Narrative Transformations from L'Astrée to Le Berger extravagant

Chapter Two. Verbal Travesty and Disguise: Parody and Citation of Typified Languages

35 Chapter Two Verbal Travesty and Disguise Parody and Citation of Typified Languages Two other devices employed by d’Urfé and Sorel to explore the problem of transforming literary language are verbal travesty and disguise. As in the use made by the two authors of echoing and discursive practices from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, their respective approaches to the use of verbal travesty and disguise differ widely. By recasting galimatias, rhetorical citations, and courtly codes of verbal expression, d’Urfé and Sorel have them reflect one another, much like echoes, to unleash the parodying and self-parodying powers specific to their narrative experiments. However, Le berger extravagant seems to cite discursive sources with the goals of explicit parody and criticism in the narrative and metanarrative. In contrast, L’Astrée allows the presence of literary and philosophical sources for two seemingly contradictory purposes: comic, self-parodying interludes and tragic complications in the extended plot. Similarly, while Sorel creates an antiromance in which characters are fully aware of borrowing speech genres from specifically literary traditions as disguises for critical scrutiny, d’Urfé never provides his characters with such an awareness, for they use verbal illusions as their sole means of personal expression in life. In other words, Sorelian characters constantly switch between encoding and decoding their borrowed utterances, whereas Urfeian characters are condemned to live in function of a series of hermetic verbal disguises whose decoding is constantly postponed. Both d’Urfé and Sorel introduce buffoons who transform their masters’ speech by citing it and discovering its comic potential. Both create episodes reminiscent of a long tradition of narratives of master-jester couples: the medieval dialogues 36 Chapter Two of Solomon and Morolf, the Renaissance chronicles of Pantagruel and Panurge, and the Golden Age novel of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (Bakhtin, Rabelais 20; Genette, Palimpsestes 164–70). Like Lysis’s Echo of Saint Cloud, these clowns transform their social superiors’utterances and texts, which are elevated and spiritual, so as to make them material and erotic. This travesty locates the converse of noble discourse in the original utterance in such a way that it produces a witty commentary on traditional master discourses. In the specific context of d’Urfé’s and Sorel’s narratives, these clowning travesties of master discourses work by means of linguistic transformation, narrative disorganization, and conceptual vulgarization and literalization. D’Urfé’s Clowns D’Urfé presents clownish characters who transform the utterances of their masters by all these means, without excluding the pronouncements of the authorial figure himself. For instance, Fleurial, the nymph Galathée’s servant, acts as a gobetween for his mistress and Lindamor; but unfortunately because of his advanced age, he has a poor memory of his superiors’ messages and an even poorer ability for rhetorical disposition. He relates to the nymph Léonide and the shepherdesses of Forez a report from Lindamor: Je croy, Fleurial, me dit-il, (car il sçavoit mon nom, m’ayant veu bien souvent dans les jardins de Montbrison et dans le logis mesme de son maistre, lors que vous m’y envoyez) que tu as ouy dire les batailles qui ont esté gagnées sur les Neustriens par le roy, avec l’assistance toutesfois de Clidaman et de mon maistre. Je m’asseure aussi que tu as ouy parler d’une dame (il me la nomma bien, dit-il, s’addressant à Leonide, mais j’en ay oublié le nom) qui, s’habillant en homme, avoit suivy, d’un pays qui est de là la mer, un Neustrien qu’elle aymoit, et qui ressembloit tant à Ligdamon , qu’estant pris pour luy, il mourut, ne voulant point espouser une femme pour qui celuy-là s’estoit abattu, et avoit tué un homme, pour le meurtre duquel estant banny, il s’enfuit en ce pays que je ne sçay nommer, et depuis revenant , fut pris par un parent du mort. Et sans ceste dame dont 37 Verbal Travesty and Disguise je te parle, il eust esté entre les mains de la justice, mais elle combatit pour luy, et se mit en prison pour l’en sortir. Ce discours embrouillé de Fleurial fit rire les nymphes […]. (II.x.423) D’Urfé borrows the name and figure of Fleurial from both literary and historical contexts: Fevrial or Le Fleurial served as the court jester under Louis XII and Francis I...