THE DESIGNS OF LOVE: SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN HONORE D'URFE'S "L'ASTREE" (FRANCE)

As a remarkably complete synthesis of the French Renaissance that nevertheless ushers in a new era, Honore d'Urfe's five-volume novel, L'Astree, includes disparate literary and intellectual currents that have sometimes been seen as contradictory or even self-nullifying. The present study argues, on the contrary, that L'Astree is a coherent whole whose diverse elements of form and content, whether traditional or modern, idealistic or realistic in outlook, unite to celebrate d'Urfe's idealized vision of the bygone world of his and his society's youth.

An initial chapter shows how, through the innovative combination of pastoral, epic and history, d'Urfe makes his work's profusion of traditional genres serve this unique vision of a universe centered around his own, nostalgically portrayed province of Forez.

Subsequent chapters examine how L'Astree's formal construction contributes to this coherence of vision by mirroring the harmonious Renaissance cosmos that nurtures d'Urfe's idyllic pastoral society. The Neo-Platonic ideals espoused in the work's numerous theoretical passages--which critics have sometimes considered as irrelevant to or even contradicted by the plot--in fact provide an essential key to the artistic unity of the novel.

The work's supreme deity, Tautates, a druidic god of love who, like the Neo-Platonists' demiurgic Love, created order out of the original chaos, embodies the artistry with which the diverse threads of L'Astree's plot are made to serve a single, unified end. This ruling image of artist-divinity is supported by other mises-en-abyme: subsidiary author figures such as the trickster, Climante, or artistic microcosms of the novel such as the grotto of Damon and Fortune, help the reader to perceive how the apparent disorder of such a vast and multi-faceted work contributes to a unified whole in a way that conforms to the requirements of many Italian literary theorists of the period.

Even more importantly, by calling attention to a form wherein diversity and contradictions are resolved by the grand designs of Tautates-Love, these self-conscious references to L'Astree's artistic qualities reinforce the unassailable harmony of the idyllic society that the work enshrines.