Splendeurs et misères des figures de style

Abstract

The shift in the sense of modesty in the sixteenth century did not only, as Norbert Elias thought, indicate a reinforcement of the repression of libidinal impulses and a greater respect for propriety, but also resulted in the display of perverse games and of transgressions in writing, as well as the establishment of new seduction strategies. The article tackles a specific aspect of this two-faced modesty, namely the ambivalent relationship that physicians conducted with figurative language in the pre-modern era. On the one hand they insisted on using the correct terminology, at the risk of threatening decency; on the other hand, in order to prove their moral standards, they claimed they used a covert language, thereby endangering the transmission of knowledge. There was thus a tension between two systems governing the propriety of discourse, a key value of rhetoric: one privileged a scientific objective (”art”), the other obeyed social conventions (”modesty”). But in both cases the intention proclaimed by the author was contradicted by ”the intentional form of the style”, what one might call its effects. This form sometimes favored the pleasurable over the factual and transformed the respectable cover into an incentive for interpretative undressing, so to speak, with all the pleasure that this involved. This undoubtedly explains a number of lawsuits filed against physicians, in which the question of style played an essential role. From the Erreurs populaires by Laurent Joubert (1578) to the Tableau de l’amour humain by Nicolas Venette (1686), this article discusses the scientific barrenness of these tropes, as well as their aesthetic and erotic splendor.

Keywords

• modesty
• style
• figure
• interpretation
• eroticism
• censorship