Onomastic Deviations and Metaliterary Consequences in the Gascon Extravagant

In his article, “Les pérégrinations du Gascon extravagant,” Emmanuel Desiles proposes that the intent of the comic novelist in the seventeenth century is to warn the reader about “la fiction du langage, et plus généralement des signes” (330). Such a thesis seems reinforced by what we know of the comic novelist of the period. The conception of the “lecteur discret,” proposed by Aléman in his preface to Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) and echoed by Sorel in his “Advertissement d’importance aux lecteurs,” at the beginning of the Histoire comique de Francion,¹ is inherent in the comic novelist’s literary imagination. In Claireville’s Gascon extravagant (1637), the reader’s literary awareness is tested more than in perhaps any other comic novel of the period. The novel’s structure is complex, comprising various intercalated narratives that are woven together in a fragmentary tale that lacks a conclusion and puts the very nature of the novel into question. Through various onomastic deviations, the fictional nature of the tale is continuously renewed and the reader is challenged by the metaliterary consciousness of the author. These onomastic deviations and the intercalated structure underscore the “signs” to which Desiles refers that punctuate the fictional language of the genre. It is the purpose of this paper to examine these signs, to evaluate the influence of said signs upon the structure of the text itself, and to consider how the reader is intended to react. In order to elaborate the metaliterary nature of the novel, I will focus on two specific aspects of its design that underscore Claireville’s intent: firstly, the novel’s structure and the importance of the paratext and, secondly, images of the author and the reader within the text and onomastic deviations that remind the reader that these are not just characters with whom to empathize but rather elements of the novel that fulfill specific functions within the text. Through this careful construction, Claireville makes of his “roman en procès” a metanovel that at its core explores the very nature of the nascent comic novel itself. Finally, in the conclusion, I consider how this reading dialogues with the theoretical notion of early modern fictionality.

Sorel announces, with the Francion, a nascent subgenre that is used today by specialists to collect a number of texts under its umbrella. While each text varies in subject matter, Jean Serroy has worked extensively to note shared characteristics and functions of many of these texts, noting that they, for the most part, share a comic tone that permits the author to examine reality as the author viewed it (702–07). Serroy classifies the Gascon extravagant as belonging to the second of three periods of development in the comic novel’s history: that of affirmation (291–361). In this phase, Serroy includes Sorel’s Berger extravagant (1627–28) and Du Verdier’s Le Chevalier hypocondriaque (1632) as examples of works that engage with romanesque modes like the pastoral or the chivalric to offer satiric and comic reinventions of the modal conventions. For Serroy, the comic novel at this moment with Sorel’s Berger extravagant denounces “l’artifice d’ un romanesque” conceived as a game of “contraintes techniques, thématiques, voire stylistiques.” Thus, Sorel incites “tout un courant parodique qui en souligne les conventions” and “détache le roman des tentations de la fiction pure, et proclame que l’invention ne saurait se passer de réalité ni l’écriture du naturel” (703). The comic novel’s role is, then, to explore reality within the confines of a comic mode (designed to incite laughter) and reflecting the sociohistorical influence of the noblesse on this reality. In essence, Serroy views the comic novel as a work by an author highly conscious of textual conventions of the period who chooses to interact therewith. The Gascon extravagant, however, not only plays with conventional norms of other romanesque forms, but, I posit, also considers the early examples of comic novels as extant at the moment, in the first third of the seventeenth century, interacting in particular with Sorel’s notion...