reformulate the traditional social and literary meanings of entombment as they were understood at the time. As a monument for human burial, the tomb is a cultural artifact whose significance is historically contingent. According to Philippe Ariès, from the twelfth century on, tombs of nobles and high-ranking clergy displayed epitaphs that served to identify the person buried within. From the fourteenth century into the eighteenth, funerary inscriptions also presented some biographical information concerning the deceased (L’homme 214–16, 219–27). During the period of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s literary production, the tomb was used to tell a story, a biography, to a public. One could then understand Le berger extravagant’s overreaching metaphor—le tombeau des romans—to mean that the whole book is one long memorial, a life story of literary convention. Ariès also emphasizes that the tomb not only records a story, but also enshrines the object, and at best preserves its significance for the passerby (L’homme 216–27). In a metaphorical sense, the tomb can serve to preserve the deceased, for it comments on the individual’s life, recounts his or her story, and thereby perpetuates the memory of his or her identity. At the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century, the term tombeau also appeared in the many titles of a series of pamphlets, chapbooks, and literary treatises.1 Some were written in a comic vein, such as the satirical treatise on rhetoric, Le tombeau de l’orateur françois (1628),2 which concludes with a heroi-comic description of Guez de Balzac’s imaginary tomb, and the collection of jokes titled Le tombeau de la melancolie (1634). Antoine Furetière comments on the significance of this last collection: “TOMBEAU, se dit aussi des choses qui font perdre la memoire d’un autre objet, & qui, pour ainsi dire, l’ensevelissent.… On intitule un Recueil de contes, Tombeau de la melancolie” (vol. 3; Furetière’s emphasis). This classical definition poses a counterpoint to the memorial function of the tomb in the Baroque period. Accordingly, the tomb also has the potential to commit something to oblivion by means of diversion, as in Le tombeau de la melancolie, or by means of condemnation, as Sorel will sometimes do in his critique of the conventions of romance. Only a few pamphlets have a condemnatory tone for clearly ideological ends. While some of these tombeaux aim to 127

Chapter Six denigrate a deceased personage, such as those written against the Maréchal d’Ancre, Concini (1617), and the Duc de Luynes (1622), others criticize allegorical personifications like “La guerre” (1616) or concrete administrative practices like “La paulette” (1618).3 Yet even more tombeaux stand as memorials valorizing the deceased, such as those in honor of the Duc de Guise (1589 and 1591), François de Chouayne (1616), Servin (1626), Nicolas de Verdun (1627), and the poet François Malherbe (1629).4 Furthermore, the poetic voices often enjoin the reader to hear the biography and merits of the deceased, much in the same manner as funerary inscriptions of the time: “Passant (qui que tu sois) arreste icy tes pas…” (Tombeau de feu Monsieur François Chouayne 21). Some even give voice to the dead by means of prosopopoeia: “Pitoiable françois arreste un peu tes pas, / Et voy je te supply ma vie & mon trespas” (Le tumbeau de Messeigneurs les Cardinal et Duc de Guyse 13). Instead of taking credit for the pamphlet or treatise, these anonymous writers of tombeaux prefer to create the illusion of the voice speaking from beyond the grave. During and soon after the period of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narrative production, French readers witnessed the proliferation of polyvalent tombeaux. The most prominent, late examples include ambivalent memorials to le Cardinal de Richelieu, such as Le thresor des epitaphes pour et contre le Cardinal (1643).5 This pro-con format can been seen in earlier anonymous, literary treatises in the guise of memorial pamphlets. For instance, Le tombeau des romans (1626), attributed both to Fancan and Sorel, discusses the usefulness of historiography and romances.6 In opposition to fiction in general, the first authorial voice criticizes its artifice as lies and its esthetic appeal as an invitation to emulate vice (Tombeau des romans 2–3). In promotion of narrative genres, the second one praises the teaching of truth in a veiled manner so as to inspire curiosity for literary interpretation and the learning of Christian virtues (Tombeau des romans 86–89). Much like the debaters Clarimond, Philiris, and Amarylle in book XIII of Le berger, the writer of Le tombeau des romans animates an endless polemic concerning the usefulness of fiction that will continue well into the eighteenth century.7 More importantly for d’Urfé and Sorel, this use of polyvalence offers the optimal authorial position for the

128

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs depiction of entombment in all its ambivalence: a memorial relying on death and promising rebirth in a new form, or a metaphor for condemnatory critical perspectives promising constant renewal. As the following analyses will demonstrate, d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s use of the tomb problematizes the emergence of a single character identity or of a monologic authorial stance. Similar to the polyvalent Tombeau des romans and epitaphs of Richelieu, d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s tombs prevent the hermeneutic closure of the text and the monologic expression of the author’s intention. Their tombs at times contribute to the multiplication of identities; at times they constitute an invitation to the reader to engage in literary interpretation; and at other times, they generate multiple perspectives on the overall meaning of d’Urfé’s romance and Sorel’s antiromance. Furthermore, d’Urfé and Sorel propose a new significance in the traditional literary deployment of the figure of the tomb and the motif of death. Their works somewhat adapt the Christian eschatological significance of death and the tomb in medieval literature and Renaissance religious poetry, to the extent that these figures promise some sort of rebirth of the self after death, at the moment of judgment or appraisal.8 With the goal of textual “transcendence” in mind, d’Urfé and Sorel redeploy these figures in allegories of literary experimentation. They challenge and transform conventions and modes of thought so as to unleash new, diverse possibilities of literary representation. Both d’Urfé and Sorel use the image of the crypt in their approaches to the constitution of authorship and the interpretation of authorial intention. In both novels, the tomb is the site of a series of authorial functions and a carrier of narrative meaning. However, in each work, the authorial figure’s relation with the tomb and the meaning it bears are different. D’Urfé’s writing resists the strictly referential interpretation of narrative, and it channels what it posits as the “plus hault sens” into the inaccessible enclosure of the tomb. In the prefaces to L’Astrée, the authorial figure tempts the reader to seek an affective, autobiographical meaning, which he then seems to steal away by shifting it and dispersing it in different locations in the narrative. D’Urfé has the implied author abandon the role

129

Chapter Six of the agent guiding narration. D’Urfé depicts the implied author entering the tomb and charges the fictional characters with the job of narrating the entombed author’s affective experiences. Nevertheless, the characters’ roles both as figures in an allegory of love and as narrators of that allegory undergo shifts and transformations when they are confronted with their own tombs; the first identity of the character dies so that a second one can be born through visual and verbal disguise. Indeed, in the prefatory letter to part I, the implied author treats disguise (“la chose…déguisée”) as a means of not only hiding (“cachée”), but also burying (“ensevelie”; I.6). This “burial” by disguise permits characters to abandon one identity to author another one. Sorel, in contrast, explicitly situates the meaning of his work on the level of literary convention and critique, which come to constitute the literary tomb. Much in the tradition of Blaise de Vigenère, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, and later Antoine Furetière, Sorel uses narrative in Le berger to create an allegory of literary experimentation and critical polemics.9 He displaces the tomb from a treatment of the personal and private, as d’Urfé used it, to a discussion of the cultural, social, and esthetic significance of literature. Sorel’s authorial figure presents the antiromance as a tomb that in and of itself mocks its models. Le berger, as a book and a personification of authorial intentionality, appears as the agent of narrative and critical discourse. The Sorelian authorial figure sometimes lends out his role as an imitator, compiler, and commentator of fictions, which will be taken up by a series of characters, the “Extravagant Shepherd” included. Lysis, as the imitator of literature, feigns death himself in order to intercept his critics’ comments and respond to them. The representation of death is therefore a fictional ploy to motivate critical dialogue in Le berger. The purpose of this chapter is not to break into the crypt, but to examine its discursive and figurative construction. In other words, my argument does not propose a hermeneutic to unveil a coherent theory of literature on the part of d’Urfé or Sorel. Instead I propose a descriptive view of the structure of literary tombs, whose intricacies as figures are explored in a close reading of one narrative sequence from each work. D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s tombs are allegorical figures, fragments of a literary his-

130

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs tory, which in their persistence to remain sealed serve as monuments to preceding esthetic and intellectual traditions. Their narratives participate in what Benjamin calls “the baroque cult of the ruin.” That is to say, they posit fragments of thought just as ruins represent fragments of things (Benjamin 178). The keys necessary for the disclosure of their meaning, if those keys ever even existed, are lost, and modern readers are left with pieces of signification that inexhaustibly recur in constellations in the narrative text. Let us observe some of these constellations.

D’Urfé’s Tombs In the prefatory letter addressed to the shepherdess Astrée, d’Urfé’s authorial figure laments his child’s release from the enclosure of writing, the private office: Il ne sied pas bien, mon cher enfant, à une fille bien née de courre de ceste sorte, et seroit plus à propos que te renfermant ou parmy des chastes Vestales et Druydes, ou dans les murs privez des affaires domestiques, tu laissasses doucement couler le reste de ta vie…. (I.5)

The author presents himself as the creator of the romance L’Astrée and the father of the character Astrée, and deplores his separation from her. He wants her to remain unsullied by the world outside the walls of the homestead or the religious orders. The monastic enclosure guarantees chastity and purity, metaphors for the hermetic sealing of the text. The private space of the writer’s office keeps the “affaires domestiques” from the roving eyes of readers. However, the remainder of the passage suggests a separation between the creator and his creation, who takes on a life of her own outside of these enclosures: “de courre de ceste sorte.” Therefore, publication risks breaking the text’s cryptic allegory and disclosing private matters said to be represented therein. The author continues to give his child a cautionary note so as to equip her with defenses against inimical beings outside the scene of writing: Si tu sçavois quelles sont les peines et difficultez, qui se rencontrent le long du chemin que tu entreprens, quels

131

Chapter Six monstres horribles y vont attendans les passants pour les devorer,…peut-estre t’arresterois-tu sagement, où tu as esté si longuement et doucement cherie. (I.5)

Astrée, as a character on a narrative trajectory and as the romance itself, will encounter monsters that will consume her (“pour les devorer”). This allegory of literary creation suggests two scenarios. If one considers Astrée as a fictional character, the monsters would be the enemies stalking her on her narrative journey in Forez. Yet if one considers her to be the figure for the romance itself, these monsters represent readers who assail and consume the literary corpus through reading and interpretation. Astrée is thus the personification of the romance L’Astrée, which is to be read and interpreted by monstrous readers. Yet why does the authorial figure associate monstrosity with readership? What might this designation elucidate concerning the expectations of the contemporary readership? The implied author takes inventory of possible readers, most of whom expect an accessible text, open to hermeneutic techniques which promise to reveal the hidden meaning of the work. The first group of readers claims to cull referential relationships from allegories of love. The authorial voice, however, firmly denies this approach and recommends that the romance Astrée keep quiet: Si tu te trouves parmy ceux qui font profession d’interpreter les songes, et descouvrir les pensées plus secrettes d’autruy, et qu’ils asseurent que Celadon est un tel homme, et Astrée une telle femme, ne leur reponds rien, car ils sçavent assez qu’ils ne sçavent pas ce qu’ils disent…. (I.6)

The author refutes the findings of interpretation applied to “songes,” which could be either imaginative fictions or allegorical dreams of love, such as that in Le roman de la rose. Indeed, the authorial figure presents thought as ensconced in the realm of narrative (“les pensées plus secrettes d’autruy”) to the extent that it has no relationship with the referential world outside (“un tel homme…une telle femme”). He situates the secret of intentionality and of authorial identity within the silent confines of L’Astrée the book (“ne leur reponds rien”). Although the book circulates outside the enclosure of the scene of writing,

132

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs the authorial figure constructs a mute, discursive enclosure within it, in anticipation of the crypt at the end of the letter. The author proceeds to describe a second group of readers, who because they listen to the interpreters of allegory, are asked to be more circumspect in their hermeneutic deliberations. He baits them with the possibility of encoded meaning, which he posits and immediately displaces in a series of hypothetical propositions: …mais supplie ceux qui pourroient estre abusez de leurs fictions, de considerer que si ces choses ne m’importent point, je n’eusse pas pris la peine de les cacher si diligemment, et si elles m’importent, j’aurois eu bien peu d’esprit de les avoir voulu dissimuler, et ne l’avoir sceu faire. Que si en ce qu’ils diront, il n’y a guere d’apparence, il ne les faut pas croire, et s’il y en a beaucoup, il faut penser que pour couvrir la chose que je voulois tenir cachée et ensevelie, je l’eusse autrement déguisée. (I.6)

On all accounts, whether the sens caché exists or not, it is buried, inaccessible to any hermeneutic technique. Whatever veil the reader lifts in his/her attempt to locate the entombed body (“la chose…cachée et ensevelie”), that body is somewhere else, for the disguise is no guarantee of its identity (“je l’eusse autrement déguisée”). The authorial figure presents its intentionality as a multiple possibility (“si ces choses m’importent…si ces choses ne m’importent point”), which eternally escapes the reader’s determination and discernment. This constant displacement and deferral of meaning relegates hermeneutics into the realm of fiction (“abusez de leurs fictions”) and appearance (“il n’y a guere d’apparence”). Therefore, instead of interpretation framing, enclosing, and explaining fiction, it is fiction that serves as the overreaching metaphor for interpretation. By reducing interpretation to the status of a fiction, the authorial figure subverts its claims to certainty and truth. The implied author closes his letter with an allegorical scene centered at the figure of the tomb. As the eventual container of the authorial figure, the tomb is a monument commemorating his wish for survival of the romance, L’Astrée: “Le Ciel…te donne un si bon Genie, que tu me survives autant de siecles que le sujet qui t’a fait naistre me survivra en m’accompagnant

133

Chapter Six au cercueil” (I.8). This allegorical scene involves a number of agents: Heaven, a Genie, Astrée, an undefined “sujet,” and the character of the author headed for the coffin. Heaven will give Astrée a Genie, which since Ronsard’s time meant both a guardian spirit and a shade of the dead.10 Since Heaven delivers a good Genie, its allegorical role is that of a protector of the romance L’Astrée. The allegorical significance of the “subject” (“sujet”) is less clear, for by d’Urfé’s time, it can mean a cause or reason for an event, the subject matter of a discussion, or an amorous interest.11 For the moment, the subject appears as an obscure allegorical figure that had somehow been the cause of or the occasion for Astrée’s birth (“le sujet qui t’a fait naistre”). Furthermore, because the preposition au means “to” as well as “into,” it is not clear whether this causative subject will accompany the authorial figure to the coffin or in it. The origin and motivation of L’Astrée’s composition can be found on the outside of the tomb (“le sujet”) as well as residing inside it with the implied author (“me”). Yet the identities of the subject outside and the authorial figure inside are suppressed. Moreover, this foreclosure of authorial identity and intention is precisely what keeps the book alive in a state beyond the tomb (“tu me survives”). Even though the author may be effaced, the wish for the survival of the work goes on in the character of the author’s child, L’Astrée. This wish both situates the narrative outside the tomb, beyond the boundaries of the prefatory letter, and erects a silent crypt within the boundaries of the book personified—L’Astrée—for she is held to silence. A number of d’Urfé’s contemporaries and today’s modern readers have sought the key to L’Astrée’s allegory by means of a hermeneutics of reference and autobiography. Maxime Gaume attests to the difficulty of substantiating the argument that the “sujet” of the book was Diane de Châteaumorand, d’Urfé’s love interest. Keys proposed to decode the cryptic mode of d’Urfé’s allegory, such as Olivier Patru’s,12 circulated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which indicates that readers ignored the affective and esthetic import of the authorial voice.13 In his correspondence with Estienne Pasquier, d’Urfé specifies that the object of his allegorical rep-

134

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs resentation is not a referent, but a set of affects, the passions of his youth: “Ceste bergere que je vous envoye n’est veritablement que l’histoire de ma jeunesse, sous la personne de qui j’ay representé les diverses passions, ou plustost folies, qui m’ont tourmenté l’espace de cinq ou six ans” (Pasquier 2: 532). In the letter to Pasquier, the apparently one-to-one equivalence between the “story” (“l’histoire”) and the person of Astrée (“la personne”) is misleading, because she in turn personifies “diverses passions, ou plustost folies,” that is, a plurality of different affects. This allegorical organization by fragment does not involve the game of masking a real person’s identity with that of a fictional character, as in a roman à clef. D’Urfé’s allegorical presentation of problems of textual dissemination, reception, consumption, interpretation, and perpetuity in the prefatory letter strongly resembles Benjamin’s characterization of Baroque allegory. First, in stark contrast to medieval allegory, which is didactic in nature, that of Baroque literature is hermetic (Benjamin 171–72). For instance, the allegorical landscape of the narrative, Forez, appears as a country quite different from the traditionally idyllic pastoral space, for the free communication and the transparency of representation of a prelapsarian Eden are absent: “…les affaires d’Estat ne s’entendent que difficilement, sinon par ceux qui les manient; Celles du public sont incertaines, et celles des particuliers bien cachées, et qu’en toutes la verité est odieuse” (“L’autheur à la rivière de Lignon,” III.6). Matters of state appear as divisive and misleading; public appearance offers no certainty; affective life is couched in secrecy. The cryptic and odious enclosures associated with the outside impose themselves in Forez. Second, Baroque allegory does not function according to a one-to-one correspondence between thing represented and thing representing, as in the case of the symbol; instead, things are represented in a fragmentary manner. According to Benjamin, “The counterpart to such an approach is triumphantly evident when the writer succeeds in significantly dividing a living entity into the disjecta membra [disjointed members] of allegory…” (198). As suggested in the prefatory letter of part I, if one considers the shepherdess to be a personification of the book sent to Pasquier, then several

135

Chapter Six affects (“diverses passions”) are delegated to and dispersed among several narrative agents in the romance through an accumulation of fragments particular to Baroque allegory. Far from abandoning the figure of the tomb in the prefatory letter of part I, d’Urfé continues to use it in an exploration of the transformation of character identity in the main intrigue. As the implied author had hinted in the preface, disguise (“la chose…déguisée”) is predicated on hiding (“cachée”) and burying (“ensevelie”; I.6). However, this Baroque allegory of changing identities and subjective positions is fraught with problems of fragmentation and interpretation. First, the fragmentary and partial knowledge of Céladon’s demise leads to a false reading, that is, a false assumption of death. The characters Astrée and Céladon repeatedly fall victim to the misinterpretation of a whole series of illusions, such as feigned love, transvestism, verbal disguise, and personal disappearance. The prospects of death and entombment present themselves in the opening pages of the romance, when Céladon throws himself into the Lignon (I.i.13–17). Although he is saved by the nymphs Galathée, Léonide, and Silvie, his beloved considers him dead for the rest of the narrative written by d’Urfé. All evidence that Astrée gathers of his living presence—such as the letter received by Silvandre (II.iii.96), Céladon’s emblems and epigrams in the Temple of the Goddess Astrée (II.v.175– 93), and his appearance before her as a shadow (II.viii.332– 33)—she misinterprets as signs of his physical absence and spiritual presence in Forez. This misinterpretation of fragments gives the characters a false belief in Céladon’s death and inspires them to construct his “vain tombeau” or cenotaph so as to put his spirit to rest (II.v.194; II.viii.334). The conclusion of their collective misinterpretation is manifest in the erection of an empty crypt, for it commemorates the first identity of the shepherd as deceased: AUX. DIEUX. MANES. ET. A. LA. MEMOIRE. ETERNELLE. DU. PLUS. AYMABLE. BERGER. DE. LIGNON.

136

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs AMOUR. QUI. PAR. IMPRUDENCE. FUT. CAUSE. DE. LA. MORT. DE. CELADON. … LUY. REND. PLEIN. DE. TRISTESSE. ET. DE. DESOLATION. CE. DERNIER. DEVOIR. ET. APAND. SA. DESPOUILLE. SUR. CE. TOMBEAU. (II.viii.349–50)

The characters construct a monument that constitutes a fiction of physical death. They give plastic form to the memory of the shepherd, and allegorically represent the personification of Love placing the body of the deceased on the tomb. A symbolic deposition of the body is necessary to put the spirit—their collective memory of Céladon’s identity—to rest as something “past.” The “past” identity of Céladon is present in the monument, the memorial, whose allegorical representation substitutes for the body. The tomb, however, does more than constitute a physical, topographical presence in the landscape and an imaginative presence in the memories of the characters. It also serves as a transformational relay for Céladon’s new identity as Alexis. Indeed, it is only once he encounters his own tomb that he, Léonide, and Adamas concoct his new self (II.x.396). Moreover, it is precisely the allegorical entombment of Céladon’s identity that enables Astrée to recognize his resemblance in Alexis without recognizing him (III.xi.598). Furthermore, through a whole series of Baroque themes of illusion, such as renaming, transvestism, and verbal disguise, the affective experience of characters and their relationships transform as well, once the tomb as a marker of memory delineates the past from the present. For instance, before the construction of Céladon’s cenotaph, in the tradition of Neo-Petrarchist literature, he referred to Astrée as his “Bel Astre” and she referred to him as her “serviteur” (I.iv.120). After the entombment of Céladon and the emergence of Alexis, Astrée is designated as “serviteur” and Alexis as “maistresse” (IV.v.266–67). The entombment of identity inaugurates both the reversal of dominant and submissive roles, and the repatterning of a courtly relationship between members of the opposite sex into one

137

Chapter Six between members of the same sex. The tomb therefore empowers the Baroque themes of illusion and metamorphosis by creating new identities and new affective realities. The crypt in d’Urfé’s romance offers an ambivalent promise of life and death, of presence and absence, of obsolescence and renewal. Even though the tomb may mark the death of the authorial figure and of characters’ identities, it may nevertheless help create new characterizations. As both a figure of transience and a device of transformation, the tomb does not maintain a static significance in the conceptual and narrative development in L’Astrée. It functions as a momento mori working in two temporal directions: it is both the reminder of something lost in the past and the promise of recovery in the future. D’Urfé’s use of the tomb as an allegorical figure and narrative device contrasts with its significance in Romantic and postRomantic literature and society of the nineteenth century, in which it calls to mind what is irretrievably lost in the past and what will be so in the future (Ariès, Images 253). In this view, the tomb in d’Urfé’s text marks and instigates a series of losses and recoveries of authorial agents and characters. The tomb in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée is therefore not the locus of decomposition and loss, but regeneration, transformation, and testimony to the past literary traditions, character identities, and authorial practices.

Sorel’s Tombeau des romans Although Sorel inherits the figure of the tomb from d’Urfé, he radicalizes its significance by transforming it into a metaphor for the whole literary and critical project of Le berger extravagant. In this respect, he places his antiromance squarely in the tradition of literary and polemic tombeaux, of pamphlets elevating and denigrating historical figures, movements, and literary creations. Yet when Sorel calls his Berger “le tombeau des Romans, & des absurditez de la Poësie” (preface, 15), is he necessarily announcing the complete annihilation of narrative prose and Pléiadist poetry at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Instead, could he be using the tomb as a metaphor for a productive enterprise that questions and transforms convention by monumentalizing and celebrating a selection of previ-

138

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs ous literary sources while rejecting others? Such a condemnatory characterization would seem to proclaim the obsolescence of chivalric and courtly romances, the death sentence of sentimental and pastoral fictions. However, if one understands the metaphor to mean a “text-crypt” or textual monument, one can say that Le berger enshrines, transforms, and innovates literary conventions so as to anticipate the development of the modern novel as a genre in France. Le berger would therefore function according to the paradoxical definition of tombeau according to Ariès and Furetière: a monument that preserves by recounting some features of the romance and committing others to oblivion. The interpretation of Sorel’s textual tomb as the complete annihilation of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literary practices began with the rediscovery of his fictions, or histoires comiques, in our century. Coulet hesitates to call Le berger a novel at all. He reads its liminal inscription to mean the mise à mort of all novels by systematically denigrating their representational devices and by undermining their imaginary investment with values of “reality,” “truth,” and “verisimilitude” (I.200–01). Reynier reads the epitaph just as literally to mean a deliberate plot to assassinate pastoral literature through critical attack; yet he derides Sorel by stating that the pastoral survived despite the assassination attempt (Roman réaliste 167, 196–97). Nevertheless, both Reynier and Coulet recognize Le berger’s merit as an encyclopedic work—a collection of previous narrative techniques summoned to present the pastoral themes of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée in the framework of a story of literary madness, similar to that of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Jean Serroy is one of the first scholars to reinterpret Sorel’s literary compilation as a productive project. For Serroy, Le berger and its 1633–34 rewrite L’anti-roman constitute histories of literature, for they combine imaginative fiction and critical commentary, Les remarques, where Sorel refers to literary predecessors, summarizes their plots, cites their poetry, and appraises their work (297–98). Debaisieux also considers Sorel’s “tombeau des romans” to be a positive contribution to the development of the novel, since its movement between narrative, metanarrative, and explicit critical discourse documents the author’s reflections on novelistic practice, on mechanisms

139

Chapter Six of literary representation, and on the genesis of his own text (“Le tombeau” 169–70; Le procès 39–40). More recently, Tucker characterizes the literary tomb in light of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque and Lukács’s notion of heroic degradation. According to Tucker, the tomb is an ambivalent metaphor signifying death and regeneration, tradition and novelty, obsolescence and innovation.14 While sustaining the thesis of the “text-crypt” as a destructive and productive space, I propose to reorient the approach to the paradoxical metaphor. First, it behooves us to understand Sorel’s literary tomb in the perspective of the monument’s significance in Baroque culture. Entombment and death would then not be metaphors for the demise of literature, but a means to situate literary traditions in an allegorical landscape. Second, it is necessary to recharacterize Le berger as an allegory of literary experimentation and critical polemics. Indeed, according to Marc Fumaroli, by the time Sorel composes Le berger, he has already tried his hand at allegorizing literary criticism. In the 1626 edition of the Histoire comique de Francion, Sorel has his character Hortensius memorize and quote Guez de Balzac’s letters, which the other characters subsequently ridicule for their sententiousness (Fumaroli 466). Sorel will use the same techniques in Le berger, where he has the title character Lysis consciously embody literary conventions, incite their critique, and thus suggest their innovation for future fictions. This dialogue between the embodiment of literary conventionality and its critique is due in large part to Sorel’s adaptation of the Don Quixote–Sancho Panza relationship to the pastoral setting. Lysis the feigned shepherd and his valet Carmelin quarrel about literary language, notions of social reality, and the hero’s reenactment of imaginative scenarios.15 However, Sorel fundamentally distinguishes his Extravagant Shepherd from Cervantes’s fearless knight in allowing the hero—the pastoral personified—to live beyond the tomb. But the question remains: what kind of tomb? It suffices to recapitulate Ariès’s treatment of the cultural significance of the tomb as monument, biography, protective reliquary, and memorial. As an architectural artifact, it carries an inscription, whose function is to narrate the principal events of a story or life story (Ariès, L’homme 214–16, 219–27). Sorel’s Berger fulfills a similar narrative function, for not only 140

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs does it claim to be the biography of an imitator of literature, but it grants this character the awareness that someone is recording his adventures, much like the eponymous hidalgo in the second part of Don Quixote.16 Furthermore, the reliquary, preservative, and memorial functions of entombment are assumed by Sorel, when he summarizes other fictions and includes excerpts of poetry in an effort to relate his many references to readers and to indicate the objects of his appraisal and transformation. Therefore, as a literary tomb, Sorel’s Berger preserves lifeless and exhausted themes, scenarios, and modes of thought in a commemorative structure, a story, destined for public viewing, that is, for a reading public. In the preface to Le berger, Sorel goes so far as to claim that the biography of Lysis constitutes a critical history of romances: Au reste je me moqueray de ceux qui diront qu’en blasmant les Romans, j’ay fait un autre Roman. Je respondray qu’il n’y a rien icy de fabuleux, & qu’outre que mon Berger represente en beaucoup d’endroits de certains personnages qui ont fait des extravagances semblables aux siennes, il ne luy arrive point d’avantures qui ne soient veritablement dans les autres Autheurs: tellement que par un miracle estrange, de plusieurs fables ramassees, j’ay fait une Histoire veritable. (Preface, 15; my emphasis)

Sorel rejects the generic marker of romance, not because the substance of the book is composed of the stuff of fiction, which he admits, but because the elements the author borrows and the character imitates have a positive existence in other fictions. As proof, there is a rich ambiguity in the phrase “mon Berger represente en beaucoup d’endroits…”; the title character’s mimicry fills the text with references and reenactments, which thus transform it into a depository or crypt of previous literary and intellectual traditions. Sorel prefers the broad, generic term of Histoire véritable, which lends to both the illusion of a biography of the protagonist and the construction of a memorial to literary convention. Indeed, Sorel depicts the composition of his Berger as an assembly of disparate fables and fragments of narrative prose and poetry. By relying on the personification of literature and on the assemblage of literary fragments, Sorel’s tomb participates in what Benjamin calls “the Baroque cult of the ruin” characteristic 141

Chapter Six of allegorical, German tragedy or Trauerspiel. In other words, Baroque allegory posits fragments of thought just as ruins represent the fragments of things. Benjamin views the ruin as a present, yet transient, structure subject to the movement of history: In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.… That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification. The baroque writers must have regarded the work of art as just such a miracle. (177–78, 179)

Let’s recall that Sorel claims to construct “par un miracle estrange” an “Histoire veritable” from “plusieurs fables ramassées” (preface, 15). This encyclopedic assemblage of discursive elements comes to constitute the tomb, the fragmentary monument to literary traditions. Yet what could possibly be Sorel’s goal? In both the narrative and the critical development of Le berger, points and counterpoints cancel one another only to introduce new and varied sets of critical positions on literary esthetics. In fact, this dialogic exchange advances and sustains the development of plot and polemic without ever seeming to tend toward a singly conclusive statement or subjective position. By considering Sorel’s literary tomb as a dynamic assemblage of disparate stories, critical thoughts, and authorial intentions, one begins to understand the positive and informative impact of such an allegory on the development of a genre. In La bibliothèque françoise, Sorel conflates the identity of the title character and that of the antiromance when he treats the text as if it were pronounced by Lysis. More importantly, the antiromance is not simply a compendium of literary conventions, as the metaphor of the tomb suggests, but also a dynamically critical piece:

142

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs Les Remarques font assez connoistre que ce Livre est un vray Anti-Roman, & que le Berger Lysis n’est appellé Extravagant, que pour ce qu’il fait voir l’extravagance des autres Livres de fiction, soit Romans, soit Œuvres Poëtiques: & comme il parle de toutes choses, il y mesle aussi quelque Critique des fautes qu’on trouve en des Livres estimez fort serieux & fort excellens.17

The composite figure of the novel-shepherd appraises and compares other works in its/his incarnation of them. Through the confrontation of fictional, historical, and critical discourse, it/he erects it/himself as a catalogue of literary conventions and maintains a dialogue with its/his predecessors. Jean-Pierre Faye considers this dialogic space of the literary tomb to be the very strength of the work, for the composite novel-shepherd’s “negative” imitation of chivalric and pastoral romances constitutes the positive imitation of the picaresque, which empowers narrative to generate its own critique—an antinovelistic critique that projects new esthetic possibilities for the genre.18 Sorel demonstrates in the comment above that the Extravagant Shepherd fulfills a dual function in the antiromance: he not only imitates and embodies previous literary models, but he is also interested in their critical reception and their incorporation in his own narrative. In book XII of Le berger, Lysis’s dual function appears clearly when he feigns death in imitation of famous literary suicides and resurrections, such as Hero in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Amerine, Ligdamon, and Silvanire in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. Although he himself never enters the tomb nor rises from one, he intends to invest himself with the significance of a funerary monument, for he wants to be “recommendable envers Charite [sa bien-aimée], & envers la postérité” (XII.451). As a fictional character emulating previous fictions, Lysis wants to make his mark on literary history by becoming a point of literary reference. Indeed, he considers himself to be the fulfillment of all past narratives, since he has imitated them all, except for the tragic death, which will add the finishing touch to his story: “…j’auray passé par toutes les avantures qui se trouvent dans les plus belles histoires, & que la mienne sera la plus accomplie du monde” (XII.453). Lysis

143

Chapter Six sees himself as the accomplished literary character who has enacted all fictional scenarios: pastoral transvestism and metamorphosis, chivalric exploits, courtly love scenes, etc. Because he considers his “story” to be a history or biography to be written by Philiris, he wants his author to exclude the detail of the feint and to present him as factually dead: “…Philiris ne parlera point de ma fiction dedans mon livre…asseurant que ma mort aura esté tres-veritable” (XII.453). Lysis is a fictional character who wants to be an historical one; as the incarnation of fictions, he strives for the effect of the real. What are Lysis’s intentions in doing so? First, he expects a monument to be built in his memory: “…je suis bien aise de finir icy mes jours, afin que mes compagnons y facent ma sepulture, & que malgré vous je demeure en cette heureuse terre” (XII.465). Although he anticipates permanence in the form of his tomb and his biography, the other critical characters, aware of the feint, decide to burn his body in imitation of Greco-Roman mythic heroes like Hercules and Roman emperors such as the Caesars (XII.468–69). When Lysis hears that his plan of entombment and resurrection will be thwarted by incineration, he proposes to Carmelin to “poser sur le buscher, quelque fagot empaquetté de linge au lieu de luy” (XII.473). As the incarnation of literary convention, Lysis wishes to be burnt in effigy; he prefers a simulacrum of death to a real death. The effect of the real has an impact on the fictional character, who decides that he does not want his narrative to be so real that he is annihilated in the process. Here Lysis seems to attempt to see how far he can push literary representation to become reality, for he forces the characters to read his imitation literally. The literal reading and imitation of myth and historiography go so far as to impinge on Lysis’s conscious sense of the limitations of that imaginary investment of social reality. Lysis realizes that his death means the end of his story and of his mimicry, so he wakes from feigned death in a resurrection scene and again retreats into literary imitation (XII.474). While Lysis’s feint may seem to end with a return to his pretense of madness, the whole process underscores two very important aspects of the character and consequently of the antiromance as a whole. First, Lysis is aware of the differences between the social and literary imaginary, for he does not want

144

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs the two to coincide perfectly. He dissociates the living of his story from its textual record, since their resemblance or identity would be death. Second, Lysis feigns absence or death so he may intercept the critiques of his companions and consequently adapt those responses to the formation of his “story.” Sorel in the Remarques praises the Extravagant Shepherd’s ruse for this very reason: “Lysis qui estoit plus fin, avoit la curiosité de voir quelle mine feroient tous ceux qui penseroient qu’il fust mort…. Lysis estoit donc fort avisé de vouloir seulement feindre de prendre du poison pour joüer son jeu plus finement” (Rems., 696). Lysis takes on the guise of death to occupy an ostensibly passive position, receptive to the comments of the entourage. He momentarily removes himself from the dialogic relationship with others to deepen his understanding of his role as a literary imitator. This fake death breaks the chain of his mimicry so that the critical subtext, which was suppressed by the other characters to maintain his extravagant emulation, may come to the forefront. So what does the “moribund” Lysis learn? He learns of his significance as an object and producer of literary criticism. While Lysis feigns death, Carmelin his valet has an interesting outburst that underscores his master’s role and his own as literary imitators and critics: …qui est-ce qui s’est empesché de dormir pour luy discourir d’amour?… qui est-ce qui luy contoit de beaux contes? qui est-ce qui luy aprenoit des sentences prises des plus beaux lieux communs? helas! c’estoit son fidelle Carmelin. Neantmoins il n’heritera aucunement de luy. Luy estant mort l’on le chasse comme un coquin. Encore s’il se fust avisé de faire son testament, j’eusse veu s’il m’eust aymé où non; Je me fusse contenté de ce qu’il m’eust laissé; faudra-t’il que des heritiers qu’il n’aymoit point du tout & pour fuyr lesquels il est sorty du monde, jouyssent entierement de ses possessions. (XII.466–67)

Carmelin the pícaro considers himself to be the source of Lysis’s discourse and actions, which are chivalric and pastoral. Furthermore, seeing that he has his master right where he wants him—namely, in a receptive, but silent position—Sorel’s Sancho Panza teases his Don Quixote to give in return a critical

145

Chapter Six assessment of this literary knowledge: “…j’eusse veu s’il m’eust aymé ou non.…” This dialogic exchange allegorically figures that which exists between high and low literary genres, or more accurately between epic, sentimental narratives and comic novels, histoires comiques. Sorel thus emphasizes a mutually productive and reproductive interaction between two divergent realms of literary discourse. Even more importantly, he presents the compelling power of one to recover and revive the other. Carmelin, by clowning his master’s models, does not condemn them to death; instead, he resurrects them by permitting them, through the ears of the receptive body of Lysis, to hear their parodic echo, their critique, their inconsistencies in the face of other discourses. By staging the death and resurrection of literature, Sorel demonstrates that every esthetic tradition needs its counterpoint in order to maintain a mutually informative and productive relationship with the whole of concurrent creations. As part and parcel of this project, Sorel erects this literary tomb as a curiously diverse and informative monument for narratives to come. He makes a very forceful claim about the didactic nature of Le berger in the preface: “…je m’asseure bien qu’en me moquant des Poëtes, je les ay obligez malgré qu’ils en ayent, & leur ay fait la leçon” (preface, 16). In fact, decades later, in both La bibliothèque françoise19 and De la connoissance des bons livres (written 1647; published 1671), Sorel continues to qualify Le berger as a didactic work: “Si [les] Autheurs [des Romans Modernes] avoient bien fait leur profit de ce qu’on leur avoit des-ja remonstré [dans Le berger extravagant et L’antiroman], ils ne seroient pas tombez en faute.”20 In light of these authorial claims, Lysis’s near-death experience constitutes an allegory of an imitative author caught in the echo chamber of literary criticism, this literary tomb. These critical utterances, however, do not conspire to assassinate authors and their pastoral romances. Instead, Sorel’s criticism reforms narrative conventions. It breathes new life into them, so as to resuscitate them to form the modern novel.

*** D’Urfé uses the tomb to figure the inaccessibility of authorial intention and to mark the moment of character transformation 146

D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs in L’Astrée. By delineating the past from the present, the crypt commemorates the death of the author and the birth of his work, which will live beyond him. Functioning in the same manner, the cenotaph memorializes Céladon’s past identity and permits the emergence of his new self as other, as Alexis. Moreover, characters’ tombs, like Céladon’s, constitute a coded story in and of themselves, that is, an allegorized biography, much like Baroque funerary monuments and pamphlets titled tombeaux. In d’Urfé’s pastoral romance, the tomb thus plays a dynamic role in certain cases of characterization and in the depiction of literary production. In this respect, the Neoplatonist notion of death and rebirth through love and the Christian belief in death and resurrection through salvation overlap. However, transcendence of the material world or of that of the romance is not d’Urfé’s goal. Instead, death and rebirth, whether of the implied author or of a character, serves as metanarrative technique in the first case and narrative development in the second. In his Berger extravagant, Sorel takes the figure of the tomb from literature and pamphlets, and then transforms it into a tomb of literature. Far from being a metaphor for the complete destruction of literary and intellectual traditions, “the tomb of romances and of the absurdities of poetry” is a productive, critical enterprise. First, Sorel memorializes conventions, scenarios, and themes by reenacting them in the narrative, and by summarizing and compiling them in the Remarques. Second, the tomb and the motif of death play a crucial role in an allegory of literary criticism, for they allow the literary imitator Lysis to hear the critical assessment of other characters. Consequently, Sorel stages the enrichment of literary imitation and production through this dialogue of different perspectives on convention. Lastly, this dialogue, while never being monologic, is destined to readers and especially writers so as to present to them various ideas concerning the powers of literary illusion and its social impact. Imitation of convention therefore invites commentary, which in turn allows for transformation and suggests innovation. By criticizing the conventions of romance, Sorel’s literary tomb announces the rebirth of new narrative and poetic techniques to writers to come.

147

Conclusion Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal

The last, great French pastoral romance, d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, and its parody, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, are both transformational narratives insofar as they both imitate and refresh previous literary conventions and modes of thought. As a project of literary recovery and communication, L’Astrée amalgamates ancient and Renaissance pastoral and medieval chivalric and courtly conventions with Platonism and Neo-Petrarchism. It is therefore a transitional text between centuries. Moreover, d’Urfé creates a self-reflective text, that is, a romance that repeats and echoes its own conventions in permutations of transformation. He has characters such as Hylas and Fleurial mimic and deform the words of their social and moral superiors. This echo effect adds to the romance’s textual polyphony of points and counterpoints, as when Neoplatonist theories of love meet their materialist counterpart. This interior polemic within the pastoral romance serves to inform narrative themes, such as courtly language and transvestism, and pits idealism against a nascent realism emerging in the development of the novel of the time. Sorel’s Le berger extravagant takes this dialectic a step further by representing the Urfeian character as a madman at grips with notions of social realism that challenge literary idealism. Sorel adapts Cervantes’s literary madman, Don Quixote, by placing him in the pastoral setting so as to create Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd: the reader who consciously imitates pastoral conventions in order to live them. Like Don Quixote, Lysis devours the texts of ancient and Renaissance writers, pretends to take them for histories, and then emulates the fictional characters’ lives to a point of literal exhaustion: a staged death

148

Conclusion scene. The harangue of Lysis’s pícaro, Carmelin, underscores the critically productive relationship between idealism and realism, and between abstract and materialist approaches to literature. The authorial figure, the narrator, the critical characters, and Carmelin all document Lysis’s sources for imitation and suggest critical appraisals of convention. While Sorel’s textual monument announces the death of some literary practices, it also recommends the means for the transformation of others. Le berger is therefore a storehouse of literary devices and themes as much as it is a compendium of critical assessments that will resonate into the eighteenth century. It is true that Sorel’s “tombeau des romans et des absurdités de la poésie” announces the obsolescence of some literary conventions and Baroque themes, in the manner that Furetière considered the tombeau: a mise à mort. Sorel’s tomb unveils the illusory quality of literary convention and Baroque theme by applying a standard of literary verisimilitude. Indeed, by virtue of its interior polemic, d’Urfé’s literary compendium sets the stage for Sorel’s critical and dialectical project. Let us document some of these transformations of convention, thought, and theme that anticipate the construction of subsequent fictions, both theatrical and novelistic, in seventeenth-century France. Silvandre’s Echo from d’Urfé’s text refers to an Ovidian myth and to a physical phenomenon, which exist in a contradictory relationship in L’Astrée, for the character is conscious of both explanations without privileging one over the other. In the equivalent scene between Anselme and Lysis, Sorel reduces Echo to the status of a fiction, a myth, a fable. Moreover, the poem in echoes, once thought to be the words of a nymph or a spontaneous, prophetic discourse, is unmasked to reveal the highly calculated poetic format of rimes couronnées. This ancient and Renaissance convention is shown to be just that, nothing more than an illusion of miraculous spontaneity produced by means of the deliberate and conscious manipulation of literary devices. Consequently, such rhymes in echo become most rare in the French seventeenth-century poetic corpus.1 Therefore, in this case Sorel has dismissed a myth and a literary convention by indicating their obsolescence in the face of emerging values of verisimilitude, skeptical thinking, and empirical approaches to knowing.

149

Conclusion While d’Urfé’s L’Astrée implicitly invites reflection on the conventionality of its means of representing characters’ words, their identities, and modes of thought, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant constitutes an explicit reflection and debate concerning the same means. Sorel’s antiromance, in fact, uses conventional narrative and poetic means to put convention on trial. Debate itself serves as an apt example, for Sorel uses it to represent controversies surrounding romance. In the polemical scene between Anselme, Montenor, and Lysis, Sorel represents a debate in order to question the unnecessary conventionality of love debate itself. As a costume or feint, debates meant to adjudicate love conflicts are proven to be ineffective and even unnecessary. This is another occasion of Sorel arguing for the obsolescence of a narrative convention. However, Sorel transforms a debate of convention into a debate on convention when he pits Clarimond against Philiris and Amarylle in book XIII of Le berger. By reproducing another court scene that does not result in a final judgment, Sorel allows a group of characters, all of whom represent conflicting critical ideas about romance, to engage in a polyphonic dialogue.2 Furthermore, this dialogue is metanarrative to the extent that it catalogues and variously comments on the models of Lysis’s imitations. Such a debate results in a set of open-ended conclusions about romance and poetics. For instance, Clarimond considers literary diversion and edification to be the negative effects of reading romances: Il y a des jeunes gens qui les [les Romans] ayant leus, & voyant que tout arrive à souhait aux avanturiers dont ils traitent ont desir de mener une semblable vie, & quitent par ce moyen la vacation qui leur estoit propre. (XIII.510)

Furthermore, according to Clarimond, women learn courtly means of action and discourse from romances, and in teaching them to their suitors, they place themselves in an undeserved position of pedagogical superiority: D’ailleurs tous les hommes ont beaucoup de sujet de former des plaintes contre de tels livres, veu qu’il n’y a si petite bourgeoise à Paris ni autrepart qui ne les veuille avoir, & qui en ayant leu trois ou quatre pages ne s’imagine estre

150

Conclusion capable de nous faire la leçon. C’est cette lecture qui leur aprend à toutes à devenir si coquettes, & qui nous oste le moyen de faire l’amour avec innocence. (XIII.510–11)

Clarimond allows his passion to inform his argument, because he tries to pass off his libertinage as innocence, and sees romances as an obstacle to satisfying his desire. More importantly, Clarimond’s argument does not pass without riposte. Philiris counters his claims by emphasizing the teaching of virtue by means of reading romances: L’on sçait bien qu’estans faits à plaisir, & ne gardans pas les fascheuses loix de l’histoire, l’on y peut mettre tout ce que l’on veut, tellement que l’on y void tous les exemples de vertu que l’on se peut imaginer. C’est là que l’on peut trouver du plaisir & du proffit tout ensemble, & que les femmes mesmes aprennent de la civilité & de la courtoisie. (XIII.524)

Philiris has summed up the Horatian maxim of diversion, or pleasure, and edification, which are the two main goals of the literary text.3 Of course, Sorel’s debaters in Le berger also echo the arguments of previous Italian theorists, such as Scaliger and Castelvetro (Bray 64–65). Sorel hints at the anti-romanesque, yet productive, argument much in the vein of contemporary novelists such as Jean-Pierre Camus, who announces that literature, and especially romances, should “auancer le regne de la Vertu, & d’amoindrir celui du vice.”4 Since the judge of the debate in Le berger (Anselme) does not decide in favor of either character, the contradictory proposition remains: literature, and specifically romances, have the double potential to please and instruct the reader to emulate vice as well as virtue. Such contradictory conclusions are the result of the pro-con format of debate and its lack of synthesis. Sorel will continue this polemic in his critical writings late in his career. In De la connoissance des bons livres (1671), Sorel entertains contradictory propositions concerning the superiority of veritable histories and romances. On the one hand, romances contain many examples of virtue: “Quelquesuns mêmes ne rapportent rien qui ait de la pente au vice, au contraire il s’y rencontre plusieurs exemples de Vertu.” 5

151

Conclusion Consequently, romances are diverting and edifying (146–47), and the reader in search of a Universal Science can find in them a “doctrine salutaire” (164). Instead of representing what is or what actually took place as in veritable histories, romances depict what should be (145), that is, what vices should be punished and what virtues should be rewarded (82). Romances would therefore be superior to historiography, if they were to conform to standards of verisimilitude determining the plausibility of events and characters’ actions based on les bienséances, or norms of propriety (81–82). On the other hand, veritable histories may also provide moral and political lessons (66–67, 71–72), for the historian accurately represents the vices of historical personages while condemning them (79). History therefore has the potential to be as edifying and pleasurable as romances. However, it is important to note that these lines of argumentation present contradictory hypotheses about the potential of the two genres of writing. The only synthesis Sorel offers is the necessity of romances to conform to esthetic and moral standards in order to provide a benefit tantamount to that of histories. Yet more importantly, in Le berger Sorel anticipates a point of debate concerning the goals of the classical novel as they will be articulated by Du Plaisir fifty-five years later: Ces sortes d’histoires, aussi bien que les pièces de théâtre, sont d’elles-mêmes une école d’édification: leur conclusion doit toujours enfermer une morale…. Quelque malheureuse qu’y soit la vertu, elle est dépeinte avec des attraits; elle intéresse, elle donne de la pitié. Au contraire, le moindre vice ou d’habitude ou d’inclination, quelque favorable qu’il y soit, paraît toujours avec des dangers, s’il ne paraît pas avec des châtiments. (Du Plaisir 70)

According to Philippe Hourcade, Du Plaisir has incorporated the critical assessments of the novel articulated by Valincour, Fontenelle, and Sorel (6). However, Du Plaisir does not have the final word about the pleasure and instruction offered by the novel. In the eighteenth century, Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy will echo Sorel. Much like Sorel’s Clarimond in his discussion of the rules governing the writing of narrative prose, Lenglet-

152

Conclusion Dufresnoy’s terms and intentions are ambiguous: “Je marque pour troisième observation la nécessité de répandre des mœurs dans un Roman, parce qu’il est fait pour instruire autant que pour récréer.”6 He does not seem to define here what kinds of mores should be represented in novels. However, similar to Clarimond, he masks a libertine agenda: “…dans le Roman toute passion devient vertu, & c’est le plus bel éloge qu’on en puisse faire” (77). Making no moral distinctions between passions, he presents narrative prose as a whole as the breviary of amorous life (Chartier 62-64). Yet, while Sorel’s Clarimond considers romances to be a distraction from passion, LengletDufresnoy sees in them a source of desire. Even closer to the thought of Lenglet-Dufresnoy is a third debater, Amarylle, who intervenes to promote the reading of romances for the benefit of female readers: Nous autres femmes qui n’allons point au college, & qui n’avons point de precepteurs comme les hommes pour nous aprendre les diverses choses qui se passent au monde, c’est seulement dans les Romans que nous avons le moyen de nous rendre sçavantes.…ce n’est pas là [dans les livres de philosophie morale] que nous pouvons aprendre ny la vertu ny l’Eloquence. (XIII.524)

In this pro-con polemic lacking finalization, Sorel lists another benefit of reading romances. Women, who have no access to traditional means of education reserved for men, have only fictions from which to learn the ways of the world. Amarylle also indicates the interdependence of the social and the literary imaginary: Qui plus est l’on nous fera un grand tort, pource que nos Amans & nos marys ne s’adonnant plus aussi à cette agreable lecture, mettront en oubly toutes les gentillesses de l’amour, tellement que nous ne serons plus servies avecque passion, & que nous n’aurons plus d’avantures qui donnent matiere d’escrire aux Autheurs du siecle. (XIII.524–25; my emphasis)

Husbands and lovers learn to incite passion by studying romances, and their exploits with wives and mistresses provide

153

Conclusion material for succeeding fictions. Readers, and especially female readers, are central to the cycles of life imitating art and art imitating life. Here Sorel presents a bipartite question that will echo throughout the seventeenth century. What do women derive from the reading of romances and novels? What is the most productive relationship between the social and the literary imaginary? It is not a mere coincidence that these two questions are simultaneously posed, since it was long held in seventeenth-century France that women were the most impressionable sex. Molière gives a rather negative picture of female readers in his Précieuses ridicules (1659): Magdelon and Cathos are bourgeois women who imitate the language, actions, and mores of characters in précieux romances, such as those by Madeleine de Scudéry (scene iv).7 Gorgibus, respectively the father and uncle of the women, is frustrated by their resistance to marriage and violently condemns their reading matter in the denouement of the play (scene xvii). Following Clarimond’s argument, when female readers expect social practice to follow literary models, social and familial disorder ensues. In step with this satirical approach, Antoine Furetière in his Roman bourgeois (1666) presents Javotte, a young bourgeois girl who is enchanted with the précieux circle of Angélique and who asks her suitor, Pancrace, to teach her rarified modes of speech and action (Furetière, Roman 1004–05). Realizing that literary emulation is an excellent means of seducing young women, Pancrace provides Javotte with a copy of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1005). Having assiduously read all five volumes, Javotte’s mind is poisoned: “plus il [L’Astrée] exprime naturellement les passions amoureuses, et mieux elles s’insinuent dans les jeunes ames, où il se glisse un venin imperceptible, qui a gagné le cœur avant qu’on puisse avoir pris du contrepoison” (1006). She begins to play the role of Astrée, and Pancrace that of Céladon (1007). She is so taken with this fictional mediation of her desire that she refuses to marry the man her parents have chosen for her (1010–11). Her parents resolve to send her to a convent, from which Pancrace kidnaps her so they may elope (1015–18). On the one hand, literature has made a lasting impression on the mind of the female char-

154

Conclusion acter and inspired her to transgress state law by engaging in a clandestine marriage. On the other hand, L’Astrée mediates Pancrace’s and Javotte’s desires to the point of their realization. Furetière seems to have taken Sorel’s (Amarylle’s) propositions concerning the mediating function of literature in the social sphere and staged them in a narrative episode. The idealization of desire by women has real effects in Furetière’s bourgeois world. More importantly for the present argument, the lack of finalization in Sorel’s debates affords Molière and Furetière two different paths to follow in their explorations of the impact of the literary on the social. Much in the same way that Sorel’s novelistic debates pose productive questions for his literary inheritors, his transformation and questioning of previous literary themes, such as transvestism and Neoplatonist concepts of love, suggest their alternative literary treatments to several writers to come. In Le berger’s second edition, L’anti-roman (1633–34), Sorel undermines the Neoplatonist notion of the lover’s transformation into the beloved and its materialization present in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. He invests his Extravagant Shepherd with a strong sense of self that Anselme tries to subvert as if he were Descartes’s malin génie: Pleust à Dieu que la ressemblance fust encore plusgrande, & que je pûsse mesme estre changée en elle [Charite]. C’est ce que je souhaitte passionnément, & c’est à quoy je tasche de parvenir. C’est le souverain degré de l’amour de se changer en ce qu’on aime, selon l’opinion des Philosophes.… Imaginez vous, dit Anselme, que dés maintenant vostre souhait est accomply, & qu’encore que vous sembliez estre un berger, c’est que vous estes la bergere Charite changé en Lysis, & que cette bergere qui est icy presente est le berger Lysis changé en Charite. Mais je connoy bien que je ne suis pas Charite, repartit le berger, car je raisonne en moymesme comme Lysis a accoustumé de faire, & je sens en moy mon esprit ancien. (L’anti-roman II.viii.2–4)

First, the Neoplatonist import of d’Urfé’s text is relegated to the reasoning of philosophers, and as such Lysis concludes that it cannot be applied in his social context. The abstract idealizations of philosophy clash with the realist view that

155

Conclusion metamorphosis by means of transvestism is impossible. In fact, Lysis reduces the philosophical justification of love to a Neoplatonist ideal that he himself finds inapplicable in his own amorous life. Lathuillère argues that this rejection of the Neoplatonist ideal is already present in d’Urfé’s romance, for the shepherds and shepherdesses more often prefer to measure their conduct according to rules of “honnêteté, des bienséances, et de la courtoisie” to transform the egotism of love into submission of the lover to the beloved. Eschewing Neoplatonism, précieux writers will bolster their justifications of love with examples from the Bible, history, legends, and heroic romances (Lathuillère 346). More specifically, Jean-Michel Pelous shows that Sorel treats the Neoplatonist justification of love as madness in Le berger, and this treatment contributed to the rupture between Platonic love in pastoral romances and heroic gallantry in epic and précieux romances. In the fictions by Gomberville, La Calprenède, and Madeleine de Scudéry, Neoplatonist ideas of transformation give way to a heroic ideal according to which the honor and exploits of the knight inspire esteem, recognition, and love in the beloved (Pelous 105–23). Consequently, the Neoplatonist ideal of love enters the domain of the pedant, while the gallantry of the aristocrat becomes the predominant pretext for sentiment in later romances. By announcing the obsolescence of the Neoplatonist ideal of love, Sorel highlights alternative social modes of sentiment already present in L’Astrée and thus opens the door to new expressions of love in romance and the classical novel. Transvestism and metamorphosis are implausible for another reason. In the example from L’anti-roman, Lysis presents himself as a self-determining subject whose identity cannot be put into question by either the Neoplatonist ideal of love nor by the suggestion of a critical character playing along with his feint of literary madness. Part and parcel of Lysis’s sense of self is his sense of a fundamental male gender. Since true metamorphosis is impossible, transvestism would only involve deception, that is, the masking of an essential gender identity. Sorel thus transforms the theme of transvestism in literature by rejecting it as a means of metamorphosis. In fact, Zuerner finds only one example of such a gender change after the 1620s: Isaac de Benserade’s drama Iphis et Iante (1636), whose plot

156

Conclusion is borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.8 From the time of Le berger’s publication, cross-dressing is treated as a means of mere deception with an aim to evade enemies, infiltrate prohibited spaces, or surmount social obstacles. In French literature postdating Le berger, cross-dressing by female characters becomes a means of obviating social norms of gender identity in a realistic world of strict sexual difference. According to John Lyons, Adrienne Zuerner, and Mordeca Pollock, more female transvestites appear in seventeenth-century texts than males, because male cross-dressing was considered “more threatening to the status quo” (Lyons 61, 81n1; Zuerner 15; Pollock 62, 77n7). In light of these arguments, Sorel not only rejects the Neoplatonist justification for the metamorphosis of a fundamental gender identity, but he also limits its application to the social realm. Female transvestites will use their disguises as a means of evading male authorities and of temporarily usurping power reserved for men. Pierre Corneille’s tragi-comedy Clitandre, ou L’innocence délivrée (1632) depicts the female transvestite, Dorise, as a criminal using disguise to evade the royal authorities. She is a criminal because she uses a sword, a symbol of male power, to attempt to assassinate her rival in love, Caliste (I.vi).9 Dorise’s fundamental sexual identity is unveiled when another criminal character, Pymante, tries to rape her (IV.i). It is only by means of marriage, a reassertion of binary sexual difference, that Dorise can be integrated into traditional society (Corneille V.iv and v; Zuerner 20, 64 ff.). In the theatrical world of Corneille, female cross-dressing appears criminally deceptive and transgressive, because its wrongs merit correction by state authorities. However, unlike the case of Céladon-Alexis in d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, female cross-dressers do not experience the subjective complications of a combined sexual identity. In the same vein, after Sorel’s dismissal of cross-dressing by men in Le berger, fictions concerning male transvestites tend to assert the norms of binary sexual difference (Lyons 61, 78, 80).10 In the abbé de Choisy’s Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville (1695), a widowed mother gives birth to a son, but since she wants to save him from possible death in military combat, she raises him as a girl (972–73). However, complications arise when the young “marquise” meets the marquis de

157

Conclusion Bercour (978–79), with whom she soon falls in love. By appreciating his effeminacy, the marquise shows signs of a heterosexual male desire (982). The young marquise’s fundamental male gender and heterosexuality do appear again when she is the first to propose marriage to the marquis de Bercour: an act few women in seventeenth-century France would dare (983). After the death of the young marquise’s mother, her uncle permits her to marry the marquis de Bercour, because knowing the true gender of the heiress, he and his inheritors would receive her share of the estate if she were to have no children (986–87). However, on their wedding night, the young marquise discovers that her husband is in fact a woman (987–88). From their union a child is born and the uncle’s plot is foiled (988). In the abbé de Choisy’s narrative, the cross-dressed couple re-enters the fold of social norms by possessing two complementary, fundamental sexual identities. Transvestism thus functions as a playful mask allowing characters to realize their desire and integrate themselves correctly in their society. Following Sorel’s treatment of male transvestism, this theme is no more than a mask contributing to the reassertion of the predominant social order, for it no longer calls into question categories of sexual identity. Sorel has therefore transformed a theme that was originally meant to subvert social norms into one that serves as proof of their power to make claims to essential sexual identity. The transvestite can no longer fool him- or herself into believing he or she has become another gender or another person. This overview of the different meanings of cross-dressing in romances and the theater serves as a backdrop for the role d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger played in the development of a theme in French literature of the seventeenth century. D’Urfé institutes the narrative devices necessary for the representation of gender identity in the romance, such as the masking of one gender with pronouns referring to the other. The abbé de Choisy certainly borrows this technique from L’Astrée when he designates the truly male protagonist la marquise de Banneville with female titles and pronouns, and his female heroine the marquis de Bercour with male marks of gender. More importantly, one can say that Sorel delineates a series of literary, philosophical, and social transformations in

158

Conclusion his critique of this theme. We have already made clear the transition from the transsexual or metamorphosed cross-dresser to the drag queen wearing a mask. The Neoplatonist ideal of love no longer functions as the reason subtending such disguise, and it is excluded as a motivating factor of amorous intrigue in later novels.11 This transformation of the theme may also indicate shifts in social practice and state ideological tenets concerning dress in general, such as sumptuary laws meant to preserve the marks of social class since 1617. Jean-Pierre Camus also condemns the practice of cross-dressing on biblical and theological grounds in his Herminia ou les déguisements in Le pentagone historique (1631; Zuerner 11, 13). Sorel’s Le berger thus marks a series of social, political, and esthetic transformations in process during the 1620s. As a compiler of forceful arguments for political, social, and esthetic changes, Sorel claims that Le berger extravagant was meant to play a corrective role in the development of literature. The “tomb of romances and of the absurdities of poetry” declares the obsolescence of some themes and modes of thought, such as poetic echoes and Neoplatonism, and calls for the reform of others, such as transvestism. It calls for romances and novels to conform to emerging notions of social and psychological reality. In La bibliothèque françoise, Sorel assigned this role to Le berger: Cet ouvrage s’est rendu necessaire, pour monstrer que le dessein du Livre du Berger Extravagant, est plus serieux & plus utile que ne pensent beaucoup de Gens…sans considerer qu’il reprend les défaux de quantité d’ouvrages, & qu’il est propre à querir de leur erreur des personnes preoccupees, lesquelles estiment plusieurs Livres qui sont de fort bas prix. En y regardant attentivement, on trouvera que cet Anti-Roman n’est pas seulement fait contre les Romans qui l’ont precedé, mais encore contre ceux qui devoient venir après, entre lesquels il y a assez qui pourroient donner lieu à la mesme critique. (109)

First, Sorel’s understanding of fault would be a disregard for his criticism in the creation of new fictions. Second, by being opposed to the errors of previous romances and anticipating the faults of those to come, Le berger fashions a retrospective as

159

Conclusion well as a prospective critique of conventions. Sorel makes this claim with the assumption that future fictions are likely to repeat the imperfections—the disregard for his criticism—of previous ones. As he states a few years later in De la connoissance des bons livres (1671), “Si [les] Autheurs [des Romans Modernes] avoient bien fait leur profit de ce qu’on leur avoit des-ja remonstré [dans Le berger extravagant and L’antiroman], ils ne seroient pas tombez en faute” (102–03). Here Sorel considers in retrospect the romances written between 1628 and 1671, whose authors disregarded the lessons suggested by the literary criticism in Le berger extravagant and L’anti-roman. Nevertheless, Sorel envisages a generation of writers who will be more aware of narrative’s potential to teach vice and virtue; who will take stock of the growing market of readers, largely composed of women; and who will understand the force of literary emulation in real society. Most importantly, Sorel calls for future writers who will be conscious of fiction’s power to model concepts of social reality and personal experience.

160

Appendix of Images

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix of Images

Fig. 1. Andrea Alciati (Andrea Alciato). Omnia Andreae Alciati v.c. Emblemata: Cum commentariis. Antwerp, 1577. 580. Emblem 180. (Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.)

163

Appendix of Images

Fig. 2. Crispin de Passe. Le portrait de Charite, in Jean de la Lande [pseud. for Charles Sorel]. Líanti-roman, ou l’histoire du berger Lysis. Vol. 1. Paris, 1633ñ34. 166. (Photo courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)

164

Notes Introduction 1. Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée, ed. Hugues Vaganay, 5 vols. (Paris: Masson, 1925; Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1966). All references to L’Astrée are to this edition. The part (volume) will be designated by an uppercase Roman numeral, the book by a lowercase Roman numeral, and the page by an Arabic numeral. 2. Charles Sorel, Le berger extravagant (Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1627–28; Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1972). All citations from Le berger and the Remarques are from this edition. Roman numerals represent the book, and Arabic numerals, the pagination of the modern reprint. I have modernized the spelling. 3. Sorel himself rechristens Le berger “The Anti-romance” in its second edition: Jean de la Lande [pseud. for Charles Sorel], L’anti-roman, ou l’histoire du berger Lysis, accompangée de ses remarques. 4. Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha 85–92. 5. “Pa'raj” and “parw/diva,” Liddel and Scott 592–93, 611. 6. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” 60–102, and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 32, 88–90. 7. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination 292–93. 8. Béchade, Les romans comiques de Charles Sorel: Fiction narrative, langue et langages. 9. Kristeva, “Le mot, le dialogue, et le roman,” Shmeiwtikh;: Recherches pour une sémanalyse 93–94. 10. Hodgson, “Poétique et pratique du roman dans l’œuvre de Charles Sorel.” 11. Montaigne presents a diverse portrait of himself near the end of his Essais in “Du repentir”: “Je ne puis assurer mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle. Je le prens en ce point, comme il est, en l’instant que je m’amuse à luy. Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage…. Je pourray tantost changer, non de fortune seulement, mais aussi d’intention. C’est un contrerolle de divers et muables accidens et d’imaginations irresoluës et, quand il y eschet, contraires: soit que je sois autre moy-mesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects par autres circonstances et considerations. Tant y a que je me contredis bien à l’adventure…” (3: 805). 12. Sarduy 88–89. Debaisieux also cites Sarduy’s discussion of the Keplerian universe to explain the concept of subjectivity during the Baroque period. See Debaisieux, Le procès du roman 11–12. 13. Judovitz, “Mort de l’allégorie dans Le berger extravagant” and “Emblematic Legacies: Hieroglyphs of Desire in L’Astrée.” 14. For basic distinctions between allegory, symbol, and myth, see Fletcher 1–23, and for the distinction between pre- and post-Romantic notions of allegory, see Beugnot “Pour une poétique de l’allégorie

165

Notes to Pages 8–22 classique”; and Miller, “The Two Allegories”; and for the persistence of allegory based on analogical and temporal organization of signification in Romantic literature, see de Man 187–208. 15. Fumaroli discusses Blaise de Vigenère’s Images ou Tableaux de Platte peinture (1578) and Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Visionnaires (1673) in his “Rhétorique, dramaturgie, critique littéraire: Le recours à l’allégorie dans les querelles littéraires (1578–1630).” For allegorized criticism in the classical age, see Couton 90–94, 100–04, 168. 16. Genette, “Le serpent dans la bergerie,” L’Astrée, by Honoré d’Urfé (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1964), 8, and rpt. Figures I 110. 17. Molinié, Du roman grec au roman baroque: Un art majeur du genre narratif en France sous Louis XIII; and for the influence of L’Astrée on subsequent narratives, see Magendie, “Influence de L’Astrée,” chapter 3 of Le roman français 96–117. 18. For d’Urfé’s influence on Corneille’s theater, see Nadal 75–93. 19. Réal Ouellet and Claude Rigault, “Le discours oxymorique de l’anti-roman,” Saggi e Ricerche di Letteratura francese 14 (1975): 112, qtd. in Chouinard, “L’anti-roman” 38. See also Hodgson, “The Parody of Traditional Narrative Structures in the French Anti-novel from Charles Sorel to Diderot.”

Chapter One Echoes of Desire and Intention: The Mirroring of Utterances in Romance and Antiromance 1. My linguistic analysis here falls into step with Hembree’s arguments concerning the epistemic transition from object-centered paradigms of human thinking, according to which a character receives the imprint of ideas of the world, to subject-centered paradigms, following which “a transcendental consciousness…exists independently of the external order.” Hembree bases this framework on the work of Ernest Cassirer, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Timothy Reiss. See Hembree’s Subjectivity and the Signs of Love 6–42. 2. Bakhtin comes to the same conclusion in his appraisal of Le berger, but he attributes the problem of authorial intentionality to subversive carnivalesque images in the novel: “Nearest of all to Sorel’s theoretic views is his novel ‘The Extravagant Shepherd’ (Le Berger Extravagant). This is a pastoral Don Quixote simplified and reduced to a bare literary parody of the shepherd theme, popular in those days. But in spite of this superficially rational and narrow tendency, the novel contains a number of traditional images and overtones. Their meaning goes far beyond the author’s initial intentions. Such is, for instance, the theme of madness or stupidity of the hero, Lysis. As in Don Quixote, the hero’s madness permits a whole series of carnival crownings and uncrownings, of travesties and mystifications. This theme (madness) permits the world

166

Notes to Pages 22–27 to abandon its official routine and to join the hero’s carnivalesque fancies.… However, these deeper elements of the traditional carnival themes and images seem almost to contradict the author’s own intentions” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 104; emphasis mine). 3. Giles Le Vinier experimented with verses in echo: “Amors ki le me comande, Mande,” qtd. from Georges Lote, Histoire du vers français, vol. 2 (Paris: Hatier, 1949), 61, in Goyet 2: 131. 4. Joachim Du Bellay, “Dialogue d’un Amoureux et d’Echo,” Recueil de Poésie, vol. 3 (Paris: Guillaume Cavellat, 1549), 148; Thomas Sébillet, L’art poétique françois, in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, ed. Francis Goyet (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1990), 153. Both qtd. in Goyet 2: 130–31. Also Tabourot 1: 158–62. 5. As evidence for this exclusion of hermetism and homonymic rhyme, it suffices to consider Malherbe’s position on the reformulation of the demands placed on French verse: clarity; an unequivocal correspondence between signifier and signified; a respect for the rules of grammar and semantics to eliminate any ambiguous utterance; a standardization and purification of morphology and lexical meaning. See Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle 31–32. 6. D’Urfé and Sorel therefore seem to be working counter to the current of Malherbian poetics. Gerhardt argues that d’Urfé “a donné naissance à toute une série de poèmes pastoraux narratifs, qui prolongent l’influence de la poésie du XVIe siècle à l’époque même de Malherbe” (264). 7. Bakhtin was the first to theorize the presence of past and virtual utterances in a single one in his discussion of the notion of speech genres: “…any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances—his own and others—with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” 69). Also see Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 88. 8. The first meaning of génie current in the seventeenth century leads to this interpretation: “Terme du polythéisme. Esprit ou démon bon ou mauvais qui présidait à la destinée de chaque homme.” Génie and démon also evoke in French the spirit that communicated with Socrates “pour le détourner de ce qu’il avait résolu” (Littré 4: 34). 9. Sorel criticizes Nicolas de Montreux’s adaptation of the convention in Les bergeries de Juliette (five parts published between 1585 and 1598): “Si tous les Echos rencontroient comme cela [comme ceux de d’Urfé!], je les trouverois assez bons: mais l’on en void de si mauvais,

167

Notes to Pages 29–31 qu’ils ne meritent pas d’estre leus, comme par exemple, dans les Bergeries de Juliette” (Rems., 557). 10. It is interesting to note that Sorel had already experimented with the clash of elevated, aristocratic scenes and sexual play in book VII of his Histoire comique de Francion (1623). Francion participates in a masquerade party of nobles that becomes a libertine orgy. See Sorel, Histoire comique de Francion (Livres I à VII) 325–42. In book IX of the second edition of the same novel (1626), the title character also disguises himself as a shepherd to seduce young peasants. See the only edition where this episode appears: Sorel, Histoire comique de Francion: Romanciers du XVIIe siècle 367–79. 11. In the early-seventeenth century, extravagant and extravaguer denote “wandering, going astray” (Cotgrave). 12. I draw this characteristic from Meding’s analysis of d’Urfé’s L’Astrée. The Urfeian romance “situates itself…in the tenuous present between the lost innocence of the prelapsarian garden and hope for its retrieval” (Meding 12). 13. The “Prologue de l’autheur” of Rabelais’s Tiers livre juxtaposes the fall from grace as the sinking of a ship and the author’s last possession as a barrel of wine whose contents inspire his creation: “Prins ce choys et élection, ay pensé ne faire exercice inutile et importun, si je remuois mon tonneau Diogenic qui seul m’est resté du naufrage faict par le passé on far de Mal’encontre. A ce triballement de tonneau, que feray-je en vostre advis? Par le vierge qui se rebrasse, je ne scay encores. Attendez un peu que je hume quelque traict de ceste bouteille: c’est mon vray et seul Hélicon, c’est ma fontaine Caballine, c’est mon unicque enthusiasme. Icy beuvant je délibère, je discours, je résoulz et concluds. Après l’épilogue je riz, j’escripz, je compose, je boy” (Rabelais 367). 14. This notion of “master discourse” corresponds best with Kristeva’s term idéologème. “Le recoupement d’une organisation textuelle […] donnée avec les énoncés […] qu’elle assimile dans son espace ou auxquelles elle renvoie dans l’espace des textes […] extérieurs, sera appelé un Idéologème. L’idéologème est cette fonction intertextuelle que l’on peut lire ‘matérialiste’ aux différents niveaux de la structure de chaque texte, et qui s’étend tout au long de son trajet en lui donnant ses coordonnées historiques et sociales” (Kristeva, Le texte 12). 15. Ovid presents Echo as a character reduced to voice and bones: “spreta latet silvis pudibundaque frondibus ora / protegit et solis ex illo vivit in antris; / sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae; / et tenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae / adducitque cutem macies et in aera sucus / corporis omnis abit; vox tantum atque ossa supersunt: / vox manet, ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram. / inde latet silvis nulloque in monte videtur, / omnibus auditur: sonus est, qui vivit in illa” (III.393– 401). “Thus spurned, she lurks in the woods, hides her shamed face among the foliage, and lives from that time on in lonely caves. But still, though spurned, her love remains and grows on grief; her sleepless cares

168

Notes to Pages 32–45 waste away her wretched form; she becomes gaunt and wrinkled and all moisture fades from her body into the air. Only her voice and her bones remain: then, only voice; for they say that her bones were turned into stone. She hides in woods and is seen no more upon the mountain-sides; but all may hear her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII I.152–53; Miller’s translation). 16. I would like to thank Professor Kathleen Wine for helping nuance d’Urfé’s treatment of the echo.

Chapter Two Verbal Travesty and Disguise: Parody and Citation of Typified Languages 1. Adam, “La théorie mystique de l’amour dans L’Astrée et ses sources italiennes”; and Gaume 436–503. For the reaffirmation of Adam’s thesis, see Antonioli, “Le néo-platonisme dans L’Astrée.” For the inclusion of materialism and erotic images in L’Astrée’s allegory of Neoplatonic love, consult Aragon, “Platonisme de L’Astrée?” 2. I give a partial list of formulations in L’Astrée, only a few of which will be treated here—part I: i.25; vi.202; vii.265; vii.274, 290; xii.459; part II: v.179–80; v.182–83; vi.263–64; ix.387–88; part III: preface, 7; v.263–67; x.565; part IV: v.233; vi.282. I owe much of this documentation to Servais Kevorkian, Thématique de “L’Astrée” d’Honoré d’Urfé 65–66. 3. On this point, I would nuance Hembree’s argument: “The result, however, is not a code of ethics predicated on the principle of the mutual self-interest of self-determining individuals, but rather a comic parody of the chivalric code which stands its principal tenets on their heads” (Subjectivity and the Signs of Love 117). 4. According to Bouchet (56–58), Hylas is an amusing cautionary example to faithful lovers; and for Winkler (184), he is an “Ausnahme” or exception to the predominant theme of spiritualized love in his engagement in frivolous courtship rituals. 5. Indeed, his change of heart inspires him to consult the oracle of the Echo in part II, in order to learn of Diane’s true feelings. The homonyms within the verses seem to point to the source of his emotional transformation: “Et quel crois-tu que ce cruel martire, / Que plein d’amour mon cœur va concevant, / Devienne enfin aux maux que je souspire?—Pire” (II.i.10). Silvandre says that he sighs (“souspire”) pains (“maux”) as well as words (“maux” = “mots”), and his amorous predicament worsens in function of these pains and words. 6. Diane repeats the same motivation (III.i.18). 7. In short, Laonice gives false report to Diane of Silvandre’s love for Madonte. Convinced that everything he ever said to her was truly a disguise, Diane refuses all Silvandre’s attentions (III.xi.610–14; IV.ii.83– 88, 90–96; IV.iii.99–108; IV.v.214–25). It is not until later that Diane

169

Notes to Pages 47–61 learns that Laonice’s report was a lie (IV.v.257–62, 276–78) and reconciles with Silvandre with the belief that his verbal disguise was sincere (IV.vi.285). It is only in the fifth and final part of L’Astrée authored by Balthazar Baro that Diane avows to Silvandre her love for him (V.i.13). 8. The reading that Lysis feigns literary madness was first suggested by Franchetti, who calls his extravagance a “deliberata assunzione d’una maschera” (Il “Berger extravagant” di Charles Sorel 112). Garavini calls him a “folle-saggio” (114), and De Vos follows their argument that his mental alienation is an “imposture” (292). 9. I expand Suozzo’s argument that only Lysis is capable of verbal disguise, for all the characters don some sort of speech genre from a literary source or a socially typified group; they mask their own identities, and they cloak their criticism or their praise of literature. See Suozzo 92–100. 10. This is the analysis of galimatias offered by the authorial figure in the Remarques: “…des discours qui de verité ont bien esté faits pour avoir du sens, mais qui n’en ont guere neantmoins.… Voila comme les mots faisoient la cullebute les uns par dessus les autres…, & quelques uns sembloient imiter les bricolles des jeux de paulme” (Rems., 660, 661). 11. Bruscambille was a farcical writer who composed galimatias prologues to Alexandre Hardy’s plays and recited them himself at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. He used gibberish to parody the style of Nervèze (Mongrédien 37).

Chapter Three Debates of Convention and Debates on Convention 1. For this reference, see Reynier, Le roman sentimental avant “L’Astrée” 248. Also Chouinard, “Les figures du procès dans Le berger extravagant” 18–19. 2. See Curtius (69) for suasoria’s role in the history of ancient rhetoric, and for a concrete example of suasoriae, see Edward, The “Suasoriae” of Seneca the Elder. Although Erasmus rejects the vain imitation of Ciceronian oration in his Dialogus ciceronianus, he includes suasoria as a pedagogical exercise that provokes personal creativity through the application of learned facts and linguistic figures in rhetorical disposition. See Erasmus, “Le plan des études (De ratione studiorum)” 458–60. 3. This act of inscription also appears as a theme in the love intrigue between Céladon and Astrée, for the shepherd has the habit of writing their names on trees and fountains as a means of preserving and communicating his desire (I.i.20 and I.xii.486). D’Urfé borrows from his friend Saint François de Sales this notion of the consolidation of human and divine will through inscription in the heart or soul. See Saint François de Sales, “Protestation authentique pour graver en l’âme la

170

Notes to Pages 66–72 résolution de servir Dieu et conclure les actes de pénitence,” chap. 20 of Introduction à la vie dévote, and “Histoire merveilleuse du trépas d’un gentilhomme qui mourut d’amour sur le mont d’Olivet,” livre 7, chap. 12 of Traité de l’amour de Dieu, Œuvres 69–71, 698–701. 4. This is how I understand Chouinard’s interpretation of the role rhetoric plays in Le berger: “…sous la voix d’un je anonyme mais fortement individualisé, perce une autre voix, autrement plus puissante, celle de la Doxa rhétorique qui mettra en branle des processus difficilement perceptibles. Quelque part, donc, entre le récit et son commentaire s’élabore un travail textuel à partir duquel il serait possible de dégager, pour adapter la formule de M. Foucault, une archéologie de la topique romanesque” (Chouinard, “Les figures du procès” 14). 5. Tilton states that “Sorel draws his knowledge of rhetoric in the narrative as a whole to convince the ultimate judge, the reader, that literature should be relegated to oblivion” (79). Coulet summarizes Sorel’s intention: “c’est toutes les fictions qui sont condamnées en principe” (200). Serroy interprets Sorel’s qualification of Le berger as a “tombeau”: “Le ‘tombeau’ qu’imagine Sorel est, en fait, une immense fosse commune, où il précipite pêle-mêle tous les romans qu’il connaît—et il les connaît presque tous—depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’aux œuvres de son temps” (297). 6. This distinction nuances Tilton’s argument that the confirmation of Lysis’s imitations is limited to the narrative and its reprehension is reserved for the authorial figure’s Remarques (Tilton 78). 7. While the narrative and metanarrative techniques do differ between Sorel and de Verville, they result in similar gestures of hermetism and the discursive adaptation of visual anamorphosis. The Remarques in Le berger and the conclusion of L’anti-roman both attest to Sorel’s familiarity and emulation of Le moyen de parvenir. See Sorel, Rems., 747–48, and L’anti-roman 2: 1107–09. Although a full analysis would exceed the limits of this study, Sorel himself uses a banquet scene in Le berger to experiment with the burlesque representation of mythological figures (book III). 8. Although they share the same name, this Amarylle is a character other than the transvested Lysis from book IV. 9. In his Polyandre, Sorel will depict another ridiculous poet, Musigène (Sorel, Polyandre 1: 7–65). 10. Horace presents this as an imperative for narrative and lyric poetry in De arte poetica: “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae” (l.333–34), “Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, / or to utter words both pleasing and helpful to life” (Horace 478–79; Fairclough’s translation). Brink argues that in this passage, Horace adapts ancient rhetorical theory to literary practice, thus giving it the duties of docere (“to instruct”), delectare (“to please”), and movere (“to move, persuade”; Brink 352).

171

Notes to Pages 73–84 11. According to Gibson, imaginative literature is only one among several means of women’s instruction at the time. Women over the century read newspapers, went to convent and charity schools, and took private lessons. See her Women in Seventeenth-Century France 34. 12. Although the scholarship on Preciosity as a literary and social phenomenon is vast, Lathuillère’s history is one of the most comprehensive to date. See his La Préciosité: Étude historique et linguistique. For a more recent appraisal of the movement’s feminocentric orientation, see DeJean’s Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. 13. Forty years later, Sorel will attribute the rise of the modern novel in France to this perfectibility of the genre: “En suite de cecy les Romans modernes les plus reguliers…se sont garantis la pluspart des deffaux qu’on impute à ceux qui les ont precedez, ou qui sont d’une autre espece, & leurs Autheurs pretendent d’y faire trouver les traces de la Verité & de la Raison” (Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres, ou Examen de plusieurs auteurs 156). 14. Also see May, Le dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle. 15. Gasté, La Querelle du “Cid”; Bray 191–230. One only needs to cite Boileau’s L’art poétique, chant III, line 48: “Le vrai peut quelquefois n’être pas vraisemblable.”

Chapter Four Experiments with Multiple Agency and Intention through Emblematics 1. I borrow this distinction between allegory and allegoresis from Quilligan 163–64. To justify this distinction, Quilligan also cites her own The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 21, 26, 29–32, 224–25. 2. John Heckman, “Emblematic Structures in Simplicissimus Teutsch,” Modern Language Notes 84 (1969): 877, qtd. in Daly 179. 3. Weinberg 310. I thank Dr. Amy Wygant of the University of Glasgow for this reference. 4. I say “privilege,” because the emblem does not necessarily employ this esthetic notion as it was meant by Horace in his poetic theory: in the De arte poetica, he means that poetry’s power to represent should stand up in repeated reading as painting’s stands up to repeated visual scrutiny. See Brink 368–69. 5. Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: n.p., 1968), 22, qtd. and trans. in Daly 38. 6. Benjamin repeatedly opposes early-Renaissance emblems as didactic and internally cohesive to Baroque emblems as fragmentary and dispersive (168, 172, 173, 186, 216, 217). 7. In the first four parts of L’Astrée, the term emblème does not even occur once (ARTFL Project).

172

Notes to Pages 86–92 8. A hybrid or composite nature is a frequent attribute of artificial monsters at the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century. Montaigne has this trait in mind when he discusses coherent self-representation in his Essai “Du repentir” (III.ii): “Je ne me suis pas attendu d’attacher monstrueusement la queuë d’un philosophe à la teste et au corps d’un homme perdu; ny que ce chetif bout eust à desadvouër et desmentir la plus belle, entiere et longue partie de ma vie. Je me veux presenter et faire veoir par tout uniformément” (3: 816). 9. According to Jacques Bompaire, Erasmus’s translation of Lucian’s PROLALIA H HRAKLHS was the most often consulted and the most frequently reprinted one in the sixteenth century in Western Europe. See his “Introduction générale,” Lucien cxlv-cxlvii. Since Erasmus translates Lucian’s adjective ajllovkoton as “noua quadam atque inusitata figura,” I argue that Mignault’s translation is original and therefore constitutes a particular reference. See Erasmus, “Praefatio, sev Hercvles Gallicvs,” Opera omnia 591–93 (p. 591 qtd.). 10. It is possible that d’Urfé has his character unconsciously touch upon a particular cultural subtext of the Hercules emblem: King Henry IV of France, through whose military prowess and policy of religious tolerance, peace and justice were re-established in the war-torn kingdom. Consult Yates 208–14; Vivanti 176–97; and Wine 85, 96–97, 103, 129, 130, 174. 11. This movement in my analysis is inspired by Hermann, Les voleuses de langue. 12. “Genereux” and “Generosité,” Cotgrave. For a comprehensive and striking catalogue of “generosity” as a male personality trait throughout the sixteenth century in France, see “Genereusement,” “Genereux,” and “Generosité,” Huguet 4: 292–93. 13. Although unaware of Célidée’s incarnation of this myth and emblem, Henein does similarly conclude that “la laideur proclame la grandeur d’âme et le courage de la bergère” (81). 14. Célidée is not miraculously cured of her deformity until L’Astrée’s apocryphal part V, where it just happens without her expecting or wanting it to happen (V.v.217–21). 15. D’Urfé borrowed the narrative theme of self-mutilation as a resolution to amorous conflict from Marguerite de Navarre’s “Dixiesme Nouvelle” in L’Heptaméron. Floride, a devout, married woman, disfigures herself with a stone to free herself from the sexual advances of an admirer, Amadour. However, Floride’s attempt to dissuade him fails, while Célidée’s succeeds. See Navarre 753–83. I owe this reference to Magendie, Du nouveau sur “L’Astrée” 119–20. 16. Crispin de Passe, Le portrait de Charite, in Jean de la Lande [pseud. for Charles Sorel], L’anti-roman 1: 166. This engraving first appeared in Sorel’s Le berger extravagant opposite page 135 in the first volume.

173

Notes to Pages 93–101 17. The best anthology of blasons available can be found in the chapter “Blasons du corps féminin,” Schmidt 293–362. Plantié considers Ronsard’s “Élégie à Janet peintre du Roi” (1555) to be one of the first ironic treatments of the blason involving artistic instructions given to a painter, and as such is a precursor of Sorel’s “portrait de Charite”; see Plantié 58–60. 18. Sorel’s implied author makes his understanding clear in a long commentary on the notion of ut pictura poesis in Rems., 567. 19. Judovitz, “Mort de l’allégorie dans Le berger extravagant” 50–51. While Judovitz takes this inscription of Lysis’s desire as a comic ploy, I am exploring its rhetorical articulation in more detail so as to prove that the protagonist overlooks deformity in preference for imaginative reinvestment. 20. While Fontanier draws a distinction between prosopopée and personification, modern critics, such as Cuddon, consider it one of the constitutive devices of personification. See Fontanier 404–06, and Cuddon 537.

Chapter Five Transvestism and Specularity: Transformations and Travesties of the Self 1. For Wölfflin’s criteria for Baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture, see his Principles of Art History and his Renaissance and Baroque. For the criteria of Baroque literary works, see Rousset 181– 82. For a study of the applicability and inapplicability of Wölfflin’s art historical categories to literary works, see Raymond, “Du baroquisme et de la littérature en France aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles” and “Préalable à l’examen du baroque littéraire français.” 2. “Mais la poésie et le théâtre baroques aimaient à se faire en marge, voire au rebours des chemins réguliers, s’extravaguant, proposant le faux pour le vrai et le vrai pour le faux pour mieux égarer le fameux ‘sens commun’ défini par Descartes comme faculté de discernement. On sait pourtant que le public français des premières décennies du XVIIe siècle, amateur de visions débridées tout autant que ses voisins espagnols et anglais, témoigne encore d’une rigoureuse liberté de l’imaginaire au risque de n’avoir pas de goût pour les ‘ouvrages judicieux’” (Siguret 42). See pp. 41 to 55 in the same work for a general overview of the epistemological status of vision in French literature of the first third of the seventeenth century. 3. Cross-dressing for purposes of evasion seems to function as a mask, which does not have the force of a metamorphosis. One incident to be studied will be Céladon’s disguise as Lucinde to escape Galatée’s palace (I.xii.455–56, 473–74). However, female characters also don the male mask to escape their oppressors, such as Silviane, who disguises

174

Notes to Pages 103–25 herself as a knight to escape the amorous pursuits of Childeric (III.xii.691–95), and Cryséide, who masquerades in men’s garb to escape Rithimer and rejoin her beloved Arimant (III.vii.412–21). 4. To understand different, competing notions of verisimilitude and les bienséances, and to examine the varying ways they condition the possible in tragedy and epic, see Bray 196, 201, 208–12, 215–30, 234, 236– 39. For an understanding of how these criteria determine characters’ actions and motivations in the classical novel, see Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” Figures II 71–99. 5. Judovitz, “Emblematic Legacies” 36. 6. For the distinctions between Renaissance and classical writing, see Timothy J. Reiss, “Power, Poetry, and the Resemblance to Nature,” in Lyons and Nichols 215–48. For this contrast in starker terms, see Lyons and Nichols’s introduction to the same collection of essays (14). 7. There is a similar exchange between Silvandre and Hylas closer to the end of part II (II.ix.387–88), soon before Céladon’s transformation into Alexis. 8. Urfé, Epistres morales III.x.490, qtd. and commented in Henein 343. 9. What Ehrmann calls the happy coincidence of friendship and love cannot come into being either through a sexual ambiguity or a singular sexual identity. See Ehrmann 23–24. 10. De Verville, Le moyen de parvenir 356. Both Marquet and Siguret have noted de Verville’s innovative application of visual anamorphosis to narrative writing, which he called stéganographie: “La stéganographie est l’art de représenter naïvement ce qui est aisée conception et qui toutefois sous les traits épaissis de son apparence cache des sujets tout autres que ce qui semble être proposé, ce qui est pratiqué en peinture quand on met en vue quelque paysage ou port ou autre portrait qui cependant musse [cache] sous soi quelque autre figure que l’on discerne quand on regarde par un certain endroit que le maître a désigné. Et aussi s’exerce par écrit quand on discourt amplement de sujets plausibles, lesquels enveloppent quelques autres excellences qui ne sont connnues que lorsqu’on lit par le secret endroit qui découvre les magnificences occultes à l’apparence commune” (Béroalde de Verville, Histoire véritable ou voyage des princes fortunés [Paris, 1610], n. pag., qtd. in Siguret 183–84; and Marquet 158). 11. “Mirer,” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, vol. 2; “Se mirer,” Cotgrave. 12. Harth maintains a clear dichotomy between L’Astrée as an aristocratic fiction and Le berger as its bourgeois parody; see Harth 18–23, 34–67. Di Piero modifies this argument by questioning the perfect coincidence between the rise of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of the novel, for he sees “the development of prose fiction in France…as the articulation of the conflict between and among various social groups”

175

Notes to Pages 125–28 (14). Any one novel may then depict a network of different social concerns without its entire discourse adhering to one class identity. See Di Piero 12–16, 38–59. 13. In their preface to Ibrahim, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry laud d’Urfé as the “Peintre de l’âme,” and then discuss the depiction of the Hero as an ideal impressed upon the reader (in Berger 83–84).

Chapter Six D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs: The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature 1. Several examples postdate the 1630s, such as the Tombeau du duc de Weimar, sonnet, written by Adam Billaut between 1637 and 1645, in Adam Billaut, ms. 538, Le recueil de poésies formé de 1637 à 1645 pour Pierre des Noyers, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France, ff. 40, 42, and 45, qtd. and reproduced in Dotoli ill. 15 and p. 223; Tombeau de Madame la Duchesse de Bouillon (1643); and Isaac de Benserade, “Tombeau de Madame D***. Stances” (1698), Les œuvres de Monsieur de Benserade 1: 223–24. 2. Attributed to Charles Sorel, published under the pseudonym De Vaux, comte de Cramail, Le tombeau de l’orateur françois 432–40. 3. Le tombeau du marquis d’Ancre (1617). And the tomb of the Duc de Luynes, constable of the young Louis XIII, Tombeau sur la mort du Connestable (1622). For the mise à mort of allegorical personifications, see Tumbeau de la guerre, A la Royne Mere du Roy (1616) and Le tombeau de la paulette (1618). The paulette was an annual fee paid to gain and retain an office in the growing royal bureaucracy. See “Paulette,” Le grand larousse universel, vol. 11 (1992 ed.). 4. Tombeau et epitaphe de tres-haut & tres-puissant Seigneur, Monseigneur le Duc de Guyse (1589) and Le tumbeau de Messeigneurs les Cardinal et Duc de Guyse, avec plusieurs sonnets en forme de regrets & autres Poesies sur le mesme subject, Plus une Hymne de la Saincte Ligue des Catholiques unis, A Monseigneur le Duc de Guyse, Pair, & grand Maistre de France, Gouverneur de Brye & Champaigne (1591); Tombeau de feu Monsieur M. François Chouayne, Escuyer de Chamblay, Conseiller du Roy, Maistre des Requests ordinaire de la Royne sa Mere, President & Lieutenant General au Baillage & siege Presidial de Chartres, & auparavant Conseiller de sa Majesté en son grand Conseil & en son Eschiquier d’Alançon (1616); D.P.L.C., Le tombeau de Monsieur Servin (1626); Tombeau sur le trespas de Messire Nicolas de Verdun, Chevalier, Conseiller du Roy en ses Conseils, & premier President en son Parlement de Paris (1627); and A. G., sieur de C., Le tombeau de feu Monsieur de Malherbe (1629). 5. Le thresor des epitaphes pour et contre le Cardinal (1643). 6. Fancan et al., Le tombeau des romans, où il est discouru: I. Contre les romans, II. Pour les romans (1626). While the inside cover of the

176

Notes to Pages 128–43 copy at the Bibliothèque nationale has the note “par Fancan,” Émile Roy attributes this treatise to Charles Sorel, because of Sorel’s citation of the title in the preface to Le berger extravagant and his use of a pastiche of the Amadis, which appears both in the treatise and in the 1623 edition of the Francion. See Roy 417. 7. In her reading of Le tombeau des romans, Armani sees the text’s points of contention reappear in treatises by Huet and LengletDufresnoy. See her “Il ‘Tombeau des romans’: dalla ‘situazione’ del romanzo all’istanza ontologica.” 8. The romance and antiromance, however, do not exploit the Renaissance Neo-Petrarchist meanings of the tomb and death as signs of, and opportunities for, personal spiritual and intellectual transcendence (Blum). 9. Fumaroli discusses Blaise de Vigenère’s Images ou Tableaux de Platte peinture (1578) and Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Visionnaires (1637) in his “Rhétorique, dramaturgie, critique littéraire: Le recours à l’allégorie dans les querelles littéraires (1578–1630).” 10. “Genius,” Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen sprachschatzes, vol. 4 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1952), 106; “Genie,” Huguet 4: 295. 11. “Subjectum,” Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen sprachschatzes, vol. 12 (Basel: Zbinden Druck und Verlag AG, 1966), 338–39. 12. Patru, “Éclaircissement sur l’histoire de L’Astrée,” in Plaidoyers et œuvres diverses de Monsieur Patru, 2e partie (Paris, 1681), 103–12, qtd. in Gaume 718. 13. Gaume recognizes d’Urfé’s deliberate attempts to obscure the evidence of referentiality: “…il convient de considérer que d’Urfé chercha à dérouter ses lecteurs et à piquer leur curiosité plutôt qu’à la satisfaire.” And he goes on to say, “Certes, l’identification n’est pas toujours facile, puisque Honoré d’Urfé cherche à embrouiller les pistes” (Gaume 165– 66, 168). 14. Tucker, “Strategies of Imitation in Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant,” and “The Entombment of Lysis: Degradation, Ostracism, and Classical ‘Death’ in Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant.” 15. Bardon was the first French critic to make this comparison in his “Don Quichotte” en France 1: 107–45. See also Thiessen 143 and De Vos 289–91. 16. In part 2, chapters 2 to 4, Don Quixote learns that someone has recorded his exploits in a “history.” See Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha 543–57. 17. Sorel, La bibliothèque françoise 59 (last series of italics represents my emphasis). 18. “Mais ‘tourner en raillerie’ paroles et actions ‘contre les choses qu’il voulait imiter,’ c’est ce retournement ironique par lequel une critique anti-romanesque ouvrait un romanesque nouveau? L’imitation

177

Notes to Pages 146–53 négative du chevaleresque et du pastoral s’y charge en sous-main de l’imitation positive du picaresque. Ou plutôt l’opposition permanente des deux libère une énergie toute nouvelle du récit, ‘toute libre et toute comique.’ Raillerie de Philosophe, dit l’excellent Sorel, c’est-à-dire raillerie qui ne blesse point” (Faye 47; Faye’s emphasis). 19. “Cet ouvrage s’est rendu necessaire, pour monstrer que le dessein du Livre du Berger Extravagant, est plus serieux & plus utile que ne pensent beaucoup de Gens qui en parlent sans l’avoir veu, ou qui le lisent pour un divertissement simple qu’ils y prennent, comme à des contes vulgaires, sans considerer qu’il reprend les défaux de quantité d’ouvrages, & qu’il est propre à guerir de leur erreur des personnes preoccupees, lesquelles estiment plusieurs Livres qui sont de fort bas prix. En y regardant attentivement, on trouvera que cet Anti-Roman n’est pas seulement fait contre les Romans qui l’ont precedé, mais contre ceux qui devoient venir après, entre lesquels il y en a assez qui pourroient donner lieu à la mesme Critique” (Sorel, La bibliothèque françoise 109). 20. Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres 102–03.

Conclusion: Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal 1. Colby demonstrates that the echo device was most popular in French pastoral drama in the 1620s and 1630s, and that it was considered ridiculous by the 1650s, when Thomas Corneille wrote his pastoral play Le berger extravagant. Colby found no examples of rimes couronnées in French verse after this period (17, 50). 2. This narrative containing characters who represent various ideas in dialogue without finalization is similar to novels by Rabelais, Cervantes, Grimmelshausen, and Dostoevsky analyzed by Bakhtin. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 32–34. 3. The decisive verses from Horace’s Ars poetica are the following (verses 343–44): “Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci, / Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo” [The writer who has combined the useful with the agreeable by equally delighting and instructing the reader has won every vote]. These are qtd. in Bray 64 (my translation). 4. Jean-Pierre Camus, “Préface,” Les evenemens singuliers (1628), in Berger 64. 5. Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres 157. 6. Nicolas A. Lenglet-Dufresnoy, De l’usage des romans, où l’on fait voir leur utilité et leurs différents caractères, avec une bibliographie des romans, accompagnée de remarques critiques sur leur choix et leurs éditions, 2 vols. in one (Amsterdam: La Veuve de Poilras, 1734; Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 63 (author’s emphasis). All references to Lenglet-Dufresnoy are to this edition. Arabic numerals refer to the pagination of the modern reprint.

178

Notes to Pages 154–59 7. Molière, Les Précieuses ridicules, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Mongrédien, vol. 1 (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 229–32. All references to Molière are to this edition. 8. Zuerner 26. Cf. Ovid IX.666–797, Metamorphoses, Books IX–XV 50–61. 9. Corneille, Clitandre, ou l’Innocence délivrée, in Œuvres complètes 113–14. 10. Lyons indicates that male cross-dressers in Baroque theater create patterns of amorous and political relationships that undermine and then re-establish the system of binary sexual identity imposed by the predominant social order. 11. In the classical novel, such as Mme de Lafayette’s La princesse de Clèves, philosophical explanations of love will yield to psychological analyses.

179

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography Adam, Antoine. Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle: L’époque d’Henri IV et de Louis XIII. Vol. 1. Paris: Domat, 1956. ———, ed. Romanciers du XVIIe siècle: Sorel, Scarron, Furetière, Mme de La Fayette. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. ———. “La théorie mystique de l’amour dans L’Astrée et ses sources italiennes.” Revue d’Histoire de la Philosophie et d’Histoire Générale de la Civilisation 4 (1936): 193–206. A. G., sieur de C. Le tombeau de feu Monsieur de Malherbe. Paris: Jacques Quesnel, 1629. BN Ye.7688. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Alciati, Andrea [Andrea Alciato]. Omnia Andreae Alciati v.c. Emblemata: Cum commentariis, quibus emblematum omnium aperta origine, mens auctoris explicatur, & obscura omnia dubiaque illustrantur: Per Clavdium Minoem [Claude Mignault] diuionensem. Antverpiae [Antwerp]: Ex officina Christophori Plantini [Christophe Plantin], Architypographi regii, 1577. Antonioli, Roland. “Le néo-platonisme dans l’Astrée.” Mélanges à la mémoire de Franco Simone: France et Italie dans la culture européenne II: XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Genève: Slatkine, 1981. 69–80. Aragon, C. E. “Platonisme de l’Astrée?” Cahiers de Littérature du XVIIe Siècle no. 6 (1984): 11–22. Arbour, Roméo. L’ère baroque en France: Répertoire chronologique des éditions de textes littéraires. 5 vols. Genève: Droz, 1977–85. Ariès, Philippe. L’homme devant la mort. Paris: Seuil, 1977. ———. Images de l’homme devant la mort. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Armani, Ada Speranza. “Il ‘Tombeau des romans’: dalla ‘situazione’ del romanzo all’istanza ontologica.” Il romanzo al tempo di Luigi XIII. Paris: Nizet; Bari: Adriatica, 1976. 179–96. ARTFL Project. University of Chicago. Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language. Ed. Robert Morrissey and Mark Olson. 1999. Dept. of Romance Langs. and Lits., University of Chicago, and Institut National de la Langue Française, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. 23 Jan. 2000. . Aubigné, Agrippa d’. Les tragiques. Ed. Frank Lestringant. Paris: Gallimard–Poésie, 1995.

181

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. U of Texas P Slavic Ser. 1. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Introd. Wayne C. Booth. Theory and History of Literature Ser. 8 Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1984. ———. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. U of Texas P Slavic Ser. 8. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 60–102. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Bardon, Maurice. “Don Quichotte” en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle, 1605–1815. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1931. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1974. Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture, suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. 1953. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Béchade, Hervé D. Les romans comiques de Charles Sorel: Fiction narrative, langue et langages. Genève: Droz, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977. Benserade, Isaac de. “Tombeau de Madame D***. Stances.” Les œuvres de Monsieur de Benserade, première partie. Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1698. Vol. 1. Genève and Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1981. 223–24. Berger, Günter, ed. Pour et contre le roman: Anthologie du discours théorique sur la fiction narrative en prose du XVIIe siècle. Biblio 17. Paris, Seattle, and Tübingen: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1996. Beugnot, Bernard. “Pour une poétique de l’allégorie classique.” Critique et création littéraires en France au XVIIe siècle: Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Ed. Marc Fumaroli. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1977. 409–19. Blum, Claude. La représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance. 2 vols. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1989. Boileau. Œuvres. Ed. Georges Mongrédien. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1961. Bouchet, Henri. “L’Astrée”: Ses origines, son importance dans la formation de la littérature classique. Diss. Université de Genève, 1923. Thèse 44. Genève: Société Coopérative d’Impression, 1923.

182

Bibliography Bray, René. La formation de la doctrine classique en France. Paris: Nizet, 1951. Brink, C. O. Horace on Poetry: The “Ars poetica.” Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Trans. and introd. Walter Starkie. New York: New American Library, 1964. ———. El ingenioso hildago Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Justo Garcia Soriano and Justo Garcia Morales. Madrid: Aguilar, 1980. Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. Vol. 1. London: Oxford UP, 1903. Charron, Jean D. “Le thème de la ‘métamorphose’ dans L’Astrée: Astrée et Céladon-Alexis: Le renversement des sexes.” XVIIe siècle 101 (troisième trimestre 1973): 3–13. Chartier, Pierre. Introduction aux grandes théories du roman. Paris: Bordas, 1990. Choisy, abbé de. Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville. Nouvelles du XVIIe siècle. Ed. Raymond Picard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 971–88. Chouinard, Daniel. “L’anti-roman de Charles Sorel: Poétique d’une lecture, lecture d’une poétique.” Diss. Université de Montréal, 1983. ———. “L’Astrée et la rhétorique: L’adaptation romanesque du genre judiciare.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 10.2 (1978–79): 41–51. ———. “Les figures du procès dans Le berger extravagant: Le commentaire sorélien et l’archéologie de la topique romanesque.” La naissance du roman en France: Topique romanesque de “L’Astrée” à “Justine.” Conference March 1988 at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the Société d’Analyse de la Topique dans les Œuvres Romanesques. Ed. Nicole Boursier and David Trott. Biblio 17. Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1990. 13–27. Colby, Elbridge. The Echo-Device in Literature. New York: New York Public Library, 1920. Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Couton. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol.1. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. 1611. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1950.

183

Bibliography Coulet, Henri. Le roman jusqu’à la Révolution. Vol. 1. Paris: 1967. Paris: Armand Colin, 1991. Couton, Georges. Écritures codées: Essais sur l’allégorie au XVIIe siècle. Théorie et critique à l’âge classique 5. Paris: Amateurs de Livres–Klinksieck, 1990. Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. 1977. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1982. Curtius, Ernest Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Ser. 36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953. Dalla Valle, Daniela. “Le thème et la structure de l’‘Echo’ dans la pastorale dramatique au XVIIe siècle.” Le genre pastoral en Europe du XVe au XVIIe siècle. Ed. Claude Longeon. SaintEtienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1980. 193–97. Daly, Peter M. Literature in Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. Debaisieux, Martine. Le procès du roman: Écriture et contrefaçon chez Charles Sorel. Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1989. ———. “Représentation et anamorphose: Histoire comique de Francion.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 14.27 (1987): 589–602. ———. “‘Le tombeau des romans’: De Francion au Berger extravagant.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 16.30 (1989): 169–78. DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd. ed. Theory and History of Lit. 7. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. De Vos, Wim. Le singe au miroir: Emprunt textuel et écriture savante dans les romans comiques de Charles Sorel. Études littéraires françaises Ser. 62. Leuven: Universitaire Pers; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1994. Di Piero, Thomas. Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569–1791. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Dotoli, Giovanni. Littérature et société en France au XVIIe siècle. Biblioteca della ricerca, cultura straniera 18. Fasano: Schena; Paris: Nizet, 1987.

184

Bibliography D.P.L.C. Le tombeau de Monsieur Servin. Paris: Jean Bessin, 1626. BN Ln27 .18888. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Du Plaisir. Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire avec des scrupules sur le style. Ed. Philippe Hourcade. 1683. Genève: Droz, 1975. Edward, William A. The “Suasoriae” of Seneca the Elder. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1928. Ehrmann, Jacques. Un paradis désespéré: L’amour et l’illusion dans “L’Astrée.” Paris: PUF; New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. Erasmus, Desiderius. Opera omnia, recognita et adnotatione critica instrvcta notisque illvstrata. Ed. Christopher Robinson. Part I. Vol.1. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1969. ———. “Le plan des études (De ratione studiorum).” Trans. Jean-Claude Margolin. Erasme. Ed. Claude Blum et al. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992. 437–67. Fancan et al. Le tombeau des romans, où il est discouru. I. Contre les romans. II. Pour les romans. Paris: Claude Morlot, 1626. BN Y2 .6010. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Faye, Jean-Pierre. “Surprise pour l’anti-roman.” Le récit hunique: Essai. Paris: Seuil, 1967. 36–55. Ficin, Marsile [Marsilio Ficino]. Commentaire sur le banquet de Platon. Trans. and ed. Raymond Marcel. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1964. Fontanier, Pierre. Les figures du discours. 1821–30. Ed. Gérard Genette. Paris: Flammarion, 1968. Forestier, Georges. Esthétique de l’identité dans le théâtre français (1550–1680): Le déguisement et ses avatars. Genève: Droz, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Franchetti, Anna Lia. Il “Berger extravagant” di Charles Sorel. Firenze: Olschki, 1977. ———. “Du bon et mauvais usage de la lecture: L’histoire comique de Francion et Le berger extravagant.” Lectures du “Francion” de Charles Sorel. Ed. Daniel Riou. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000. 79–88. François de Sales, Saint. Œuvres. Ed. André Ravier and Roger Devos. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

185

Bibliography Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971. Fumaroli, Marc. “Rhétorique, dramaturgie, critique littéraire: Le recours à l’allégorie dans les querelles littéraires (1578–1630).” Critique et création littéraires en France au XVIIe siècle: Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 4-6 juin 1974. Ed. Fumaroli. Actes du Colloque International 557. Paris: CNRS, 1977. 453–72. Furetière, Antoine. Le dictionnaire universel. 3 vols. La Haye and Rotterdam: Leers, 1690. Paris: SNL–Le Robert, 1978. ———. Le roman bourgeois. Romanciers du XVII e siècle: Sorel, Scarron, Furetière, Mme de La Fayette. Ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. 899– 1104. Garavini, Fausta. La casa dei giochi: idee e forme nel seicento francese. Turino: Giulio Einaudi, 1980. Gasté, Armand. La Querelle du “Cid.” Paris: Welter, 1898. Gaume, Maxime. Les inspirations et les sources de l’œuvre d’Honoré d’Urfé. Saint-Etienne: Centre d’Etudes Foréziennes, 1977. Genette, Gérard. Figures I. Paris: Seuil, 1966. ———. Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. ———. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Gerhardt, Mia I. La pastorale: Essai d’analyse littéraire. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1950. Germa, Bernard. “L’Astrée” d’Honoré d’Urfé, sa composition, son influence. Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1904. Ehrmann 48. Gibson, Wendy. Women in Seventeenth-Century France. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Goyet, Francis, ed. “Notes et variantes.” Le bigarrures du Seigneur des Accords. By Estienne Tabourot. 1588. Textes Littéraires Français. Facs. ed. 2 vols. Genève: Droz, 1986. Harth, Erica. Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983. Heckman, John. “Emblematic Structures in Simplicissimus Teutsch.” Modern Language Notes 84 (1969): 876–90. Henein, Eglal. Protée romancier: Les déguisements dans “L’Astrée” d’Honoré d’Urfé. Biblioteca della ricerca, cultura straniera Ser. 67. Fasano: Schena; Paris: Nizet, 1996.

186

Bibliography Hembree, James. Subjectivity and the Signs of Love: Discourse, Desire, and the Emergence of Modernity in Honoré d’Urfé’s “L’Astrée.” New York: Lang, 1997. ———. “Subjectivity and the Signs of Love: Paradigms of Self-Representation in Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée.” Diss. U of Washington, 1993. Henkel, Arthur, and Albrecht Schöne. Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967. Hermann, Claudine. Les voleuses de langue. Paris: Editions des femmes, 1976. Hersant, Yves. “L’Astrée ou l’enchantement de la parole.” Micromégas 11.2 (May–Aug. 1975): 1–11. ———. “Mythe et allégorie dans L’Astrée.” Mythe—Symbole—Roman: Actes du Colloque d’Amiens. Ed. Jean Bessiere. Paris: PUF, 1980. 29–46. Hinds, Leonard. “From Emblem to Portrait: Early Modern Notions of Selfhood in Novels by Honoré d’Urfé and Charles Sorel.” Glasgow Emblem Studies 4 (1999): 59–76. Hodgson, Richard George. “The Parody of Traditional Narrative Structures in the French Anti-novel from Charles Sorel to Diderot.” Neophilologus 66 (1982): 340–48. ———. “Poétique et pratique du roman dans l’œuvre de Charles Sorel.” Diss. U of Toronto, 1977. Horace. Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1978. Horowitz, Louise. Honoré d’Urfé. Twayne World Authors Ser. 698. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Hourcade, Philippe. Introd. Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire avec des scrupules sur le style. By Du Plaisir. Genève: Droz, 1975. Howells, Robin. Carnival to Classicism: The Comic Novels of Charles Sorel. Biblio 17. Paris, Seattle, Tübingen: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1989. Huguet, Edmond. Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle. 7 vols. Paris: Champion; Paris: M. Didier, 1925–73. Jourda, Pierre, ed. Conteurs français du XVIe siècle. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.

187

Bibliography Judovitz, Dalia. “Emblematic Legacies: Hieroglyphs of Desire in L’Astrée.” EMF: Studies in Early Modern France: Word and Image. Ed. David Lee Rubin. Vol.1. Charlottesville: Rookwood, 1994. 31–54. ———. “Mort de l’allégorie dans Le berger extravagant.” Lendemains: Zeitschrift für Frankreichforschung und französische Studien 50 (1988): 46–55. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. L’énonciation: De la subjectivité dans le langage. Paris: Armand Colin, 1980. Kevorkian, Servais. Thématique de “L’Astrée” d’Honoré d’Urfé. Paris: Champion, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Shmeiwtikh;: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969. ———. Le texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationnelle. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Lathuillère, Roger. La Préciosité: Étude historique et linguistique. Vol. 1. Position du problème: Les origines. Genève: Droz, 1966. Le Breton, André. Le roman au dix-septième siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1890. Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Nicolas A. De l’usage des romans, où l’on fait voir leur utilité et leurs différents caractères, avec une bibliographie des romans, accompagnée de remarques critiques sur leur choix et leurs éditions. 2 vols. in one. Amsterdam: La Veuve de Poilras, 1734. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. An Intermediate Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Littré, Émile. Dictionnaire de la langue française. 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard; Paris: Hachette, 1972. Lote, Georges. Histoire du vers français. Vol. 2. Paris: Hatier, 1949. Goyet 2: 131. Lucien [Lucian]. Œuvres. Ed. Jacques Bompaire. Vol.1. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993. Lyons, John D. A Theatre of Disguise: Studies in French Baroque Drama: 1630–1660. Columbia, SC: French Literature Publications, 1978. Lyons, John D., and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., eds. Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1982. Macary, Jean. “Poétique du dialogue dans L’Astrée.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 10.2 (1978–79): 29–39.

188

Bibliography Magendie, Maurice. “L’Astrée” d’Honoré d’Urfé. Paris: Société Française d’Editions Littéraires et Techniques, 1929. ———. Du nouveau sur “L’Astrée.” Paris: Champion, 1927. ———. Le roman français au XVIIe siècle: De “L’Astrée” au “Grand Cyrus.” Paris: Droz, 1932. Marquet, Jean-François. “Béroalde de Verville et le roman alchimique.” XVIIe siècle 120 (July–Sept. 1978): 157–70. May, Georges. Le dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1963. Mayfield, Susan Newmark. “The House of Games: The Fictional Works of Charles Sorel.” Diss. Johns Hopkins U, 1975. Meding, Twyla Anne. “The Fallen Pastoral and the Faces of Vanity in Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée.” Diss. U of Virginia, 1992. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Two Allegories.” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Harvard English Ser. 9. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 1981. 355–70. Molière. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Mongrédien. Vol.1. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964. Molinié, Georges. Du roman grec au roman baroque: Un art majeur du genre narratif en France sous Louis XIII. Travaux de l’Université de Toulouse-le-Mirail. Ser. A. Vol. 19. Toulouse: Service des Publications U.T.M., 1982. Mongrédien, Georges. La vie littéraire au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1947. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Ed. Pierre Villey. 3 vols. Quadrige. Paris: PUF, 1992. Nadal, Octave. Le sentiment de l’amour dans l’œuvre de Pierre Corneille. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Navarre, Marguerite de. L’Heptaméron. Conteurs français du XVIe siècle. Ed. Pierre Jourda. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. 699–1131. Nicéron, Jean-Pierre. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la république des lettres. Avec un catalogue raisonné de leurs ouvrages. 43 vols. Paris: Briasson, 1729–45. Ouellet, Réal, and Claude Rigault. “Le discours oxymorique de l’antiroman.” Saggi e Ricerche di Letteratura francese 14 (1975): 111–54. Ovid. Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Vol. 1. London: William Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s, 1921.

189

Bibliography Ovid. Metamorphoses, Books IX–XV. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Ed. G. P. Goold. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Pasquier, Estienne. Les œuvres d’Estienne Pasquier. 2 vols. 1723. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1971. Patru, Olivier. “Éclaircissement sur l’histoire de L’Astrée.” Plaidoyers et œuvres diverses de Monsieur Patru, 2e partie. Paris, 1681. 103–12. Gaume 718. Pelous, Jean-Michel. Amour précieux, amour galant (1654–1675): Essai sur la représentation de l’amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines. Paris: Klincksieck, 1980. Petronius and Seneca. The Satyricon, The Apocolocyntosis. Trans. J. P. Sullivan. Rev. ed. 1965. New York and London: Penguin, 1988. Plantié, Jacqueline. La mode du portrait littéraire en France, 1641–1681. Paris: Champion, 1994. Pollock, Mordeca Jane. “Transvestites in French Prose Baroque Fiction: The Psychological Structure of Femininity.” Degré Second 3 (1979): 61–81. Quilligan, Maureen. “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Deallegorization of Language: The Roman de la rose, the De panctu naturae, and the Parlement of Foules.” Allegory, Myth, and Symbol. Ed. Morton W. Bloomfield. Harvard English Studies 9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. 163–86. Rabelais, François. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Guy Demerson. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Ratner, Moses. Theory and Criticism of the Novel in France from “L’Astrée” to 1750. New York: De Palma, 1938. Raymond, Marcel. “Du baroquisme et de la littérature en France aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles.” La profondeur et le rythme. Paris: Arthaud, 1948. 139–204. ———. “Préalable à l’examen du baroque littéraire français.” Baroque et renaissance poétique. Paris: Corti, 1955. 7–63. Reure, O.-C. La vie et les œuvres de Honoré d’Urfé. Paris: Plon, 1910. Reynier, Gustave. Le roman réaliste au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1914. ———. Le roman sentimental avant “L’Astrée.” Paris: Armand Colin, 1908. Riou, Daniel. Lectures du “Francion” de Charles Sorel. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000. Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et la paon. Paris: Corti, 1954. Roy, Émile. La vie et les œuvres de Charles Sorel, Sieur de Souvigny (1602–1674). Paris, 1891.

190

Bibliography Russell, Daniel. The Emblem and Device in France. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985. ———. Emblematic Structures in Renaissance French Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Trans. Jacques Henric and Sarduy. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Schmidt, Albert-Marie, ed. Poètes du XVIe siècle. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Schöne, Albrecht. Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock. 2nd rev. ed. Munich: n.p., 1968. Daly 38. Sébillet, Thomas. L’art poétique françois. Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance. Ed. Francis Goyet. Livre de Poche classique. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1990. 41–183. Serroy, Jean. Roman et réalité: Les histoires comiques au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Minard, 1981. Siguret, Françoise. L’œil surpris: Perception et représentation dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Nouvelle éd. Théorie et critique à l’âge classique 8. Paris: Klincksieck, 1993. Sorel, Charles [Jean de la Lande, pseud.]. L’anti-roman, ou l’histoire du berger Lysis, accompagné de ses Remarques. 2 vols. Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1633–34. ———. Le berger extravagant. Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1627–28. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1972. ———. La bibliothèque françoise. 1664. 2nd ed., rev. and aug. 1667. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. ———. De la connoissance des bons livres, ou Examen de plusieurs auteurs. Paris: André Pralard,1671. ———. Histoire comique de Francion (Livres I à VII). Ed. Yves Giraud. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1979. ———. Histoire comique de Francion: Romanciers du XVIIe siècle: Sorel, Scarron, Furetière, Mme de La Fayette. Ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. 61–527. ———. Polyandre, histoire comique. 2 vols. 1648. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1972, 1974. ——— [De Vaux, comte de Cramail, pseud.]. Le tombeau de l’orateur françois, ou Discours de Tircis, pour servir de response à la lettre de Periandre, touchant l’apologie pour Monsieur de Balzac. Paris: Adrian Taupinart, 1628. BN Z.19908 and BN Microfiche Z-19908. Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. Souiller, Didier. La littérature baroque en Europe. Paris: PUF, 1988.

191

Bibliography Suozzo, Andrew, Jr. The Comic Novels of Charles Sorel. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1982. Tabourot, Estienne. Les bigarrures du Seigneur des Accords. 1588. Ed. Francis Goyet. Facs. ed. 2 vols. Genève: Droz, 1986. Thiessen, Sigrun. Charles Sorel: Rekonstruktion einer antiklassizistichen Literaturtheorie und Studien zum “Anti-Roman,” mit einem kritischem Verzeichnis von Sorels Schriften. Müchener Romantinistische Arbeiten Heft 45. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977. Le thresor des epitaphes pour et contre le Cardinal. Anvers: I.I., n.d. [1643]. BN Ye.1156, Ye.1158, Ye.4629. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tilton, Elizabeth Meier. “Charles Sorel, Lawyer, and the Case of the Berger extravagant.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 3 (1975): 69–81. Tombeau de feu Monsieur M. François Chouayne, Escuyer de Chamblay, Conseiller du Roy, Maistre des Requests ordinaire de la Royne sa Mere, President & Lieutenant General au Baillage & siege Presidial de Chartres, & auparavant Conseiller de sa Majesté en son grand Conseil & en son Eschiquier d’Alançon. Chartres: Claude Cottereau, 1616. BN Ye.4602. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Le tombeau de la melancolie, ou le vray antidote et preservatif à Messieurs les tristes, Ouvrage facecieux, gay & divertissant, bon pour les Vieillards, & les vieilles Grammaires [grand-mères]. Rouen: Jean Oursel, n.d. [1634]. BN Rés. Y2. 2773. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Le tombeau de la paulette. N.p., 1618. BN Lf 4 24. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tombeau de Madame la Duchesse de Bouillon. Charenton: Louis Vendosme, 1643. BN Ye.7739(1). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Le tombeau du marquis d’Ancre. Paris: Fleury Bourriquant, 1617. BN 8 Lb36 .1008 and 8 Lb36 .1008.A. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tombeau et epitaphe de tres-haut & tres-puissant Seigneur, Monseigneur le Duc de Guyse. Paris: Guilleaume [sic] Bichon, 1589. BN 8 Lb34 .570.A. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tombeau sur la mort du Connestable. N.p., 1622. BN Ye.33954. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tombeau sur le trespas de Messire Nicolas de Verdun, Chevalier, Conseiller du Roy en ses Conseils, & premier President en son

192

Bibliography Parlement de Paris. Paris: Jean Barbote, 1627. BN Ye.33955. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Tucker, Holly. “The Entombment of Lysis: Degradation, Ostracism, and Classical ‘Death’ in Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 23.45 (1996): 511–25. ———. “Strategies of Imitation in Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant.” Diss. U of Wisconsin–Madison, 1995. DAI 57.2 (Aug. 1996): 707A. Tumbeau de la guerre, A la Royne Mere du Roy. Paris: Jean le Bouc, 1616. BN 8 Lb36 .831. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Le tumbeau de Messeigneurs les Cardinal et Duc de Guyse, avec plusieurs sonnets en forme de regrets & autres Poesies sur le mesme subject, Plus une Hymne de la Saincte Ligue des Catholiques unis, A Monseigneur le Duc de Guyse, Pair, & grand Maistre de France, Gouverneur de Brye & Champaigne. Paris: Guillaume Bichon, 1591. BN 8 Lb34 .569. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Urfé, Honoré d’. L’Astrée. Ed. Gérard Genette. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1964. ———. L’Astrée. Ed. Hugues Vaganay. 5 vols. Paris: Masson, 1925. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1966. ———. L’Astrée. Ed. Jean Lafond. Paris: Gallimard–“Folio,” 1984. ———. Les epistres morales et amoureuses, reveu, corrigé et augmenté en ceste dernière édition. 1619. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1973. Verdier, Gabrielle. Charles Sorel. Twayne’s World Authors Ser. 728. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Verville, Béroalde de [François Brouard]. Histoire véritable ou voyage des princes fortunés. Paris, 1610. Siguret 183–84. ———. Le moyen de parvenir. Ed. Hélène Moreau and André Tournon. 1610. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1984. Vivanti, Corrado. “Henri IV, the Gallic Hercules.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 176–97. Wartburg, Walther von. Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen sprachschatzes. 29 vols. to date. Bonn: Fritz Klopp; Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn; Basel: Zbinden Druck und Verlag AG, 1929–. Weinberg, Kurt. “The Lady and the Unicorn, or M. de Nemours à Coulommiers: Enigma, Device, Blazon, and Emblem in La Princesse de Clèves.” Euphorion 71.4 (1977): 306–34.

193

Bibliography Wine, Kathleen. Forgotten Virgo: Humanism and Absolutism in Honoré d’Urfé’s “L’Astrée.” Travaux du Grand Siècle 15. Genève: Droz, 2000. Winkler, Egon. Komposition und Liebestheorieen der “Astrée” des Honoré d’Urfé. Diss. Friedrich Wilhelms Universität zu Breslau, 1930. Breslau: Hermann Eschenhagen, 1930. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover, 1929. ———. Renaissance and Baroque. Trans. Kathrin Simon. London: Collins, 1984. Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Themes in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1975. York, R. A. “La rhétorique dans L’Astrée.” XVIIe Siècle 110–11 (1976): 13–24. Zuerner, Adrienne Elizabeth. “(Re)constructing Gender: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century French Literature.” Diss. U of Michigan, 1993.

194

Index Achilles Tatius, 118 Adam, Antoine, 3, 167n5, 169n1 Aesop, 74–75 Alciato, Andrea, 85–90, 163 allegoresis, 8, 80, 85, 96–97 allegory, 7. See also Benjamin, Walter and anthropomorphism, 94 Baroque, 78 and the emblem, 80 of literary criticism, 7–8, 10, 15, 140, 177n9 symbol, contrasted with, 7, 135 Ambassadors, The (Holbein), 117 anamorphosis, 108–09, 115–19, 124 as stéganographie, 175n10 antiromance, 55–56 didactic role of, 76–78 as experiment, 2 relationship with romance, 3–4 title, 3 Apollodorus, 100 Ariès, Philippe, 12, 127, 140–41 Ariosto, Ludovico, 102 Astrée as figure for the romance, 131– 36 relationship with CéladonAlexis, 137–38 Armani, Ada Speranza, 177n7 Aubigné, Agrippa d’, 1, 2, 9 author authorial vacuum, 41–42 as creator of illusion, 32 entombment of. See tomb: and the author intention of, 66, 77 loss of mastery by, 21 Lysis as, 50 representation of, 1–2, 6, 9, 12–13

as unified subject, 14 voice of, 21–22 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 165nn6–7, 166–67n2, 167n7 carnivalesque, 31, 48, 140 encoding intention, 4–5, 15 on heteroglossia, 4–5, 20 on lack of finalization, 178n2 polyphony, 22, 148, 150 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 108 Balzac, Guez de, 127, 140 Bardon, Maurice, 20, 177n15 Baro, Balthazar, 170n7 Baroque. See also allegory allegory, 83 ambiguity of sight, 100 between Renaissance and classical paradigms, 107–08 esthetics, 14, 100–01 language, 7, 14–15, 24, 37 motifs, literary, 100–01 Béchade, Hervé, 5 Benjamin, Walter on allegory, 7, 131, 135–36 on cult of the ruin, 141–42 on emblems, 82, 172n6 Benserade, Isaac de, 156–57 Beugnot, Bernard, 165–66n14 bienséances, 13, 79, 175n4. See also plausibility; verisimilitude as what should be, 70, 72, 102–03, 152 Blanbeausault, 23 blason, 93, 97–98 Blum, Claude, 177n8 Boileau, Nicolas, 79, 172n15 Bompaire, Jacques, 173n9 Bouchet, Henri, 169n4 Bray, René, 172n15, 175n4, 178n3

195

Index Brink, C.O., 171n10, 172n4 Brouard, François. See Verville, Béroalde de Bruscambille, 54, 170n11 Calidon, 59–64 Callimachus, 102 Camus, Jean-Pierre, 151, 159, 178n4 Carmelin, 116–17 Casseneuve, 9 Cassirer, Ernest, 166n1 Cave, Terence, 5–6 Céladon “death” of, 13 specular image of, 105–06 tomb of, 136–37 transformation of, 12, 105–06 transvestism of, 8, 12, 106–14 Célidée disfigurement of, 12, 90–92, 98, 173n13–14 expression of, 11, 86–92, 97– 98 and monstrosity, 85–92 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote as biography, as history, 177n16 Le berger as continuation of, 20 literary madness in, 54, 56, 102, 148–49 master-jester couples in, 35–36, 148–49 as pattern for Le berger extravgant, 2, 9, 28, 54, 139–41, 148–49, 177n15 pícaro in, 145, 149 La Galatea, 9, 59, 102 characterization in L’Astrée, 35, 147 awareness of literary conventions in, 27, 29–30, 35, 46, 55, 97–98, 115

196

in Le berger extravagant, 19 loss of self in, 104–05 subjective division in, 113–14 Charnes, abbé de, 79 Châteaumorand, Diane de, 134 Choinard, Daniel, 166n19, 170n1, 171n4 Choisy, abbé de, 9, 157–58 Clarimond debate with Philiris and Amarylle, 69–75, 150– 51 parodying Lysis’s speech, 52– 54 clowns, 35–36, 36–38, 47–50 Colby, Elbridge, 178n1 Corneille, Pierre Clitandre, ou l’innocence délivrée, 157 générosité, 90–91 literary allegory of, 8 Querelle du Cid, La, 10, 79, 172n15 theater of, 9, 79 Corneille, Thomas, 9 Cotgrave, Randle, 120–21, 168n11, 173n12 Coulet, Henri, 3, 10, 171n5 Couton, Georges, 166n15 cross-dressing. See transvestism Cuddon, J. A., 4, 174n20 Curtius, Ernest Robert, 170n2 Daly, Peter M., 80, 172n2, 172n5 Debaisieux, Martine on Le berger extravagant, 139–40 on Keplerian cosmology, 6, 165n12 on pseudo-anamorphosis, 117 debate. See also rhetoric antidebate, 66 between Silvandre and Hylas, 85, 175n7 compared to emblem, 64, 110– 11

Index concerning literary convention, 64–78, 150–55 concerning love interest, 59– 64, 150 resolution of, 58–59, 64, 67– 68, 71, 73, 75–76, 150, 153 as speech genre, 11–12, 57, 150 DeJean, Joan, 172n12 de Man, Paul, 166n14 Descartes, René, 155, 174n2 des Escuteaux, 54 Desfontaines, Pierre-François Guyot, 79 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, 8, 9, 79, 130, 166n15, 177n9 Desmolets, Pierre-Nicolas, 79 De Vaux, comte de Cramail. See Sorel, Charles: Le tombeau de l’orateur françois De Vos, Wim, 170n8, 177n15 Diderot, Denis, 9–10 Di Piero, Thomas, 3, 175–76n12 disguise. See also transvestism; travesty in allegory, 136 verbal, 11, 42–47, 68, 80 Don Quixote. See Cervantes, Miguel de Du Bail, Louis Moreau, sieur, 9 Du Bellay, Joachim, 22, 167n4 Du Broquart, G., seigneur de La Motte, 10 du Choul, Jean, 88 Du Plaisir, 10, 79, 152 Du Verdier, Gilbert Saulnier Le chevalier hypocondriaque, 9 La Diane françoise, 10 echo versification, 11, 22–23, 149, 163n3

Edward, William A., 170n2 Ehrmann, Jacques, 175n9 emblem, 12, 174n17 and blason, 93, 97–98 of Cupids, 40–41, 84–85, 98 definition of, 81–82 emblematic worldview. See Judovitz, Dalia origins, 82 polysemic power of, 83 “portrait de Charite” as, 92–97 representative and interpretive functions, 7, 80–81, 83, 92–93, 97–98 subversion of, by Hylas, 85 Erasmus, Desiderius, 22, 88, 170n2, 173n9 experiment, literary, 8 Fancan. See Langlois, François, chantre de Saint-Honoré Faye, Jean-Pierre, 143, 177– 78n18 Ficino, Marsilio, 38, 40, 98, 109 figures of speech, 52, 58, 96. See also rhetoric analogy, 93 antitheses, 53 galimatias, 11, 14, 35, 37–38, 48, 52–53, 67, 170nn10– 11 metaphor, 51, 53, 93, 94 personification, 53, 94, 96, 174n20 pleonasm, 53 prosopopoeia, 96, 128, 174n20 simile, 93 Fletcher, Angus, 165n14 Fleurial, 11, 36–38, 45–46, 47, 55 folly, literary, 9, 28, 75–76, 118 ambiguity of, 68 as feint, 33, 55–56, 102, 170n8 playacting for Lysis’s, 121 writers subject to, 103 Fontaine de la Vérité d’Amour, 12, 98, 104–05, 114

197

Index Fontanier, Pierre, 174n20 Fontenay, 121–24 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 152 Foucault, Michel, 113, 166n1 Franchetti, Anna Lia, 9, 170n8 François de Sales, Saint, 170– 71n3 free-thinking. See libertinage Frye, Northrop. See romance: definition of Fumaroli, Marc, 140, 166n15, 177n9 Furetière, Antoine literary allegory, 8, 130 Le roman bourgeois, 9, 125, 154–55 and tombs, 127 gageure, 42–46, 169–70n7 Garavini, Fausta, 170n8 Gasté, Armand, 172n15 Gaume, Maxime, 134, 177nn12– 13 Genette, Gérard, 9–10, 27, 166n16, 175n4 Gerhardt, Mia I., 167n6 Germa, Bernard, 114–15, 125 Gomberville, Marin Le Roy de, 9, 156 Goyet, Francis, 167nn3–4 Grands Rhétoriqueurs, 7 Greek Anthology, 22 Guarini, Giambattista, 23 Guéret, Gabriel, 8 Hardy, Alexandre, 170n11 Harth, Erica, 3, 175n12 Heckman, John, 80, 172n2 Heliodorus, 102, 118 Hembree, James, 41, 110, 166n1, 169n3 Henein, Eglal, 173n13, 175n8 Heracles. See Hercules; Lucian heraldry, medieval, 96

198

Herbert, George, 23 Hercules Gallic, 87–90, 173nn9–10 and générosité, 90–91, 173n12 Hermann, Claudine, 173n11 Hersant, Yves, 7 histoires comiques, 114–15, 139, 146 Hodgson, Richard, 5, 165n10, 166n19 Holbein, Hans (The Ambassadors), 117 Horace usefulness and pleasure of reading literature, 72, 74, 79, 151–52, 171n10, 178n3 ut pictura poesis, 82, 172n4, 174n18 Horowitz, Louise, 38, 41, 86 Hourcade, Philippe, 152 Howells, Robin, 4–5 Huet, Daniel, 10, 177n7 Huguet, Edmond, 120, 173n12, 177n10 Hylas debates with Silvandre, 109–12 as parodic writer, 41–42, 46 imagination, literary and language at court, 54 of self, 116–17 and social imaginary, 59, 70– 75, 144–45, 153–55 jeux partys, 59, 64 Judovitz, Dalia, 165n13, 174n19, 175n5 on emblematic worldview, 7, 80 on transvestism, 113–14 Kevorkian, Servais, 169n2 Kristeva, Julia, 165n9 ambiguity in literature, 21–22

Index on intertextuality, 5 master discourse, 31, 168n14 La Calprenède, Gautier de Costes de, 9, 156 Lafayette, Mme de (née MarieMadeleine Pioche de la Vergne), 81, 125, 179n11 La Haye, 10 La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de, 79 Lande, Jean de la. See Sorel, Charles: L’anti-roman Langlois, François, chantre de Saint-Honoré (pseud. Fancan), 128 Lathuillère, Roger, 156, 172n12 Latour Hotman, 9 Le Breton, André, 3 Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Nicolas, 10, 79, 152–53, 177n7 Le Vinier, Giles, 167n3 libertinage embodied in Clarimond, 151 embodied in Hylas, 38–42 literature. See also Horace; narrative; novel; romance condemnation of, 74 in contrast to history, 69–70 death and resurrection of, 129, 146 history of, 69–70 only pleasure by means of, 73 perfectibility of, 77–78, 172n13 pleasure and instruction by means of, 72, 74, 79 Littré, Émile, 167n8 Longus, 102 Lote, Georges, 167n3 love courtly, 42–45, 53, 106, 137– 38, 148, 150

god of, 16–18, 60–61 materialist approach to, 101, 110–11, 148 mercantile approach to, 110– 12, 124 Neoplatonic. See Neoplatonism tyranny of, 63 Lucan, 126 Lucian, 87–88, 90, 173n9 Lukács, Georg, 140 Lyons, John, 157, 179n10 and Nichols, Stephen G., Jr., 175n6 Lysis death of, feigned, 13, 143–47 debating with Anselme and Montenor, 11–12, 67– 68, 150 and echo of Saint Cloud, 27– 34, 149 fate of, at end of antiromance, 75–76 language of, parodied by Carmelin, 47–52 language of, parodied by Clarimond, 52–54 and Neoplatonism, 124–25, 155–56 and “portrait de Charite,” 92– 98 as a reader, 75–76 transvestism of, 8, 12, 117–21 madness. See folly, literary Magendie, Maurice, 166n17, 173n15 on parody, 3 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 9 Marot, Clément, 22 Marquet, Jean-François, 175n10 May, Georges, 172n14 Mayfield, Susan, 20 Meding, Twyla, 108–09, 113, 168n12

199

Index metamorphosis. See Ovid; transvestism Mignault, Claude, 87–88, 90, 173n9 Miller, J. Hillis, 166n14 mirroring. See specularity Molière (pseud. for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 154–55 Molinié, Georges, 166n17 monstrosity in L’Astrée, 86–92, 131–32 in Le berger extravagant, 93, 95 Montaigne, Michel de, 126, 165n11, 173n8 Montemayor, Jorge de, 9, 59, 64, 102 Montreux, Nicolas de (pseud. Olenix du Montsacré), 64, 102, 167–68n9 monument. See also tomb L’Astrée and Le berger extravagant as, 10 Nadal, Octave, 166n18 narrative. See also novel; romance picaresque, 11, 13, 47, 143, 145–46, 149 realist, 144, 148–49 technique in L’Astrée, 36–38, 45–46 transformational, 1, 148 Navarre, Marguerite de, 10, 80– 81, 173n15 Neo-Petrarchism, 1, 8, 29, 80, 148, 177n8 parody of, 38 Neoplatonism, 1, 8, 29, 114 in L’Astrée, 98, 148 in Le berger extravagant and L’anti-roman, 99, 124– 25, 155–56 challenge to, by Célidée’s example, 87 emblem of, 84–85

200

love, notion of, 38–39, 101, 104–05, 111–12, 122, 124, 155–56 material embodiment in, 111– 12, 124–25 parody of, 38–42, 46 and transvestism, 98–99, 155– 56 Nervèze, Antoine de, 54 Nicéron, Jean-Pierre, 10 Nichols, Stephen G., Jr., and John Lyons, 175n6 novel. See also narrative; romance modern, 146, 179n11 realist, 114–15, 148–49 Olenix du Montsacré. See Montreux, Nicolas de Ouellet, Réal, and Claude Rigault, 166n19 Ovid (Metamorphoses), 12, 24, 31, 100, 101, 102, 119– 20, 157, 168–69n15, 179n8 parody, 146. See also satire ancient notion of, 4 of courtly language, 47–54 of Neo-Petrarchism. See NeoPetrarchism, parody of of Neoplatonism. See Neoplatonism, parody of self-parody, 37, 115, 148 surpassed by antiromance, 55– 56 Pasquier, Estienne, 134–35 Passe, Crispin de (Le portrait de Charite), 12, 92–97, 164, 173n16 pastoral. See romance: pastoral Patru, Olivier, 134, 177n12 Pelous, Jean-Michel, 156 Petronius, 100 Phillis, 11, 42–46 pícaro. See narrative: picaresque

Index Plantié, Jacqueline, 174n17 Plato, 69 plausibility, 70, 72, 79, 152 See also bienséances; verisimilitude polemics. See debate Pollock, Mordeca, 157 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Molière portrait de Charite, Le. See Passe, Crispin de preciosity, 75. See also women propriety. See bienséances prosopopée. See figures of speech: prosopopoeia

romance. See also narrative; novel ancient Greek, 9, 102, 118–19 debate concerning, 128–29 definition of, 2–3 didactic function, 151–54 and history, 151–52 pastoral, 9, 10, 48, 59, 66, 93 précieux and epic, 156 sentimental, 48, 59, 93, 146 Ronsard, Pierre de, 134, 174n17 Rorty, Richard, 166n1 Rousset, Jean, 100–01, 102, 174n1 Roy, Émile, 176–77n6 Russell, Daniel, 80–81

Querelle du Cid, La. See Corneille, Pierre: Querelle du Cid, La Quilligan, Maureen, 172n1

Sannazzarro, Iacopo, 9 Sarduy, Severo, 165n12 on Baroque language, 14–15, 24, 37 on Keplerian cosmology, 6 satire. See also parody satirical style, 65–66 social, 69, 154 Scarron, Paul, 9 Schöne, Albrecht, 82–83, 88, 172n5 Scudéry, Georges, and Madeleine de Scudéry, 9, 176n13 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 9, 79, 125, 154, 156, 176n13 Sébillet, Thomas, 22–23, 167n4 Serroy, Jean, 139, 171n5 Shakespeare, William, 143 Sidney, Sir Philip, 23 Siguret, Françoise, 101, 174n2, 175n10 Silvandre debates with Hylas, 109–12 and echo, 23–27, 33–34, 149, 169n5 and gageure with Phillis, 42– 46, 169–70n7 as Neoplatonist, 38–41 verbal disguise of, 11

Rabelais, François, 36, 37, 168n13 Raymond, Marcel, 100, 174n1 Reiss, Timothy, 166n1, 175n6 repos, 106 Reure, O.-C., 10 Reynier, Gustave, 3, 170n1 rhetoric. See also figures of speech jeux partys, 59, 64 ludic use of, 66 movements of judicial, 60, 64– 65, 67 persuasion by, 61, 86 Senecan suasoria, 60, 62–63, 78, 170n2 Rigault, Claude, and Réal Ouellet,166n19 rimes couronnées. See echo: versification Roman de la rose, Le, 97, 132 roman réaliste. See novel: realist

201

Index Sorel, Charles L’anti-roman (by Jean de la Lande, pseud. for Sorel), 64–65, 66, 99, 124–25, 143, 155–56, 165n3 La bibliothèque françoise, 142–43, 146, 159–60, 177n17, 178n19 De la connoissance des bons livres, 146, 151–52, 160, 172n13, 178n20, 178n5 Histoire comique de Francion, 9, 140, 168n10, 176– 77n6 Le tombeau de l’orateur françois (by De Vaux, comte de Cramail, pseud. for Sorel), 127, 176n2 Polyandre, histoire comique, 171n9 his “portrait de Charite,” 92– 97. See also Passe, Crispin de Souiller, Didier, 7 specularity, 12, 98–99, 101 and loss of self, 105–06, 120– 21, 124 and narcissism, 119–23 speech. See also debate; figures of speech; rhetoric theory of, in L’Astrée, 16–18 theory of, in Le berger extravagant, 19–22 suasoria. See rhetoric: Senecan suasoria Suozzo, Andrew, Jr., 20–21, 170n9 Tabourot, Estienne, Seigneur des Accords, 22–23, 167n4 Taillepied, Noël, 88 Tasso, Torquato Aminta, 17, 27, 61 Theocritus, 102 Thiessen, Sigrun, 177n15

202

Tilton, Elizabeth Meier, 64–65, 171nn5–6 tomb. See also Ariès, Philippe and the author, 1–2, 126, 129– 30, 134–36, 146–47 cenotaph, 136–37 and characters, 126, 130 critical function of, 128–30, 140–41, 146 and death, Lysis’s, 144–46 didactic function, 146 and dismissal of literature, 66, 67, 138 eschatological significance, 129, 146–47 Furetière’s definition, 127, 149 history of, 127 literary, 1–2 and memory, 127, 137 as monument, 137, 139, 149 and Neoplatonism, 147 in nineteenth century, 138 obsolescence and renewal, 10, 12–13, 126, 129, 138– 39, 146, 149, 159–60 pamphlets, 12, 127–29, 147, 176nn1–5 and subjectivity, 126 Tombeau des romans, Le, 128– 29, 176–77nn6–7 Toutry, Jean Picard de, 88 transvestism, 12 in L’Astrée, 106–15, 148, 174– 75n3 in Le berger extravagant, 115– 23 as conventional theme, 101, 106–07 of Filandre, 43 as mask, 101, 156–59 as metamorphosis, 101, 111– 12, 156–57 parodied, 8, 13 and rhetorical technique, 107– 08 and selfhood, 103

Index travesty, verbal, 80. See also disguise: verbal in L’Astrée, 34 in Le berger extravagant, 46– 54 Tucker, Holly, 140, 177n14 Urfé, Honoré d’ Epistres morales, 114, 175n8 ut pictura poesis, 82, 172n4, 174n18 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste-Henri du Trousset de, 79, 152 Verdier, Gabrielle, 20–21 verisimilitude, 13, 70, 72, 79, 102–03, 139, 149, 152, 172n15, 175n4. See also bienséances; plausibility Verville, Béroalde de (pseud. for François Brouard), 69, 116, 171n7, 175n10 Videl, Louis, 10 Vigenère, Blaise de, 8, 130, 166n15, 177n9 Villedieu, Mme de (née MarieCatherine-Hortense Desjardins), 9, 125

Virgil, 102 Viterbe, Annius de, 88 Vivanti, Corrado, 173n10 Wartburg, Walther von, 177nn10– 11 Weinberg, Kurt, 81, 172n3 Wine, Kathleen, 55, 169n16, 173n10 Winkler, Egon, 169n4 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 100–01, 174n1 women disempowerment of, 86 education of, 72–73, 153, 172n11 empowerment of, 89–92 impressionability of, notion of, 154–55 as readers, 13, 72–73, 151–55 as writers, 74–75 Wygant, Amy, 172n3 Yates, Frances, 173n10 Zuerner, Adrienne, 156–57

203