ABSTRACT
Les Aventures de Telemaque was extraordinarily successful at pleasing readers eager to conjoin usefulness and delight, and who enjoyed entertaining adventures that included wise instructions on life. The exasperated reaction of Fenelon's most virulent critics, Nicolas Gueudeville and the abbe Faydit, testifies to the sweeping success of Les Aventures de Telemaque. Fenelon overcame the practical challenge to instructing an impetuous young man through what might be called the pedagogy of prose, since verse would prove inadequate to render the pulse of the hero's emotions, and would distort the pace of his journey to match a pre-given rhyme scheme. Instead of a chief exercising personal authority, Fenelon presented his pupil and readers with the abstract entity of a Mariannelike Republic, a collegial authority and benign polity. Aragon published Les Aventures de Telemaque in 1922, the same year as another prose poetic venture to rewrite the Odyssey, James Joyce's Ulysses.
