Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

Chapter Six. D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs: The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature

126 Chapter Six D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs The Question of the Death and Birth of Literature Tout ce qui branle ne tombe pas. La contexture d’un si grand corps tient à plus d’un clou. Il tient mesme par son antiquité; comme les vieux bastiments, ausquels l’aage a desrobé le pied, sans crouste et sans cyment, qui pourtant vivent et se soustiennent en leur propre poix, nec jam validis radicibus haerens, Pondere tuta suo est. Il ne tient plus par de solides racines; son propre poids le fixe au sol. Montaigne, quoting Lucan Both d’Urfé’s L’Astrée and Sorel’s Le berger extravagant restage novelistic conventions by rethematizing ancient, medieval , and Renaissance intellectual and literary traditions. These narratives raise specific questions regarding conventional modes of representation that inform narration: the difficulties of establishing identity through gender characterization, speech, love debate, and emblematic representation. In both works, the tomb serves as the figure of a retrospective account. The tomb in L’Astrée situates the deterioration, transformation, and rebirth of the author and fictional characters, who, as travestied bodies or disembodied voices, defy identification with a unified subjectivity. The tomb in Le berger becomes the antiromance itself: a locus where narratives, metanarratives, and explicit critical commentaries compete to exhaust the very traditions they ostensibly celebrate. Yet, in each case, how do the tomb and its accompanying motif of death function as allegorical figures and as literary strategies? 127 D’Urfé’s and Sorel’s Tombs Both d’Urfé and Sorel reformulate the traditional social and literary meanings of entombment as they were understood at the time. As a monument for human burial, the tomb is a cultural artifact whose significance is historically contingent. According to Philippe Ariès, from the twelfth century on, tombs of nobles and high-ranking clergy displayed epitaphs that served to identify the person buried within. From the fourteenth century into the eighteenth, funerary inscriptions also presented some biographical information concerning the deceased (L’homme 214–16, 219–27). During the period of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s literary production, the tomb was used to tell a story, a biography, to a public. One could then understand Le berger extravagant’s overreaching metaphor—le tombeau des romans—to mean that the whole book is one long memorial , a life story of literary convention. Ariès also emphasizes that the tomb not only records a story, but also enshrines the object, and at best preserves its significance for the passerby (L’homme 216–27). In a metaphorical sense, the tomb can serve to preserve the deceased, for it comments on the individual ’s life, recounts his or her story, and thereby perpetuates the memory of his or her identity. At the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century, the term tombeau also appeared in the many titles of a series of pamphlets, chapbooks, and literary treatises.1 Some were written in a comic vein, such as the satirical treatise on rhetoric, Le tombeau de l’orateur françois (1628),2 which concludes with a heroi-comic description of Guez de Balzac’s imaginary tomb, and the collection of jokes titled Le tombeau de la melancolie (1634). Antoine Furetière comments on the significance of this last collection: “TOMBEAU, se dit aussi des choses qui font perdre la memoire d’un autre objet, & qui, pour ainsi dire, l’ensevelissent.… On intitule un Recueil de contes, Tombeau de la melancolie” (vol. 3; Furetière’s emphasis). This classical definition poses a counterpoint to the memorial function of the tomb in the Baroque period. Accordingly, the tomb also has the potential to commit something to oblivion by means of diversion, as in Le tombeau de la melancolie, or by means of condemnation, as Sorel will sometimes do in his critique of the conventions of romance. Only a few pamphlets have a condemnatory tone for clearly ideological ends. While some of these tombeaux aim to 128 Chapter Six denigrate a deceased personage, such as those written against the Maréchal d’Ancre, Concini (1617), and the Duc de Luynes (1622), others criticize allegorical personifications like “La guerre” (1616) or concrete administrative practices like “La paulette” (1618).3 Yet even more tombeaux stand as memorials valorizing the deceased, such as those in honor of the Duc de Guise (1589 and 1591), François...