Le roman humaniste: Un genre novateur français 1532-1564 (review)

In an erudite and readable study, Pascale Mounier sets out to demonstrate that the novel as form emerged at a specific time and place as a response to a convergence of factors, not the least being the role of printing in transmitting courtly romances in the form of popular prose compilations. She rejects an empirical approach based on description in favor of a typological analysis grounded in common elements found in the pivotal works of four authors in the period between 1532 and 1564. These works include the Five Books of François Rabelais, Les Angoysses douloueuses qui procedent d'amours of Hélisenne de Crenne, Mythistoire barragouyne de Fanfreluche et Gaudichon by Guillaume Des Autels, and Barthélemy Aneau's Alector.

While acknowledging the impact of the Italian and Spanish parodies of the courtly romance with its chivalric knights, Mounier outlines in a convincing manner practices that point to the specifically French innovations in the novel's development. Her comprehensive treatment of examples and counterexamples of possible models explores original practices in these exemplary practitioners of the new form: how competing narrative voices undermine the unity of the work and how these works incorporate dissonant ideological and discursive practices.

The works identified as emergent novels were published in a time at which there was a frantic rewriting in prose both of courtly romances such as Amadis and works of allegory modeled on the Roman de la Rose. What distinguished the French Amadis from the innovators Rabelais, Hélisenne de Crenne, Aneau, and Des Autel is their desire to create a rhetorical performance that would rival the Spanish and Italian texts they were exploiting.

Mounier sees a growing split between the linguistic and rhetorical performance of those who produced the French adaptations of Amadis and the authorial position of their source. The rising national pride taken in writing in French created tension with the source material. By contrast, the verbal virtuosity of Rabelais or Des Autels is at one with the strong authorial presence and voice in their works.

Basing the theoretical underpinnings of the study on theories of genre (Bakhtin, Zink, Dubuis, Pérouse, and Huchon), rhetorical theory (Colie and Rigolot), and linguistics (Bakhtin and Benvéniste), Mounier demonstrates that the "roman nouvelle manière" (24) marks a rupture with the past. Here we see the discourse of several genres called on to articulate a diversity of ideologies. Hélisenne's narrator notes the contrast between her illustrious predecessors and her petite oeuvre (Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses, 1997), in which she will faithfully paint her true feelings instead of erudite reflections. Rabelais and Des Autels play with the oaths of veracity so common in Amadis and other chivalric romances.

For these authors, writing in the vernacular becomes a creative space for neologisms, evident as Des Autels recalls Rabelais in evoking "histoire fanfréluchique," or Mythistoire, to capture what Amyot refers to as "histoire fabuleuse," where truth and legend come together. The play on true history as an overt admission of facticiousness is a thread through Rabelais, Aneau, and Des Autels.

Building on analyses by Terence Cave and Michel Jeanneret, Mounier stresses the centrality of the notion of varietas —the production of imagery as a key element of the langage romanesque. Equally fundamental to the roman humaniste is the concept of copia verborum, where verbal energy takes transforms a more restrained number of ideas into an energetic force of invention. Mounier finds in the convergence of different styles —where genres and social strata combine —a key locus of the energy so characteristic of the emerging novel.

The major premise of Mounier's study is that in the period between 1532 and 1560, a new form of writing develops that places new demands on the reader, where travel writing, dialogue, and courtly adventure combine to involve the reader in deciphering the text. Mounier shows how...