The Novel

by Steven Moore

  158 Not an anachronism: although most people used quills, “ornamental pens made of metal were awarded as prizes in British schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Morrish notes in one of her informative essays on Nova Solyma (2003, 262). Her close reading of this episode is especially good, for Gott’s Latin style changes with each genre.

  159 As Morrish shows in a later essay (2005), Gott does the same with old wives’ tales: early in the novel (1.3), a matron tells her dream to Joseph’s two younger brothers (an allegory on maintaining virtue, which can be boiled down to avoiding girls wearing flirty clothing), showing how old wives can convert their disreputable tales into clean Sunday-school lessons.

  160 If interested, see Patrick’s essay on it listed in the bibliography, the source of my quotation.

  161 The first (1640) in a trilogy of heroic romances written by the diplomat and historian (1572–1644). He’s one of the few Italian novelists of the early modern period; I decided there were not enough of them to warrant coverage, especially after reading Ann Hallamore Caesar’s “History or Prehistory? Recent Revisions in the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Italy” (pp. 215–24 in Mander’s Remapping the Rise of the European Novel).

  162 From Morrish’s essay on Psyche Cretica (271), my source for Susanna Elisabeth Prasch’s essay as well.

  163 The first hollow-earth novel appears to be La Vie, les aventures et le voyage de Groenland du Réverend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange (1720) by Simon Tyssot de Patot (1655–1738), never translated into English.

  164 Chap. 9 in McNelis’s dumbed-down revision of the anonymous 1742 English translation of Niels Klim (hereafter cited by chapter, except for editorial apparatus): see next note.

  165 This aspect of the novel is lost in McNelis’s edition because he “decided to leave out all those quotations which contribute little or nothing to the story” (254), misunderstanding their function. (I was tempted to use the 1742 translation, which includes the quotations, but it doesn’t include the handful of additions Holberg made to the second Latin edition of 1745, along with a playful “Apologetic Preface,” which McNelis includes.) He also notes that Holberg’s “memory for them was not so good as he thought it was” (233), again missing the point: it’s Klim who is misremembering those quotations in the thick of action, not Holberg in the quiet of composition. A new, faithful translation is needed.

  CHAPTER 2

  The French Novel

  In 1607, two years after Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote, a French aristocrat named Honoré d’Urfé (1568–1625) published the first volume of Astrea (L’Astrée), which occupies the same position in French fiction as Don Quixote in Spanish: the nation’s first modern novel. As the French critic Gérard Genette wrote in his preface to a severely abridged edition in 1964, “If there is a history of the Novel, not only as a ‘literary genre,’ but also as a mode of feeling and form of existence, L’Astrée is the key work in this history, and its most important moment; it is the narrow strait through which everything passes, and passes into the whole of modernity.”1 Like Cervantes, d’Urfé renovated older genres of the novel to create a work that would register the changes and challenges of a new world order supplanting the old. But while everyone’s heard of Don Quixote, few people outside France have ever heard of Astrea, much less wandered through “this vast and curious wilderness of delights,” as Saintsbury called it (175). This is partly due to its forbidding length: Cervantes wrote only one sequel to the first volume of Don Quixote, whereas d’Urfé brought out a second volume in 1610, and a third in 1619, each one longer than the last. After he died in 1625, his secretary Balthasar Baro edited and published the immense volume 4 in 1627, and the following year brought out the concluding volume 5, supposedly based on d’Urfé’s rough drafts.2 They add up to about 3,000 pages, three times as long as Don Quixote, and while often reprinted at the time, after 1647 the five-volume novel wasn’t printed again until a modern edition appeared in 1925–28.3 It fared worse in England, where John Davies’ slightly abridged translation of all five volumes (1657–58) has never been reprinted. Steven Rendall’s excellent English translation of volume 1 attracted little attention when it appeared in 1995, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a complete translation. Quel dommage.

  At its simplest, Astrea concerns the longest lovers’ tiff in literary history. At its grandest, d’Urfé’s novel is an encyclopedic investigation into the nature of love, and a national epic that celebrates the era when the tribes of Gaul threw off Roman control and began the formation of what would become France. It melds several traditional genres of fiction into something new, as though d’Urfé decided singlehandedly to catch up the lagging French novel with the rest of Europe and produce a gigantic work that would overshadow their comparatively shorter works. He began with the pastoral genre, which, again like Cervantes, was his initial inspiration to write fiction. (He had written a pastoral poem entitled Le Sireine in 1596, and just before he died finished a pastoral play, La Sylvanire.) An extremely well-read aristocrat – his family had one of the largest libraries in France and he excelled at the Jesuit Collège de Tournon – he knew the Greek pastoral poets and the novella Daphnis and Chloe, Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Montemayor’s Diana (which especially impressed him), Torquato Tasso’s play Aminta, and even Cervantes’ Galatea. (The stilted pastoral novels produced by his fellow Frenchmen in the last quarter of the 16th century don’t seem to have influenced him much, if at all.) D’Urfé set his novel in the 5th century around the banks of the river Lignon in the Forez region of southeastern France, where he himself had a castle. His shepherds and shepherdesses are actually the descendants of noblemen who quit the painted pomp of the envious court for a simpler life, and thus display polished manners despite their rustic garb – the first of many instances in the novel of the deceptiveness of appearances. It is a matriarchal society ruled by descendants of the Roman goddess Diana, who used to hunt there with her nymphs – d’Urfé enhances his pastoral with sprinkles of myth and fairy tale – and where Druidism is still practiced.

  A full plot summary of the novel would be long and tedious, but here’s what one needs to know: Astrea, a vacuous beauty, has been vigorously courted by the shepherd Celadon for three years, ever since he was “fourteen or fifteen years old, and I only twelve or thirteen,” she says vaguely (89). It was love at first sight, but the enmity between their parents meant they had to conceal their love. Back then, Astrea was entered in a beauty contest modeled on the Judgment of Paris; because the three contestants were to be presented “naked except for a light undergarment that covers them from the waist to the knee” (91), the judge playing Paris must be a girl. Young Celadon disguises himself as one, wins the chance to play Paris, gets an eyeful of his beloved, and of course awards her first prize. Three years later (in the novel’s present), when Celadon is “seventeen or eighteen” and she is “fifteen or sixteen,” as Astrea guesses, she encourages him to flirt with another shepherdess to allay their parents’ suspicion, which he reluctantly does, but when another shepherdess maliciously tells Astrea that Celadon is flirting for real, she throws a fit and banishes him from her sight. Celadon is so distraught at her decree that he throws himself into the Lignon and is swept away, presumably drowned.

  Like the composer of an opera announcing its themes in the overture, d’Urfé loads the opening paragraphs with such words as tyranny, enmity, ingratitude, inconstancy, lamentable, misfortunes, treachery, deceive, obstacles, maliciously, dissimulation, “so much suffering, so many regrets, and so many tears” (7–8). There is nothing joyous, fulfilling, fun, or sexy about love in Astrea; instead, love is a battlefield, an onerous task filled with obstacles, often calling for deception and ruses, a rigid regime with ridiculous rules, impossibly high standards, and with endless deferrals of gratification even for those who make it through the obstacle course. In the opening scene, Astrea and Celadon deceive their parents, Celadon deceives the girl he flirts with, Astrea is deceived by her treacherou
s informant, and Celadon—in strict obedience to the courtly rules of love—attempts suicide. Deception, disappointment, despair: these are the dire punishments for anyone who falls in love in Astrea, whose narrative consists of dozens of variations on this dismal theme.

  When Celadon dives into the Lignon, he launches one narrative arc: instead of drowning, he washes up unconscious on the other side of the river and is rescued by three “nymphs,” as the aristocratic daughters of the region are called. They secretly nurture him back to health, smuggle him out of their castle in women’s clothing, and reluctantly release him into the wild, where he becomes a heartbroken, long-haired hermit. The chief druid of Forez, named Adamas, convinces him to return to civilization by way of a ruse, by dressing up as his absent daughter, a druidess-in-training named Alexis. No stranger to transvestism, Celadon agrees: this way, he can return to his beloved without violating her command because it is not Celadon but “Alexis” who will enjoy Astrea’s company. Distraught ever since she drove Celadon to suicide, Astrea is instinctively attracted to Alexis and finds her a suitable surrogate for her lost love. They share sleeping quarters with other shepherdesses, during which time Alexis gets several more eyefuls of his beloved en déshabillé and is able to fondle her to his heart’s content, which she returns with what can only be called lesbian enthusiasm. (These “girl”-on-girl scenes are quite explicit and outraged some 17th-century readers.) Eventually—by which I mean 2,000 pages later—Celadon reveals his ruse, but instead of being relieved to learn her beloved lives, Astrea banishes him again for endangering her reputation. Not until near the end of volume 5 are they reconciled. (The abridged editions of the novel available today in France deal only with this story-line, as does Eric Rohmer’s pretty film The Romance of Astrea and Celadon [2007].)

  A second, more complex narrative arc concerns the many affairs of Galathée, the haughtiest of the three nymphs who rescued Celadon and daughter of Amasis, queen of Forez. (Her name was probably taken from Cervantes’ Galatea.) This humorless princess was once involved with a nobleman named Polémas, but dumped him for another knight. Polémas is the villain of the piece, and helps expand Astrea from a pastoral to a Dumasian adventure novel of royal intrigue and treachery. Conniving to win Galathée back, he enlists a fake druid to convince her she will meet her future soul-mate on the banks of the Lignon at a specific time, which happens to be the moment when Galathée and the other nymphs rescue Celadon. The swain’s rustic sex appeal overrides her keen sense of social superiority and she makes a pass at him, but Celadon rejects her in devotion to Astrea. (She then mocks his ideals and argues that infidelity among consenting adults is no big deal.) Frustrated Polémas, determined to possess both Galathée and the queendom she will inherit, eventually leads an army against Amasis’ castle, where many of the novels’ characters have gathered for protection and defense—Celadon joins the fray while still in druidess drag—and after many battle scenes Polémas is defeated and beheaded. This exciting castle siege would be the climax of any other novel, but in Astrea it’s just one more skirmish in the endless battle between the sexes.

  Several other narrative arcs are generated from Forez’s reputation as a pastoral getaway, and as the site of the oracular Fountain of Love’s Truth. Many characters show up and tell their stories, often asking for a wise shepherdess or one of the “nymphs” to act as judge in romantic disputes. As the novel progresses, these interpolated stories grow longer and more complicated; some are broken up into installments narrated by different characters over long intervals, enacting on a formal level the delayed gratifications its characters endure, but putting impossible demands on the reader’s memory. (Even d’Urfé specialists admit getting lost occasionally in the labyrinthine narrative.) These characters arrive from all over Europe, and their stories combine actual historical events (like the assassination of Roman emperor Valentinian III in 455) with romantic adventures familiar from earlier novels. For these subplots, d’Urfé drew upon ancient Greek romances, chivalric novels, Italian novellas, history chronicles, fairy tales, and story-cycle novels (especially the Heptameron), resulting in a veritable anthology of premodern narrative forms. These stories—which, when combined with the backstories of other Forez denizens, make up the bulk of the novel—are all variants of Celadon and Astrea’s messy situation: jealousy and misunderstanding, ruses that backfire, unrequited love, and other vexations.

  Most of the 200 or so characters in Astrea talk about love,4 but the novel has two principal theorists on the subject. Silvandre, abandoned as a child but raised as an aristocratic soldier/scholar, arrives in Forez shortly before the novel opens to take up the shepherd’s life. A brooder apparently indifferent to women, he is reluctantly persuaded to court a friend of Astrea’s named Diane in competition with Philis, another of Astrea’s friends, a game to see who can play the more devoted lover. (Philis adopts male courtship rituals, adding to the gender confusion that runs throughout this transgressive novel.) Schooled in Renaissance Platonism—though ostensibly set in the 5th century, the novel’s worldview is late Renaissance—Silvandre advocates a highly spiritual form of love, a view held by most of the females in the novel, who want to be “served” per the rules of courtly love, not tumbled in a haystack like real shepherdesses. Opposing him is another recent arrival in Forez, the freethinking, fun-loving Hylas, who takes a cavalier, love ’em-and-leave ’em approach to women. “I have loved more than a hundred shepherdesses,” he admits, and “have said farewell to some before I left them, and left the others without saying anything at all,” adding, “I have been shared by several at once” (233). These two engage in numerous debates, and while most of the novel’s characters regard Hylas as a clever heckler against Silvandre’s noble pronouncements, the novel’s narrator doesn’t take sides, and in fact is careful not to let Hylas be defeated in debate or otherwise disgraced. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Silvandre and Hylas represent two worldviews; the former is a man of the past, drawing uncritically upon 2,000 years of idealistic philosophy to form his views, while Hylas is a surprisingly modern type. He is disarmingly frank, witty, irreverent, unconventional, and unapologetic in his preference for carnal love over spiritual. (He is also the only character described with any degree of specificity: only about 21, he is balding with red hair.) As it happens, Hylas hooks up with a merry young widow named Stelle who shares his views, and they are about the only happy couple in the book.

  A fan favorite of the early readers of Astrea, Hylas is a character type who will play an increasingly large role in French fiction: the libertine.5 The term originally designated a person who insisted on freedom of thought in religious matters (John Calvin used it against dissenters), then spread to those who favored reason and natural law over theology and faith, and/or expressed skepticism toward metaphysics and abstract philosophy (like Montaigne, who has been called a libertine), and only later did the term come to describe a dissolute pleasure-seeker. (The most extreme example of the libertine is the Marquis de Sade, the learned monster ominously waiting for us at the end of this long chapter.) Far from being a mere womanizer or “jester,” as some critics have called him, Hylas emerges as the most sensible character in the novel, and perhaps a spokesman for d’Urfé’s views. The author often has Hylas deflate Silvandre’s lofty views by literalizing them, as in this exchange over the spiritual union of true lovers’ souls:

  “Though you have puzzled my brains with your discourse,” said Hylas, “yet you cannot demonstrate unto me that a lover is changed into the loved, since there is one part left out, which is the body.”

  “The body,” said Silvandre, “is not a part but only an organ or instrument of the soul, and if the soul of Philis were separated from her body, would it not be said there is the body of Philis and not Philis herself?” . . .

  “If it be so,” said Hylas, “that the body is but the instrument which Philis maketh use of, I will give you that Philis and let me have the rest, and see whether you or I shall be better contented.”
(1:307)

  Silvandre can have Philis’s soul; Hylas will take her body. Similarly, the narrator salaciously literalizes the union of souls when Alexis (Celadon) wakes one morning and accidentally puts on Astrea’s dress: “Love . . . produced enormous happiness in this false Alexis, from wearing the dress of her beloved shepherdess, so much so that unable to take it off, she began to kiss it and to press it affectionately against her body, . . . [Then “she”] “approached the bed where Astrée was sleeping, and kneeling down, began to worship her.”6 Wearing his girlfriend’s clothes is obviously an erotic experience for Celadon, and I imagine one of his hands was busy while he was down there on his knees “worshiping” the half-naked sleeping beauty. (When Astrea wakes to find Alexis in her dress, she plays along and climbs into Alexis’ druidess habit!) I don’t think autoerotic transvestism is what Renaissance Platonists had in mind when describing the spiritual union of lovers, and since this scene (and others like it) comes from the narrator rather than Hylas, it’s not a stretch to identify one with the other, especially when biographical matters are taken into account.

  Forced at age 13 into the Order of Malta, which included a vow of chastity, d’Urfé became fascinated as a teenager with his older sister-in-law, the rich and beautiful Diane de Châteaumorand. He began planning his novel in the 1580s, partly under her spell and that of Montemayor’s Diana, and when his older brother’s marriage to Diane was annulled in 1599, d’Urfé got released from the chaste order a month later and married her in 1600. But the marriage didn’t go well; his diplomatic duties in Savoy meant long absences from her, and in 1614 they separated for good. Thereafter living alone in his castle in Virieu-le-Grand, writing the remainder of his long novel, his attitudes toward love must have undergone a sea-change from those idealistic yearnings of a chaste youth. Hence the heavy air of unhappiness that hangs over Astrea until the final page (when the novel’s various sparring partners are married off in a perfunctory manner), hence the recurring metaphors aligning love with illness, poison, shipwreck, and madness.