Subject of Desire: Petrarchan Poetics and the Female Voice in Louise Labé

Chapter Three: From Polemics to Poetics: The Debat de Folie et d'Amour

Chapter Three From Polemics,to Poetics The Debat de Folie et d'Amour The multileveled social and artistic concerns advanced in the Epistre and the sophistication of its rhetorical strategies reveal that Labe's rich and complex prose is far more than a mere formalistic accoutrement to her celebrated love poetry. The Debat de Folie et d'Amour bears this idea out in a most powerful way. Situated in the transitional position between the dedicatory letter and the poems, the Debat bears the burden of activating the public preoccupations ofthe Epistre while at the same time laying the theoretical groundwork for the private lyric to come. Its role, in sum, is to modulate between Labe's polemics and her poetics and to suggest points of interconnection with them both.l In this chapter, after briefly reviewing several points about the overall presentation of the Debat, .I will move to highlight and develop a selected group of these crucial interconnections. Although certain resonances with Labe's other writings can be readily identified, establishing a synthesizing structure for the Debat is problematic, to a large extent because the text itself is so expansive and multiform. As Fran~oise Charpentier points out in two recent articles arguing for the Debat's participation in Labe's global poetic, this prose text's daunting variety of discourse and plurality oftone complicate the reader's attempt to link it to the more consistent voices of the Epistre's feminist advocate and the poems' female lover.2 Moreover, in contrast to the homogeneity of the genres used in Labe's other works, the Debat is strikingly diverse, a hybrid that intermingles the basic structure of medieval allegorical debate with other elements, including Platonic/Neoplatonic dialogue and love treatise, mythological fable, and Erasmian satire.3 The intertextual importance of Erasmus's Praise of FoUy in particular 41 Chapter Three is key, as Rigolot remarks, especially since that work had seen several editions in Lyons dating from 1511 and had appeared there in translation in 1520 ("Preface" 11). Notably, Labe both assumes and deviates from the Erasmian rhetorical strategy of having Folie speak for herself: the goddess in the Debat first assertively fashions her own praiseworthy portrait in a dialogue with Amour, then later cedes her voice to the championing male oratory of Mercure (Mercury), a switch highlighting the issues of gender roles and competition that operate across the fabric of the entire text. Moreover, the Debat embodies the Praise of Folly's profoundly paradoxical character, which, as John Olin has noted, is reflected not only in the advancement of a worldview based on continuing ambiguity and the disparity between appearance and reality, but in the concurrent dual presentation of the text itself as playful verbal virtuosity and serious social and philosophical commentary (53). In fact, the overall mixing of genres informing Labe's composition of the Debat could be likened to the purposeful rejection of artistic unity and the paradoxical interpenetration of genre forms in the broader tradition of Menippean satire, notions that Peter Dronke has recently associated with a crucial process of "truth-testing" based on the constant relativizing and undermining of accepted artistic authorities and forms.4 The Debat's melange of genres has been given many succinct labels, such as Giudici's "genre nouveau ... ami-chemin entre conte et comedie, dialogue et traite"; Berriot's "long poeme en prose dialoguee"; and Rigolot's "conte mythologique dialogue en prose." Whatever label one prefers, another important global feature of the Debat is its overall theatricality.5 In Kupisz's reading, not only does the text's basic presentation in five separate discours-complete with a list of characters, opening argument (prefatory plot summary), and occasional scenic indications-suggest the typical modalities of a five-act play, but its progression moves with witty and erudite elegance through the requisite dramatic stages of exposition, character development, culmination, and denouement ("Le Theatre de Louise Labe" 125, 139).6 The theatrical mode dominates in the conversations between characters in the first four discours, before giving way to the expository mode developed almost hyperbolically in the stylistically variegated speeches ofApolon 42 From Polemics to Poetics (Apollo) and Mercure in Discours 5. Hdwever, just as the lengthy exposition of the final discours incorporates dramatic scenes of human conduct and mythological lore, the highly staged dialogue and action of the earlier discours contain passages of expressive oratory spoken by Amour and Folie...