Pleasure, Seduction, and Authorial Identity in Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant

Abstract

In his preface the Le Berger extravagant (1627–1628), published in 1633 as L'Anti-Roman, Charles Sorel explains that he is working for the public good by composing a text that mocks all others and that is, as a result, the "tombeau des romans, & des absurditez de la Poësie." Sorel's statement of the "otherness" of his text is complicated the fact that the Anti-Roman is more or less a studied duplication of the very texts it criticizes. In this article, I examine the role of pleasure in the ambivalent dynamic between roman and anti-roman. Using Barthes's notions of pleasure and jouissance as a framework for the study, I consider the implications of Sorel's attempts to seduce the reader into his text by imitating the conventional novel's perceived use of pleasure as a mask for vice. The double-layered nature of the narration poses particular challenges for interpretation because meaning becomes suspended in the murky space between "same" and "other," between novel and anti-novel. Furthermore, the semantic ambiguities of this game of seduction confounds body and text to such a degree that the author's own identity becomes lost itself in the imitative disguises he adopts. He becomes, like his text, multilayered, polysemous, uncertain.