by Steven Moore
Like Cervantes, d’Urfé straddled two eras, one foot in the old world of chivalry and idealism, the other in the brave new world of epistemological uncertainty and moral relativism. Forez may have been a nostalgic dream-world for Catholic noblemen like d’Urfé—and many of his aristocratic readers took it that way—but it is also a pagan matriarchy with considerable prejudice against patriarchal authority (fathers, husbands, kings, occasionally even the gods) and where male aggression is considered the root of all evil. Though characters like Silvandre and Adamas voice idealistic ideologies of love so persuasive that many 17th-century readers regarded Astrea as a handbook to amorous conduct, d’Urfé consistently undercuts their arguments. Scoffing Hylas is their most vocal opponent, but Galathée too mocks family values, warning against the trap of matrimony (in a society where divorce was not an option) and praising open relationships. And then there is the questionable behavior of the “perfect lovers,” Celadon and Astrea. Celadon takes the codes of ideal love so seriously that he first attempts suicide, then retreats from civilization, refusing to reveal himself to grieving Astrea (even though he knows she regrets her jealous fit) because she has not formally rescinded her original command “never to present yourself before me unless I command you to do so” (10). He obeys the letter of the law while violating its spirit, punishing his beloved with passive aggression, and is suckered by Adamas’s sophistry into thinking that by disguising himself as Alexis he can technically evade her command. Celadon is meant to exemplify the ideal lover whose constancy is unmatched, but should we really admire a suicidal, passive-aggressive, crossdressing voyeur who is such a stickler for an antiquated code that he would make his beloved’s life miserable? He is as daft as Don Quixote.7
And she’s no better. She suggests he flirt with another girl, then gets upset when he does (trusting a conniving friend over Celadon’s protests of innocence), and when he finally reveals himself near the end, Astrea throws another fit and banishes him again! Her case is more interesting: the narrator drops many clues suggesting the inexperienced 16-year-old fears adult sexuality, and banishes Celadon on flimsy pretexts in order to postpone the loss of her virginity. This is the obvious interpretation of a nightmare Astrea relates in part 4, where she enters “a thicket heavy with trees and brambles [whose] thorns, after ripping all my clothes, . . . pierced my skin at every jab” (trans. Horowitz, 120). She is much more erotic in the arms of Alexis than she ever was with Celadon, and Astrea suggests joining her in a druid convent for the rest of their lives. It’s worth noting her name comes from the Greek goddess Astraea, who inhabited Earth during the Golden Age but left when mortals began engaging in Adult Situations and was metamorphosed into the constellation Virgo—the Virgin.8 A vapid virgin with lesbian tendencies afraid to grow up—she’s as poor a model for the perfect lover as Celadon.
The dozens of other characters who try to live up to the ideals of true love likewise fail, usually dragged down by their own fears, jealousies, and egos. The only exceptions are unconventional couples: in part 2 we’re given the story of a rich man named Thamire who falls in love with a cute little shepherdette named Celidée when she is only nine years old. He begins courting her—“I would sometimes steal a kiss, sometimes put my hand into her bosom, and indeed, great nymph [Galathée’s sister Leonide, to whom he is relating the story], so tampered with her that I did extremely win upon her affection, for when she came to be eleven years of age, she loved me, as she herself said, as well as she did her father” (1:208)—and plans to marry her when she’s a few years older. Then his 18-year-old nephew returns from abroad, a strapping lad named Calidon, who predictably falls for the beautiful girl. (She doesn’t care for him at all, citing an “antipathy in nature.”) Disgusted at the rift between uncle and nephew her beauty has caused, Celidée defaces herself with a diamond ring. At the sight of the mutilated girl, Calidon’s “fiery flaming passion did quite extinguish” (1:382) and he leaves her to his uncle, who is saddened but unshaken in his love for her and marries her anyway. Throughout the rest of the novel, Thamire’s devotion to her inner beauty is held up as a shining example of constancy, the defining feature of love according to most of its characters. Celidée’s face is magically restored at the end of the novel, but it makes no difference in their relationship, the only happy couple in the entire novel except for Hylas and Stelle. What are we to make, then, of an encyclopedic study of love where the only two couples who express and enjoy true love are a pair of swingers and a transgenerational couple consisting of a child-molester and a tween cutter? Where the novel’s two principal theorists of ideal love are an unmarried druid and a wanderer uninterested in women? Where transvestism is routine and gender as fluid as the Lignon river? Where didactic lectures on metaphysical love are followed by erotic descriptions of the physical allure of certain nymphs and shepherdesses? Astrea’s reputation as a lofty paean to spiritual love is misleading; like so many of its characters, the novel wears a disguise, pretending to advocate Platonic ideals while subverting them and suggesting unconventional alternatives.
Disguise has been a standard plot device in novels from the beginning, of course, but the extensive use d’Urfé makes of disguises and pretenses creates a world where nobody is who he or she seems to be. A woman might be a man in drag, a visored knight a young lady, a shepherd a nobleman, a druid a conman, a beseeching lover a lying bastard. There are dozens of instances of crossdressing, more than I’ve ever come across in a single novel; there are two lookalikes named Ligdamon and Lydias whose resemblance causes much confusion; there are two boys switched at birth, and a baby girl who is raised as a boy until adulthood (and prefers male freedom); and virtually everyone who comes to Forez adopts shepherds’ garb, making it impossible to distinguish them from the real ones. Some characters are unknowingly disguised—they turn out to be the offspring of someone other than they thought—and then there are the countless pretenses and counterfeit behavior. A more dissembling cast would be hard to find in fiction, which makes Hylas’s candor so startling and refreshing. But d’Urfé is not, like Gaddis in The Recognitions, exposing a counterfeit society; Celadon ponders “how uncertain were the fortunes of love, as uncertain as other kinds of fortune” (52), and it’s uncertainty that is d’Urfé’s grand theme. Writing during a paradigm shift when scientific advances were unsettling old certainties, when people were abandoning their places in the great chain of being, when gender was revealed to be as much social construction as biological essence, when there was a “gradual turning from cosmology toward psychology as the source of personality identity,”9 when thinkers were calling virtually everything into question, d’Urfé envelops his 5th-century characters in the fog of uncertainty that was settling onto sensitive 17th-century readers. Cherpack warns the modern reader not to view Astrea’s “discords as symptomatic of the tortured Zeitgeist in which the author was immersed” (333), but the unusual prevalence of disguise in the work, the puzzlement over oracles and the intentions of the gods, the misinterpretations virtually every character makes—all far exceed the norm for traditional fiction. Only nine years separate the concluding volume of Astrea from Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1637), which grapples with the same epistemological uncertainties. D’Urfé masterfully harmonizes the routine misunderstandings that generate the plot-lines of pastorals and romantic novels with the changing intellectual temper of his time, which is one reason he avoided certainty and closure in his novel for as long as possible, leaving it to his secretary to supply the generic happy ending.
Despite its intellectual subtlety, Astrea is sometimes clunky in its literary execution. There are countless violations of point-of-view as its various narrators tell their tales, revealing details they couldn’t possibly know; the narrator often stage-directs his characters as though they’re in a play, making them pace back and forth and clutch their brow to signal indecision, for example. There’s some lazy plotting and a hazy chronology. Everyone speaks in the same sophisticated register as the narrator
, though this can be excused since the novel makes no pretense to realism, and its anachronisms can likewise be attributed to d’Urfé’s transhistorical agenda. Many of the subplots are similar, which gives Astrea more the quality of a long-running, open-ended soap opera rather than a contained work of theme and variations, and add to the unwieldly bulkiness of the novel. D’Urfé was self-conscious of its size and often has his narrators apologize and insist they are keeping their stories as short as possible, but only his death halted the massive flow of words. In this regard, it must be admitted, d’Urfé is typically French: Astrea is actually shorter than such medieval French novels as the Lancelot-Grail and Perceforest, though after the 17th-century fad for giganticism d’Urfé inspired faded, French writers would return to this supersizing tendency with their immense romans-fleuves (literally “river novels”), like Balzac’s and Zola’s multivolume fiction cycles, Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and later cycles by Roger Martin du Gard and Jules Romains. Jacques Roubaud’s recent “great fire of London” cycle occupies six volumes, or “branches,” harking back to those medieval meganovels.
On the other hand, Astrea’s interpolated tales are much better integrated into the text than those in Don Quixote or earlier pastoral novels; as the fearsomely monikered Edward Baron Turk notes, “d’Urfé enormously advanced the structural form of the modern French novel by synthesizing the juxtaposed commentaries of discrete stories in works like the Heptaméron with the stories themselves. . . .”10 The reader blessed with an elephant’s memory watches in amazement as dozens of far-flung stories eventually link up, as characters from one subplot interact with those from another narrated many hundreds of pages earlier, resulting in an elaborate construction not unlike the garden described early in part 1, “which was supplied with all the rarities the place allowed, fountains and terraces, and lanes and bowers, nothing having been left out that artifice could add. On leaving this place one entered a large wood with various kinds of trees; in one quarter there were nut-trees, which all together formed such a graceful labyrinth that even though the paths twisted and led into each other in the most confusing way, they were still delightful because of the shade” (28–29). Indeed, readers found Astrea so delightful “it was read aloud in fashionable gatherings, sometimes attended by nobles dressed as one or another of the characters,” translator Rendall informs us (xv). But in the same way blood in the water attracts sharks, its bloodless abstractions and artificiality quickly attracted satirists.
The Extravagant Shepherd by Charles Sorel (1597?–1674) was published the same year as volume 4 of Astrea (1627) and mocks it and other pastoral novels, hoping to put an end to such productions. Like many satirists, Sorel was a reformer at heart. A Parisian bourgeois with pretensions to nobility, he felt most things needed radical improvement: manners, morals, education, the censorship imposed by totalitarian Cardinal Richelieu in the 1620s, the French Academy—which was established in 1635 at Richelieu’s suggestion but never invited Sorel to join—and, later in life, the way history and science were written. As a later French novelist put it, “had he been called to counsel at the Creation, we should have seen things very unlike what they are at present.”11 But as a young man, he first took on the French novel; as one critic dramatically puts it, “Sorel’s most enduring concern was the reform of literature which required as a first step the destruction of the contemporary novel” (Suozzo, 11).
The most popular genres when Sorel was growing up were the roman sentimental—flowery romance novels—and pulp fiction exploiting “monstrous crimes and unnatural passions often based on news items.”12 Novels of chivalry were still popular, as were romantic adventure stories, most of them conventional, derivative works. (The latter were predictable imitations of ancient Greek novels, many of which had been translated into French by this time.) Young Sorel was much more impressed by Cervantes’ iconoclastic approach to fiction, especially the realism in the Exemplary Stories, and began his own quixotic quest to reform French fiction by ridiculing its current modes. He first went after the romantic adventure novel in his own Histoire amoreuse de Cleagenor et de Doristée (The Romance of Cleagenor and Doristée, 1621). Sorel throws in all the staples of such fiction—parental disapproval, abduction, disguises, attempted rape—but pushes them to ludicrous lengths, especially the use of countless coincidences and disguises (probably a swipe at the disguise-heavy Astrea). But among his innovations are a rational outlook (no supernatural or miraculous elements) and a wider register of language. Unlike Astrea, where everyone sounds alike, Sorel’s peasants talk like peasants; base seducers wilt the appeal of flowery language; and he uses a playful, punning style that mocks the humorless, stilted manner of his models.
He followed this with what one critic has called “an experiment in formal and thematic variation” (Verdier 21). Le Palais d’Angelie (1622) is a lengthy frame-tale novel—enclosing five novellas narrated over five days at Angelie’s country-house outside Paris—with a higher degree of interaction between the frame and the tales than usual in that genre. They are very contemporary and realistic, both in circumstantial detail and setting, and the five novellas vary in formal presentation. (One is even incomplete, and there are other uncertainties left unanswered.) Next, inspired by Cervantes’ Spanish novellas, Sorel published Les Nouvelles françoises (French Novellas, 1623). As the title indicates, this was Sorel’s attempt to establish a distinctly French kind of fiction: it would be more realistic in setting and language, seek a middle ground between high-flown romances and bawdy Boccaccian tales, give French names (rather than Greek) to its characters, challenge hidebound social hierarchies and traditional values, and in Sorel’s case would feature “the omniscient narrator’s frequent intrusions within the stories themselves to explain their unconventional aspects” (Verdier, 25). Most literary historians agree the qualities that define the “classic” French novel beginning with Lafayette’s Princess de Clèves (1678) originated with Sorel’s innovations in this collection.
In late 1622 or early 1623, Sorel also published the first of the two novels that earn him a privileged place in the history of innovative fiction. The Comical History of Francion (Histoire comique de Francion), a 700-page “comic novel”: a new genre that Sorel felt was needed to supplant the overly serious French fiction of the time. Francion is the anti-Astrea: it is bawdy where Astrea is chaste, set mostly in cities rather than the country, realistic rather than idealistic, modern rather than historical, and linguistically diverse rather than consistently formal. Their literary inspirations couldn’t be more different: while d’Urfé traveled the high road of Greek romances, novels of chivalry, pastorals, and idealistic philosophy, Sorel took the low road of Roman satires (the protagonist’s servant is named Petronius), medieval jestbooks, racy tales from the Decameron, carnivalesque satires like Solomon and Marcolf and Gargantua and Pantagruel (which earns Sorel a few pages in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World [103–5]), Spanish picaresque novels (Lazarillo and Guzman are name-checked in the text), and libertine philosophy. I don’t have to tell you which is more fun to read.
Francion’s unusual publication history forced Sorel to revise his novel into a more complex work than he originally intended. The first edition (only a single copy of which survives) consisted of seven chapters, breaking off mid-incident, and was published anonymously because of its near-pornographic content and language. After Richelieu clamped down on the libertines, Sorel in 1626 published an expanded edition of 11 chapters, cleaning the X-rated first edition up to an R-rated work, and prefacing chapters with commentary on his aesthetics. Seven years later, Sorel added the lengthy 12th and final chapter for a definitive edition called La Vraye [True] histoire comique de Francion, working the prefatory material into the body of the text, and ascribing the revised work to a minor novelist named Nicolas Moulinet du Parc, who had died a decade earlier. Sorel pretends du Parc got tired of writing sappy romances for the ladies and decided to write a big, bawdy picaresque. (Sorel nev
er did acknowledge the novel as his own, though everyone knew.) What began as a youthful farce ended up as a middle-aged concession to maturity.
Rather than beginning with the protagonist’s birth and upbringing, as in most picaresques, Francion’s opening pages are mystifying but hilarious. Outside his castle walls, an old aristocrat is conducting a nighttime magic ritual to restore his sexual potency while his sexy young wife Laurette awaits a visit by 20-something Francion, who had conned the cuckold into following his magic recipe to get him out of the way. But as he climbs the ladder to Laurette’s room, our hero is knocked unconscious by some thieves who happen to be burglarizing the castle—their inside man is dressed like a servant girl—and Laurette has sex instead with one of the burglars; more hijinks ensue until the transvestite servant “girl” gets hung upside-down on the castle wall with his genitals exposed to the villagers the next morning, when the aristocrat is found tied to a tree, convinced that devils attacked him. Not until the second half of the chapter does the reader learn from Francion how all this came about, a narrative strategy Sorel pursues throughout the novel—mystification followed by clarification—enacting at a formal level Francion’s growth as a person. As critic Andrew G. Suozzo notes, “The whole movement of the novel, thanks to its dramatic opening, becomes one of progress from ignorance and illusion to a clear, nearly cynical understanding of the world” (14). In the second chapter, Francion meets an old woman who provides further background: as she tells the long story of her life as a pícara, we learn she happens to be the bawd who raised Laurette to be a whorish gold-digger. At the same time Francion meets a nobleman who invites him to recuperate at his castle in Burgundy. Not until chapter 3 does Francion take control of the narrative, first recounting an extraordinary dream revealing his sexual anxieties before launching into the story of his own life—another instance of mystification followed by clarification.