La Fontaine’s judgment is generally determined by an aesthetic principle and the pleasure it awakens: things, landmarks, towns, and their inhabitants are either beautiful or ugly. Thus, the young woman from Poitou is not beautiful enough. When he sees the Maid of Orléans it brings him no pleasure: “I found in her neither the appearance, the stature, nor the face of an Amazon”; Amboise is “pleasant and diverting”; Blois, “very beautiful”; the shores of the Loire are a “fine countryside” and one cannot say “enough of its marvels”; Poitiers is a “villace” (a city of no interest); and Billac is, at first sight, “vexatious,” with “its mean streets, its badly accommodated and badly proportioned houses.” In sum, La Fontaine has little recourse to explanation or description. For example, in speaking of Montléry, a fortress built by the English, he explains: “As for the fortress, it is demolished, but not by the years; that which remains, which is a very high tower, has not fallen into ruin, although they destroyed one side of it. There is still a stair remaining, and two rooms where English paintings are seen, which is a proof of the antiquity and singularity of the place. Such is what I learned from your uncle, who says that he entered the rooms; as for me, I saw nothing. The coachman only wanted to stop at Châtres.”
In many ways, the narrator of Voyage de Paris en Limousin, this “child of sleep and laziness” who complains of his lack of memory and assures us that “this journey would be a fine thing if one didn’t have to get up so early in the morning,” is an anti-traveler. His letters, like Les états et empires of Cyrano, can be read as a critical parody of the narratives of great travelers that, having met with a certain amount of success, flourished and were well known in France, although travel writing did not yet exist as a formally codified literary genre after the manner of drama and poetry
The second half of the sixteenth century in Europe was marked by the politics of conquest and territorial expansion, leading several sovereigns to sponsor major expeditions. These expeditions were, in turn, recounted by explorers in travelogues. They were not, however, just official reports; they would quickly captivate the European imagination. Beginning in 1534, Jacques Cartier, at the expense of King François I, led three expeditions to North America. These were detailed by Cartier in his Relations, a travelogue that was subsequently translated into both English and Italian. This was followed by Samuel de Champlain’s Les voyages de la Nouvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada (Voyages to New France), which was published between 1603 and 1632. In 1578, the Protestant Jean de Léry came back from “France Antarctique”—today’s Rio de Janeiro, where he was sent by Calvin—and published his Histoire d’un voyage fait en terre de Brésil (History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil). The French explorers and sailors competed with the colonizing enterprises of Spain and Portugal, whose political and economic influence extended into Africa, India, and South America. These expeditions and the resulting accounts made a lasting impression on European readers, who were brought through the medium of writing to parts of the world whose natural riches, climate, and geography were unexpectedly novel, and, at the cultural level, into an encounter with other customs and mores. At all levels, these experiences and accounts of conquest, domination, and encounter strongly influenced the European imagination.
In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne, in the famous essay that was to become a canonical instance of its kind, “Des cannibales,” examined and explored the concept of the “savage” as mediated by these accounts of what was then called the “Nouveau Monde.” Montaigne poses the following questions, ones that will themselves travel throughout Western thought and literature, down through the eighteenth century into the Romantic period, and on into the twentieth century. Should we not situate, interpret, and understand what we call the savages’ “barbarism” in the context of their own society—which is, in fact, one that we know nothing about? Are we not obliged to consider the moral and religious beliefs that we thought universal to be relative? Are we not perhaps, in their eyes, the barbarians and savages by virtue of our own habits, beliefs, and customs? While appealing to the myth of the “noble savage” (judged to be closer to a “natural” condition that we have lost and forgotten), Montaigne already deploys the strategy of thought-provoking inversion that Cyrano would take up in his own way.
In addition to these expedition narratives, there were the accounts of missionaries, in particular the Jesuits, which also played a fundamental role in the representation of the “Other” in the seventeenth century. From the Crusades onward, territorial annexation and religious conversion became inseparable. The work of converting infidels was constantly invoked as an argument for expansion. In the context of the Protestant Reformation, sustaining the role of Catholic missionaries became a central concern for the Church. Jesuit accounts, in reports that appear in France between 1632 and 1672, contributed to the diffusion of knowledge about the Americas and the Near East, in addition to arousing interest in distant lands among the learned and ordinary public alike.
Cyrano and La Fontaine, who were both the inheritors and contemporaries of these accounts, enjoyed negotiating the conventions of the genre. They were mindful of three problems that recur among explorer narratives: the problem of memory and its reliability (one must remember, note, and report); the problem of vision (one must see, bear direct witness); and the problem of the transmission of knowledge (one must represent that which is unknown to the reader and that for which the narrator, at times, has no words).
As he prepares to describe Richelieu’s château, La Fontaine confesses: “I promised you by the last post the description of the château Richelieu; rather cursorily in order not to tell you untruths, and without taking into consideration my slight memory or the trouble that this enterprise was bound to give me.” The poet often refers to his faulty memory. He who extols the beauty of Vaux-le-Vicomte has sudden amnesia when trying to evoke the riches of Richelieu. La Fontaine tells us that it is a place that is exceptionally spacious but admits: “I do not quite recall its shape,” and “neither do I remember of what the base court, fore court, and subsidiary courts are composed of, nor the number of pavilions and corps-de-logis of the château, still less of their structure. These details have escaped.” In addition to this implied criticism of Richelieu (to which I will later return), La Fontaine frees himself from the obligation of the traveler to precisely report what he has seen. In doing so, he undercuts his authority and legitimacy as a narrator: there is no longer the promise of authenticity, totality, or objectivity. Cyrano employs the same device. In Le soleil, the narrator encounters a tiny man who lives on the macula and who assures him: “I will reveal to you … secrets which are not known in your climate.” The author goes on to explain that the meeting concludes with “… a still more private conversation, in which he revealed to me very hidden secrets (on part of which I shall keep silent, while the rest has escaped my memory).” How do we know what a narrator may or may not have said, what he remembers, and what he invents? Even though this extraordinary voyage does not rest on a referential agreement, Cyrano plays with the genre while, at the same time, underlining the kinship it has with his own fiction.
The traveler is a person for whom sight is primordial: he or she witnesses and reports what is seen. However, La Fontaine is not concerned with what he misses or does not capture his interest: in Ambroise, he chooses not to visit the room of the prince and, of the fortress of Montléry, we are told that he “saw nothing.” In contrast, the narrator of Etats et empires is attentive to what he sees and seeks explanations for it. Cyrano indicates his satirical intent when the main character tries to justify the plausibility and possibility of the most fantastic facts. Upon his return to earth, he insists that he is an eyewitness to the mores and customs of the Selenites, imitating the kinds of justification supplied by the genre of the travelogue: at the behest of his friend M. de Colignac, so we are told, he provides an account of the “extraordinary things” that he has seen, and on that basis publishes the book Etats et Empires
de la Lune. There is of course a joke here, as fiction is allowed to justify fiction, once again blurring the line between true and invented narratives. Cyrano here questions the assumptions of travel narratives: the authority of the narrator, the validity of subjective judgment, and the legitimacy of eyewitness accounts, which are always infused with the dreams, desires, and prejudices of their author.
In the end, and largely because of its pedagogical functions, travel literature often appears to be a hybrid genre, combining stories, descriptions, and commentaries. It aims to transmit knowledge to readers who, a priori, know nothing of and share nothing with, the world that is being explored. The first letter of La Fontaine immediately calls into question this supposed virtue of the genre. His wife, he confirms, devours the light reading of chivalric novels, which she knows by heart. La Fontaine plays on this to justify the interest of his letters: “Consider, if you please, how useful this would be for you, if, in fun, I had accustomed you to history, either of places or persons. You would have the wherewithal with which to divert yourself your whole life, provided that this was without the intention of remembering anything, still less of citing anything. It is not a good quality in a woman to be learned, and it is a very bad one to affect appearing as such.”
Pleasure and banter, that which is opposed to erudition and learning, guide the traveler and his readers. Moreover, on the road, La Fontaine refuses to adopt the role of the masterful knowing subject. Concerning the town of Montléry, for example, he asks: “Does one say Montlhéry or Montléhry? It’s Montlehéry when the verse is too short, and Montlhéry when it’s too long. Montlhéry therefore or Montlehéry, as you wish.” It is poetry, the art of rhyme, and aesthetic balance which take precedence over knowledge. The pleasure of the bon mot allows fiction and literature to find a place alongside erudite and scholarly texts. Again, from this perspective, Cyrano and La Fontaine are close despite their many differences. La Lune and Le Soleil resemble the expositions of scholars and philosophers on subjects as diverse as the movement of the earth, the plurality of worlds, the corruptibility of the sun, the arrival of the apostle John in paradise, the affective life of plants, or the immortality of the soul. All these theories and hypotheses are bundled together. Put another way, the practice and sharing of knowledge is seen as consisting in the capacity to invent and generate fiction. Science is not only the practice of seeing, experimenting, and explaining perceptible phenomena. It is also a manifestation of the capacity to imagine. The main character makes his way to the sun because he is transported by a “burning of fever,” a joy that animates his will and allows him to see that which remains invisible to “the most obstinate.” This is the same principle that would arouse the enthusiasm of the scholar. Science nourishes fiction, and fiction, in its turn, stretches the limits of science.
In the cases of both La Fontaine and Cyrano, the reader is deliberately drawn into a world of satire and critique directed at an increasingly popular genre. The political, religious, or scholarly functions of travel stories are strongly undermined and discredited. On the other hand, imitation equally confers legitimacy on the pleasant and extraordinary accounts of both La Fontaine and Cyrano. Similarly, the hybridization of genres and themes found in both texts, in addition to the prestige given to the imagination and fiction, accord to pleasure and dreams the same importance that is conferred on science or scholarship.
To occupy his fellow travelers, Socrates’s daimon offers the narrator “a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed.” By turning the key of the book, “immediately, as if from a man’s mouth or a musical instrument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.” The narrator describes it as miraculous, explaining: “[Y]ou have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.” In a certain sense, this is how we experience Cyrano’s two texts. L’autre monde is the distant descendant of Lucian’s True Story. The Roman voyager (who also finds himself on the moon) assures us that he has “no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life.” He adopts, that is, the liar’s paradox: “I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that I am a liar.” Cyrano was greatly influenced by Lucian’s game playing and borrowed several episodes for his own work.
Cyrano’s two texts are, in fact, saturated with references to earlier works: The Man in the Moon, by the Englishman Francis Godwin; The City of the Sun, by the Italian monk Campanella; The Metamorphoses by Ovid; and, of course, Homer’s Odysseus, a character in whom storytelling and travel merge. The Socratic love banquet raises questions about the tales of anthropophagy worthy of Léry. The materialist thesis of the Epicureans is explored by the Selenite philosophers or the birds of the sun. The episode of the narrator as beggar in Toulouse is a gesture to the comic novels that came from Spain and from which La lune borrows several of its formal aspects. It would be impossible to cite all the literary references and allusions. The point that matters concerns their radically heterogeneous character: philosophical dialogues, satirical works, ancient travel narratives, contemporary accounts of utopias. These literary journeys unfold on several planes: the intervention of real-life people (Descartes) or well-known fictional characters (the daimon of Socrates); the reappropriation of topoi from the ancient odysseys or the early modern picaresque novels; and the staging of a familiar thesis in amplified, deformed, or caricatured fashion. Cyrano thus practices his own particular brand of scholarship. Ambulo ergo sum: the story exists as a complex weaving of these perspectives, genres, and voices, among which we can wander as we please.
La Fontaine’s work is equally inscribed in a literary tradition in a manner demonstratively marked in the writing. He owes the very form of “galant” travel writing (which is directly opposed to scientific accounts) to Voyage d’Encausse by the poets Chapelle (1626–86) and Bachaumont (1624–1702). In this work, the two travelers are looking to escape their Parisian excesses but end up dedicating their expedition to the procuring and enjoyment of good food. Furthermore, while evoking the novels of the Knights of the Round Table that his wife so adored, La Fontaine does not hesitate to pastiche their style: “Supper time having arrived, knights and ladies were seated at their rather poorly spread tables, and afterward went to bed immediately, as one might imagine; and with that the chronicler brings the present chapter to a close.” Later on, to describe the Loire, the poet both recalls and dismisses a reference to Ovid: “Que dirons-nous que fut la Loire / Avant que d’être ce qu’elle est? / Car vous savez qu’en son histoire / Notre bon Ovide s’en tait.” (What say we the Loire was / Before being what it is? / For you know that concerning its history / Our good Ovid is silent.) It is thus left to La Fontaine to make up for this lacuna, which he does while simultaneously insisting that the Loire has no mythical allure (“Et disons ici, s’il vous plaît, / Que la Loire étoit ce qu’elle est / Dès le commencement des choses.” (And let us say here, if you please / That the Loire was what it is / Since the beginning of things.) Rivaling the ancients, La Fontaine confers on his voyage the quality of a literary divertissement, offering his readers variations on well-known poetic themes. We find, for example, the topos of locus terribilis (frightening place), when he crosses the valley of Tréfou, “République de loups, asile de brigands” (Republic of wolves, sanctuary of brigands), a motif that occasions a more general reflection on human ills: “En combien de façons, hélas! le genre humain / Se fait à soi-même la guerre!” (In how many ways, alas, does mankind / Make war upon itself!).
It is important to emphasize that in both Voyage de Paris en Limousin and La Fontaine’s Lettres, the narrator is an exiled or rejected character. As previously remarked, La Fontaine recalls the conditions under which he goes into exile, along with the sadness aroused in him by the prison in which Fouquet was confined. In Cyrano’s novels, even though the main character leaves voluntarily to explore t
he moon, he is thereafter hunted, imprisoned, or threatened with death. For example, an inappropriate remark provokes the anger of the prophet Elijah, who then casts him out of the earthly paradise. On the moon, he is taken for an animal, caged with a character from a Godwin novel, and summoned before a tribunal. When he returns to earth, the publication of his account gains him the wrath of those “most obstinate,” and he is once again pursued and imprisoned. On the sun, it is the birds who this time accuse him of being a human and put him on trial. Mistreated and often cast in the role of the Other, pursued because he is misunderstood, the main character is forced to flee, a fate that causes him to leave most of the places he visits. The worlds described are imprinted with a remarkable violence. War, death sentences, incarceration, and cannibalism are common ills. The inversion that the accounts provide does not, thus, propose a better world. On the moon, a young man explains that, in their community, the young have authority over the old and that “the old render every deference and honour to the young.” The reversal of the customs of the narrator and his readers is striking; the young man obliges us to question what we consider evident. However, in the end, the young Selenites treat the oldest badly, viciously whipping them if necessary. The stateless and foreign status of the narrator allows him to accurately illustrate this commonplace violence.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 32