Critical Tales: New Studies of the 'Heptameron' and Early Modern Culture

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1997 by Lisa Neal

This volume of essays on the Heptameron is among the most significant of the studies that have been devoted to Marguerite's work over the past two decades. Contributors include many leading French Renaissance scholars, and their essays are certain to elicit further discussion. They not only recognize the specificity of Marguerite's work - Edwin Duval, for instance, emphasizes that the French nouvelle, as Marguerite practices it, must not be confused with the Italian novella - but also demonstrate the subtlety and originality of the Heptameron's narrative discourse and the ways in which it opened new pathways for French writing. Most of the essays also seek to historically situate the Heptameron in relation to developments in sixteenth-century culture, and to "show how shifts in structures of thinking manifest themselves not just thematically but formally, linguistically, and aesthetically as well."

The variety of these essays makes it very difficult to provide a synoptic overview of the themes and issues they deal with. Fortunately, the editors of the volume have rendered this task almost superfluous: in their "epilogue" they offer a masterly discussion of the essays, ranged under the rubrics "The Heptameron in the History of Narrative Genres," "Narrative Theory," and "The Narrative and the Self." A reader with limited time (is there any other kind of reader these days?) might do well to begin with the epilogue, but will probably find it so interesting that she will end up reading all the essays anyway.

Of course, other itineraries could be followed through this volume, and to suggest its richness, I will sketch just one of these. In a particularly provocative essay, Andre Tournon points to a virtual narrative in the Heptameron - the one which is constituted by the complicated erotic relations among the storytellers, and which is implicit in their sly doubles entendres, allusions, and even their choice of tales. Crucial elements of this narrative are omitted; as a result, it can be only gradually, and never fully, decoded by the reader. In her essay on the practice of confession, Mary McKinley points out that in the Heptameron, erotic activity occurs in the domain of the secret, and should be kept there, but like everything repressed, it frequently returns in language, as Robert Cottrell, Hope Glidden, Francois Cornilliat and Ulrich Langer persuasively demonstrate. Thus the themes of secrecy and privacy, so important in modern culture, are linked with an ambivalent, multi-leveled narrative discourse that gestures toward another, partly concealed story without ever quite telling it. This other story generates endless new narrative possibilities. "Like Sceve, and later Montaigne," Tournon writes, "it is through postulating that language is never perfectly transparent - that human motivations and behavior can never be entirely deciphered - that Marguerite de Navarre creates a literary form whose wellspring never runs dry, a literary form arranged around a blind spot which she defines as the"'conseil prive' of the God of novelists."

LISA NEAL University of Puget Sound