Radu Toderici

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

todericu@yahoo.com

 

 

“Un faux établi a l’air de la verité”:

Dominique Bouhours on Myth

 

 

Abstract: At the dawn of the modern, rational critic of mythology and the mythological mentality, myth was tolerated and even embraced by the educated people, due to its roots in the classical tradition of Greece and Rome. Some argued for its profane coexistence in a society filled with sacramental rituals, as seventeenth-century France was. Their argument was mainly that, though depicting false events, myth was nevertheless true, allegorically translating a forgotten truth or simply being of a different essence than the facts to which the regular true-false distinction applied. In his writings, Dominique Bouhours, a preeminent teacher and man of taste of the seventeenth century, argued mostly for the latter opinion.

Keywords: Myth; Fable; Dominique Bouhours; Seventeenth-Century France.

 

 

Dominique Bouhours was one of those littérateurs of the seventeenth century, whose presence in the salons of his time was well regarded, while his opinions on elegant literary usage, which made him famous during his lifetime, are mostly forgotten nowadays. His work, notably his 1671 Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, reprinted several times during his lifetime, and his La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit, published only after his death, in London, in 1705, have made him an example of the seventeenth-century man of taste, involved in numberless disputes concerning not only literary matters, but also language quarrels (his Doutes sur la langue française proposés aux Messieurs de l’Académie française, published in 1674, stands as one of the influential systematizations of the complaints targeted against the dictionary elaborated by the French Academy and an excellent response to Vaugelas’s 1647 Remarques sur la langue française). He was, in many respects, a man of his century, and his opinions on myth, or fable (fable), as the myth was referred to at the end of the seventeenth century, were largely those met in many writings of his contemporaries.

If there is a certain status that myth has in the seventeenth century, that status is one of a profane entertainment, as Jean Starobinski brilliantly proved it in his essay, “Fable et mythologie aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles”[1]. One has to be aware of the mythical legacy of the ancient authors in order to understand a work of art; since one is expected to instantly recognize mythological allusions, one also feels free to use them in any way one fancies, even in a humorous way. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, a current of skepticism regarding myth and the use of myth can be traced, beginning with a small treatise called De l’origine des fables, written by Bernard de Fontenelle and published only in 1724, whereas its elaboration can be traced back to the 1690s. Still using the word “fable” instead of “myth”[2], Fontenelle argues that mythical thinking belongs to an early age of humanity and should be analyzed accordingly; hence, any myth contains misleading conceptions, due to an early attempt to understand phenomena. One of his most important contributions to the future history of religions is the attempt to trace parallels between similar myths from several regions and analyze their content from a comparative point of view. For Fontenelle, even more fascinating than critically dismembering a myth is revealing the mentality that produced it[3].

If for Fontenelle a myth consisted of erroneous facts, which could be scientifically proved wrong, the seventeenth century was no less precautious about the reality of myth. However, myths benefited for a long time from a different treatment concerning their validity. The main reason consisted in the long tradition of interpreting the myths of Antiquity allegorically; though it may seem that the Church had banished the pagan gods, they had survived in disguise in the actual writings of the ecclesiastic writers[4]. The seventeenth century turned repeatedly to allegorical interpretations in order to explain the obscure causalities of myths, and Bouhours is no exception in this respect. However, it also resorted to a secondary strategy, which consisted in allowing the use of myth in certain literary genres and carefully establishing the proper use of fable according to the literary genre.

Dominique Bouhours frequently uses allegory for explaining the fable; as a matter of fact, when one of his characters from La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit is supposed to talk about the Graces and the reason why they were depicted rather small, he argues that their size is due to the allegory hidden by the image – the ancients symbolized through their size the fact that poetical delights come from minor things, like small gestures[5]. Behind the rather grotesque image of the Graces, contradicting through their statures the classical canon, lies a more profound message, which an expert in decrypting fables must be aware of.

Even when a fable is not seen as an allegory, there is always a double meaning involved. As a consequence, Bouhours seems to address fables the way he addresses metaphors. Both fable and metaphor have in Bouhours’s writings the same ambiguous status, part “real” and part “fiction”. The significance of both fable and metaphor can be misleading, as it is supposed to be assembled according to a state of facts that represents a higher reality. There is a whole list of precautions that a writer must take in order to meet all the conditions of a great metaphor, and the same thing goes for the use of fables in literature. There is, in his Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, a whole chapter, the last, dedicated to the right use of metaphor, entitled “The Devices” (“Les Devises”), as it is supposed to encapsulate the right technique for creating a heraldic device. This technique consists mainly of feeling and taste, combined with a proper use of verisimilar, natural images. There is a whole rhetoric of the “natural”, of the verisimilar in Bouhours’s dialogues; this “natural” must resemble the canonical, already known use of a metaphor or of an image; the opposite of the natural consists in letting the imagination interfere; the real and the certain are opposed to the imaginary and the haphazard. When thinking of a metaphor, pick something from the natural use, Bouhours adds, like that of the fables, exemplifying with two known mythical symbols[6]. For Bouhours, fables can then be real or not, but what makes them relevant is their affiliation to the practical literary tradition. In the line of this use, a device can be properly or improperly executed, depending on one’s ability to emulate tradition.

As in any literary quarrel of the seventeenth century, in Bouhours’s writings one of the main terms is “reality”. According to this not always distinct concept of “reality”, an image can consist of mythical elements, as long as they are known and used properly; although the imaginary beings depicted in myth have never existed, they are somehow part of this “reality” as inherited representations[7]. The legitimation of mythical beings, as Ariste, one of the two companions in Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, implies, comes from the literary use, but also from the authority of the poets[8]. In the corpus of myths, Bouhours takes all the necessary precautions, since he wants to establish “real” myths as “traditionally accepted”; furthermore, he separates history from literary use and proclaims an area distinct from the truth as one would understand it from an historical point of view. Moreover, nature and fable have all the reasons to be incongruous. Still, there are times when nature and fable mix in a device, says Ariste; but that does not make the actual content of the fable true, the same way the sun and the moon can be part of a device, but their assumed mythological kinship is fake[9]. The iconic representation tying the sun to the moon is real regardless of their nature of celestial bodies. That is just one example of the many Bouhours adds, like the myth of the Phoenix bird or that of the swan song. It is interesting, though, to see Ariste’s final conclusion: no device is perfect without fantastic, even magical elements, as if the mastery of the mythological element can contribute to the actual success of a device. Nevertheless, the fantastic elements need to be verisimilar and have to provoke the viewer’s admiration, and also have to be “true and real”[10]. Ironically, Bouhours brings as a final example the very curious case of a device that uses the figure of the Dragon guarding the garden of the Hesperides[11]. Almost the perfect device, the image lacks only the associative power needed for the casein which it was used. We are told that a device should use fantastic elements, but with the purpose of reflecting reality through mythological “realities”.

It becomes clear that in the seventeenth century, if we follow Bouhour’s logic, myth is equally accepted and banished. It is accepted as the realm of profane entertainment, but, as Bouhours puts it, only by consensual agreement between fellow cultivated men, as Eudoxe in the first of his dialogues in La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit would repeat, but this time trusting the world of the fable to the poets. In contrast with those who are unaware and ignorant of the fables, they are the ones mastering them, and even if the world of fables may seem chimerical at first glance, this chimerical world becomes something almost real by their shared consensus[12]. This agreement is not, though, an agreement about something fake, but an agreement about something that is similar to the truth, that is entirely plausible, something untrue that has the air of something true[13]. As we see, the status of fables in the seventeenth century, as it appears from Bouhours’s writings, is constantly imprecise. On the sole condition of being verisimilar, a myth does not have to be true; all it has to be is something contiguous to the truth, a certain kind of truth. Myth constantly escapes criticism as long as it is a part of a work of fiction and becomes even more verisimilar because fiction gives it a status that evades the truth.

Lying as a way of telling the truth: the poet, even if he does not tell any particular truth, is protected by the nature of his craft; Eudoxe adds that it is permitted for a poet to lie so gloriously as in a fable, as long it is strictly within the conventions of poetry [14]. For Bouhours, these conventions refer to the fact that the essence of the object must not be destroyed by utter improvising; as long as lying means something untrue, but verisimilar, poetry is still far from being fake.

What about prose, then? In another paragraph of the first dialogue, Eudoxe and Philante talk about the use of Fortuna as a character, a commonplace in the writings of the second half of the seventeenth century. The system of prose, says Eudoxe, has its own measure regarding the use of fables and myths, and because this system is different, a complete new set of arguments is needed for the use of a pagan motive in prose[15]. Bouhours seems to credit the very origins of poetry with the lack of distinctions between true and false; her pagan nature made her inherit also the ability to deal with fantastic motifs. When it comes to prose, Bouhours seems to let the writer decide when the subject should be adapted to the imperatives of poetry and when it should not. He even exemplifies with a paragraph taken from Cicero, in which Fortuna is taken rather symbolically[16].

Even if it might seem that way, Bouhours does not lack a critical vocabulary concerning myths, as we are not to assume that the seventeenth-century writers naively believed in the content of fables. Many paragraphs of Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène concern the very fact that both Ariste and Eugène are skeptical enough and they are, by the standards of their century, well-read, educated men. By the standard of the eighteenth century, their dialogues would have been, of course, in the vein of Fontenelle’s approach; but Ariste and Eugène seem more preoccupied with justifying their inherited mythological culture and regard poetry as a sum of practices that transcend the habitual meaning of the world “truth”, even if the ultimate aim of poetry remains that of being “true and real”. By mapping a territory where the habitual distinction between true and false does not apply anymore, and by placing all fables in that territory, irrespective of their origins, Bouhours classifies with no chronological restrictions a whole set of motifs or subjects, which he places under the sole restriction of the verisimilar. Though some of these fables are still regarded as allegories, for most of them the criterion is their origin (as topoi shared by a community of educated men, “savants”) and their function (they can replace “true” representations, as the ones perpetuated through the writings of the historiographers).

By establishing a different criterion for truth in the works of fiction, Bouhours also defends fiction from the limitations of religious standards. If from a clerical point of view what is dogmatically accepted is also true, the norm does not apply to fiction, since fiction has its own, eclectic set of limitations. For ecclesiastical writings, as Bouhours carefully adds, the rules have not changed, as we have seen regarding the use of pagan gods in prose – a mixture of Christianity and paganism is nowhere to be found stated in the seventeenth century, due to the severe repression and censorship exerted by the Church. But, as fables are the perfect incarnation of the profane, they can very well be the melting pot of various tendencies; thus, fables tended to become the motifs used mainly when speaking plainly about sacramental matters was not possible.

The main arguments that separated myth from falsehood were to be applied later to fiction only. By that time, though, myth was also regarded as mostly fiction, while its many elements were to be rigorously classified into a realm less obscure than the place reserved for fable in the seventeenth century.

 

Lucrare publicată în cadrul unui proiect cofinanţat din Fondul Social European prin Programul Operaţional Sectorial Dezvoltarea Resurselor Umane 2007-2013.

 

 

Notes