J'aime ta joie parce qu'elle est folle: écrivains en fête (XVIe et XVIIe siècles) by Michel Jeanneret (review)

This book draws upon a host of remarkable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European (nearly exclusively French) writers, including the famous, infamous, marginal, and unknown, to craft an essayistic Ode to Joy—not the lofty joy of intellectual or mystical pleasure but joy as enjoyment, especially of life's material pleasures. Against the background of the Counter-Reformation's restraint of a variety of modes of freedom, Jeanneret brings to light an overlooked yet abundant element of the cultural defense of an increasingly endangered liberty: the key role played by partisans of laughter and play. As antidotes to interdiction, moral imperatives, the repression of natural instincts, and the assignment of guilt, this host of witting fools celebrates gaiety, utter lack of constraint, the unhindered pursuit of appetites, extreme eccentricity, and absolute freedom of thought, language, and lifestyle—all while violating, mocking, and deflating classicizing norms of beauty, refinement, and order. Festival or carnival for these writers is not a brief contained release of repressed energy but rather constant unregulated activity. They assume the guise of madman, buffoon, and "comedian" (in the modern English sense) both for no reason whatsoever (thus eschewing utility and purposefulness) and for a good reason—to point toward an egalitarian and tolerant social order and to re-balance human life away from aspirations of transcendence toward enjoyment and acceptance of our imperfect reality. Opening with somewhat perfunctory treatment of perhaps unavoidable giants of the sixteenth century (Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne), the book gains the reader's sustained interest with its chapter on Béroalde de Verville's Le moyen de parvenir—a work that, flaunting its own inanity, is a wildly inventive unrestrained mess (described by Jeanneret as a massive outburst of creative verve and linguistic innovation nearly unparalleled in French literature and as the most vast collection of gauloiseries ever compiled in France). Not a book of theses and arguments but rather an archaeology of mostly buried and often stunning curiosities, J'aime ta joie parce qu'elle est folle nonetheless does offer, in its latter half, two significant claims: first, that the vogue for undignified genres such as farce and the copious production of pornography in the first half of the seventeenth century was a final salvo of resistance to the Counter-Reformation's prudery and its designation of virtually all desire as sin; secondly, that, as the rising disciplinary regime that increasingly ostracized madness and deviance spelled the end of such institutions as the official position of fool to the king, there was a sort of return of the repressed, as that expelled official was informally reintroduced to the centers of power, in the person of scandal-provoking figures such as Molière, who performed nearly all of the once-recognized functions of the court buffoon. Jeanneret offers numerous sketches of fascinating, sometimes appealing, sometimes disgusting, often perverse rogues and bohemians (both professional and nonprofessional authors) who shuttled back-and-forth between the palaces and the taverns with ease and impunity. The book is an outstanding adventurer's guide to the other side and the underside of the literature of the French Renaissance.