Death's Desire: Sensuality and Spirituality in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron

Recent critical readings of the Heptaméron have convincingly argued that desire both inaugurates and motivates narrative in Marguerite's text, that the decision by the stranded travelers to fill their leisure time by telling stories sublimates rather than eliminates their preference for amorous play, that in fact desire's discourses, implicit and explicit, permeate both the novellas and the conversations that surround them. ¹ I find this reading compelling, but I am persuaded now that it is only partial, that desire's own story remains incomplete if, as too often occurs, it ignores, represses, or masks its necessary and complex relation to death. It might be that the coupling of Eros and Thanatos is as essential and as old as time itself, as Bataille's L'Erotisme suggests, or that their conjuncture in the Western imagination represents a particular historical contingency that corresponds to the emergence of the macabre in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Ariès holds in his Essais sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident. ² Without explicitly entering this particular debate we can say that while desire and death have each been marked historically as subjects of both interdiction and of violation, the discourse that would speak of their relationship has effectively been taboo, a forbidden discourse fearful perhaps of the dark and disturbing implications it could uncover for the human psyche and for human culture in general. It is then not surprising that neither the narrator of the Heptaméron, nor the characters who speak in its stories and debates, nor the critics who have read the work, venture to break this taboo. ³ I want to argue here that what needs to be read is precisely the silence that surrounds desire and death, what needs to be brought back into the story of desire in the Heptaméron is how death--what we might take as the negation of desire and the life force that it represents--reveals itself as both the source and the end of desire, its uncanny and constant companion, paradoxically perverse and procreative. From the opening prologue to the last novella, desire and death are joined in an awesome embrace whose complex forms both derive from and affect the literary, the cultural, and the spiritual dimensions of the work.

The Prologue reveals that the flight from death lies at the origin of narrative. The opening of the Heptaméron recounts the story of that escape to refuge as the travelers flee death from the flood waters and raging river that threaten their lives and those of their servants and animals, as they escape from marauding thieves and murderers and from wild beasts that endanger them. The brute force of nature, and man's own murderous instinct, threaten them from without but we will also recognize as we read that these are allegorized versions of their own destructive passions that persistently threaten from within. Thus the safe haven that protects them from their literal demise will never in a sense be absolutely safe because it cannot ultimately protect them from themselves. And this is inevitably what the experience of the haven reveals, that while physical death can for a time be averted, other deaths, metaphorical though equally fatal, lurk ominously and surreptitiously, and constantly, within. The flight from death is always paradoxically a flight into death. No sooner freed from concern about physical harm, the travelers confront the figure of death in boredom, in the ennui that weighs so heavily upon them that they can only represent it as a mortal illness, and death itself: "nous sommes en danger de devenir malades"; "nous deviendrons fascheuses, qui est une maladie incurable"; "je suis bien d'oppinion que nous ayons quelque plaisant exercisse pour passer le temps; si elle estoit ung jour sans passetemps, elle seroit morte le lendemain" (8). ⁴

Why the compelling urge, "passer le temps"? If we...