La Fantaisie philosophique à la Renaissance by Alice Vintenon (review)

Following in the wake of Olivier Guerrier's Quand 'les poètes feignent': 'fantasies' et fiction dans les 'Essais' de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 2002), and John D. Lyons's Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Alice Vintenon's study returns to the topic of the imagination (the 'fantaisie' of her title) with a focus on — as she sees them — comic works in Renaissance Italy and France. This is a book of ambitious scope and detail with a wealth of sources and authorities analysed in often minute detail. Although formally divided in four sections, it really falls into two equal parts: theory in the first two sections and literary practice in the latter two. As is not unusual with books deriving from PhD theses, a certain amount of the ground covered in the theoretical section synthesizes material available in previous studies. For example, one of Vintenon's major claims here is that, far from being linked to lies and delusion (as in the Platonic version of phantasia), the imagination benefited from an enhanced interest in creativity linked in part to a renewed understanding of Horace's Ars poetica. This is not an entirely new argument, but Vintenon re-invigorates it and aligns it with Marie-Luce Demonet's work on sixteenth-century fictional and logical possible worlds and with Françoise Lavocat's full-blown theoretical study of the same (Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (Paris: Seuil, 2015)) in order to highlight the status of her chosen corpus aware of its own unreality, yet inviting its reader to interrogate the troubled boundaries between fact and fiction. In Part Two of the book, six 'fantaisies philosophiques' are chosen as case studies: Leon Battista Alberti's Momus, Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso, and Teofilo Folengo's Baldo precede Rabelais, the seasonal hymns of Ronsard, and the Nouvelle Fabrique by Philippe d'Alcripe. In terms of literary precursors, Vintenon views Lucian of Samosata as producing writings of similar comic invraisemblance and philosophical ambition, although in truth it is not always easy to see his influence at work; Ronsard's practice, for example, is unclear in this respect, as is Alcripe's, despite Vintenon's assertions to the contrary (p. 520). One characteristic these literary works do display is their resistance to full decoding in moral or allegorical terms — which is precisely one of the chief characteristics of fiction as an autonomous or semi-autonomous category. Vintenon's argument in that respect confirms Neil Kenny's analysis of Renaissance 'other worlds' — competing value systems existing alongside each other — and I would have expected his studies of philosophical fictions to have played a more prominent role in her conceptual framework. Vintenon nevertheless produces a wide-ranging study emphasizing how the imagination, even in its most extravagant manifestations, not only provides an acute means of thinking different from other discursive modes, but also how '[e]n suscitant des réactions intellectuelles telles que l'incrédulité, le doute ou l'étonnement, elle [l'écriture fantaisiste] entraîne l'esprit à adopter un recul critique à l'égard de ses propres certitudes' (pp. 523–24).