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

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∞ 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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, &

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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”:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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

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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.…

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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. Non