La passion pour Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie et la flamme sombre du “Zohar”

Abstract

Set against the background of the frequent references to the French and Italian Renaissance scattered in Petits traites – particularly in tome VI – and spanning from Marot to Sceve, from Du Bellay to Montaigne, from Ariosto to Strozzi, this close reading of the text concerning the Norman kabalist erudite and poet Guy Le Fevre de La Boderie (1541-1598) illustrates many recurrent and intertwining themes and images. The sea or riverside (bridges, vessels and shipwrecks), the starlit sky and the color yellow form a highly symbolic hibernal Flemish landscape. Biographical sketches and death scenes, the identification of the author’s life with his work, the solitude and the silent voice of any reader and writer delineate a portrait of the artist. Mystical and philosophical sources and implications of Le Fevre’s work – especially his orphic voyage Encyclie and his Galliade, both structured in circles – are explained in order to draw a parallel between Quignard’s Petits traites and Le Fevre’s linguistic dream of reviving the act of creation by reuniting the whole world in a single word. In so far as they are traces and echoes of an originary alphabet, etymology, anagrammatism and toponymy stand out among the means of an obsessive investigation in, and restoration of, the sacred essence of nomination. Defined by the ascensional spirals in his work, Guy’s “passion” is a transcendental quest and, at the same time, an obsessive illusion.