PLEASURE, SEDUCTION, AND AUTHORIAL IDENTITY IN CHARLES SOREL’S

LE BERGER EXTRAVAGANT

HOLLY TUCKER

Vanderbilt University, Department of French & Italian, Furman Hall 205, Nashville, TN 37235, USA

Abst rac t

In his preface the Le Berger extravagant (1627–1628), published in 1633 as L’Anti-Roman,Charles Sorel explains that he is working for the public good by composing a text thatmocks all others and that is, as a result, the “tombeau des romans, & des absurditez de laPoësie.” Sorel’s statement of the “otherness” of his text is complicated the fact that theAnti-Roman is more or less a studied duplication of the very texts it criticizes. In this article,I examine the role of pleasure in the ambivalent dynamic between roman and anti-roman.Using Barthes’s notions of pleasure and jouissance as a framework for the study, I considerthe implications of Sorel’s attempts to seduce the reader into his text by imitating the con-ventional novel’s perceived use of pleasure as a mask for vice. The double-layered natureof the narration poses particular challenges for interpretation because meaning becomessuspended in the murky space between “same” and “other,” between novel and anti-novel.Furthermore, the semantic ambiguities of this game of seduction confounds body and textto such a degree that the author’s own identity becomes lost itself in the imitative disguiseshe adopts. He becomes, like his text, multilayered, polysemous, uncertain.

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Ce lecteur, il faut que je le cherche (que je le drague).Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte1

Published between 1627 and 1628 and later re-edited between 1633 and1634 as L’Anti-Roman, Le Berger extravagant is a spirited mockery of whatthe author considers to be the “invraysemblances” of conventional fictionand has as its end goal the moral edification of its readers. As Sorel claimsin his preface to Le Berger extravagant: “Le desir que j’ay de travailler pourl’utilité publique m’a fait prendre le dessein de composer un livre qui semoquast des autres, & qui fust comme le tombeau des Romans, & des absur-ditez de la Poësie.”2 Sorel’s statement establishes the “otherness” of LeBerger extravagant by characterizing it as a work that calls into questionreceived fiction. By positioning “utilité” and “absurditez” as counterpoints,he suggests that this criticism is based primarily on the distinction betweenhis own text, which contributes to the edification of the reading public,and other, anterior texts that do not. He argues that because of their disre-gard for the “utilité publique,” these nonedifying forms of fiction shouldbe destroyed or at the very least censored.3

Neophilologus

84: 347–358, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The author’s intention of “entombing” conventional fiction is an essen-tial, and enduring, element of Sorelian discourse. For example, in his laterwork of literary criticism, De la connoissance des bons livres (1671), Sorelcatalogues the qualities of a good book with the purpose of protecting hisreaders from the dangers of “bad” ones. Although focusing on a diverserange of texts (grammars, scientific works, books of devotion, transla-tions, etc.), Sorel’s attention often turns to novels and poetry, which heconsiders to be especially dangerous for the reading public, and his primarycomplaint is that these works do nothing to contribute to the moral strengthof the reader: “Les Romans, les Poësies et tous les Ouvrages de plaisirpeuvent corrompre la jeunesse, ou la mettre au danger de perdre son temps.”4

His attack on the novel in particular is even more strongly worded; thesole purpose of the novel is ostensibly to incite licentiousness: “A quoydonc sont propres nos Romans? Leurs Auteurs nous estiment si credules,ou le sont tellement eux-mesmes, que de nous dire serieusement que leursLivres sont faits pour exciter à la Vertu. Mais ne doivent-ils plûtost exciterà toute sorte de vices, comme à l’amour impudique, à l’oisiveté, et à unabandonnement general aux Voluptez?” (125–126). Contributing to acommon argument against the novel,5 Sorel suggests here an equivalencebetween textual pleasure and sexual pleasure – or at the very least aneffect of contagion from the text to the imagination – which influencesthe reader to act in a manner that is contrary to norms of moral conduct.6

Filled with pleasurable stories that are seemingly benign, livres de plaisirmask a particularly corruptive message. For this reason, it is essential thatthe reader look behind the pleasurable image that this fiction projects inorder to reveal the pernicious message that lurks behind it:

Il faut s’informer premierement si le Livre dont il s’agist est sur un sujet legitime et permis,et s’il n’est point capable de troubler la bonne croyance par des propositions dangereuses. S’iln’est question que d’un Livre de plaisir, il faut voir si le poison n’y est point caché sous dedouces amorces, et si tout cela ne corrompt point les moeurs par de mauvais principes. (44)

In order to mitigate the dangerous influence of the livre de plaisir onthe reader, Sorel recognizes that he must make a similar attempt to seducethe reader into his text with the promise of pleasure. Describing the strategybehind the composition of Le Berger extravagant, Sorel explains thatfictions that are intended for the instruction of the reading public will gounnoticed if they do not make an effort to attract (“attirer”) the reader tothem:

Si j’eusse fait mon livre sans quelque poincte d’esprit, il n’eust point trouvé de lecteurs, &puis ayant à faire mespriser la Poësie & les Romans, non pas à des hommes graves qui lesmesprisent assez, mais à des jeunes gens qui n’ayment rien autre chose, il a falu que je mesois accomodé à leur humeur que j’aye escrit mon histoire d’un stile plus facetieux que lesremarques pour les attirer à m’écouter car si l’on se comportoit autrement envers eux, unAnge mesme ne trouveroit pas une audience favorable. (Rem, XIV: 801)7

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If even an “ange” could not lure readers to a serious text, Sorel explainsthat certainly he, too, would have little success. For this reason, he must usedivertissement as a type of travestissement. Employing pleasure in muchthe same way as the “dangerous” fiction the author criticizes, the authorthus fashions a type of disguise that is based on the fabrication of animage of the roman that is used to mask the underlying, and edifying,anti-roman. This process is made particularly explicit in Sorel’s directaddress to his readers in the second edition of Le Berger extravagant: “Ovous qui aimez la lecture des Histoires feintes! Vous ne sçavez commentl’on a peu faire pour en imiter les advantures de telle façon qu’elle vouspuissent plaire encore, & que pourtant cela soit avec une intention differ-ente de l’ordinaire” (1633, I: 3).

While Sorel clearly acknowledges that he imitates traditional fictionto attract readers, he also underscores that his imitation is essentially anarticulation of difference (“une intention differente de l’ordinaire”); hethus hints at a type of double-layered (text/subtext) configuration to hishistoire. As part of this process of differentiation, however, it is essentialthat the text, which seduces the reader by its initially reassuring and familiarimage, be deconstructed in order for the unfamiliar and, thus, potentiallyuncomfortable anti-roman to emerge.

Indeed, the entire plot of Le Berger extravagant is based on this gameof disguise, pleasure, revelation, and moral instruction. Deceived andseduced by the pleasurable stories of pastoral tradition, the Cervantineprotagonist, Lysis, functions as a type of virtual reader for Sorel.8 Anselmeand his companions disguise themselves as shepherds in order to repro-duce the fictional world that Lysis is expecting to find in the real world withthe hopes of dissuading him from his folly. As Anselme explains, thepurpose behind the masquerade is to allow Lysis to “se divertir” and, as aresult, “il se tirera de beaucoup d’erreurs” (I: 37–38). Throughout the text,however, Lysis is either unable, or unwilling, to see the errors of his ways.In the eighth book of Le Berger extravagant, Carmelin enters the “magician”Hircan’s room, which had been left unlocked. Exiting the room as quicklyas he entered it, he describes to Lysis the horrors that he found therein:“Ce Magicien a arraché la teste à quelqu’un de ses ennemys, & l’a enferméedans son cabinet pour contempler à son plaisir” (VIII: 282). A frightenedCarmelin then leads Lysis into the room, opens an armoire in which someonehad left the key, and reveals to his master several wigs and fake beards.Trying to calm Carmelin, Lysis tells his companion: “ne voy tu pas qu’iln’y a point là de teste, & qu’il n’y a que du poil? où sont les yeux, lenez, & les oreilles?” (VIII: 282). Almost suggesting that he is aware ofthe group’s deceptions, Lysis then reasons that they are, indeed, the costumesworn by the River gods and demands that Hircan explain why he has them.Although annoyed that he had been so careless not to lock the room andthe armoire, Hircan quickly explains that he had to remove the River gods’

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beards and hair in self-defense; they had tried to drown him, an explana-tion that appeases Lysis.

The open door and the armoire “où l’on avoit laissé la clef ” suggestthat Lysis and Carmelin are more or less free to discover on their ownthe group’s tricks, if they wish to do so. Although Lysis has, it seems, amoment of clarity in which he suspects that he has been duped,9 he prefersinstead to accept Hircan’s marvelous explanation. Eventually, however, inthe fourteenth book, the protagonist is given no option; the group is com-pelled to recount the major episodes of the novel in order to encourage Lysisto renounce his adherence to traditional fiction by showing him exactly howhe was deceived by both the texts he reads and by disguised companions.

According to Sorel, his over eight hundred pages of Remarques on LeBerger extravagant are the result of his awareness that like Lysis, readers,content with the pleasure the text offers them, will be equally unwillingto accept the plurivocity of his text. Sorel explains that this unwillingnessis due to pre-conceived expectations that render the reader blind to thevery possibility of a multi-voiced text: “Au premier bruit qui a couru qu’ils’estoit fait un livre facetieux, plusieurs l’ont voulu voir sans avoir autrepensee, sinon que cela les servoit bien rire, & j’en sçay beaucoup qui s’yfont trompez, ne considerant pas que j’ay dessein d’apporter plus de profitque de delectation” (Rem, I: 3).

The author’s assertion that the public is more interested in receivingpleasure than instruction can also be found in the anonymous text, LeJugement du Cid, composé par un Bourgeois de Paris, Marguillier de saParoisse (1637), which has generally been attributed to Sorel.10 In thispamphlet, the “bourgeois” Sorel claims to speak on behalf of “le peuplequi l’avoit [Le Cid] si tendrement aymé” (1). Although the author acknowl-edges that the play is, at least at times, invraysemblable, he praises it becauseit is above all “agréable” (5). Feigning ignorance of Aristotelian estheticsof tragedy – which constituted a central point of contention in the Querelledu Cid – Sorel states that “je n’ay jamais leu Aristote, & ne sçay pointles regles du theatre, mais je regle le merite des pieces selon le plaisirque j’y reçoy” (4). While Gabrielle Verdier argues convincingly that Sorel’sdiscussion of Le Cid is example of “his opposition to the codification ofliterature and language,”11 I would suggest that, in the context of the presentstudy, Sorel’s pamphlet might also be read as another type of tongue-in-cheek mockery of the “bourgeois” reader.

Sorel asserts that readers cannot make sense of a text that does not, insome way, resemble them. He explains in one of his frequent insults tohis readers that: “l’on sçait bien que les sots ne peuvent trouver icy quedes sottises que ce qui leur ressemble, & ne sçauroient s’y representer deschoses trop eloignees de leur esprit” (Rem, XIV: 804). The traditional romanhas meaning for a reader only insofar as it meets his expectations, and whenit does, the text becomes a reflection of the reader himself. The implica-

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tions of the text’s deceptive reflection of the reading subject are exploredin a scene in which Carmelin, Lysis’s companion, tells of his experiencesas an assistant to a pompous Bourgeois who commissioned a portrait ofhimself from a young painter (VII: 258–265). Pleased with the artist’s depic-tion of him as a virile soldier, the Bourgeois’s only criticism of the paintingis that its colours are not vibrant enough. To remedy the situation, the painterinstructs his client to buff the painting gently with a damp cloth, but suggeststhat he do so only when showing the portrait to others.

Not long after, the Bourgeois invites several of his friends over for dinnerand a showing of the portrait. Following the painter’s instructions, theBourgeois rubs the painting with a wet rag, causing the original portrait,which was in tempera, to be transformed from a representation of virilityto another one – in oil – of mocking cocuage: “Ce portraict changea toutà faict d’estat. L’on ne vid plus d’autre pennache sur le chapeau qu’une pairede cornes; au lieu de bottes, il y avoit des guestres de paysan, & un compaspendoit à la ceinture au lieu d’espee, & un rabor sur la table au lieu ducasque & des gantelets” (VIII: 263).12

In her Le Procès du roman: Ecriture et contrefaçon chez Charles Sorel,Martine Debaisieux uses the Bourgeois portrait scene to lay the groundworkfor her analysis of anamorphism in Sorel’s histoire comique, a conceptthat is fundamental to her study. She explains that “masquant une image parune autre, l’anamorphose met ainsi en question la stabilité de la représen-tation ou en d’autres termes, à cette époque qui favorise les figuresrhétoriques exprimant l’ambiguïté, l’univocité du signifiant.”13 Accordingto Debaisieux, the reader of such ambivalent texts plays a fundamentalrole in the construction of meaning: “comme ce qui apparaît vise à occulterun sens autre, le spectateur (ou le lecteur) est appelé à chercher cet enversen redistribuant les figures de l’image (ou du discours)” (13). Indeed, sig-nificant semantic uncertainty occurs precisely when the Bourgeois“redistributes” the image(s) by rubbing the painting with the rag. As thefirst layer is deconstructed to produce the second one, neither image isfully formed. Meaning is rendered plural, de-centered, uncertain; it is sus-pended between the two layers of representation. As a result, the spectatoror reader may freely interpret the portraits as he pleases.

This scene shares important affinities with the Roland Barthes’ contrastbetween textes de plaisir and textes de jouissance in his essay on textualeroticism, Le Plaisir du texte. Although Barthes himself admits thesomewhat vague distinction between the two terms,14 a text of pleasuremight be considered as one that is “comfortable” – one that disrupts neitherthe reader nor the received ideology that he brings to the text. The textede jouissance,15 on the other hand, is unsettling and calls into questionthe stability of all that the reader holds dear: the world around him, thelanguage by means of which he manoeuvres within that world, and con-sequently, his reassuring image of himself.16 For Barthes, the “crisis” that

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the texte de jouissance initiates forces a critical rethinking of tradition,and this rethinking characterizes what he calls the “avant-garde” text.However, Barthes stresses that jouissance is not simply the counterpointof tradition, of plaisir. Jouissance is found instead in the murky fissurebetween the “classical” texte de plaisir and the “avant-garde”:

Deux bords sont tracés, un bord sage, conforme, plagiaire (il s’agit de copier la langue dansson état canonique, tel qu’il a été fixé par l’école, le bon usage, la littérature, la culture) etun autre bord mobile, vide (apte à prendre n’importe quels contours), qui n’est jamais quele lieu de son effet. . . . La culture ni sa destruction ne sont érotiques; c’est la faille del’une et de l’autre qui le devient. (15)

Barthes argues that without the ambiguity that is found in the seambetween tradition and its destruction, the text would be “sans fécondité, sansproductivité, un texte stérile” (14–15). Entirely scriptible (“ce qui peutêtre aujourd’hui écrit (ré-écrit)”),17 this faille reveals instead the rich andlimitless polysemy of language, which requires the reader to take on therole of active negotiator of meaning. In his earlier study, Le Degré zérode la littérature, Barthes describes the pre-classical period in similar termsof semantic plurality. While the “classical” (1650–1850) refers to the nor-mative or “universal” status of language that renders writing transparent(language used solely as a vehicle for expression), the as-yet-unstablestructure of language during the “pre-classical” mode affords of momentof “euphoric freedom” from convention. Barthes explains that “il y a dansla Littérature préclassique, l’apparence d’une pluralité des écritures,” whichgives it “l’allure même de la nuance et l’euphorie d’une liberté” (Degré zéro169).

When placed in the context of jouissance, this notion of anamorphismin Sorel’s decidedly “pre-classical” text is still more revealing. In the portraitscene, the painter responded to the bourgeois’s desire for pleasure – boththe pleasure of seeing his self-image confirmed and the pleasure of socialpretence that the portrait provided – and teased him into a collaboration that,given the stress on dampness and rubbing, borders on the erotic. LikeCarmelin’s Bourgeois who “rearranges” the layers of the portrait, it is pre-cisely the reader’s traversée between the image that the text projects (textede plaisir) and its essence (texte de jouissance) that moves him in theBarthesian sense from passive “consommateur” to active “producteur” oftexts and meaning (Barthes, S/Z 558).

Despite the “euphoric freedom” (Degré zéro 169) on which the com-position of this scene appears to be based, it is nonetheless essential to recallthat anamorphism, which is closely linked to the field of optics, is basedon perspective. To make sense of the distorted, anamorphic image, theobserver must discover the specific angle at which the image is to beviewed.18 For example, once fully revealed, the portrait of the cocu remindsthe reader that the artist’s initial portrait of the valiant soldier can be read

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only in one way – as a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the egotistical Bourgeois.As this suggests, to interpret accurately the portrait of the valiant soldier,the reader must “view” it ironically.

The impotence signalled by the “cornes” and the replacement of the(phallic) sword reveals that once the subject discovers the appropriate per-spective, he necessarily moves out of the faille (the confused space betweenthe two portraits); the erotic is no longer possible. If we take Sorel’ssupposed goal of moral edification seriously, the subsequent negation of theerotic serves to release the reader from the contagion of pleasure by forcinghim to see its vices.

There is thus an a priori contradiction inherent in the anti-roman asboth a texte de plaisir and a texte de jouissance: although the reader plays– at least momentarily – an essential role in the construction of meaning,the text itself nonetheless imposes on him a specific point of view – aspecific perspective. In many ways, the “freedom” of interpretation thatthe double-layered text allows the reader appears to be negated by the author,who uses his extensive Remarques to guide – or even to control – the mannerin which readers interpret the text. Making similar revelations to the readersas the group does to Lysis in the last book of Le Berger extravagant, Soreloffers, then, his Remarques to readers to help them see the deception behindthe text: “. . . pour ce qu’il y a des esprits moins subtils que les autresqui ne peuvent penetrer dans les artifices d’une telle Histoire, il a estébien à propos de faire en suitte des Remarques qui donnassent à connoistreles fautes de tant de Livres inutiles afin que l’on cesse de les estimer, &que l’on s’abstienne d’en composer de pareils” (1633, Avis: 6–7). Thisnotion of authorial control is further underscored in Sorel’s preface to theAnti-Roman: “voyez cette Histoire qui ne sçauroient manquer de vousapporter de la delectation, & de l’utilité, si vous la prenez du biais qu’illa faut prendre” (1663, preface: n.p.).19 Clearly the discovery of the second“layer” of meaning hidden in the text depends essentially on the correctperspective, the biais, of the reader. This perspective is determined, atleast it would seem, by the definitive nature of the author’s Remarques.As Daniel Chouinard asserts, “il y a effectivement, dans les remarques,une nette volonté d’imposer au récepteur une autorité supérieure, d’assurerchez lui une subordination aussi prononcée que possible par rapport auxcommentaires.”20

In his Remarques, Sorel appears, then, to impose yet another type oflimiting ideological system that is not unlike the one he wishes to seedestroyed. With this in mind, an important question remains. How do wereconcile the apparent stranglehold that the author exerts on the text withthe apparent “freedom” that the histoire itself appears to offer?

Clearly, Sorel’s Remarques to Le Berger extravagant do, indeed, conveythe notion of a nonfictional, authorial control over the fictional text.However, as Sorel himself warns in the conclusion to the Anti-Roman, the

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reader should be aware that his Remarques themselves contain their ownfictions. Like his histoire, and like Carmelin’s portrait, they are constructedon conflicting layers of meaning:

Il faut que je vous confesse icy que pource que nos Remarques ont suivy l’histoire qui esttoute libre & toute Comique, vous y avez veu des opinions que l’on ne doit pas recevoir sil’on les prend à la rigueur; mais vous reconnoistrez avec facilité celles qui ne sont pas ditesà bon escient, & qui ont une double signification. (1633: XIV, 1133)21

The Remarques can be understood, then, as a “locus of mutual conta-mination” where fiction and nonfiction merge, but at the same time aredelineated.22 This phenomenon is still more striking in changing configu-rations of the text across editions. In the first edition, the Remarques aredivided into fourteen sections – each dealing with a specific book of thetext – and are placed at the end of the histoire. In the second edition, theAnti-Roman, each section of Remarques is placed immediately following itsrespective book. In this manner, the physical layout of the book helps toweave the Remarques into the story, thereby blurring the distinction betweenhistoire and Remarques.

Standing at the crossroads of these two discursive counterpoints is Sorel,author of both texts. Mediating fiction and nonfiction, the author repre-sents his physical body in much the same way as he does his text. Thatis, he becomes himself a figure for the ambiguities that result from the“anamorphic” text. This notion of the fundamental dynamic between textand body is evidenced in the pharmaceutical lexicon that can be foundthroughout Sorel’s works. In De la connoissance des bons livres, the authorcompares the deceptive titles that are often used for “corruptive” fictionto the mislabelling of an apothecary’s vials: “Il y a des titres aussi menteursque ces écriteaux des boëtes d’Apoticaire, qui portent le nom des droguesrares et excellentes, et n’en contiennent que de mauvaises et de corrompuës”(45). In his “Advertissement” to the first edition of Histoire comique deFrancion, Sorel uses a similar pharmaceutical lexicon to describe his owntext. He must use pleasure to “sugar-coat” his message, to make it morepalatable for his readers. The author explains that he is imitating the double-layered nature (Pleasure/Poison) of the fiction that he criticizes, but withan important difference (Pleasure/Antidote). However, to provide this “cure”for the reader, Sorel stresses that as author he, too, must mask himself ina manner similar to that of his text: “Il faut que j’imite les Apotiquairesqui sucrent par le dessus les breuvages amers afin de les faire mieux avaller”(62).23 He becomes, then, a type of charlatan, disguising both himself andhis text (his “breuvage”) in order to fool his readers.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the equivalence of textualand authorial dissimulation can be found in Sorel’s concluding remarksto Le Berger extravagant in which he explains that: “la honte en estgrande pour les hommes d’aujourd’huy, s’il est besoin de se desguiser si

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prodigieusement pour leur [les lecteurs] faire connoistre la verité, & s’ilfaut paroistre bouffon devant eux au lieu de paroistre Philosophe” (Rem,XIV: 802). Although Sorel sets up an opposition between “bouffon” and“philosophe”, his stress on the word “paroistre” in both instances suggeststhat the “être” of the author still remains hidden. Dispersed across a seriesof masks, the true identity of the author – the être behind the paraître –is rendered uncertain.

The juxtaposition of bouffon and philosophe also calls to mind the prin-cipal qualities of a morosophe, an “identity” that Sorel also claims to adoptas a result of his composition of Le Berger extravagant. Comparing himselfto the courtier who imitates the follies of the madman in order to gain theattention of the king, Sorel, too, imitates “le stile facetieux” of the romanin order to gain the attention of his readers.

Il faut faire comme ce rusé Courtisan qui avoit veu qu’il n’y avoit que des bouffons qui fussentbienvenus aupres d’un certain Roy de l’antiquité, tellement qu’il estoit repoussé toutes lesfois qu’il s’en vouloit aprocher avec une contenance modeste. Il s’habilla en fin en bouffonde comedie, & apres avoir esté receu avec force risees, comme il vid que le Roy prestoitl’oreille à quelques sornettes qu’il contoit, il proposa tout de suitte conseils salutaires qu’ilavoit à luy donner. (Rem, XIV: 802)

The courtier is above all a social chameleon whose actions and speechare a reflection of the person(s) with whom he interacts.24 In this respect,the author is depicted here as being in constant movement, freely creatingand recreating himself as necessary to provide pleasure and, therefore, toreach an interlocutor who is, at first, inaccessible. As the courtier/Sorel’smask of the bouffon suggests, pleasure is the primary purpose for the dis-simulation,25 and this pleasure allows him to adopt yet another mask –that of moral counsellor.26

Throughout Le Berger extravagant, Sorel’s use of pleasure to create adouble-layered text allows the author to occupy a role similar to that ofthe painter.27 Like the painter, so, too, does Sorel respond to the desiresof his readers by providing them with a text that entertains and seduces.Moreover, like the Bourgeois, the reader is also deceived (“cuckolded”)by the image that the text projects; once the “seduction” of the reader iscomplete, pleasure is interrupted to reveal the underlying, and edifying,mechanisms behind the image. In this context, then, it might be arguedthat Sorel’s textual strategy prefigures the late seventeenth-century paradigmof “plaire et instruire” and adds other elements of trickery and disruption(“plaire et tromper pour instruire”).

However, this equivalence between text and body creates semanticinstability precisely where readers might least expect it – in the author’sremarks. If the Remarques appear to impose a certain authoritative, autho-rial presence on the histoire, the integrity of that presence is significantlyundermined by representations of an author whose identity is not fixed.

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Layering masks upon masks in an attempt to seduce the reader into hisunsettling anti-roman, the author disappears into the fictional identitieshe adopts. A figure for the texte de jouissance itself, he, too, is multilay-ered, polysemous, uncertain.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 11. I wish to thank theUniversity Research Council of Vanderbilt University, whose generous funding facilitated thecompletion of this article.

2. Charles Sorel, Le Berger extravagant ou parmy des fantaisies amoureuses on voidles impertinences des romans & de poësie (Paris: T. du Bray, 1627–1628; Geneva: Slatkine,1972), preface (n.p.). All references preceded by 1633 are to the second edition of Le Berger extravagant, L’Anti-Roman (Paris: T. du Bray, 1633–1634). “Rem” refers to Sorel’sRemarques on Le Berger extravagant, and roman numerals indicate the specific book in whichthe quote is found.

3. “. . . chacun demeurera d’accord que si l’on vouloit n’estre plus trompé [par lesmauvais livres], il seroit besoin d’establir un Censeur de livres, qui ne donnast congé qu’auxbons d’aller par le monde, & condamnast les autres à la poussiere d’un cabinet” (Sorel, preface,Le Berger extravagant, n.p.).

4. Charles Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres, ed. Lucia Moretti Cenerini (1671;Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 65–66.

5. Thomas Dipiero’s Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1596–1791 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) provides a cogent analysis ofcriticism of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

6. In her Le Parcours du plaisir: Francion de Charles Sorel (Paris: Centre CulturelPortugais, 1985), Maria Alzira Seixo also details the presence and function of pleasure, seduc-tion, and eroticism in Sorel’s earlier histoire comique, Francion. However, she makes littlereference to Le Berger extravagant and does not focus on the function of pleasure in the inter-relationships between author, reader, and text as I do here.

7. The author also explains in his preface to Histoire comique de Francion that “jeconfesse qu’il m’estoit facile de reprendre les vices serieusement, afin d’esmouvoir plutostles mechants à la repentance qu’à la risée. Mais il y a une chose qui m’empesche de tenirceste voye là: il faut user un certain apast pour attirer le monde.” Histoire comique de Francionin Romanciers du XVIIe Siècle, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 62.

8. See also Andrew Suozzo, The Comic Novels of Charles Sorel: A Study of Structure,Characterization and Disguise (Lexington: French Forum Publishers, 1982), 15: “It is thusthe reader rather than the principal character who is the apprentice in lucidity and the victimof a sardonic and teasing author.”

9. A passage in the fourteenth book places further doubt on the depth of Lysis’s madness.After his “repentance,” Lysis explains to Clarimond that it was difficult to refrain fromengaging in his “follies”: “pource qu’encore qu’il connust bien la verité, quelquefois il sevouloit abuser aussi les autres, afin de rendre ses avantures plus remarquables . . .” (XIV:235).

10. “Le Jugement du Cid composé par un Bourgeois de Paris, marguillier de sa paroisse,”La Querelle du Cid, ed. Armand Gasté (Paris: H. Welter, 1899), n.p.

11. Gabrielle Verdier, Charles Sorel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 11. For furtherdiscussion on Sorel’s Jugement du Cid, see Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,”Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969).

12. The fourth book of Sorel’s Polyandre (1648; Geneva: Slatkine, 1972) also depicts

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another painting that consists of multiple, and often conflicting, representational layers.Clorinie employs painters to change her portrait daily so that it resembles her most accurately.

13. Martine Debaisieux, Le Procès du roman: Ecriture et contrefaçon chez Charles Sorel(Stanford: ANMA Libri, 1989), 13.

14. “(Plaisir/Jouissance: terminologiquement, cela vacille encore, j’achoppe, j’embrouille.De toute manière, il y aura toujours une marge d’indécision; la distinction ne sera pas sourcede classements sûrs, le paradigme grincera, le sens sera précaire, révocable, réversible, lediscours sera incomplet.)” (Le Plaisir du texte 10).

15. Although some critics have used “bliss,” “raptur,” or “ecstasy” as an approxima-tion of jouissance, the translation of this expression presents particular problems in English.For this reason I will retain the French. For discussion on problems of translation, see JaneGallop, “Beyond the Jouissance Principle,” Representations 7 (1984), 110–115 and ArmineKotin Mortimer’s introduction to The Gentlest Law: Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of theText (New York: Lang, 1989).

16. “Texte de plaisir: celui qui contente, emplit, donne de l’euphorie; celui qui vientde la culture, ne rompt pas avec elle, est lié à une pratique confortable de la lecture. Textede jouissance: celui qui met en état de perte, celui qui déconforte (peut-être jusqu’à uncertain ennui), fait vaciller les assises historiques, culturelles, psychologiques, du lecteur,la consistance de ses goûts, de ses valeurs et de ses souvenirs, met en crise son rapport aulangage” (Le Plaisir du texte 25–26).

17. Roland Barthes, S/Z, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1993), II:557.

18. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses (Paris: Olivier Perrin,1955), 5. For a study of perspective in seventeenth-century France, see Françoise Siguret,L’Oeil surpris: Perception et représentation dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris:Biblio 17, 1985). Although anamorphosis does not necessarily involve a “layering effect”as discussed here, I use the term to describe the copresence of two distinct – and often con-flicting – images whose meaning is constructed according to a prescribed perspective.

19. My italics.20. Daniel Chouinard, “Charles Sorel: (anti)romancier et le brouillage du discours,”

Etudes Françaises 14 (1978), 84.21. My italics.22. Caren Greenberg, Mediation and Madness: Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant,

diss., Cornell University, 1977, 122. I disagree, however, with Greenberg’s association ofthe histoire as “fiction” and the Remarques as “reality” and prefer to express them as “fiction”and “nonfiction” (or even literary criticism).

23. Jean-Pierre Camus, among others, uses a similar analogy in his “Eloge des Histoiresdévotes,” the postface to Aganthonphile ou les martyrs siciliens: “J’ai voulu sous le plaisirde l’histoire cacher l’utilité de l’instruction, afin que la douceur de l’un servît de sirop etde véhicule à l’âpreté de l’autre.”

24. The ideal courtier “must perceive the differences between one man and another,and change his style and method from day to day, according to the nature of the personwith whom he undertakes to converse.” Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier(New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 109.

25. “Hence, as to what I desire in the Courtier, let it suffice to say (beyond what hasalready been said) that he should be one who is never at a loss for things to say that aregood and well suited to those with whom he is speaking, that he should know how tosweeten and refresh the minds of his hearers, and move them discreetly to gaiety andlaughter with amusing witticisms and pleasantries, so that, without ever producing tediumor satiety, he may continually give pleasure” (Castiglione 140). It is important to note,however, that the courtier is specifically warned in Castiglione’s text not to provide pleasurein the manner of a buffoon.

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26. Intertextual parallels between Sorel’s self-depiction as a courtier in his Remarquesto Le Berger extravagant and scenes in Francion in which the protagonist adopts a similarrole further contribute to Debaisieux’s assertion that, in Francion, “l’image de l’auteur quitransparaît au sein du roman, ou dans les cinq textes liminaires des éditions successives, s’avèreaussi dispersée et insaisissable que celle de Francion” (146).

27. In his “Advertissement d’importance aux lecteurs” to Francion (1626), Sorel alsocompares himself to a painter: “Si j’eusse voulu, j’eusse fait comme ce peintre qui se cachoitderriere son tableau, et après avoir ouy les differents advis de la populace, le reformoit suivantce que l’on avoit dit.”

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