Baroque comic fiction  

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Baroque literature, comic fiction

Not all fiction from baroque literature is a wild flight of fancy in far-flung lands and rarefied adventurous love stories. Influenced by the international success of the picaresque novel from Spain (such as the novel Lazarillo de Tormes), and by Miguel de Cervantes's short story collection Exemplary Tales (French translations started to appear in 1614) and Don Quixote de la Mancha (French translation 1614-1618), the French novelists of the first half of the century also chose to describe and satirize their own era and its excesses. Other important models of satire were provided by Fernando de Rojas's Celestina and John Barclay's (1582-1621) two satirical works in Latin Euphormio sive Satiricon (1602) and Argenis (1621).

Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Aventures du baron de Faeneste portrays the rude manners and comic adventures of a Gascon in the royal court.

Charles Sorel's L'histoire comique de Francion is a picaresque inspired story of the ruses and amorous dealings of a young gentleman, and his Le Berger extravagant is a satire of the d'Urfé-inspired pastoral, which (taking a clue from the end of Don Quixote) has a young man take on the life of a shepherd. Despite its "realism", Sorel's works remain, nonetheless, highly baroque with dream sequences and inserted narrations (for example, when Francion tells of his years at school) typical of the adventure novel. This use of inserted stories also follows Cervantes who inserted a number of nearly autonomous stories into his Quixote.

Paul Scarron's most famous work, Le Roman comique, uses the narrative frame of a group of ambulant actors in the provinces to present both scenes of farcical comedy and sophisticated inserted tales.

Cyrano de Bergerac -- made famous by the 19th century play by Edmond Rostand -- wrote two novels that, sixty years before Gulliver's Travels or Voltaire (not to mention science-fiction), use a journey to magical lands (the moon and the sun) as pretexts for satirizing contemporary philosophy and morals. By the end of the century, Cyrano's works would inspire a number of philosophical novels in which Frenchmen travel to foreign lands and strange utopias.

The early half of the century also saw the continued popularity of the comic short story and collections of humorous discussions, such as in the Histoires comiques of François du Souhait; the playful, chaotic, sometimes obscene and almost unreadable Moyen de parvenir by Béroalde de Verville (a parody of books of "table talk", of Rabelais and of Michel de Montaigne's The Essays); the anonymous Caquets de l'accouchée (1622); and Molière d'Essertine's Semaine amoureuse (a collection of short stories).

Select list of baroque comique writers and works:

In the latter half of the century, a contemporary setting would be also used in many classical "nouvelles" (or short novels), especially as a form of moral critique of contemporary society.


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