The Eye and the Ear

“Je ne represente rien à l’oeil: mais à l’oüye seulement, qui n’est pas un sens qui touche si vivement l’ame” (I represent nothing for the eye, but only for the ear, which is a sense that touches the soul less intensely). Honoré d’Urfé's declaration, placed at the end of the preface to the first volume of his sprawling novel, is meant to justify his idealized depiction of shepherds and shepherdesses, who have little in common with actual villagers forced to tend sheep to make a living. His distinction between the eye and the ear, between the visual and the verbal, follows his observation that if pastoral theater can represent its characters with golden staffs and refined manners, he may certainly do the same in a novel, with fewer strains to credibility, since his characters are not seen, but heard. Interestingly, this observation occurs immediately following d’Urfé's explanation of why he chose a real place – Forez and the banks of the Lignon – as his novel's setting. From the outset, then, L’Astrée is characterized by representational instability. Idealized shepherdesses converse in a realistic setting, their adventures recounted by an author keenly aware of the stakes involved in the materiality of sight, sound, and the soul.

The argument of whether sight or sound is a more efficient means of touching the human soul is not new. In her footnote to this passage in her new edition of L’Astrée, Delphine Denis notes that d’Urfé's allusion to a hierarchy between the senses comes from Aristotelian sources, and thereby contradicts Celadon's espousal, at the end of the second volume, of the Neoplatonist view – which he claims to have heard from a druid whom he met years ago – that all of the senses, along with reason, equally equip humans to appreciate and experience true beauty. Denis's efforts to locate the foundations of d’Urfé's aesthetic theories in ancient philosophical texts recently discovered and interpreted in the Italian Renaissance are characteristic of much of the scholarship surrounding L’Astrée and its well-read, curious author.