Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

Introduction

1 Introduction Va livre, tu n’es que trop beau Pour être né dans le tombeau Duquel mon exil te délivre; Seul pour nous deux je veux périr: Commence, mon enfant, à vivre Quand ton père s’en va mourir. Agrippa d’Aubigné “Préface: L’auteur à son livre” Les tragiques Death, entombment, and renewal serve as apt metaphors to explain the role played by Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–28) and Charles Sorel’s Le berger extravagant (1627–28) in the development of the novel in seventeenth-century France. The two works imitate moribund literary traditions: ancient and Renaissance pastoral, medieval chivalric and courtly scenarios, Neoplatonist and Neo-Petrarchist verse. Like tombs, they enshrine and commemorate dying literary conventions at the end of an era. Yet they do promise rebirth and renewal at the dawn of the century. They can be called transformational narratives, for they change and refresh previous literary techniques and modes of thought. The metaphors that characterize the relationship between these works and literary tradition are not arbitrary. Both d’Urfé and Sorel use the figure of the tomb to open their narratives. Yet although they employ the same image, they have different ends in sight. In d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, the tomb appears as a monument signaling the death of the authorial figure and the survival of his romance: “Le Ciel…te [Astrée / L’Astrée] donne un si bon Genie, que tu me survives autant de siecles que le 2 Introduction sujet qui t’a fait naistre me survivra en m’accompagnant au cercueil” (“L’autheur à la bergère Astrée,” I.8).1 As in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s “Préface,” the tomb figures the imminent death of the author and the birth of his work. It marks an end and announces a beginning. Furthermore, this tomb memorializes an author born in the sixteenth century, the era of La Pléiade, Italian epic, and Spanish pastoral. In the opening of Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, the tomb is invoked in a manner apparently contrary to d’Urfé’s. Instead of broadcasting the disappearance of the author, it serves as the comic epithet of the whole narrative—a riposte or threat to literary conventions, some of which d’Urfé embodies and memorializes : “…le desir que j’ay de travailler pour l’utilité publique, m’a fait prendre le dessein de composer un livre qui se moquast des autres, & qui fust comme le tombeau des Romans, & des absurditez de la Poësie” (preface, 15).2 This metaphoric epithet serves as the overreaching emblem for a literary and critical experiment—the first French antiromance.3 The tomb introduces here the theme of death that is present both on the narrative level of the protagonist’s demise and on the metanarrative, critical level of the fate of literary tradition. These levels overlap in the figure of Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd, who embodies different modes of literary representation by imitating pastoral, chivalric, and sentimental fictions, much like Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This representative of literary traditions encounters exhaustion, impending destruction, and entombment at the hands of critically oriented characters, the narrator, and the authorial figure. These critical agents conduct a trial of literature, much like the inquisition of romances conducted by the curate and the barber in chapter 6 of the first part of Don Quixote.4 Sorel’s antiromance is therefore the tomb enclosing the incarnation of moribund, literary discourse. This study examines the relationship between the romance and antiromance by giving a detailed account of the transformations that the constitutive conventions of the first text undergo in the second. Such an examination gives us a glimpse of the transition between the romance and the seventeenth-century novel, which the antiromance anticipates and to some extent makes possible. Following Northrop Frye, the romance is an aristocratic mode of fiction relying on idealization, archetypal 3 Introduction characterization, and moral allegory; it frequently involves a quest in a setting of innocence (33, 136–37, 151, 186–87, 195, 304–06). More recently, Erica Harth and Thomas Di Piero have characterized L’Astrée as an aristocratic, reactionary text that celebrated the values and modes of expression dear to a social class whose prerogatives were in decline. They maintain that a counterpoint to this aristocratic idealism and nostalgia was a bourgeois parody, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, which challenged the ideals of...