Polyphonic Narrative in Early Modern France: A Question of Literary History

The sharp distinction traditionally drawn between French Renaissance and Classical literature was based in part on the assumption that the defining genre of literary history was poetry--including verse tragedy and epic; if prose fiction is taken into account, the history of French literature in this period looks rather more complicated. Thus Gustave Lanson placed the most prominent novelists of the early seventeenth century--D'Urfe, Sorel, Mlle de Scudery, and Scarron--in his infamous category of the attardes et egares--that is, those writers of the period who did not indicate the character of the new age, or as we might say, failed to get the (classical) program.(1) A modern critic influenced by Bakhtin's theories might see things quite differently. Bakhtin's insistence on the centrality of the novel in literary history inverts the traditional hierarchy of genres, just as his critique of monologic discourse undermines the assumptions of neo-classical aesthetics. In a very fine article, Nicholas Cronk has recently suggested that from a Bakhtinian point of view, French classicism could be seen as developing a series of techniques for concealing heteroglossia or the plurality of languages involved in any utterance. These techniques or devices--which include, according to Cronk, le style indirect libre--are designed to make the text appear to speak with a singular by disguising its inherent dialogism as monologic.(2) For Bakhtin, such an enterprise would be essentially incompatible the novel, since the latter is defined precisely by its representation of the plurality of languages and by its resistance to every sort of monologic centralization and discipline. In reconsidering this issue, we propose to focus on the role of polyphony or polyvocality (that is, the plurality of voices, languages, or sociolects) in early modern French narrative fiction. We will take as our starting point the device commonly known as for three reasons. First, it can be argued that this device is a structural constant characteristic of most narrative fiction from Marguerite de Navarre to Mme de Lafayette, and thus constitutes a continuity that problematizes any sharp distinction between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century narrative. Second, it is a device allowing the representation of different voices, since not only may the voice of a secondary storyteller differ from that of the primary or framing narrators, but there are usually several secondary storytellers, and their voices often differ from each other as well. Third, focusing on frame narrative permits us to avoid discussing Rabelais; while his work is clearly relevant to any general discussion of polyphony, it is also largely sui generic, and therefore difficult to integrate into an examination of the development of French narrative fiction in this period. Surprisingly little work has been done on the subject of frame narrative, most of it focusing on Chaucer or Boccaccio. We have found nothing that could be described as a poetics of this device, and so it may be appropriate to begin by defining our terms. A frame narrative is one in which a secondary narrative is embedded within a primary narrative.(3) The secondary, framed narrative is recounted by a character within the primary diegesis, and is therefore metadiegetic, to adopt Genette's contested but familiar terminology.(4) The relations established between the primary and secondary narratives are of several types, and these are important to note because the history of frame narrative is in part a history of Western writers' efforts to integrate and unify an originally diverse narrative form inherited from the East.(5) Such efforts tend to reduce the plurality of voices inherent in frame narrative by subordinating the secondary stories to the primary narrative in various ways. The relations between the primary and the secondary narratives in the period we are concerned here seem to be of four main types: the primary narrative presents the secondary narrative (1) as an amusement or pastime (as in Chaucer and Boccaccio, as well as in sixteenth-century French novella collections such as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles; (2) as an exemplum proving or disproving a general principle (as in Marguerite's Heptameron); (3) as an analeptic explanation of how some current situation came to be (as in la Princesse de Cleves' mother's story of Diane de Poitiers' relations Francois I and Henri II); (4) as operating on a different diegetic level than the reader has previously supposed (as in Helisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours). …