Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

Conclusion: Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal

148 Conclusion Narrative Transformations and Critical Appraisal The last, great French pastoral romance, d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, and its parody, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant, are both transformational narratives insofar as they both imitate and refresh previous literary conventions and modes of thought. As a project of literary recovery and communication, L’Astrée amalgamates ancient and Renaissance pastoral and medieval chivalric and courtly conventions with Platonism and Neo-Petrarchism. It is therefore a transitional text between centuries. Moreover, d’Urfé creates a self-reflective text, that is, a romance that repeats and echoes its own conventions in permutations of transformation. He has characters such as Hylas and Fleurial mimic and deform the words of their social and moral superiors . This echo effect adds to the romance’s textual polyphony of points and counterpoints, as when Neoplatonist theories of love meet their materialist counterpart. This interior polemic within the pastoral romance serves to inform narrative themes, such as courtly language and transvestism, and pits idealism against a nascent realism emerging in the development of the novel of the time. Sorel’s Le berger extravagant takes this dialectic a step further by representing the Urfeian character as a madman at grips with notions of social realism that challenge literary idealism. Sorel adapts Cervantes’s literary madman, Don Quixote, by placing him in the pastoral setting so as to create Lysis, the Extravagant Shepherd: the reader who consciously imitates pastoral conventions in order to live them. Like Don Quixote, Lysis devours the texts of ancient and Renaissance writers, pretends to take them for histories, and then emulates the fictional characters’ lives to a point of literal exhaustion: a staged death 149 Conclusion scene. The harangue of Lysis’s pícaro, Carmelin, underscores the critically productive relationship between idealism and realism, and between abstract and materialist approaches to literature . The authorial figure, the narrator, the critical characters , and Carmelin all document Lysis’s sources for imitation and suggest critical appraisals of convention. While Sorel’s textual monument announces the death of some literary practices, it also recommends the means for the transformation of others. Le berger is therefore a storehouse of literary devices and themes as much as it is a compendium of critical assessments that will resonate into the eighteenth century. It is true that Sorel’s “tombeau des romans et des absurdités de la poésie” announces the obsolescence of some literary conventions and Baroque themes, in the manner that Furetière considered the tombeau: a mise à mort. Sorel’s tomb unveils the illusory quality of literary convention and Baroque theme by applying a standard of literary verisimilitude. Indeed, by virtue of its interior polemic, d’Urfé’s literary compendium sets the stage for Sorel’s critical and dialectical project. Let us document some of these transformations of convention, thought, and theme that anticipate the construction of subsequent fictions, both theatrical and novelistic, in seventeenth-century France. Silvandre’s Echo from d’Urfé’s text refers to an Ovidian myth and to a physical phenomenon, which exist in a contradictory relationship in L’Astrée, for the character is conscious of both explanations without privileging one over the other. In the equivalent scene between Anselme and Lysis, Sorel reduces Echo to the status of a fiction, a myth, a fable. Moreover, the poem in echoes, once thought to be the words of a nymph or a spontaneous, prophetic discourse, is unmasked to reveal the highly calculated poetic format of rimes couronnées. This ancient and Renaissance convention is shown to be just that, nothing more than an illusion of miraculous spontaneity produced by means of the deliberate and conscious manipulation of literary devices. Consequently, such rhymes in echo become most rare in the French seventeenth-century poetic corpus.1 Therefore, in this case Sorel has dismissed a myth and a literary convention by indicating their obsolescence in the face of emerging values of verisimilitude, skeptical thinking, and empirical approaches to knowing. 150 Conclusion While d’Urfé’s L’Astrée implicitly invites reflection on the conventionality of its means of representing characters’ words, their identities, and modes of thought, Sorel’s Le berger extravagant constitutes an explicit reflection and debate concerning the same means. Sorel’s antiromance, in fact, uses conventional narrative and poetic means to put convention on trial. Debate itself serves as an apt example, for Sorel uses it to represent...