Viewing Romance in La Fontaine’s Psyché

Viewing Romance in La Fontaine’s Psyché Kathleen Wine [ N HIS EPILOGUE TO THE FIRST SIX BOOKS of the Fables, La Fontaine professes his need to restore his creative energies with a change of pace: Il s’en va temps que je reprenne Un peu de forces et d’haleine Pour fournir à d’autres projets Retournons à Psyche.1 Laying aside the instructive Fables, he again takes up his Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, 2which he describes in his preface as aiming only at the reader’s pleasure. Yet despite this work's frivolity, its composition does not afford La Fontaine the desired respite, for its prose seems to cause him as many difficulties as his most polished verse. In adapting for modern readers a story from Apuleius’ Golden /Iss, La Fontaine finds himself hesitating between the three stylistic levels appropriate to history, romance and the heroic poem: “ Mes personnages me demandaient quel­ que chose de galant; leurs aventures, étant pleines de merveilleux en beaucoup d’endroits, me demandaient quelque chose d’héroïque et de relevé.” Since “ l’uniformité de style est la règle la plus étroite que nous ayons,” he seeks “ un caractère nouveau, et qui fût mêlé de tous ceux-là,” a mixed style that he would reduce to a “ juste tempérament.” 3 As Jean Lafond has shown, La Fontaine’s search for a style at once mixed and regular is symptomatic of the broader concerns he shares with a generation of writers that found the increasingly dominant classical ideal of regular beauty insufficient, or even cold and boring, if not accompanied by the less easily definable qualities of grace and charm. Many of the thematic developments of Psyché allow La Fontaine to explore this esthetic problem. The fable of Myrtis and Mégano, for example, evokes the limitations of regularity.4Despite the perfect pro­ portions of the noble Megano, “ son esprit, sa beauté, sa taille, sa per­ sonne ne touchaient point, faute de Vénus qui donnât le sel à ses choses.” The less perfectly beautiful shepherdess Myrtis, on the other hand, possessed an undefinable charm. The unfortunate Megano died V ol. XXVIII, N o .4 17 L ’E sprit C réateur admired, but unwed, while Myrtis married a king, whom she managed to captivate ever after (222). In his âttempts to avoid the monotonous regularity of Megano, La Fontaine often draws on romance. Thus, though he speaks of romance in his preface as embodying a single style, it is in romances like L ’Astrée that he finds his stylistic compromise—the mixture of prose and verse.5 Moreover, he multiplies the subjects and episodes of his inherited plot through such romance conventions as a pastoral episode, architectural descriptions, and debates on love and literature. This use of romance stems naturally from La Fontaine’s esthetic problem. For the character of modern romance had itself grown out of efforts to reconcile the multi­ plicity of chivalric romance with the unity of ancient epic.6 France’s first theoretical contribution to the sixteenth-century debates on romance was Jacques Amyot’s preface to his translation of the Histoire éthiopique (1547), in which he offered the third-century Greek romance of Heliodorus as an artful alternative to the chaotic adventures of the Amadis cycle.7According to Amyot, romance, a genre which regrettably serves only to please, is justified by the “ imbecility” of the human spirit which, “ travaillé . . . de grave estude,” must sometimes “ user de quelque divertissement, pour le destourner de ses tristes pensees . . . puis après le remettre plus alaigre . . . à la consideration, ou action des choses d ’importance.” In fact, Amyot accounts for his own work on the Histoire éthiopique much as La Fontaine would later explain his return to Psyché: “ j ’ay moy mesme adoucy le travail d’autres meilleures et plus fructueuses traductions en le traduisant par intervalles aux heures extraordinaires.” Like La Fontaine, Amyot links pleasure to multi­ plicity: the ability of romance to divert lies, as the word’s etymology sug­ gests, in its diversity: “ [la] delectation d’un bon entendement est tousjours voir, ouyr, et aprendre quelque chose de nouveau.” However, he heartily condemns the...