Voltaire and the temple of bad taste: A study of 'La Pucelle d'Orleans'.

摘要

Bad writing has often been the inspiration for good, states Pat Rogers in his 1972 work about English eighteenth-century satire, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. Rogers' observation applies particularly to Voltaire, whose mock-epic poem, La Pucelle d'Orleans, is a complex pastiche of the very literary forms and styles that the author criticized.;The distinction between good and bad taste, or between the noble and the vulgar, held special significance for the erudite, classically-trained Voltaire. His critical writings vehemently defend his conception of good taste in literature, especially in the epic genre, mocking and rejecting any literary work that falls short of the requisite sublimity. Consequently, La Pucelle, which he began writing around 1730, shortly after the publication of La Henriade, shows the underside of his epic theory.;This notorious comic poem about Joan of Arc reinforces Voltaire's literary criticism by illustrating exactly what should not be included in an epic; for example, vulgar language, irrelevant love episodes, and fantastically improbable events. To this end, he imitates and exaggerates the mass of writings that somehow associated themselves with the classical epic, such as the Christian epics of Tasso, Milton, and the French Moderns, the chivalric romances of Italy, and the burlesques of Scarron and Samuel Butler.;My thesis thus concentrates on Voltaire's Pucelle as an attack on bad writing, or what is so defined in Voltaire's critical works. It focuses on four kinds of breaches of taste that Voltaire's mock epic parodies: gender inversion, social class inversion, animals, and madness. All of these themes are part of the Early Modern imagery of the world upside down, in which hierarchies are reversed for comic purposes, but also to reinforce orders and boundaries.