SOURCE: “Poetic License, Censorship and the Unrestrained Self: Ronsard's Livret de folastries,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 45, 1996, pp. 449-62.

[In the following essay, Randall describes the trangressive and pornographic qualities of Ronsard's Livret de folastries.]

I. MAKING FREE WITH THE TEXT: RONSARD, LA FONTAINE AND A VOICE FROM VICE

One of the ways in which freedom of expression can be measured is through an examination of poetic license taken. “Poetic license” implies a censoring body, one overseeing the norms of expression. When censorship is ignored, or when limits are stretched, usually consciously (since poetry's very idiom—its formalism—renders an unconscious violation of norms fairly inconceivable), a politics develops and is demonstrated in that verse. This poetic politics mandates as privileged “licensing agency” the self, rather than the state.

In mid-sixteenth century France, while censorship was not explicitly codified, the standard of the privilège du roi certainly worked to maintain a policy regarding acceptable limits on speech. Such literary surveillance was particularly relevant to poetry, since at this time poetry was the privileged mode of communication for all noble and elevated matters, be they love affairs or affairs of state.

In the great majority of his publications, Pierre de Ronsard exercised his own system of self-correction and censorship both of himself as writer and of his readers. He generally did not encourage any unauthorized contact with his works; only those texts which he had personally corrected and perfected were permitted dissemination to the world at large.¹ In this way, he both internalized implicit public expectations for “censorship” at the time, and exalted himself as the preeminent “censoring” mechanism.

An unusual collection of poetry was published, at first anonymously, in Paris in 1553. This collection voiced no pretensions to grandeur or an elevated style; it seemed rather the aimless wanderings of a frivolous, erotic sensibility. What makes this volume so important, and what makes it so surprising that little critical attention has been directed its way, is that it was authored by Pierre de Ronsard, the official poetic voice for the court and arguably for his time. In the Livret de folastries a fascinating tension between public and private poetic personae can be read between the lines.

Ronsard, so involved in contemporary discussions of poetic theory, leader of the Pléïade, seems to have felt personally hamstrung by some of the effects of his theorizing. In the Folastries, he shapes a private, playful space in which to express interests, and to explore themes, at variance with official speech. However, he had some concerns about the book's reception, as his initial anonymous posture makes clear. In this he was not mistaken.

Although widely read by contemporaries, this little book was much decried, for a variety of reasons. First, otherwise sympathetic readers felt that the style of the book was too unravelled and too racy, not sufficiently stylistically soigné, not adequately “politically correct” for the day. Indeed, the Livret was, arguably, the first bona fide free verse construction of French literature,² composed primarily “en strophes et en vers libres.”³

Ronsard chose never to integrate his Folastries into his collected works,⁴ suggesting thereby a dissonance between public and private permission and vehicles for expression. This decision to set apart from the main body of his published material this self-consciously constructed work indicates a metaperspective on the former by the latter: in this regard, the Folastries convey personal truth, and are critical of the dissembling and polishing necessary to please in the public arena.⁵ If the Sonets pour Hélène, Marie and Cassandre are examined by scholars as indicative of Ronsard's psychology of love, so much more so must the Folastries be considered as revealing an intimate, personal prise de conscience mediated through the body of the woman. The major difference between the three “officially received” collections and the Folastries is that the body of the woman is not necessarily—indeed, should not be—beloved. It is instead a commodity, an object appropriated to fulfil Ronsard's own purposes. In that sense, at least, the woman's body is employed pornographically. Lawrence Kritzman has noted that our reading patterns of the Ronsardian œuvre should aim at extracting from the text

[une] stratégie du topos corporel … le texte ronsardien est investi des avatars du corps qui prennent la forme du langage … [ces corps] assur[ent] une représentation implicite de ce qui est apparemment inconnaissable.⁶

Thus, in writing the Folastries, Ronsard creates a decoding device for discerning an alternative, perhaps even counter-cultural, poetry: what his verses would say, were they only to find the tolerance for their audition. This device is defiant—sometimes erotic, sometimes obscene, certainly “unprincipled” in the light of formal expectations. It dares the reader to see beyond the public posture, to attend to an individual, self-indulgent stance. How free the verse? This verse is both very free, because so audacious, especially at the level of content, and very constrained, in that it arises dichotomously out of a condition of cultural constraint, and thereby cannot, in some measure, exist without those limitations. It both codifies and reacts against those norms.

Ronsard's publication of the admittedly occasionally obscene Folastries was further complicated by Protestant polemicists, against whom he had been waging a fierce verbal war with his Discours sur les misères and Continuation des misères. Delighted with his risk-taking self-revelations, Calvinist poets turned his text against him, upbraiding him for the immorality of the poems and using that to undermine his authority.⁷

Pornography, then, or at least what can be construed as pornographic in the Folastries, shows that the adjective “free” in “free verse” stands more for a personal pushing against constraint at the thematic level than an innovation at the formal level. Pornography, in this reading, is not a writing about sex solely, but also a text about the self situated within and reacting against constraint. Such a text ultimately becomes a critique of a political order perceived as oppressive or overly dominant. Lynn Hunt observes that:

pornography [is] most often a vehicle for using the shock of sex to criticize … political authorities … Pornography … [is] a category of understanding … Its political and cultural meanings cannot be separated from its emergence as a category of thinking, representation and regulation.⁸

Thus, even though the Folastries' publisher did secure a privilège, publication of the bawdy book nevertheless caused Ronsard considerable awkwardness. Why, then, did this popular, much-respected court poet, versifier to kings, choose to compose such a volume? Why risk so much on so little? Was it, in fact, so little? What is the ultimate intent of the Folastries, and what is its effect?

II. DEMEANING DIMINUTIVES: DENYING BLAME IN THE LIVRET

The title of the Livret provides some clues as to its interpretation. “Livret” means “a little book,” but also puns on the verb “livrer,” both “to deliver” and “to free,” as well as on the noun “livrée,” or “domestic servant's uniform.” The diminutive “livret” has the effect of purportedly diminishing the book's importance (and thus, perhaps, allowing its contents to go unscrutinized), while the tension inscribed between liberty and retainer may hint at a political perception on Ronsard's part that his unofficial utterances, his private self, may not be as publically acceptable as his courtier persona. “Folastries” contains “fol,” or “crazy person”, a conventional device for enabling a writer to make a bold statement yet remain uncriticized, as witnessed by Erasmus' In Praise of Folly. “Folastrie” is defined by Randle Cotgrave's 1610 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues as “wanton or lascivious trickes.” “Fol-as-” suggests a homophonic pun on the conventional way of announcing a proverbial utterance (such as “Fol est qui jette à ses pieds ce qu'il tient en ses mains”). Ronsard thereby lobbies for the facile popular acceptance, because of the “on dit” quality of the implicit aphoristic intertext, of the text. With this sort of title, including lechery, servitude, and proto-aphoristic pronouncement, Ronsard has already constructed a complex concatenation of text, sexual proclivity and political perspective. The Livret de folastries is, clearly, much more than a playful pastime or well-written bawdy book. Ronsard's attempt to dismiss its components as “vers raillars” (p. 4, v. 6) is obviously disingenuous, a mask for something more.

The contents of the Livret suggest interpretive paths. The first Folastrie takes pain to deculpabilize Ronsard; it is the fault of the woman that he writes such verse: “qu'éperdument j'ayme mieux / … éperdument asservie / De son grasset embonpoint …” (vv. 3-8). He creates the fiction of a man deprived of power, yearning after two women at once. He is sandwiched between them (“entre les dames” v. 191). This divided self accepts no responsibility; it is thus a very effective technique for concealing and protecting Ronsard. He is speechless (“Que dirai je davantage?” v. 136) except when she allows him voice through a pun: “elle me rend contant” (v. 28). The end of the Folastrie takes up the theme of censure; he protests (perhaps too much) that an entire litany of events and circumstances cannot keep him from his love:

Ny le temps, ny son effort,
Ny violence de mort,
Ny les mutines injures,
Ny les mesdisans parjures,
Ny les trop sales broquards

(p. 16, vv. 203-209 and passim)

yet the block of space devoted to this enumeration is so large as to dominate the text in importance, suggesting that his fear of censorship for incorrect speech is actually far greater than the passion he feels (and which he uses as a cipher to describe his fear of reprisals). In addition, Ronsard hides behind the figures of the women, in that he claims that they fear the villagers' criticism of their lewd behavior, while in actuality he is describing his own malaise resulting from others' characterizations of his writing. Power is the real issue here:

… caquette de vostre honneur
Et qu'il die: Ces deux belles,
Qui font le jour les rebelles,
Toute nuit d'un bras mignon
Echaufent un compaignon,
… Las, mignardes, je scay bien
Qui vous empeche, & combien
Le Tyran de ce vilage
Vous souille de son langage,
Mesdisant de vostre nom
Qui plus que le sien est bon.

(p. 15 vv. 170-182).

Not only the explicitly lubricious poems in the collection, but also the “monster poems” included there attest, maintains Françoise Jouvkovsky, to a fundamental perceived instability in Ronsard's world, what may be interpreted as an ontological insecurity regarding his ability to truly express his inner self through the medium of poetry as officially-crafted.⁹ Treachery to one's master, similarly, is dismissively discussed in a poem again linked to sexuality, the Folastrie V, in which a dog betrays his master's illicit affair to the neighbors by barking outside the door of the room where the lovers are clandestinely entwined. The word “traistre” recurs with obsessional frequency: “desloyal et trasitre mastin … Ainsi, traistre, ton aboyer / Traistre … Mechant mastin … Si traistre à ton fidelle maistre” (pp. 36-38, vv. 13-59).

Finally, the figura upon which nearly all the poems in the collection are based - all the free verse poems, that is - offers some hermeneutic insights. The woman is always the figura, the medium for Ronsard's constrained expression. In this light, it is significant that the rhyme endings to many of the Dithyrambes included in the Folastries are feminine: “l'absence d'alternance régulière dans le genre de rimes [qui] se trouve d'un bout à l'autre dans la pièce … résulte de la liberté complète du rythme strophique …”¹⁰ In addition, Ronsard employs the stylistic strategy of parenthetical utterance: the woman's remarks are often related within parentheses, as though to underscore that it is she, not Ronsard, who makes these bold statements, but also to remark upon the spatial constraint which was the lot of women in sixteenth-century France (and which Ronsard wants to adopt as his own, in order to represent the limits placed on his speech): “Et toutesfois ceste insensée … / A mille inventions. / Et quoy (dit elle) ma mignonne?” (p. 26, vv. 95-103). Ronsard's verse structure, further, closely imitates the actions of the women whose tales he recounts. For example, in Folastrie IV, Robin and Jaquet, goatherds, go to the fields to have a picnic, and eventually copulate. The outcome of the anecdote is represented early on in the poem by the embracing pattern of the verses describing their feeling for each other: “O amourettes doucelettes, / O doucelettes amourettes” (p. 31, vv. 7-8). When the couple eventually makes love, nature imitates art, showing the power Ronsard hopes to acquire through the construction of his verses, as the goats they have been guarding begin to copulate, too:

A peine eut dit, qu'elle s'aproche,
Et le bon Jaquet qui l'embroche,
Fist trepigner tous les Sylvains
Du dru maniment de ses reins.
Les boucs barbus qui l'aguetèrent,
Paillars, sur les chèvres montèrent

(p. 34, vv. 91-96).

The frenzied movement of copulation is what Ronsard yearns for: ébranlement, improvisation and liberation. Similarly, the topos of the flea who alights on the mistress' breast sketches a bounding, aimless pattern, á l'abandon, subverting formalism:

Que pleust à dieu que je peusse
Pour un soir devenir puce …
Qu'en glissant plat dessus elle,
… Pour me suivre à l'abandon,
… Suivoit par toute contrée

(pp. 40-41, vv. 35-63).

Elsewhere, Ronsard petitions “que j'erre sans fin” (p. 46, v. 80), and in his famous Folastrie on “L'Ivrogne”, this random wandering produces text: “qui se transforme en cent nouvelles” (p. 51, v. 93).

The Dithyrambes that conclude the collection of Folastries dramatize the culmination of Ronsard's move toward liberated speech and free verse through the mouthpiece of the woman or of such ungovernable creatures as the flea; Bacchus is invoked, and language degenerates into a dionysian non-sense, utterly unfettered by formalistic constraints: “mes parolles sanglotent / Je ne scay quelz vers insensez … Evoé ïach ïach,” (pp. 60-61, vv. 95-112), he shouts jubiliantly, at last untrammeled by formalistic expectations.

III. SPECULATIONS: MIRRORING CONSTRAINT AND CONTEXT

The Folastries line up in the development of a self-critical French discursive voice. That voice—developed through the recourse to free verse—expresses itself, in a different context but a similar genealogical derivation, a century later with La Fontaine, for example. Even though the context in which he writes exercises a more rigid and formalized surveillance of publications (Richelieu having founded the censoring institution of the Académie française in 1632), La Fontaine feels considerably less constricted. His verse is as free as Ronsard's, if not more so. Why is this the case?

These two literary figures form an instructive diptych, the two halves of which circumscribe a lacuna, an enigma that remains to be teased out. If Ronsard writes pornographics (about) politics—and I use (about) in parentheses to indicate that his text postures as other than it is, La Fontaine writes poetics about politics. La Fontaine's FABULA faces down Ronsard's FEMINA, as woman is the figure and voice through which Ronsard tries to speak. That is, Ronsard appears trapped in the Renaissance cycle of representationality in which verse seems to speak for itself, but in fact can only be heard through an intermediary or filter—in this case, that of the loose woman. The role of this woman is to deflect blame from the writer onto the whore.

For La Fontaine, on the other hand, nearly a century later, verse has itself become its own efficacy, verse possesses its own voice. Women are incidental and trifling figures for La Fontaine; he uses and abuses them poetically, and exculpates himself glibly:

J'ai lieu d'apprehender des objections bien plus importantes. On m'en peut faire deux principales: l'une, que ce texte est licentieux; l'autre, qu'il n'epargne pas assez le beau sexe … Quant à la seconde objection, par laquelle on me reproche que ce livre fait tort aux femmes, on aurait raison si je parlais serieusement; mais qui ne voit que ceci est jeu, et par conséquent ne peut porter coup?

(La Fontaine, Contes et nouvelles, I, Préface, 556-7)

For La Fontaine, women are objects of play; Ronsard takes them with deadly seriousness. This shift from image to speech enacts one facet of the development of the discursive mode in French literature. A figure of speech thus becomes a mode of speech.

While Ronsard probes the boundary between social and political acceptability and salacious transgression,¹¹ La Fontaine's verse is able to go further. His poetry relaxes by pleasing itself with titillation, but aims at more: it develops its own politics of language that seeks to define itself against the backdrop of control by Richelieu, the throne and the new royal academies. Thus, what is important to him is less the morality, or immorality, of the woman's figure or the bawdy tale, but rather the potential power inherent in the language used to convey that form or story. His subject is liberating for his verse; unlike Ronsard, who seems to peek around the edges of his transgressive tales, La Fontaine uses their very subject matter as the legitimizing factor for his style: just as Renaissance theorists had deemed “un haut style” appropriate to a tragedy, or a “bas style” fitting for a comedy, La Fontaine says that pornography brings with it its own suitable style:

On me dira que j'eusse mieux fait de supprimer quelques circonstances, ou tout au moins les déguiser. Il n'y aurait rien de plus facile; mais cela aurait affaibli le conte, et lui aurait ôté de sa grace. Tant de circonspection n'est nécessaire que dans les ouvrages qui promettent beaucoup de retenue dès l'abord, ou par leur sujet ou par la manière dont on les traite.

(C et N, I, p. 556)

In addition, he ascertains a legitimizing factor for his bawdy writing in the century itself, thereby exculpating his personal involvement:

Apollon se plaignit aux neuf sœurs l'autre jour
De ne voir presque plus de bons vers sur l'amour.
Le siècle, disait-il, a gâté cette affaire:
Lui nous parler d'amour! Il ne la sait pas faire.
Ce qu'on n'a point au cœur, l'a-t-on dans ses écrits?
J'ai beau communiquer de l'ardeur aux esprits …
Les belles n'ayant pas disposé la matière,
Amour, et vers, tout est fort à la cavalière.

(C et N, III, “Clymène: comédie,” vv. 1-8, p. 777)

Pornography's style is its own excuse: you've been told up front, he tells his reader, to expect no more and no less than what you get, so don't complain:

Voici les derniers ouvrages de cette nature qui partiront des mains de l'auteur: et par conséquent la dernière occasion de justifier ses hardiesses, et des licenses qu'il s'est données … [elles] sont inséparables … [de ce genre de pœsie].

(II, Préface, 603)

The power that such rhetoric masks is enormous. “Circonspection” disaggregates into components that reorient its meaning: “cir-CON-spection” licenses a global gaze at women's erogenous zones. Pornography, then gives La Fontaine the ability to express illicit matters. But it also allows him to make free with his textual models: as he would with a whore, he takes them and uses them for his own purposes and pleasure:

Je me suis écarté de mon original.
On en pourra gloser; on pourra me mécroire: …
J'ai suivi mon auteur en deux points seulement:
Points qui sont véritablement
Le plus important de l'histoire.

(“La Fiancée du roi de Garbe,” II, vv. 9-16, p. 667)

Pornography as subject facilitates the liberty that he craves and requires. This liberty includes the freedom to rework precursors, to rewrite models, to form collages of several pre-texts, to insert his own perspective (“j'y mets du mien”) wherever he so desires. For this process, he implies a mercantile transaction, just as a whore is procured for a fee:

Boccace n'est le seul qui me fournit.
Je vais parfois en une autre boutique …
Je puise encore en un vieux magasin
… quiconque en soit l'auteur,
J'y mets du mien selon les occurrences:
C'est ma coûtume; et, sans telles licenses,
Je quitterais la charge du conteur.

(“La servante justifiée,” II, vv. 1-16, p. 637)

No explanation or justification is given; La Fontaine asserts boldly that “c'est ma coûtume;” censors and readers are required to accept this. At other times, La Fontaine coyly plays with the censor, offering just enough details to titillate, but not quite enough to warrant a censoring process:

Et le chien? Le chien fit ce que l'amant voulût.
Mais que voulût l'amant? censeur, tu m'importunes:
Il voulût par ce chien tenter d'autres fortunes.
D'une seule conquête est-on jamais content?

(C et N, III, “Le petit chien qui secoue l'argent et des pierreries,” vv. 510-513, p. 776)

This otherwise fairly bold statement about bestiality cloaks itself in elliptical respectability and allusion at the very last moment. The prosaic tenor of the poetry facilitates such a ruse: prose can both spell things out and backpedal quickly; the suggestive quality of Ronsard's verse can get it into more trouble than La Fontaine's clarity or clear evasion.

The role of the conte or nouvelle as La Fontaine uses it is to convince, to winnow out disbelief through narrative strategies, as Ross Chambers has described in The Oppositional Narrative. Chambers asserts that La Fontaine

has no other power to which to have recourse than `the power of fable.' So, unlike the Orator, he does not interrupt his discourse in order to pounce; on the contrary he pursues his story to its end. He is not in the business of deceiving rhetorically so as to win on another terrain altogether; he wishes to gain his (own) oppositional ends, certainly, but he does it, not by arousing hopes and desires that are to be cruelly dashed, but through the satisfaction of narrative desires. So pleasure is his byword, for it is pleasure which, for him, equates with the power of fable.¹²

This is a new twist to Barthes' concept of jouissance: the text masturbates, arousing itself with pornography despite—or to spite—a situation in which pleasure is not physically realizable. The “fable develops the art of inhabiting a space possessed by the other,” (Chambers, 65) in which “the `narrative function' reproduces a discourse of power,” (Chambers, 51) which it can then revise and undercut, predominantly through a strategy of irony.

For La Fontaine, then, the figure of the woman wanders through a theater of ironic situations. How does this take place? First, in his Contes et nouvelles en vers (1666; 1674), La Fontaine privileges a private place embedded within public space. This private area, what he calls his “cabinet” (I, 556), is doubly figured by the text which it shelters: the “petit receuil” (I, 556) of the text gathers itself (recueillir) to itself, rubbing against itself, pleasing itself for itself. It recognizes limits imposed on others (“je confesse qu'il faut en cela garder des bornes, et que les plus étroites sont les meilleures” I, 557), but it disregards those constraints for itself. The private space of the text, then, is characterized by freedom and self-fulfillment: “trop de scrupule gâterait tout” (I, 557).

Another participant is invited into this private space; this is the reader. Now the text does not only rub itself, it rubs against the readers and, in so doing, is augmented: “jamais ce qu'on appelle un bon conte ne passe d'une main à l'autre sans recevoir quelque nouvel embellissement” II, 605). In this intercourse, the reader must also experience the seduction that the text exercises: “encore l'auteur n'aurait-il pas satisfait au principal point, qui est d'attacher le lecteur, de le réjouir, d'attirer malgré lui son attention, de lui plaire enfin (II, 603).” This “principal point” resonates with the great importance given to the final pointe of La Fontaine's fables, contes and nouvelles. The reader's jouissance “comes” at the last moment of the text, the culminating instance in which, with a phallic thrust, La Fontaine exposes his intentions and thrusts home with his wit. Often, these textual ingressions are effected against the woman's figure, miming the act of intercourse verbally. In “La fiancée du roi de Garbe,” for example, the tale concludes with a remonstrance to a woman bemoaning her lost virginity. “Ne m'allez point conter,” (don't tell me any stories about it), this story asserts, thus denying to woman within the space of the text the right to voice her own story, “il est bon de garder sa fleur; / Mais, pour l'avoir perdu, il ne se faut pas pendre.” (II, vv. 800-1, p. 686). She is thus doubly ravished; first, in the story; second, by the story. Randle Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues corroborates this reading: he defines pointe as “a pricke … also, quicknesse, sharpnesse … the main point of an argument.” The proliferation of pointes in La Fontaine's stylistic attests to the aggressive nature of his text. His verse is very free; Ronsard's is on the defensive, but La Fontaine goes on the offensive. Because of such assertiveness, La Fontaine can go beyond the private space in which his narration begins, and influence the public sphere: “Venons à la liberté que l'auteur se donne de tailler dans le bien d'autrui aussi bien que dans le sien propre” (II, 605).

Further, as narrative in the form of fable is employed by La Fontaine, encouraging a praxis (disclosure) rather than a stasis (image), it generates what Ronsard does not yet possess the resources—although he certainly demonstrates the inclination—to produce: “[censors/readers and author] are locked into a negotiation, an exchange with the works they seek to abridge.”¹³ In order that this “negotiation” occur, however, it is necessary that French poetry begin to slide toward a prose mode; the fable is one such possibility. “Censorship comes to loathe all that is uncertain. It loathes poetry”¹⁴ precisely because it cannot negotiate or reason with it. La Fontaine, too, like Ronsard, experiences censorship; wanting to convert to Christianity on his death-bed, La Fontaine is blocked by his confessor who instructs him that unless he repents of his “contes infames”¹⁵ he will be denied last rites. In light of this negative reception, it is interesting that La Fontaine, like Ronsard, speaks of his works as folastries and bagatelles (Préface, Contes, 555), apparently in this way seeking to discount their influence: “la gaiété de ces contes; elle passe légèrement” (I, 557). La Fontaine shows his concern to disguise their power by situating the production of his work in a situation of constraint:

Voilà les principaux points sur quoi j'ai cru être obligé de me défendre. J'abandonne le reste aux censeurs: aussi bien serait-ce une entreprise infinie que de prétendre répondre à tout. Jamais la critique ne demeure court, ni ne manque de sujets de s'exercer: quand ceux que je puis prévoir lui seraient ôtés, elle en aurait bientôt trouvé d'autres.

(I, 557)

Censorship and criticism seem omnipresent, but La Fontaine's verse will render them impotent. Criticism lurks everywhere; like the plainclothed vice squad cop luring whores on a crowded street at dusk, censorship writes its own plethora of possibilities: when one target removes itself, it determines more.

IV. CONCLUSION

Thus, if in a sense it is true that, as Paul Laumonnier avers, “c'est aux Folastries qui se rattachent notamment tous les recueils de poésies `gaillardes' et `satyriques' de la fin du XVI^e siècle et du premier tiers du XVII^e,”¹⁶ nevertheless La Fontaine breaks some of the strings of attachment to his model. Some of these ruptures are stylistic, some thematic, but all have the effect of circling around censorship rather than explicitly evading it, as Ronsard seems to feel the need to do. La Fontaine both lures and subsequently rejects the censor, wrapping him in coils of porn and poetry: the porn to seduce him, the poetry to ensnare him. While Du Bellay called Ronsard's verse “lawless verses,” in fact his are not, because through their very avoidance of the implicit norm for speech and writing, they observe those conventions in a hyperactive way. La Fontaine's are the true lawless verses: writing within known constraints which he accepts, he underwrites them with his own new laws: laws of free speech jocularly uttered, concealing a barb, speech more powerful than the institution that tries to regulate it. He turns Richelieu's rhetoric of control against itself, riding rhetoric to a farther potential: if institutional control of speech is necessary, then poetry may posit itself as a metainstitution to, equally, patrol the purlieux of institutional speech. This is the real, and ultimate effect, of the Contes et nouvelles en vers. The strategies of domination and mastery exercised against the women therein serve, in the final analysis, to show the sway and dominion the figure of the woman wields within the rhetorical space: powerless, she knows power intimately, and adopts its masks and stratagems.

Notes

1. Richard Regosin, “Poétique et rhétorique de l'amour: le propre et l'impropre de la lecture de Ronsard,” Sur des vers de Ronsard, Actes du colloque international Duke University, 11-13 Avril 1985, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990) 117. Regosin speaks of “Ronsard qui défend toute lecture inautorisée.”

2. Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, ed. P. Laumonnier (Paris: Didier, 1968) xiv.

3. Ibid. xiii.

4. Ibid. xvi.

5. Ibid.

6. Lawrence Kritzman, “Le corps de la fiction et la fiction du corps chez Ronsard,” Sur des vers de Ronsard: 1585-1985, Actes du colloque international de Duke University, 11-13 Avril 1985, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990) 72.

7. Ibid. xix. “Une certaine opposition se manifeste parmi les membres du parlement, dont certains manifestent des tendances au protestantisme. Même ses amis, tels Michel de l'Hôpital, le réprimandent et lui demandent d'écouter une inspiration plus chrétienne.”

8. Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Pornography (New York: Zone, 1993) 10-11.

9. Françoise Jouvkovsky, Le Bel Objet: les paradis artificiels de la Pléiade (Geneva, 1991) 185. “On sait que le démon est instable par manque d'être, et par conséquent à la fois incomplet et soumis à des mutations.” Was it perhaps to avoid censorship that Ronsard makes his texts “obscur” (187), that in them can be found “rien de préconçu” and “la seule loi est le hasard” (187)?

10. P. Laumonnier, ed. Œuvres complètes, 55.

11. The deliberate inclusion in the narrative fabric of Ronsard's poems in the Folastries of obscene, popular ribaldry and seamy vocabulary attests to a desire to shock and to break out of the confines enclosing normative correctness. In Folastrie III, for instance, Catin “exerce le mestier de l'un sur l'autre.” In Folastrie IIII, the words “jauche moy,” “chouser,” “son petit cas” and “guignoit le tribart qui lui pendoit entre les jambes” occur. As Gregory de Rocher observes in “Ronsard's Dildo Sonnet: The Scandal of Poissy and Rasse des Noeux” in Writing the Renaissance, ed. Raymond La Charité (French Forum, 77, 1992): 149-167, Ronsard is “known to have exploited an extremely libertine vein during his early career in Les Folastries.”

12. Ross Chambers, The Oppositional Narrative: Reading Oppositional Narrative (University of Chicago, 1991) 65.

13. Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: the Paradox of Censorship,” PMLA Special Issue on Censorship (January 1994) 17.

14. Ibid., footnote p. 56.

15. La Fontaine, Œuvres completes, (Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1991) 1v.

16. Paul Laumonnier, ed. Ronsard, Les folastries (Paris: Didier, 1968).

Works Consulted

Anon., Cabinet satyrique (1618) (Paris: Fort, 1928).

Burt, Richard, ed. The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (University of Minnesota Press).

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Censorship and the Imposition of Form,” in Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard University Press, 1991).

Fleuret, F. Les amoureux passe-temps (Paris: Montaigne, 1925).

Holquist, Michael. “Corrupt Originals: the Paradox of Censorship,” in PMLA Special Issue on Censorship, January 1994: 14-25.

Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800 (New York: Zone, 1993).

Jansen, Sue Curry. Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1988).

Lachèvre, Frédéric. Recueils collectifs libres et satiriques (Paris: Champion, 1914).

Macé, Jean. Philippe contre les poetastres (1555).

Patterson, Annabel. “Censorship,” in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990).

Ronsard, Pierre de. Œuvres complètes, v. 5, ed. P. Laumonnier (Paris: Didier, 1968).