by Steven Moore
Set in and around Le Mans in the 1650s—right there a major departure from the ancient settings of the heroic novels—The Comic Novel alternates between the daily lives of the touring actors and the gradual unfolding of their romantic histories. The troupe attracts a variety of spectators and supporters, most importantly a dwarfish country lawyer named Ragotin, who decides to fall in love with one of the actresses—he’s not sure which, he just wants to fall in love as in a novel—and later applies to join the troupe. Pretentious Ragotin is the butt of much of the novel’s cruel comedy, an outrageous series of skits involving overturned chamberpots, uncooperative horses, fights in the dark, practical jokes, loss of clothing, mishaps with farmyard animals (which wander through the inns the troupe stays at), and more shenanigans than a Three Stooges marathon. Scarron avoids Sorel’s bawdiness, though during one mêlée at an inn, two of the actors take advantage of the confusion: “Destiny, having closed with a lusty wench and tucked up her smock, gave her a thousand slaps on the buttocks; Olive, who saw the company pleased with it, did the same to the other maids.”38 The troupe stages ramshackle but well-received versions of plays by leading dramatists of the time like Corneille, Tristan l’Hermite, and Scarron’s own Dom Japhet d’Arménie (1653), which is interrupted by a brawl. When not performing, the “strollers” tell their local sponsors the stories of their lives, especially those of the company’s allegorically stage-named principals, Destiny and Star. Posing as brother and sister, they are in truth a romantically involved couple with a complicated backstory and on the run from a nemesis named Saldagne, who eventually catches up with them and kidnaps Star. In this French provincial adaptation of the abduction topos of the roman héroïque, Destiny pursues his Star as heroically as Oroondates or Cyrus, rescues her, and marries her at the end.39 In turn, the locals entertain the actors with some Spanish novellas in translation, embedded like the numerous histoires in the heroic novels. Thus The Comic Novel is not so much a repudiation of that genre as a successful attempt to streamline and modernize it, to modulate from fanciful romance to realistic novel, all in a relatively compact 460 pages.
The freshest thing about The Comic Novel is Scarron’s playful attitude toward the conventions of fiction. More raconteur than narrator, he often interrupts his story to defend his metaphors and narrative choices from anticipated criticism, to make sarcastic asides, examine proverbs and clichés, or feign difficulty writing his novel. In the first chapter, for example, in which he begins with highfalutin diction (“Bright Phoebus had already performed above half his career . . .”) before dropping the act (“To speak more like a man, and in plainer terms, it was betwixt five and six of the clock”), he compares an actor carrying a bass fiddle on his back to “a great tortoise walking upon his hind feet,” then pauses to defend his untraditional simile: “Some critic or other will perhaps find fault with the comparison, by reason of the disproportion between that creature and a man; but I speak of those great tortoises that are to be found in the Indies; and besides, I make bold to use the simile upon my own authority” (1.1) Boldly claiming “my own authority” over that of classical writers, Scarron fired one of the first shots in the battle between the ancients and moderns that would rage among the French and English literati over the next half century. In the preface to Ibrahim, Scudéry adviced novelists to follow the rules set by Heliodorus and other classical authors, but Scarron is claiming the freedom to rewrite or ignore the rules. “A man of my parts may make new rules whenever he pleases,” Ragotin boasts (1.10). The narrator pretends he’s making it up as he goes along, ending the short first chapter by noting “whilst the hungry beasts were feeding, the author rested a while, and bethought himself what he should say in the next chapter.” Similarly, he begins 1.18: “I made the foregoing chapter a little of the shortest; perhaps this will prove somewhat longer; however, I am not sure of it; but we shall see.” In between these two instances of playing dumb, Scarron makes a similar demurral that nonetheless hints he knows what he’s doing:
I am too much a man of honour not to advertise the courteous reader that if he be offended at all the silly trifles he has already found in this book, he will do well not to go on with the reading of it; for upon my conscience, he must expect nothing else, although the volume should swell to the bigness of that of Cyrus the Great: and if from what he has read he doubts what will follow, perhaps I am in the same quandary as well as he. For one chapter draws on another, and I do with my book as some do with their horses, putting the bridle on their necks and trusting to their good conduct. But perhaps I have a fixed design, and without filling my chapters with examples for imitation, shall instruct with delight after the same manner as a drunken man creates in us an aversion for drunkenness, and yet may sometimes divert us with his merry impertinence. Let us end this moral reflection and return to our strollers, whom we left in the inn. (1.12, my italics)
In his classic essay on early self-conscious narrators, Wayne C. Booth identifies “this claim to method in madness” as the first of its kind (170). Early critics took the uncertain narrator at his word and claimed The Comic Novel was an improvised, episodic narrative lacking structure, though more recent critics have demonstrated that sly Scarron knew exactly what he was doing and plotted his novel with care. “Although Scarron tells the reader over and over again that there is no order in his work,” Frederick de Armas writes, “the balance and parallelism which exist in the different supporting characters of the novel are again proof that this simplicity and lack of order are only apparent, as in life, and the reader must order events in fiction, as Scarron orders them from life.”40
Throughout, the narrator explains his methods and choices, saying of one character, “I could relate a thousand curious stories about her, which I pass by for fear of being tedious” (1.4), and of the acting profession, “There are a great many more things to be said upon this subject, but we must use them, and place them in several stations, for variety’s sake” (1.8). Distancing himself from old-fashioned narrators, he writes of Ragotin, “Although an exact historian would now think himself obliged to tell all the most important particulars of this man’s life, and the places wherein they happened, yet shall not I be very certain in what part of our hemisphere this little hovel of Ragotin’s stood, whither he was carrying his brethren that were to be, being not yet admitted of their strolling order. It shall suffice then to inform you that is was on this side the Ganges, and not very far off from Sillé le Guillaume” (2.16) Following in the dusty footsteps of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which Scarron greatly admired, he indulges in flippant chapter headings, such as those for 1.11 (“Which Contains What You’ll Find If You’ll but Take the Pains to Read It”) and 2.27 (“Which Has No Occasion for a Title”). Upstaging Don Quixote’s metafictional mystification at discovering a novel about himself in a bookstore, Scarron claims ignorance of what happened next after one of Ragotin’s misadventures with some peasants, learning of the sequel only when the novel we are reading was already at the printers:
The discreet reader may perhaps have a desire to know what these fellows would have had with Ragotin, and how they came to do nothing to him, but which I could not pretend to satisfy him in had it not come to my knowledge by chance. A priest of the Lower Mayne, a little melancholy mad, having been brought up to Paris by a suit of law, during the time his cause was preparing for a hearing would needs spend his time in printing some whimsical fancies of his own on the Revelation. He was so exceeding fertile in chimeras, and always so fond of his last productions, that he still blotted out the former, whereby his printers were forced the correct the same sheet at least twenty times over. This made them so mad that for every sheet he was obliged to look out for a new printer, till at last he happened on the person that printed this present romance, wherein he chanced to light upon some leaves which mentioned this same adventure I have told you. This priest knew more of the story than I who wrote it, having it seems been informed from the peasants’ own mouths who had carried away Ragotin
what had been the occasional of their so doing, which I could not possibly have come to the knowledge of. He saw at first dash wherein my relation was defective, and acquainted my printer therewith, who was extremely surprised at the information, thinking with the rest of the world that my romance had only been a fabulous story of my own invention. Supposing it might be of some service to me to put me in the right, my printer desired he would come and give me a visit, which he readily consented to. Then did I learn . . . [author narrates the rest of Ragotin’s adventure]. These memoirs I had from this priest pleased me extremely and, I must own, did me no ordinary service; in return I thought I made him sufficient recompense by advising him not to proceed any farther in the publishing of his Ridiculous Visionary Comment. (2.16)
Taken literally, this episode would call into question the book’s status as fiction and cast suspicion on the reliability of the narrator (willing to take a religious kook’s relation for truth), but of course every reader knows Scarron is having fun, treating the novel genre more like a toy than an antique.
Unlike Sorel, Scarron wasn’t out to destroy the novel, just nudge it in a different direction. His story is filled with characters who like to read and discuss novels, one of whom (speaking for Scarron) believes
nothing could be more diverting than our modern romances; that the French alone knew how to write good ones; however, that the Spaniards had a peculiar talent to compose little stories, which they called novelas, which are more useful, and more probable patterns for us to follow, than those imaginary heroes of antiquity, who grow oftentimes tedious and troublesome by being over-civil and over-virtuous. In short, that those examples which may be imitated are at least as beneficial as those that exceed all probability and belief; from all which he concluded that, if a man could write as good novels in French as those of Miguel de Cervantes, they would soon be as much in vogue as ever heroic romances have been. (1.21, “Which Perhaps Will Not Be Found Very Entertaining”)
To that end, Scarron inserted six novellas into his narrative, adapted from collections by Alonso de Castillo Solórzano and María de Zayas. They are typical adventures of romantic intrigue, more gimmicky than the romanesque story of Destiny and Star, which unfolds in installments instead of as stand-alone recital pieces, but nevertheless thematically related to the larger concerns of The Comic Novel. Scarron wasn’t alone in advocating Spanish novellas—in the 1650s, others published French imitations of them—and these shorter, more realistic works did indeed shape later 17th-century French fiction. But his greatest influence was on 18th-century comic English novelists like Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, all of whom acknowledged his example. Anyone who remembers Lady Booby’s attempted seduction of Joseph Andrews will gag with déjà vu when reading the gamey episode in The Comic Novel in which short, fat Madame Bouvillon “turned towards Destiny, giving him to understand by her large fiery cheeks and little sparkling eyes what sport she had in mind to be at; then she proceeded to take off her handkerchief from her neck and thereby discovered to her lover at least 10 pounds of exuberant flesh; that is to say, near the third part of her bosom, the rest being distributed in two equal portions under her armpits” (2.10).41 And Scarron’s comparison of trusting his narrative to find its way like his horse will be echoed in Tristram Shandy. Beyond specific incidents, however, it is Scarron’s realistic details, farcical situations, “merry impertinence,” and metafictional musings on writing that appealed to later novelists—German and French, as well as English—an appeal that is as fresh today as it was in their time.42
Among the others publishing French-style Spanish novellas in the 1650s was Scarron’s fellow salon habitué Jean Regnault de Segrais (1642–1701), who had published a 4-volume heroic romance (Bérénice, 1648–51) but was better known as the secretary to the “Grand Mademoiselle,” the duchess of Montpensier (1627–93), whose dozen or more broken engagements, beginning at age 5, provide a running joke in Dugan’s Precious Lies of Madeleine de Scudéry. In 1656 Segrais published Les Nouvelles françaises (French Novellas), an anthology-novel clearly modeled on the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, Montpensier’s great-great-grandmother. What’s significant about the book is not the half-dozen novellas it contains—with one exception, old-fashioned romantic intrigues—but the frame tale.43
At the end of the Fronde, rebellious Princess Aurélie (= Montpensier) retreats with five fellow frondeuses to her château and they decide to rebel instead against current fiction by telling and discussing stories, which the princess’s secretary (= Segrais) will record. (Based on this arrangement, DeJean proposes that Montpensier is the real author of Les Nouvelles françaises, and Segrais only her editor. This is plausible given the reluctance of Frenchwomen to publish under their own names, as in Scudéry’s case; in fact, decades later Segrais’s name would appear on the title pages of Madame de Lafayette’s novels.) As in other critifictions (see p. 580 of my previous volume), the ladies begin by discussing recent romances from Astrea to Artamène, dismissing them as passé; what is needed, as both Sorel and Scarron proposed, were shorter, realistic fictions set in modern times and using French names. Princess Aurélie narrates the first novella, and commenting on a certain action in it afterward with her friends, she makes a crucial distinction that sets a new course for French fiction:
We have undertaken to recount things as they are, and not as they ought to be: And this seems to me to be the difference between the roman [heroic novel] and the nouvelle [novel]; that the heroic novel writes about things as propriety dictates, and in the style of a poet; but the new novel must be more historical, and try to give images of things as we see them occur ordinarily, instead of as our imagination constructs them.
“Her program proved so revolutionary,” DeJean writes of Montpensier/Aurélie, that the repurposing of fiction here and in the novel’s prologue “has been commonly referred to as the first manifesto of the modern French novel and considered”—along with Scudéry’s preface to Ibrahim and Huet’s History of Romances—“one of the three major seventeenth-century theoretical statements on prose fiction” (54).
Unfortunately, as DeJean admits, the novellas the ladies tell don’t live up to the hype. “In fact, Aurélie’s story of a German gentleman disguised as a lady-in-waiting to his mistress, while it is brief and has a contemporary setting, is as incredible as any tale from Artamène” (54–55). Donovan says most of the other novellas are “flat stereotypical examples of the genre,” and that only “one replicates the comic realism emerging in Scarron and others at the time” (118). And even that one (“Honorine”), according to Segrais’s modern editor, is derived from one of the stories in Sorel’s Nouvelles françoises of 1623.
As I said, Segrais was a friend of Scarron, and Montpensier visited him and gave him financial support. Everyone liked Scarron; crippled and 42, he even inspired a beautiful 16-year-old to marry him. (She appears as Lyriane in Clelia but achieved greater fame after her husband’s death as Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s mistress and second wife.) Everyone, that is, but Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55), the big-nosed satirist and gay blade. They had been friends up until the Fronde, and both initially supported the rebels, but opportunistic Cyrano flipflopped to support Mazarin and the king’s party, then wrote a broadside mocking his friend’s progressive rheumatism in the grossest terms: “People say that for more than 10 years nature has twisted his neck without being able to strangle him. His body is a rotten gallows where the Devil has hung a soul and in animating this fetid and rotting cadaver, Heaven wishes to discard his soul on the dung heap before his death” (quoted/translated by Phelps, 146). Critics sympathetic to Cyrano write off these and similar letters as “little more than exercises in outrageous style” (Harth, 201), so we’ll give him a pass. Around the same time Scarron began writing his Comic Novel, Cyrano began a different kind of comic novel, an early excursion into science fiction entitled The Other World (L’Autre monde). Too radical to be published while Cyrano was alive, “his manuscript circled
in samizdat among the underground intelligentsia of his day,” as his most recent English translator notes (Brown, xiii). Like Scarron’s, it’s a three-part novel missing its final third; the first and most popular part, in which the narrator travels to the moon and back, was published posthumously (and in censored form) in 1657; the second, in which he journeys to the sun, appeared in 1662; the third, a journey to the stars, went missing after Cyrano’s mysterious death and, unlike the manuscript for part 1, has never been recovered.44
The Other World is essentially a vehicle for Cyrano’s libertine philosophy, a utopian fiction whereby he can mock conventional beliefs and propose rational alternatives. Gazing up at the moon one night and speculating about it with his friends, who believe in myths and old wives’ tales about the moon, narrator Drycona—his name, an anagram for “Cyrano d’,” isn’t supplied until part 2—suggests the moon is an inhabited world like Earth, which serves as its moon. This earns his friends’ ridicule, even though Drycona cites recent speculations by Copernicus and Kepler, the first of many conflicts in the novel between modern, scientific thinking and premodern myths and superstitions. Determined to prove his thesis, and comparing himself to Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, Drycona first invents a kind of hot-air balloon powered by bottles of dew, which lifts him into the sky as the dew evaporates. This carries him from the suburbs of Paris to New France (Canada), where he is first attacked by Indians then taken by French soldiers to Quebec’s viceroy, with whom he discusses astronomy. (The Jesuit fathers are convinced he’s a sorcerer.) He argues that people (especially Catholics) cling to the idea that the earth is the center of the universe only because of “the intolerable pride of human beings,” another recurrent theme in The Other World, especially part 2.45 Drycona builds another flying machine, which crashes soon after takeoff; the soldiers who recover it strap rockets to it for a fireworks display, and Drycona jumps in just as they light the fuse and gets blasted into space, and after a few days crash-lands on the moon.