by Steven Moore
You have now all; it was in my design to tell you of the diverse fortunes of the shepherd Lysis, according to the notes I had of them from Philiris and Clarimond, who it seems had not leisure to put them into order. Lysis, having read some part of this, was nothing troubled to see his adventures made public because he believes, such as they are, they will be a testimony of the affection he ever bore Charite; and that besides, it will be an example for youth not to regulate their lives according to those impertinences [in novels] which are contrary to the order of the world. But because I speak to you of him as one that is still alive, I am in doubt whether many who shall read his history may not be guilty of a curiosity to go to Brie to see if they can find that so famous Lysis. Wherefore I give them notice that henceforth they shall not need take the pains, and that possibly they may not find him, because he is so changed that he hath left off that very name he was called when he was a shepherd. And besides, why may they not distrust me? What know they whether I have not related a fable to them instead of a true history, or that I have not, to disguise things, and not discover [reveal] the persons I have spoken of, as indeed I have called them by other than their ordinary names, and mistaken Brie for some other province? (14)
Thus we have a “true history” allegedly worked up from notes by two fictional characters, and vetted by the protagonist, which also pretends to be the work of the fictitious protagonist of Francion; like it, The Extravagant Shepherd was published anonymously, leaving the identity of the author in doubt, but when it was reprinted as The Anti-Romance it was attributed to an editor named Jean de La Lande, the equivalent of Cervantes’ Cide Hamete Benengeli. Add its hundreds of pages of autocriticism and its nouveau roman title, and Sorel’s antinovel feels even more postmodern than Don Quixote. More than anyone, Sorel reminds me of the late Gilbert Sorrentino, who not only wrote a mock pastoral himself (Blue Pastoral) but who devoted himself to exposing bad writing and literary pretension in his many novels, having as much vicious fun with the art versus life dichotomy as Sorel did. Genette notes “the dryness and meanness of his tone” (Palimpsests, 151), another trait Sorel shares with his sardonic 20th-century counterpart.
The Extravagant Shepherd was a popular success, and evidently did its job: no pastoral novels of note were written after it. (The impossibility of surpassing Astrea was probably a bigger factor.) Having plowed under the pastoral, however, Sorel seems to have been at a loss what to do next. Around this time he compiled a fictional miscellany entitled La Maison des jeux (The House of Games), which was not published until 1642. Within this frame-tale narrative a group gathers to play a series of games with complicated rules; Verdier’s account of it (75–83) makes it sound interesting, like something a member of OuLiPo might turn out.18 In 1640 he published a bizarre philosophical fable entitled La Solitude, about a character on a mystic quest for truth that anticipates both Rousseau’s natural philosophy and science fiction: Verdier claims the novel predicts “airplanes, electric light bulbs, and motion pictures!” (102). Like La Maison des jeux it was never translated into English, nor was Polyandre, a realistic novel about the Parisian bourgeoisie. Sorel published the first two parts in 1648, anonymously as usual, but abandoned both it and fiction altogether after that, devoting himself instead to compiling reference books for the remainder of his life. This is a shame, according to Verdier, who considers Polyandre “significant theoretically as the first systemic attempt at a novel of manners in France,” though she adds, “Like so many experimental works, it is at times a rather laborious illustration of a theoretical position” (84). Nonetheless, Sorel is an unacknowledged pioneer of many trends in later fiction, and of all the French novelists of the 17th century he is the one most deserving of rehabilitation in the 21st.
Sorel’s call for greater verisimilitude and more middle-class characters in fiction went unheard. The predominant genre of French fiction from around 1630 to 1660 was the “heroic novel”: vast, multivolume works of romance and adventure featuring privileged mortals dashing from one daring exploit to the next.19 In fact, Sorel may have been the first to use the term roman héroïque (near the end of La Maison des jeux), which Bannister defines as “a prose epic based on history and offering a reflection of galant society” (5). But he cautions that few of these novels “have anything to offer in the way of creative imagination and convincing characterization,” and are useful mostly for “what they can tell us about the ideological and ethical climate of seventeenth-century France, for the novel reflects, possibly better than other genres, the ideological consciousness of the period” (2). Most were churned out by authors responding to a market, not to their muse, and were ostensibly intended for aristocrats displaying “extraordinary virtue” (as a character in one of them defines “heroic”),20 but mostly read by the idle rich, who called them “long-term novels” (les romans de longue haleine) because they took so long to read. (“Long-winded novels” is the preferred translation of impatient critics.) The best were translated into English for Francophiles, but they dated quickly; by the 1660s they were considered old hat, and looking back a century later, English novelist Clara Reeve dismissed them as relics of a bygone era: “These were the books that pleased our grandmothers, whose patience in wading through such tremendous volumes may raise our surprise: for to us they appear dull, heavy, and uninteresting” (The Progress of Romance, evening 5). “[T]o enjoy them now,” Jacques Barzun wrote in 2000, “one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases” (340). But (to alter Barzun’s geological metaphor) these gigantic novels form a mountain range in the middle of 17th-century French fiction that must be scaled before reaching the more interesting novels on the other side. We’ll do some skipping, as Barzun advises.
Heroic novels were mongrels sired by (1) French translations of ancient Greek romances, especially Heliodorus’s influential Ethiopian Story and Barclay’s modernization of the genre in Argenis; (2) chivalric romances like the long-running Amadis cycle; and (3) pastorals like Astrea. They took their melodramatic plots from the first, the concept of a hero as a crusading superman from the second, and the idealization of love and the use of interpolated tales from the third. Before this new genre bulked up, a few shorter works showed the way. Jean Desmarets’s Ariana (L’Ariane, 1632)—which at a mere 328 pages (in the anonymous English translation of 1636) is a weakling compared to the heroic novels that followed—is set amidst Nero’s Christian persecutions in 1st-century Rome. Two boys from Syracuse visit Rome to see the big city and eventually fall in love with two Roman virgins: the heroic Mélinte with noble Ariane, and his Hylas-like wingman Palamède with her maid Epicharis. They try to avoid persecution from both Nero and Ariane’s uncle, but Mélinte differs from the protagonists of Greek romances by his eager participation in some grisly battle scenes. As in Astrea, the titular character often finds herself naked and/or in scandalous situations, the better (we presume) to contrast her Christian purity with pagan sensuality. Greek heroes were content to return home, marry their partners-in-adventure, and settle down, but Mélinte, forced to fight for his life near the end of the novel, scorns such complaisance, and in fact is grateful that the gods seem ready to end his life at the height of his heroic career: “If they refuse me an idle life, and ordain me to die now [that] there remains no more honor for me to acquire, ought I to complain to them for retiring me in the most illustrious period of my life?” (320). He beheads his foe and marries Ariane, but this gusto for glory and honor is what Desmarets grafted onto his more modest models, thereby creating the prototype for the heroic novel.
“Prepare yourself,” boasts the protagonist of the first extended-length heroic novel, “for the most incredible and the least to be hoped for adventure you are able to imagine.”21 Polexander is a 1,300-page novel composed over a 20-year period by a wealthy nobleman named Marin Le Roy, sieur de Gomberville (1600?–74). Making the mistake of publishing his early drafts, he brought out L’Exil de Polexandr
e et d’Ericlée in 1619 when he was still a teenager, expanded it for a 1629 edition, completely rewrote it for a two-volume edition published in 1632 simply as Polexandre, spent another five years rethinking and rewriting it for a five-volume edition in 1637, then reprinted it the following year with corrections and further revisions for the definitive edition, over half a million words long. It was a huge success, partly because of its novelties: much of it takes place at sea or on islands in the Atlantic, making it the first sea adventure in the history of the novel (a distinction usually given to The Pilot by James Fenimore Cooper [1823]);22 it is the first major novel to include scenes set in America and western Africa, creating a taste for exotica; and it is the first novel to take into account the unimaginable immensity of the world as a result of a century of exploration, displacing Europe as the center of the world (in the European mind) and fostering a multicultural attitude: heroes, virtuous maidens, and villains exist everywhere, from Peru to Timbuktu.
Polexander is the young king of the Canary Islands, which were considered the westernmost edge of the world at the time the novel is set (c. 1500). A noble-minded hero of the old school, Polexander is tormented by the memory of his encounter several years earlier with the child-queen of the Inaccessible Isle, Alcidiane. Sixteen at the time, Polexander had seen and fallen in love with her portrait, and then had been blown by a storm to her mysterious island, where he performed services for the queen that entitled him to seek her hand in marriage, which she resisted, reluctant to give up her independence. Leaving the island to pursue the abductor of Alcidiane’s confidante, Polexander could not find his way back to the uncharted island, and in the novel’s present—he’s now 21, Alcidiane 17—he roams the seas in search of his ideal. Like knights of old (at one point he is compared to Amadis), he is often diverted from his quest by calls for assistance to fight battles, to restore kingdoms to their rightful owners, to patch up relationships between noble-minded lovers, and to listen to the long, sad tales of heartbreak and betrayal of those he meets during the course of his adventures. (These secondary tales take up nearly 60 percent of the novel.) Eventually, he makes his way back to Alcidiane’s island, quells a Spanish invasion, and marries the independent young woman.
The novel opens with a literal cliffhanger: from the vantage point of a young Turk aboard a ship, we watch as two men atop a cliff, struggling for possession of two boxes, fall into the sea. Gradually, we learn the details: after they are rescued, one proves to be a pirate, the other a mute; the two boxes contain the heart and a confessional manuscript from a man who committed suicide after seeing a portrait of Alcidiane and realizing he could never possess her. (There seems to be several portraits of the beautiful queen in circulation, and Polexander is only one of many who falls for her image.) We later find out the young Turk is actually Polexander’s brother Iphidamante, and that all this is taking place on Ferro, the westernmost of the Canaries. This gradual revelation of details—a tactic that can be traced back to Heliodorus—is typical of Polexander: most characters are not named until several pages after they appear, or hundreds of pages if they are in disguise, like the androgynous Iphidamante, who masqueraded as a woman before disguising himself as a Turk. The novel is not narrated in linear fashion but is made up of a series of interpolated tales and digressions that jump around in time, gradually filling in the backstories and relationships of the large cast of characters. As a result, Polexander is a candidate, Thomas DiPiero proposes, for “what may be the most tortuous and labyrinthine narrative in all of French literature” (105). Unlike the characters in Astrea—which Gomberville admired and wrote a sequel to in his mid-twenties—characters rarely tell their own stories; they are narrated by a companion or servant, and often break off to be taken up by someone else from a different, sometimes contradictory viewpoint later in the long novel. Since the bulk of the novel is made up of these twice-told tales rather than an omniscient narrator’s account, the reader drifts along under a cloud of uncertainty, in the same boat as Polexander on his endless quest for an island whose location is uncertain, and like educated 17th-century Europeans who were unmoored from their old certainties after the existence of Americas was revealed, along with the sphericity of the globe and centrality of the sun.
One of the first interpolated tales concerns an Incan prince named Zalamtide, whom Polexander meets on a pirates’ island in the Atlantic. His long tale, told by another because he is too morose to talk, takes us from Peru through Panama (and a tribe of Amazon women) to Mexico, where he falls in love and loses Montezuma’s daughter, and consequently sinks into despair. This melancholy American and the suicide mentioned earlier set the tone for the entire novel: love is treated as a frustrating, disappointing ordeal, generated by superficial physical attraction (Alcidiane’s pinup) and encouraging men to waste their lives on fruitless romantic quests. Although Polexander marries Alcidiane on the final page, the novel is littered with romantic suicides, ex-lovers crippled by rejection and/or jealousy, and abused spouses. Even Polexander has to humiliate himself as an African slave to win Alcidiane’s hand, and by giving her hand the young feminist is giving up her much-loved liberty. Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more satisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable. Upon first landing upon the Inaccessible Isle, the 16-year-old Polexander is worried rather than excited at meeting his dreamgirl: “Know, my friend, that I am absolutely unworthy of Alcidiane’s chains, that the least of her slaves hath those qualities to which I can never pretend, and that fortune hath thrown me on these inaccessible coasts for no other end but to engage me in a despair which surpasseth the despair of all that have been unfortunate from the beginning of the world” (2.3). Another character asks “if love be not a dangerous thing, or rather a malediction which heaven in its anger pours down to chastise the sins of the earth. Certainly ’tis the greatest scourge it can inflict upon us” (2.4). But pursuing an ideal love is part of the job description for the protagonist of a French heroic novel, so Polexander never loses sight of this objective during his adventures on land and sea.
Gomberville chose the ocean for his mise-en-scène not only for its fresh plot possibilities—“a theater of prodigies and novelties,” he calls it (2.5)—but also for its metaphoric possibilities. Polexander “imput[es] the ordinary agitations of the winds and the sea to the cruelties of Fortune” (1.5), regards tempests and shipwrecks as symbols of his frustrated quest for Alcidiane’s love, and considers his bootless wanderings o’er the watery main as an apt metaphor for life. Occasionally our hero expresses confidence in a benevolent (Christian) Providence, but an unpredictable, uncontrollable (pagan) Fortune rules the world of Polexander, often personified by the senseless sea. Gomberville even uses typography to evoke the ocean: Edward Baron Turk, who has written the best book in English on Polexander, notes that it lacks normal paragraphing: “the words of the text [are] spread out to form an even surface” like the ocean itself (86), a clever union of form and content, and a ploy that shanghais readers into serving as crew on “that fatal ship [Polexander’s] after which we have been so long wandering” (4.5). Even Gomberville’s style resembles the gray wastes of the ocean. Turk describes it as “undeniably dull . . . monochromatic” (86), unrelieved by any “islets of verse” (84), a feature of most romantic adventures of the time. Gomberville had included some poetry in the 1619 version and was a published poet, but there are no poems to interrupt the monontonous surface of his ocean of prose, not even a sea shanty.
The one stylistic exception occurs at the end of part 1 when a slave of Alcidiane’s arrives at the pirates’ hideout by chance (one of way too many incredible coincidences in this novel). He shares with Polexander some pages from his queen’s diary, in which she struggles with her contradictory feelings for Polexander. Gomberville casts overboard his usual long, flowing sentences to replicate the hurried jottings of a lovesick teenage girl: “What could cause the stran
ge alteration I find in myself? Can I be sick or mad without knowing it? Within this little while I am ill wheresoever I am. If I walk I am presently weary. The places I delight in, I cannot now endure” (1.5). Transcribing a nightmare, she uses violent imagery to describe the man who loves her (recalling the dream of Astrea, another virgin scared of sex): “Cruel and pleasing enemy; dragon that hast the face of an infant; fair monster, content thee with my tears and with the blood that thy paws have drawn out of my breast. Give not over to rend it wider: What, are thou not yet glutted? Thou pullest out my heart, and thy nails instead of tearing it, covers it over with wounds that burn it.” On one page,“half blotted out” and resembling a passage from Tristam Shandy, the poor girl is reduced to sputtering in fragments, beginning with the last syllable of her tormentor’s name: