Tuesday, August 25, 2009

A Novel Enterprise

Although I write novels set in sixteenth century France, the novel, as a genre, was unknown during this period. The Middle Ages had witnessed the flowering of narrative poetry--epics like the Chanson de Roland or Les quatre fils Aymon, romances like Chrétien de Troyes's Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion--and the development of the historical chronicle, such as those of Froissart, but the form of the novel--a long fictional work of prose depicting characters, settings, and events imagined by the author--would not develop until the seventeenth century.

Of course, people have always told stories, especially in pre-literate times when individuals would gather and tell tales to entertain themselves. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars began to transcribe such tales, often setting them in a mimetic framework. A prime example, which served as the model for countless other works, is Boccaccio's Decameron, composed in the early 1350's in the Italian vernacular. The frame story of the Decameron depicts ten young people taking refuge in the Italian countryside from the plague; each day, for ten days, the characters each recount a tale to while away the hours. The first example of such a structure in French is Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, or "One Hundred New Tales" compiled by Antoine de la Sale around 1456 at the court of Philippe le Bon. Numerous noblemen contributed tales to the collection, although many are borrowed directly from Boccaccio and other Italian conteurs. These often bawdy tales give tantalizing glimpses into the lives of fifteenth-century noble and middle classes.

While the Cent nouvelles nouvelles lacks a frame story, the importance of the mimetic context grew during the sixteenth century. At mid-century, Noël du Fail, a rural aristocrat from Brittany, penned three collections of tales, Les Propos rustiques (1547), Les Baliverneries d'Eutrapel (1548) and the Contes et propos d'Eutrapel (1585). In these works, the frame story depicts in realistic detail the social milieu of the rural peasantry as well as that of the upper classes. Du Fail focuses on the linguistic habits of each group; his tales have been called "dialogue tales" because they strive to recreate the speech patterns of each social group in a conversational way. In their expanding situational context and attention to realistic detail, Du Fail's tales prefigure the larger narrative and pyschological scope of the novel.

Of course, the most well-known of the French tale collections is that of Marguerite de Navarre, L'Heptaméron, published posthumously in 1558, although it had circulated in manuscript form for years. In this collection of seventy-two tales, the interplay between the tales and the tellers is critical. Following Boccaccio's lead, Marguerite strands a group of travelers in an abbey during a torrential storm; each day, the members of the group tell tales to pass the time until the bridge is rebuilt. However, in Marguerite's collection, the characters' commentary on the tales and the relationships that blossom during the conversations that link the tales together became just as, if not more, important than the tales themselves. Marguerite develops a distinct personality for each of her tellers and manipulates their interaction with great psychological insight. Her attention to the psychology of the characters heralds the birth of the novel, which is traditionally attributed, in the French tradition, to Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), a novel set, ironically, in the sixteenth century at the end of the reign of Henri II.

I love the fact that the first French novel is an historical one.

7 comments:

Danja said...

What a fascinating post! Decameron is a favorite of mine as far as early prose goes. I read it many times. I am definitely going to try to get my hands on paper copies of L'Heptaméron and Princesse de Clèves.

Catherine Delors said...

Fascinating, Julianne!

La Princesse de Cleves is certainly the first psychological novel in French. To me the earliest novel is Apuleius's Golden Ass, which I studied for my high school Latin, and couldn't resist including in my own second novel.

Ah, novels...

lucyp said...

Fascinating! But I'd put the first novel, using your definition, back in the thirteenth century, when Ramon Llull wrote Blaquerna in Catalan.

Julianne Douglas said...

I'm glad you found this interesting. Thanks for mentioning Blaquerna, Lucy--I'm not familiar with that work. I wasn't claiming LPdeC to be the first novel ever, but the first in French. Is Blaquerna considered part of the French canon, like the works of the trobadours?

lucyp said...

No, not at all --- I just thought as a literary person, you might be interested to hear of an early novel that has been pretty much forgotten outside Spain. It may help to explain, for instance, DonQuixote, which is also often described as the earliest novel.

Shauna Roberts said...

Very interesting post! I was unfamiliar with most of these authors, even though I love folk tale collections.

Julygirl said...

I, also thought of Cervantes "Don Quixote". Wherever it ranks in the list of early novel forms, I have read that it ranks as the most 'perfect' novel in terms of form.