Precious Time: Pushing the Limits of Narrative in the Seventeenth Century

Literary theorists interested in the representation of time in story and narrative need look no further than Michel de Pure's La Pretieuse ou le mystere des ruelles (1656-58) to find a rich array of techniques for their reflections. In this study, I use Gérard Genette's concept of iterative narrative and Gerald Prince's reflections on nonnarrated and disnarrated to examine narrative time in the novel. Not only do the novel's nearly eighty embedded narratives (spread over five diegetic levels) cover practically the entire spectrum of narrative possibilities considered by Genette in Narrative Discourse, they also are extraordinary in proposing inventive variations on the type of metadiegetic narratives common in most multivolume novels of the period. Narrative sequences I call abstract and potentialnarratives question traditional representations of time, space, character, and narrative itself. Prince's observation that narrative prefers "tensed statements" becomes surprisingly problematic in this discussion (Narratology 149), leading one to wonder whether his conditions for a minimal narrative are actually fulfilled or whether perhaps the notion of minimal narrative needs to be revisited.

Since de Pure's novel is not well known, it would seem prudent to preface my theoretical remarks, first by a brief description and contextualization of the work, and second by an overview of its narratological structure. La Pretieuse has attracted attention almost exclusively as a sociohistorical document giving a crucial perspective on préciosité, a feminine (and for some observers feminist) movement characterized by an excessive refinement in attitudes towards language and love. ¹ This short-lived and much satirized phenomenon has been immortalized, but forever tainted, by Molière's acerbic lampooning of this behavior in his 1659 play, Les Précieuses ridicules. Critics have summarily dismissed de Pure's novel as poorly written and have concentrated almost exclusively on the extraliterary. ² Essentially a series of conversations in a ruelle (a more intimate version of the literary salon), the novel has a very loose plot and spectacular instances of mise en abyme. Part IV contains excerpts from an embedded novel, "le Roman de la Pretieuse," in which many of the characters functioning in the embedding novel are depicted. These excerpts are read aloud in a ruelle in the presence of these very same characters. Furthermore, the embedded and embedding novels finish together with no narrative closure, this double open-endedness proving ultimately to be inherently logical given the overall structure of the text. With respect to its physical organization, there are more or less sixteen "chapters," each one of these being set off not only typographically but also spatio-temporally as an afternoon session hosted by one particular précieuse (precious woman). ³

Using Genettean narratology gives a clear picture not only of the complex relationships pertaining between various segments of the text but also of the divergent roles adopted by masculine and feminine narrators. One notices, for example, that the vast majority of the autodiegetic narratives are life stories recounted by female narrators even though, at the same time, male narrators prefer to maintain a greater affective and spatio-temporal distance from their narratives than do their feminine counterparts. Furthermore, although male narrators tell fewer stories than do female ones, these stories occupy a larger percentage of discourse time. ⁴ Over the course of the sessions, almost eighty discrete narratives are spread over the novel's five diegetic levels (ED, D1, D2, D3, and D4). ⁵

However limpid such an orthodox narratological analysis may appear, it does not take into account the highly abstract nature of the novel and certain key narrative segments. As we shall see, it excludes twelve abstract narratives and thirteen instances where potential narrators evoke, but do not actually tell, a staggering total of 1,027 potential narratives. The representation of time and its inevitable corollary, space, holds the key to a more complete understanding of the work and will in turn lead to theoretical considerations of a more general...