'Dire par fiction': métamorphoses du je chez Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart et Christine de Pizan (review)

Much of the work of Machaut, Froissart and Christine de Pizan is characterized by their appropriation of narratives from diverse sources, including the Bible, classical mythology, faits divers, history and bestiaries. By far the most important source for these tales is Ovid's Metamorphoses, which, by the time these authors were writing, had already been reworked and given a Christian gloss by the Ovide moralisé. Didier Lechat dubs these embedded narratives 'micro-récits', and argues that scrutiny of their framing and articulation can shed light on the use of the first-person narrative by Machaut, Froissart and Christine de Pizan. The 'métamorphoses' of the title of this book, then, refer both to the tales of transformation that the first-person narrators select and rework, and to the way in which the 'je' of the poems in question is altered by this process. The three authors in question position themselves in relation to a series of fabled creators, and the names of Pygmalion and Orpheus recur and resonate in this book, as they do in the dits amoureux of the authors it considers.

For those who prefer an analytical rather than classifying and descriptive approach to literary criticism, this book has more than its fair share of longueurs. Lechat's method of explicating takes texts one by one and tends to move through them from beginning to end. Since, not unexpectedly in a book on the reworking of narratives from one text to another, intertextuality is a strong theme of Lechat's argument, this is not a very helpful or stimulating structure for this work. Whilst he shows, for instance (as many others have done), that Machaut's dits build one upon the other and construct an intricate and playful web of references from one to the other, Lechat's staccato listing of texts and their component sections works against the organic interaction which gives Machaut's oeuvre its appeal. The one advantage of this way of proceeding is that it is easy to look up any given work; this is also aided by the very thorough indexes. This book gets better as it goes along. The chapter on Machaut, the first author Lechat examines, is far too long, far too reiterative and contains little strikingly original material. The chapter on Froissart is more subtle and thought-provoking, but when Lechat finally abandons his list-making style in the final chapter, on Christine de Pizan, his argument becomes much more engaging. Here Lechat weaves skilfully between many of Christine's works to demonstrate that she realizes herself as an author via her use of fictions. The quotation in this book's title from Christine de Pizan's Mutacion de Fortune (in which the first-person narrator undergoes the most graphic metamorphosis of any of the poems considered in this book, by becoming a man), and the publication of this book in the 'Études christiniennes' series, both indicate that Christine, although she is relegated to the last chapter, is Lechat's principal interest, and should have been this book's main focus.