Sampling the Book: Renaissance Prologues and the French 'Conteurs.'

Prologues, prefaces and other literary protocols of introduction share the phenomenological characteristics of the threshold (Latin "limen" and French "seuil"), the ambiguous area mediating between inside and outside. In the last ten years of scholarship in French Renaissance literature, prologues have elicited increasing attention as they have provided insights into the shifting modes of the contract between reader and writer in a century which can itself be viewed - to use Antoine Compagnon's description - as a threshold "divided between two instances, tradition and the individual 'subject.'" The enormous success of the printing press, which radically modified the interpretive exchange, exacerbates such a division.

In light of these macroscopic amphibologies marking the sixteenth century, Deborah Losse's brief book comprehensively examines prologues to French collections of mostly short prose fiction ("contes"). The "conteurs" whose introductory gestures are surveyed comprise figures both well-known (Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Bonaventure Des Periers, Jeanne Flore, Louise Labe, Tabourot, Bouchet, Beroalde de Verville) and less well-known (Philippe de Vigneulles, Noel Du Fail, Jacques Yver, Philippe le Picard, Helisenne de Crenne, Benigne de Poissenot, Cholieres). Additionally, major portions of the book examine Montaigne's "Au lecteur" as a key document in this particular textual domain, since the Essais, as a convincing article by Gabriel Perouse argues, closely participate in the generic parameters of the "conte."

Losse organizes her treatment of this daunting multiplicity of liminal texts both synchronically and diachronically. In diachronic terms, she recapitulates some important concerns of Medieval "entrees en matiere," especially the authenticating mention of the "auctores" which give legitimacy and veracity to the text being introduced, and she notes the relations our "conteurs" entertain with this earlier notion of fictional authority. She sees the Renaissance prologue moving through a questioning of its own validity as a textual entity, until, in the seventeenth century, it loses its narrative function and ceases being the hybrid "seuil" which engages the reader in a "sampling" or "echantillon" of the narratives towards which it beckons. It is this "sampling" - both the act and its results - which insures that sixteenth-century liminal texts bear direct, functional relations with the fictions into which they usher the reader.

In offering the reader an adequate "sampling" of the larger text, prefatory materials function by positioning the fictional world of the text vis-a-vis the historic period at which it was conceived - a propaedeutic maneuver insuring acceptable readings of the fiction, and a proliferation of metaphors which act as symbols of the interpretive commerce we undertake. In the final chapter ("Women Addressing Women - The Differentiated Text"), these questions acquire the additional complexities of gender-distinct discourse. In her discussions of these various dimensions of the prologues, Losse uses and refines for her own purposes the terminology elaborated in Gerard Genette's influential typology of paratexts, Seuils (Paris: 1987); she also strategically employs the vocabulary of contemporary hermeneutics (Derrida, Ricoeur, Prince, Cixous). Refreshingly, however, her familiarity with these critics' idiosyncratic stances never obfuscates the descriptive and exploratory concerns of the book, and consistently militates for the elucidation of the Renaissance texts at hand.

The modest length of the book entails some drawbacks, not the least of which is the sense that we are experiencing a mere sampling of compelling observations often strung together by the necessity to pass from text to text in rapid succession. Losse sparks up our interest for the fertile relations the prologues proleptically entertain with the narrative fictions they present, but she stops short of a more substantial treatment. This craving for more, however, attests to the author's success: for the first time she sets side-by-side a series of texts that share both similarities and differences, and she asks of them difficult questions which are fundamental for a reconstitution of the imaginaries subtending the text/reader contract in the fictional literature of sixteenth-century France.

MARC-ANDRE WIESMANN Skidmore College