Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

Chapter Four. Experiments with Multiple Agency and Intention through Emblematics

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 80 (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 81 Multiple Agency, Intention, and Emblematics 82 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...