Œuvres complètes, Tome II,1: Solitaire premier, ou, Discours Des Muses, Et de la fureur Poétique by Pontus de Tyard (review)

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• Œuvres complètes, Tome II,1: Solitaire premier, ou, Discours Des Muses, Et de la fureur Poétique by Pontus de Tyard
• Roberto E. Campo

Pontus de Tyard, Œuvres complètes, Tome II,1: Solitaire premier, ou, Discours Des Muses, Et de la fureur Poétique, Ed. Jean-Claude Carron, Dir. Eva Kushner. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019, 264pp.

As the latest addition to Eva Kushner's collection of critical editions of the poetic and prose works of the sixteenth-century French author and Pléiade affiliate Pontus de Tyard, Jean-Claude Carron's presentation of the Mâconnais's Solitaire premier, ou, Discours des Muses, Et de la fureur Poétique is elaborate in every important regard.

In 1950, Silvio Baridon published an edition of the first Solitaire that offered a brief (nine-page) introduction explaining the editor's plan to reproduce the work's 1587 edition (the last one published during Tyard's lifetime, preceded only by the editions of 1552 and 1575), his approach to variants (thereafter [End Page 112] appended as footnotes throughout the text), and his own orthographic modifications. After the discourse, Baridon also supplied a table of the work's principal topics, likewise derived from the 1587 version.

By contrast, Carron's volume opens with a fifty-seven-page Introduction consisting of seven subsections. These divisions afford analyses of Tyard's application of the dialogue genre, the Solitaire's place in the author's works, the discourse's status as an "art poétique," its topical structure, its dual function as an amorous dialogue and philosophical treatise, and its role in establishing Tyard's impact on the poetic theory of the Pléiade. The Introduction includes a history of the discourse's editions as well. Here, Carron focuses on the variants and additions that account for what he calls "le caractère évolutif du processus de l'édition" (69).

To complement the Solitaire text, Carron provides a set of 463 endnotes, many of which present detailed discussions of the inspirational sources and critical literature surrounding Tyard's writings in addition to helpful explanations of the mythological references and elaborations on the textual variants. This apparatus is followed by the first Solitaire's table of topics (apparently based, although never acknowledged, on the list from the 1587 edition), an appendix comprised of the liminary pieces from the work's 1552 and 1575 editions (themselves supplemented by fifty-two elucidative footnotes), a glossary of words likely to challenge today's reader (highlighted by an asterisk within the text of the discourse). The backmatter closes with an extensive bibliography of Tyard's works, his principal sources or influences, and scholarly studies of the author or his writings, as well as an index nominum and rerum.

Among the numerous strengths of Carron's edition are his Introduction's discussions of key features of the Solitaire premier that have earned the work the distinction of being "l'ouvrage de Pontus de Tyard qui a eu le plus d'influence dans l'histoire de la littérature et de la critique littéraire" (13). One of these points has been studied by Carron and Kushner in other contexts. It concerns the Mâconnais's recourse to the dialogue form as a heuristic device employed to stimulate "la curiosité des lecteurs" (56) and to mediate the instruction of contemporary French readers in the finer points of Ficinian Neoplatonism and humanity's quest for ultimate salvation. To this end, and most closely inspired by the author's recent translation of Léon l'Hébreu's Dialogues d'amour (1551), Tyard stages himself as the teacher-philosopher "Solitaire" engaged in a serious, but often lively, occasionally flirtatious, exchange with his pupil-interlocutor Pasithée, the object of the poet's amorous desires since his recently published [End Page 113] Erreurs amoureuses (1549). While this arrangement enables Tyard's objective to abandon what Carron calls "l'orthodoxie d'un projet 'purement' néoplatonicien" (27), it also problematizes the interaction, which often approaches what the editor characterizes as a "harcèlement, fait sous le couvert de la galanterie" that "contredit ce que le maître prétend communiquer" (17).

The Introduction likewise considers...