Pastoral Palimpsest: Writing the Laws of Love in L'Astrée
Mediated by Neoplatonist thought of the Quattrocento, paradox governs both form and content of Honore d'Urfe's L'Astree. The prefatory epistles to the work's first three parts establish a Foucaldian notion of ``author function'' while simultaneously positing the author's profound distrust of writing and his preference for an oral medium. Within the romance itself, the three episodes featuring the authoritative Laws of Love, their falsification, and finally their complete revision illustrate deconstruction of the ``author function'' through the force of the Platonic textual ``drift'' against which d'Urfe cautions his protagonists in his prefaces. At the same time, the revised Laws of Love announce means of collective composition prevalent in the later seventeenth century. The romance's sylvan cabinet thus reflects and resolves the dilemmas of authority and composition conceived in the prefaces' paternal Cabinet.