Sampling the Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs by Deborah N. Losse (review)

Book Reviews89 three-body equation who seems to have come closest to first identifying chaos as it is now understood. Lorenz writes: "To TPoincaré, chaos] was the phenomenon that rendered the three-body equations too complex to be solved, rather than the principal subject of a future field of investigation" (121). Nevertheless, until the advent of computers, most mathematicians focused on the less challenging linear equations; the nonlinear equations required more computational time than they could profitably spend on them. Today's powerful computers, however, enable mathematicians to do routinely what Poincaré could envision, but could not bring to reality. Lorenz's book is nicely complemented by seventy figures (graphics, printouts , schematics) to illustrate his narrative, and his presentation is usefully structured around the central image of a board sliding down a slope covered with moguls such as one finds on a ski hill. Unlike those on the ski hill, however, Lorenz's moguls can be changed to desired heights and pitches and spacing, and he returns repeatedly to this convenient metaphor to illustrate his theses. In addition to appendixes which hold the mathematical formulas and calculations that support his narrative and a wonderfully useful "A Brief Dynamical-Systems Glossary," there is a bibliography which is necessarily selective, but the choices are those of someone who has worked most of his life on the subject. If chaos is a new science, one might consider this passage from Lorenz's headnote to his bibliography: "Hao Bai-lin has supplemented his extensive collection of reprinted articles in Chaos and Chaos II with a selected bibliography of more than two thousand entries, while Zhang Shy-yu, a protégée of Hao's, has subsequently listed 7,460 items, including 303 books, in her Bibliography on Chaos, published in 1991" (214). ARTHUR B. COFFIN Montana State University-Bozeman DEBORAH N. LOSSE. Sampling the Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French Conteurs. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1994. 136 p.¡Sampling the Book—a critical sampling of sixteenth-century prologues— has the merit of drawing our attention to some lesser known French storytellers . Losse pays homage to the work of Gérard Genette in her analysis of how conteurs condition "a good reading" of their texts within the liminal space which separates and "bridges" the world of the tale and that ofits real and virtual readers. Though she proposes to examine the "liminal strategies " of Renaissance storytellers from a variety of angles—rhetorical, stylistic, gender-based—Losse is too preoccupied with typologies of prefatory functions to develop the most interesting and problematic issue she raises: "the interrelationship between history and fiction in the Renais- 90Rocky Mountain Review sanee prologue" (15). She articulates this question in her second chapter ("Nue vérité ou invention poétique?"), but since it reappears as a key thread throughout, one wonders why Losse does not offer a compelling central argument about the often playful and hazy boundaries constructed in the preface among notions of historical accuracy, verisimilitude, truth, and art. Instead, Losse's approach starts out as an evolutionary one: as Renaissance storytellers assume an "authorial" stance toward their work— as opposed to a fictional posture of compiler or chronicler—the preface presents more "literary" qualities (including narrative passages, metaphoric language, and engaging or digressive metadiscourse) which complement, and sometimes parody, the classical expository functions of summary, dedication , and didactic gloss. In her first three chapters Losse seeks to establish this transition brought about by the author's "appropriation" of creative responsibility for his/her tales. Chapter 1 opens with the example of Philippe de Vigneulles' preface to his 1505 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, in which the author's stance as narrator constitutes an important moment of "self-authorization" as against the medieval tradition of auctoritas, and it closes with Montaigne's "Au lecteur," in which the equation of author and book expresses "a total act of appropriation" (31). Losse's second chapter establishes the importance of historical contextualization in the narrative tradition. The "Renaissance insistence on situating the tale in history" (42) informs the practice of masking collected stories (such as Noël du Fail's Propos Rustiques and Jacques Yvei^s Le Printemps) beneath an illusion of "truth" through...