Stultitia loquitur: Fiction and Folly in Early Modern Literature

Abstract

In the first edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, after the Greek title of the work, Encomion Morias, the European public of 1511 could find a brief designation of the character in charge of the speech: ‘Stultitia loquitur’ – ‘Folly speaks’. Halfway between the theatrical indication of the entrance of Folly as a dramatis persona and the rhetorical game of the orator opening a declamatio, and playfully showing his public the mask that the writer only pretends to assume, this phrase presents the reader with a particular problem: that of the special ability of ironic discourse to create fiction. This is a problem that, from the Renaissance to the early modern period, in France as in England, Italy or Spain, is linked to the development of a general theory of fiction, concerning representational as well as figurative forms of literature, whether narrative or dramatic. Folly does indeed share with fiction the capacity of creating alternative representations of the world – and thus of re-figuring the world depicted by reason or history. But their discourses also share another feature, whose importance is best seen in such experimental forms of narration in the Renaissance as the Utopias of Giacopo Sannazaro and of Thomas More, the first novels of Rabelais in France or the Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain. This feature would be their paradoxical structure, and hence the instability of their speech acts, which deny, suspend, or do not seriously guarantee the truth of their statements. The merging of folly and fiction in the creation of the literary fool by Cervantes, and the lasting influence of the Quijote’s imaginative or imaginary madness, for instance in the French seventeenth-century tradition of the ‘anti-roman’, lead these two different means of reformulating the world effectively to coincide; inventing and animating the character of the Fool nearly always brings out the heuristic and epistemological potentialities of this coincidence. Nevertheless, this extensive use of fictional or fictive folly, from the fury of Ariosto’s