SOURCE: "Conclusion," in A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the "Fables" of Jeàn de La Fontaine, pp. 97-107. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay Rubin asserts that, contrary to the arguments of other critics, La Fontaine did not ignore the prevailing poetic styles and concerns of the time, but that in fact his Fables reveal his interest in the baroque style current at the time as well as the influence of contemporary writers such as the satirist Boileau.]

A crucial problem of La Fontaine studies, and, more broadly, of the historiography of early modern French literature, is the seeming disconnectedness, even isolation, of the Fables from the general trend of seventeenth-century lyricism. While leading scholars concede that La Fontaine's masterpiece contains scattered borrowings from poems by Malherbe, Théophile de Viau, Tristan l'Hermite, and others, the Fables are viewed as a lieu privilégié, unspoiled by the disruptive, heterogeneous forces—baroque, manneristic, or précieux—that governed poetic practice in France from the late 1590s to the early 1660s.¹ Similarly, these authorities are at pains to acknowledge any relationship at all between the Fables and works composed at approximately the same time, notably the Satires of Nicolas Boileau. If the latter are usually dull, we are told, they nonetheless respect the officially sanctioned hierarchy and impermeability of literary kinds. Moreover, they obey reason and propriety as well as propagate sound morals. In short, they are irrefutably and purely classical.² By implication, the Fables are not: they rank as hybrids, composed in a non-canonical genre. Their narratives—as unrealistic as they are, at times, indecorous—expound and illustrate an egocentric, machiavellian ethic that has little to do with honn&ete. ³

Repeated so often and with such conviction that it has become orthodoxy, this "isolationist" perspective seems to neglect the depths for the shallows, and the currents for the ripples. When persistent literary habits receive less attention than aesthetic doctrine, or metaphysics and psychology eclipse the dialogue of poets and poems, the reason is not dereliction of critical duty but analogical placement.⁴ The isolationists methodically refer literature to extra-poetic disciplines. These, in turn, provide antithetical paradigms in whose terms (purpose/drift, maturity/disequilibrium, conformity/revolt and so on) individual texts are interpreted, judged, compared, and finally placed in the context of time. While this modality has produced superb close readings (the work of Odette de Mourgues is one example), it often confuses the historical issue by compartmentalizing and artificially opposing authors, works, movements, and trends under labels that rapidly pass from hypothesis to dogma. Taking on an existence of their own, quite apart from the texts they purport to explain, these labels problematize the literary canon by segregating works that merely diverge from one another, however slightly, with respect to any of the dialectical categories. Because clusters of texts appear to exist in a pure state, neither influencing nor influenced by one another, crucial continuities are obscured. As philologists and the much maligned source-hunters have abundantly shown, however, this perception is not only counter-intuitive: it is false.

To close this study, I propose to reconsider the Fables' place in the history of the French lyric from La Ceppede to Boileau in a resolutely literalist light. By this I mean that the poetry will be treated here for its own sake and in its own nature as an artifact in which, by various techniques, a purpose is realized through the imposition of form on materials not naturally disposed to assume it. From chapters I and 3, the basic terms and distinctions I employ are known and require no further elaboration. What does call for a brief review, however, is my understanding of French poetics during the generations immediately preceding the Fables.

In The Knot of Artifice and, to a lesser extent, in its predecessor, Higher, Hidden Order, I argued that despite real merits the established view of early seventeenth-century French lyric art is not altogether complete or precise. No one seriously disputes the traditional claim that many poems of Malherbe, Régnier, Theophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, Tristan l'Hermite, and others give every appearance of disorder. In Jean Rousset's critical language, they possess (or are possessed by) forme éclatée; or, as Odette de Mourgues put it, they are fragmented and even, perhaps, myopic.⁵ To infer, however, that the poems in question are incoherent seems to me hasty and less easily defended.

This is so because—unlike Rousset or Mourgues—I assume that literary works are composites of autonomous elements, dimensions, or strata, each with its own principles and procedures so that, in a given work, what may be true of one aspect implies nothing about the others or the relations between them. In other words, they are independent variables. From this, it follows that each aspect must be examined separately and compared for consonance with, dissonance from, or overlap on the others. Poetic unity (or singleness, completeness, and integration) may occur at, and be reinforced on, all poetic levels (as in Phèdre); or it may be entirely absent from all (see most of the selections in The Stuffed OWl.⁶ Alternatively, unity on one level may—and frequently does—involve, implicate, or recuperate disunity on others. A case in point is Candide. Because rigorous cause-and-effect connections are occasionally missing from the plot (the Bulgarians, for instance, appear spontaneously) the novel's consecutive unity is in question. On the other hand, part of Candide's purpose is to demonstrate the anti-panglossian thesis that there do exist effects without causes. As a result, structural unity is recuperated on the level of rhetoric, where the disruptive feature becomes an element of proof and thereby contributes to a very different mode of oneness.⁷

Thus it is germane to ask several questions. Where does disorder occur? Is it manifest in the purpose, the structure, the technique, the style, or in some combination of these? What does the disorder consist of? How, and to what degree, does it prevent the work, at that level, from achieving completeness, singleness, or integration? Finally is the disorder or the resulting disunity echoed, disconfirmed, or offset elsewhere in the work—and if so, with what effects?

With all these questions in mind, I will now turn to problems of unity in the poetry that preceded La Fontaine's Fables. In the early seventeenth-century French lyric, disorder routinely appears on the formal level. Serial structures are disrupted; narratives, like that of Saint-Amant's "Le Mauvais Logement," founder in chronological confusion; syllogisms, such as Malherbe's in "Priere pour le roi allant en Limousin," are interrupted and may end in non sequiturs or paradoxes; conventional organizations (witness the alba in "Le Matin" by Theophile de Viau) become so distorted as to defy recognition by the reader. At times, seriality disappears altogether to be replaced by discrete sets arising from repetition (as in Sigogne's "Cette petite dame au visage de cire") or association (as in Theophile's "Ode: 'Un corbeau devant moi croasse"'). In poems like these, consecutive unity is foreclosed.

Further study, however, shows that elsewhere in the same texts there is a high degree of coherence, which ramifies and recuperates. On the representational level, for instance, the poet may model anecdotes or descriptions on the unparticularized motifs of a myth, an historical episode, or an earlier literary work. This technique produces an implicit analogy (with negative as often as positive features) between subtextual elements and the poem's formal materials, whose disjecta membra are thereby drawn together into a tight synthesis. Alternatively (or in conjunction with allusive analogy) the poet may have embedded in the work a system of key words, a network of synonyms or resonant ambiguities, a cluster of images, or a metaphore filée (complete or incomplete, explicit or half-hidden) that implicitly involves the developmental fragments in a thematically charged whole.

This technical recuperation of consecutive fragments makes possible other kinds of singleness, completeness, or integration: the descriptive, for example, in which parts are to the whole what aspects are to a state or condition; the iterative, where the same or analogous features are repeated, with or without variations, to suggest a pattern; and the didactic, in which every element contributes to the definition of a problem or the propounding of a thesis. The unities may be simple or hierarchically combined, as in Malherbe's "Priere pour le roi allant en Limousin," where the iterative subserves the didactic.

In this critical framework, then, the early seventeenth-century French lyric is distinguished by a balance between opposing movements, or by a tension between the centrifugal and the centripetal.⁸ To neglect either, I believe, not only discounts and distorts the baroque poets' achievement, but above all impedes much of the pleasure that their works can afford the reader.

The same can be argued of poetry in the classical period, most importantly the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine.

Far from renouncing or ignoring earlier seventeenthcentury poetic practice, La Fontaine, in my view, adopted its principal ideas and methods. These he developed and extended with unprecedented subtlety, which was all the more impressive an achievement given the severe generic confines to which he restricted his work. Like Malherbe in the du Perier consolation or Saint-Amant in the sonnet "Fagote plaisamment …," or La Ceppede in certain passages of the Theoremes, La Fontaine disrupted a serial structure but simultaneously used representational techniques or devices of language to salvage the unity of his composition.⁹

Consisting of a theme-dominated narrative or description (the apologue), preceded or followed by a relatively abstract statement of its central idea (the exposition), fable may be classified as a logical or conventional form whose continuity subserves didactic unity. If logical, the form would be deductive or inductive, depending on the order of its parts. But thematic statements that precede are not always letter-perfect: they may omit or condense premises. Those that follow almost invariably generalize from one or two examples. These inductions or deductions are enthymemes and thus recall the conventions of an extra-poetic discipline: rhetoric. Furthermore, the precept-and-example pattern of fable—as well as the themes and motifs—can usually be traced back to moral or pragmatic instruction in traditional communities. Given the historically established interdependence and parallel development of persuasion, pedagogy, and formal reasoning in a wide variety of cultures, fable structure may best be seen as a composite of the logical and the conventional, with the conventional being given at least slight chronological priority. For my purposes, however, a fine enough point is put on the issue by recognizing fable as a literary kind impelled by the principle of rigorous sequence—always with a didactic end in view.

To establish a generic reference point and, more importantly, to make his value system explicit, La Fontaine composed a certain number of fables that I have called assertional. Aesopic or Indic in technique and style, they are invariably complete, clear, closural, and uncomplicated by verbal puzzles. But others exist that so strongly echo the working methods of the baroque poets as to cast doubt on the isolationist argument.

The fables that in this study are considered lafontainian, or problematic, lack unity normally because of the poet's selection and (what may loosely be called) arrangement of elements. A lafontainian fable may be incomplete, like "La Cigale et la fourmi" (1.1), from which the exposition has been omitted. It may lack singleness, like "Le Héron et la fille" (7.4-5), and may contain two or more narratives unrelated by circumstance or cause and effect. Finally, there may be a split or lack of integration, as in "Un Animal dans la lune"(7.18), which passes bewilderingly from an epistemological meditation to a political tract. Alternatively (and at times concurrently), there may be thematic incompleteness, witness "Testament explique par Esope" (2.20), whose exposition, though not incorrect, gives only a glimpse into the apologue's central idea. Double irony (the interplay of viewpoints that cancel one another out) may divest a fable like "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse" (12.1) of its thematic singleness. Finally, the integration of ideas in "Un Animal dans la lune" is obscured in the juxtaposition of constructive or gassendist skepticism and an epicurean critique of Louis XIV's military policy.

Recuperation in the lafontainian fable may be internal or external to the individual poem. Paradigmatic cases of internal recuperation include "Le Héron et la fille" and "Un Animal dans la lune." Typical of the double or multiple fable, "Le Héron et la fille" contains a somewhat vague exposition, but the symmetry of images, metaphors, and allusions in the apologues brings both the theme and the thesis clearly to light. In this instance, two natural but unnecessary pleasures—gastronomy and amour précieux—are likened, while their rigidity and inflexibility, as well as their openness and closedness, are illustrated in detail, with contextual nuancing for each protagonist. In "Un Animal dans la lune," the pivotal statement. "Dans la lunette était la source de ces guerres" (v. 53) exploits a richly suggestive metaphor to draw a unifying parallel between lucidity and its opposites (illusion and bedazzlement) in ordinary experience, in scientific investigation, and in the setting of national policy. If these fables do not go beyond the recuperative practices of La Fontaine's immediate predecessors, "La Cigale et la fourmi" and "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse" (to name only two cases) reveal a major innovation. Both poems send the reader on a global and circular quest, from the individual fable to the values of the Fables (especially the assertional examples) and then back to the point of departure. This procedure will reveal that (to the extent "La Cigale et la fourmi" addresses the problem of pleasure) the narrator sides with neither protagonist but implicitly urges a middle course between hedonism and austerity. On the other hand, a broadly contextual reading suggests that the implied author of "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse" approves their choice of survival and serenity over arbitrary allegiance to mere ideals. This, in turn, invalidates Ulysses' thought as well as the mean-spirited, uncomprehending, and unctuous narrator's.

A second respect in which La Fontaine half-continues, and half-diverges from, the practice of his precursors is the teaching that underlies his poetic project. The epicurean La Fontaine is certainly not the only doctrinaire secular lyricist of the French seventeenth century. Malherbe, for example, founded the political theses of his odes and prayer on the system of Jean Bodin, and Theophile de Viau poetically disseminated, and suffered persecution for, a materialism drawn from Vanini and others.¹⁰ In both baroque cases, however, the relationship between doctrine and lyric oeuvre appears to have been covert and reflexive: without naming their sources, Malherbe and Theophile generally affirmed the received values and restated the standard arguments.

La Fontaine took a different tack. Not only did he radically change the fable genre by making it a vehicle for systematic thought (as opposed to bon sens bourgeois or folk wisdom), he also established a constructive dialogic relationship between his own work and its principal and openly acknowledged source, De Rerum Natura. One facet of La Fontaine's project in the Fables may well have been to revive, explore, elaborate, and adapt epicureanism for the intellectual stimulus—and even, perhaps, the edification—of modern, literate, but unscholarly, readers to whom De Rerum Natura might have seemed tedious and the works of the libertins &rudits, especially Gassendi and Bernier, were inaccessible. In other words, the Fables may be read as a work of high, but critical, vulgarization.

The third and final aspect of the Fables' partial similarity to the earlier seventeenth-century French lyric resides in the recueil structure. Integrated collections of lyrics were less common after the Pléiade, and their modes of organization diverged significantly from Renaissance models, where the logic of cause and effect had dominated. Narrative pretexts, for example—common to Sceve's Delie and certain sequences by Ronsard—as well as philosophical argumentation—best exemplified by Du Bellay's L 'Olive—gave way to other patterns. Sponde's Sonnets sur la mort and La Ceppede's Theoremes are conventional, based on the meditative practices popularized by Saint Ignatius Loyola and his imitators. Parataxis (or the structure of theme and variation) also occurs, sometimes framed, temporally (or otherwise), as in Saint-Amant's seasonal sonnets and sometimes not, as in the Ghirlande de Julie. Much like his Solitude, Theophile de Viau's Maison de Sylvie proceeds mainly by the associative linkage of largely self-contained descriptive fragments.¹¹

For his part, La Fontaine did not arrange fables at random, or purely by theme, in his twelve books. As my third chapter suggests, he folowed the baroque precedent of avoiding causal or logical principles to achieve recueil arrangement, but at the same time he sought and found another technique far removed from conventional, paratactic, or associative dispositio. Book I I is typical of the Fables in that it establishes, deviates from, and finally returns to, a complex formal, technical, and stylistic, as well as thematic, norm. If the norm differs more or less subtly from book to book, the ternary structure appears to be a constant.

In a sense, La Fontaine was to the baroque poets what he had been to Lucretius: a discipulus, in the full sense of the Latin term—not only a follower and a continuator, but above all a successor, who modified, adapted, and at times broke with, his predecessors' examples. But what of the relationship between his Fables and the works of Boileau, especially the Satires? Here, of course, the evidence is thinner but still suggestive.

First of all, it is now clear from the work of Robert Corum and Gordon Pocock that, despite his commitment to reason and order, Boileau did not organize his most powerful works, the conventionally structured formal verse satires, in a conspicuously sequential manner.¹² Seen in the perspective developed on these pages, Boileau's satires on the embarras de Paris and the souper ridicule betray a strong predilection for, and mastery of, the paratactic mode, whose loose bundles he tied together with imagery, symbolism, and covert metaphor. Satire 3, for instance, presents a near plethora of images, characterized by Pocock as pure "theater of the absurd" where "a helpless guest is treated to equally grotesque food and conversation"; "vile dish succeeds vile dish," there is "a drunken singsong," and the literary debate becomes "a fantasia on nonsense."¹³ I would contend, however, that underlying the whole silly mess are two ideas: of orality as a measure of culture, and a corollary equivalence between what is produced and what is received by mouth. In the best of all possible worlds—the archetype that Boileau's narrator idealistically assumes—quality is exalted: the poetry is perfect, the music mellifluous, the discourese worthy of a platonic symposium, and all are matched by exquisite food and drink. But the narrator's world has fallen away from such perfection. To put it crassly, that way of happening, the mouth, gets as badly as it gives. In Satire 6, as Robert Corum has shown, there are several temporally framed sets of themes and variations, each dominated by a more or less covert image, metaphor, or symbol, with the whole satire synthesized under the sign of Paris-as-barrier. The other satires, as well as the Epîtres, deserve in-depth study to determine if this is a local or a systematic phenomenon.¹⁴

The similarities between Boileau and La Fontaine do not end here. Notwithstanding the witty and much quoted dismissal, "Boileau n'a rien ajoute a la doctrine classique que ses vers," the legislator of Parnassus appears to have done far more than combine the ideas of his more original forerunners. Like La Fontaine in the Fables, he entered into a dialogic relationship with the learned theoretical treatis.es, refining, extending, and revising what he drew upon until he, too, had made them new. As a result, the pseudo-Aristotelian formulas by which poetry had been justified and composed since the Italian Renaissance were absorbed by a larger and more significant scheme "in the group of works around L'Art poétique, including that poem itself."¹⁵ Specifically:

The basis remains that movement of the mind as it is led to contemplate its own moral activity, but other preoccupations find expression as well. Poetry takes on a more public function. It plays its part in upholding collective values more directly, making attractive and exemplifying the ground rules which society has worked out in order to build the necessary bulwarks of civilization. In the case of literature, these are the rules of neoclassicism.…

In all this, there is a strong urge to unify: to attempt, in fact, a universal synthesis. Collective and individual morality must be linked. Social, literary and moral excellence must be shown to go together. Poetry, like religion, has achieved a firm doctrine, which defines its usefulness and right to exist. Boileau's work shows a determination to bring these separate elements together, to build an impregnable structure. This comes out in one striking featuere of his work which has often been under-emphasized: his desire to bring together seemingly incompatible moods and elements, to blend farce and seriousness, morality and pleasure, the lofty and the undignified. (emphasis added)¹⁶

Not only doctrinal originality but hidden coherence account in large measure for the organization of the Satires as a lyric collection. In two relatively recent studies, Susan W. Tiefenburn and Allen G. Wood argue that variations on a single plot pattern, modulations of ironic tone, the nature and treatment of literary allusions, permutations of recurrent imagery, and the subtle handling of various figures, tropes, and even grammatical features, all serve to make the Satires a homogeneous (but far from monotonous) whole.¹⁷ If Boileau sought a new schematism by which to unify a lyric collection, it is as yet unclear whether he shared La Fontaine's interest in establishing, deviating from, and returning to norms.

Envoi

To conclude: despite his cultivation of the didactic muse through a single, conventionally structured genre, La Fontaine shared with the baroque poets a fascination with the undoing of rigorous sequence in the lyric, and the recuperation of coherence by subtleties of technique and of style. He also affirmed his predecessors' commitment to systematic thought as an underpinning of poetry, but insisted on an openly dialogic, rather than covert and reflexive, relationship with the philosophical source. And while he did not embrace repetition or suggestion as principles of recueil structure, he concurred with the derniers renaissants that poetic collections should be organized according to principles other than cause-and-effect or syllogistic reasoning. In virtually all of these respects, La Fontaine appears to have labored in silent—and perhaps unknowing—unison with the satirical Boileau.

La Fontaine was no literary isolate. Indeed, his Fables sum up, and offer brilliant new solutions to, the chief poetic problems of his time.

Notes

¹ For the best recent accounts of La Fontaine's local indebtedness to earlier seventeenth-century French poets, see Jean-Pierre Collinet, "Maynard et La Fontaine" and "La Fontaine et Tristan" in his collection of essays La Fontaine en amont et en aval, 71-89, 90-103. Compare Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, 559-64, with Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque, and Précieux Poetry and 0 Muse, fuyante proie … Essai sur la poésie de La Fontaine, 13-78. For Lanson (and, in general, his disciples) La Fontaine steered a correct course, toward the achievement of the classicism that French literature had been striving for since the Renaissance. Mourgues's thesis is an eclectic blend of lansonisme and leavisisme. She sees the Fables as a welcome shift to maturity (read mental balance and stability) after many decades of struggle, in which intellect, passionate imagination, or brittle wit had contended and successfully gained the upper hand, with dire effects on poetic value. The Fables' artistic innovations are, in Mourgues's schematism, a vital response to the sterility or exhaustion of baroque, as well as précieux, forms and techniques.

² See, for example, Antoine Adam's treatment of Boileau in Histoire de la littérature française, 3:49-156, and in the introduction to Françoise Escal's Pléiade edition of the poet's (Euvres compltes, ix-xxviii. For an excellent reassessment of the aesthetic and historiographic ideas underlying the changing notion of classicism, see Domna Stanton, "Classicism (Re)constructed: Notes on the Mythology of Literary History."

³ The contrast between Boileau and La Fontaine has been overdrawn, I think, because of a trifling quarrel over "Le Mort et la bûcheron" and the fact that L'Art poétique makes no mention of the fable genre.

⁴ For the pluralistic assumptions underlying this argument, see the first two chapters of Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism.

⁵ Jean Rousset, La Littérature de I'dge baroque en France: Circé et le paon, 181-229, and Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque, and Précieux Poetry.

⁶ Jean Racine, Théâtre complet. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, eds., The Stuffed Owl.

⁷Voltaire, Romans et contes. I am indebted to Bernard Weinberg for this observation.

⁸ The principles of what Terence Cave, in a TLS review of The Knot of Artifice, called "two-tiered" composition (226) vary from theory to theory and from critic to critic. The late Robert Nicolich provided a succinct account of the spectrum in "La Fortune critique de la poésie du premier 17e siècle," 20-24. 1 would draw particular attention to the contributions of Edwin M. Duval, John D. Lyons, Robert T. Corum, Jr., and Catherine Ingold—all dealing with the poetry of Saint-Amant.

⁹ For La Ceppede, see Nancy W. Hafer, "Developmental Patterns in La Ceppede's Theoremes."

¹⁰ See Maria Green, Sovereign Power, Sovereign Glory: A Study of Jean Bodin's Political Ideas as Reflected in Malherbe's Poetry, and Antoine Adam, Theophile de Viau et la libre pensée française en 1620.

¹¹ For Sceve's Delie, see Doranne Fenoaltea, "Si haulte architecture": The Design of Sceve's Delie. For the influence of Saint Ignatius Loyola, see Terence Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570-1613. For Saint-Amant's sonnets, see Robert T. Corum, Jr., Other Worlds and Other Seas: Art and Vision in Saint-Amant's Nature Poetry, and Catherine Ingold, "Form and Value in the Poetry of Saint-Amant," and "Order and Affinity in the Seasonal Sonnets of Saint-Amant." For Theophile de Viau, see Jacques Morel, "La Structure poétique de La Maison de Sylvie de Theophile de Viau."

¹² For the definitive treatment of formal verse satire, see Mary Claire Randolph, "Structural Design of Formal Verse Satire," rehabilitated by Susan Tiefenbrun in Signs of the Hidden: Semiotic Studies. For Boileau's commitment to reason and order, see Nicolas Boileau, L'Art poétique (1, vv. 37-38) in Œuvres compltes, 158.

¹³ Gordon Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neoclassicism, 47, 48.

¹⁴ For analyses of L 'Art poétique from related perspectives, see Nathan Edelman, "L'Art poétique: 'Longtemps plaire et jamais ne lasser,'" and Jules Brody, "La Metaphore erotique dans la critique de Boileau."

¹⁵ Pocock, Boileau, 174. See also Bernard Weinberg, "From Aristotle to Pseudo-Aristotle."

¹⁶ Pocock, Boileau, 174-75.

¹⁷ Susan W. Tiefenbrun, "Boileau and His Friendly Enemy: A Poetics of Satiric Criticism," and Allen G. Wood, Literary Satire and Theory.