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MASKS AND MIRRORS: PROBLEMS OF REPRESENTATION IN FRENCH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE James Robert Leva Lexington, Virginia B.A., Washington and Lee University, 1980 M.A., University of Virginia, 1986 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of French Language and Literature University of Virginia ·August 1990 I_ [ j j '{ Abstract Renaissance writers often seem to place human existence in a ludic context, that of the theatrum mundi. As they expose the folly of believing the illusions of the theatrum mundi, the writers also must confront the paradoxes into which they enter by attempting to intimate truth through the mise-en-abfme of literary representation. Chapter One posits the theater as a paradigm for the dynamics of representation because the theater constantly exposes itself by emphasizing the provisional and arbitrary nature of its illusions. The inability of the creative illusions of art or language to attain the absolutes towards which they strive is examined through ancient and modern contexts. Chapter Two compares .the poetic endeavors of Marguerite de Navarre and Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard seeks to create a poetic persona that becomes substantial through his poetry. His poems figure the desire to be the divinely annointed descendent of Homer and Virgil. They enact his desire to transform himself, like Jupiter, as a means of working his will. Thus his poetry figures the desire for the capacity to satisfy desire. Marguerite's poetry and theater give form to her yearning for incorporation with the Divine Totality. Prerequisite to that reunion is the annihilation of self and the stilling of its voice. Marguerite's poetic voice is a figuration of the desire for silence; it constantly points beyond its own utterances to the silence by which it is succeeded and absorbed. The Chansons spirituelles are examined in Chapter Two. Chapter Three contains readings of Marguerite's Theatre profane and the poem "L'Umbre." Rabelais mocks the desire for absolutes as a craving that can only be satisfied through delusion. Seekers of certainty, absolute knowledge or power are ridiculed. Rabelais emphasizes the process and growth of becoming rather than the vain attempt to arrest and contain the truth and vitality that informs existence. The final chapter examines Montaigne's project of self-portrayal through a reading of "Des boyteux." The human desire for perfection, Montaigne seems to say, can only proceed through recognition of our incapacity to seize perfection. Desire mirrors our deformity as it fuels our quest . TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 The Theatrical Paradigm and 1 "l' autre monde" Chapter 2 The Unseizable Self and the 39 Web of Desire Chapter 3 Shadow and Reflection 89 Chapter 4 The Larval Stage 125 Chapter 5 Deformity and Desire in 177 Montaigne's "Des boyteux" Conclusion 240 Bibliography 253 1 Chapter 1 The Theatrical Paradigm and "l' autre monde" "La poesie est ce qu'il ya de plus reel. C'est ce qui n'est completement vrai que dans un autre monde." 1 Thus poetry, as characterized by Baudelaire, crystalizes a paradox that can be found at the heart of human perception and representation. The paradox, proteiform as it is, may be summed up as follows: There is nothing more "real" than that which must transcend phenomenal "reality" to attain fullness and closure. And so, obversely, anything which purports to be "real" and complete in the world which we perceive, must of necessity be fraud or illusion, since such closure is unattainable in the fragmentary world of human perception. This dilemma has many faces; many writers have explored and evoked it in many ways, a variety of which we shall examine in this study. However, it is in the theater that the paradoxes of perception and representation are physically delineated and their mechanisms enacted. The theater is a consciously provisional representation of its own provisional status as representation; it illuminates the truth of its own insufficiency through the illusion of completion. For Baudelaire poetry is "real" because it recognizes that it is not truly itself until it transcends what it seems to be. It would then seem to follow that poetry's perceivable "truths" must be of a provisional nature, as 1 Baudelaire's quote is taken from a fragmentary note, "Puisque Realisme il y a", published in l' Art romantique. See Curiosites esthetiques; l' Art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri LeMaitre (Paris:Garnier, 1962), 825. 2 representations of a transcendant meaning and being "dans un autre monde". As such, poetry also represents its own provisional status as representation in this world. Both poetry and theater present illusions that expose the illusion of "reality" in this world by mirroring its function of representative image. This reflection, by adding its image to that of the world it reflects, opens before us a hall of mirrors, suggesting to us that that world, too, is the image of another. And so the conscious "illusions" of theater and poetry invite us to recognize the world in which they exist as a series of reflected images of an elusive truth and being, beyond immediate attainment, adumbrating and duplicating the promise of realization and fulfillment. This quality, inherent in the written word and physically manifested in the theater, will be a source of reference and inquiry throughout this study. The fact that the theater has long been a source of metaphors for a multitude of 2 perceptions and situations in life and literature has been amply documented • The seemingly ubiquitous evocation of this metaphor as well as its diverse applications raise many questions about the nature of the theater and its relation to other forms of representation and other literary genres. The question arises as to whether the theater, rather than being the source of our notions of the nature of representation, does not in fact 2Lynda G. Christian's Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea traces the literary lineage and evolution of the world as theater metaphor, examining its varied applications and interpretations in western thought from Heraclitus through the Renaissance. Frances Yates' Art of Memory studies the appropriation of the theatrical locus as an organizing principle for the psyche in its perception and comprehension of the phenomenal world from ancient times to the 17th Century. Marianne Robson's article "Du theatrum mundi au theatrum mentis" explores the transformation of the concept of the psychic spectator from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. 3 serve as a paradigm of these concepts. As a paradigm or model the theater represents the dynamics of representation, thus opening a mise-en-abfme to the self-reflexive nature of representation. According to C.S. Peirce, The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevent clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here3. The infinite regression, as we shall see, seems to be an inevitable corollary of representational endeavor. The infinite regression arises from, and mirrors, the search for, and impossibility of, a closure that would culminate in the coincidence of that which is represented with the dynamics and means of its representation. But representation is itself an evocation of the absence of what it purports to represent. The act of representation thus consists of contradictory movements: one which strives for identification with the object of representation, and another that simultaneously asserts autonomy from and non- coincidence with the phenomenon represented. Because of this, representation can be seen as a provisional operation; its mimetic function is limited by its autonomy while its autonomous existence cannot be separated from its mimetic purpose. The theater reflects this provisional quality common to representation; in fact, it exploits it. Nothing is more "theatrical" than the flaunting of theatrical devices, than the celebration of the artificiality of the theater and the arbitrariness of its conventions. The 3Collected Papers (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960) I, 117. 4 theater's conventions are "arbitrary" in that they do not seem to be the result of some natural force or unyielding necessity. They are arbitrary in the way that language is arbitrary, in that they manifest a limited number of an infinite number of endlessly changing possibilities to form a system that can reflect both aspects of itself and the 4 world in which it exists • The conventions of a representational system, such as language or the theater, pretend to render perceptible and comprehensible the world beyond those conventions by reference to that world. Yet the representational system is contained within the world it represents rather than vice versa. Thus the representational system relies on its conventions to establish the illusion that it, an infinitesimal component of existence, is capable of containing and transmitting the whole of existence. Illusion in the theater is based on this premise - that a recognizable and perceptible world can be contained within the limited theatrical locus. One might suggest that this action mirrors the very act of perception, in that the representation to one's self of a boundless phenomenal world requires provisional circumscription of the aspects of that world which are to be perceived. This perception, that the perceived phenomenon is separable from its ontological matrix, could be considered an illusion born of psychic "conventions" which provide a system for the noetic apprehension of the phenomenal world. The paradoxes that accompany an infinite regression towards an unattainable origin and completeness are inseparable from the theater. In this study the notion of the theater 4The theater's voluntary and intrinsic exposure of its own arbritrary nature has much in common with Paul Valery's idea that a primary function of a work of art or literature is to evoke the myriad possiblities not chosen or realized in the execution of the oeuvre.

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