ABSTRACT
Examination of scatological motifs in Theophile de Viau's (1590-1626) libertine, or 'cabaret' poetry is important in terms of how the scatological contributes to the depiction of the Early Modern body in the French lyric. l This essay does not examine Theophile's portrait of the body strictly in terms of the 'Baroque' or the 'neo-Classical.' Rather, it argues that the scatological context in which he situates the body (either his, or those of others), reflects a keen sensibility of the body representative of the transition between these two eras. Theophile reinforces what Bernard Beugnot terms the body's inherent 'eloquence' (17), or what Patrick Dandrey describes as an innate 'textuality' in what the body 'writes' (31), and how it discloses meaning. The poet's scatological lyric, much of which was published in the Parnasse Satyrique of 1622, projects a different view of the body's 'eloquence' by depicting a certain realism and honesty about the body as well as the pleasure and suffering it experiences. This Baroque realism, which derives from a sense of the grotesque and the salacious, finds itself in conflict with the Classical body which is frequently characterized as elegant, adorned, and 'domesticated' (Beugnot 25). Theophile's private body is completely exposed, and, unlike the public body of the court, does not rely on masking and pretension to define itself. Mitchell Greenberg contends that the body in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century French literature is often depicted in a chaotic manner because, 'the French body politic was rent by tumultuous religious and social upheavals' (62)? While one could argue that Theophile's portraits of a syphilis-ridden narrators are more a reflection of his personal agony rather than that of France as a whole, what emerges in Theophile is an emphasis on the movement, if not decomposition of the body.3 Given Theophile's public persona and the satirical dimension of his work, it is difficult to imagine that the degeneration he portrays is limited only to his individual experience. On a collective level, Theophile reflects what Greenberg calls 'a continued, if skewed apprehension of the world in both its physical and metaphysical dimensions'
(62-3) typical of the era. To a large extent, the body Theophile depicts is a scatological body, one whose deterioration takes the form of waste, disease, and evacuation as represented in both the private and public domain.
