The Rhetoric of Repetition in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron

Abstract:

This article focuses on a specific instance of repetition in the Heptaméron, the frequent repetition of the word bien. Drawing on the scholarship of Robert Cottrell and Isabelle Garnier among others, the article first situates this specific instance of repetition within a broader framework of Marguerite’s use of repetition in her poetry and her prose and its relationship to her understanding of how human discourse can engage with the divine. The article then argues that while the word bien has an ostensibly positive meaning, Marguerite undermines its positive valence both in her use of it as an adjective of degree and as a noun by associating it with a broad range of both positive and negative human traits and dispositions. Thus, in the Heptaméron, the word bien comes to lose a fixed valence and comes to symbolize human discourse’s inadequacy to articulate the fundamental nature of the good, which for Marguerite is the souverain bien represented by God. However, Marguerite’s frequent repetition of the word bien in the Heptaméron also serves to cut through the polyvocal bruit of human discourse represented by the devisants’ stories and debates, offering the reader an opportunity for meditation on the inadequacy of human discourse to represent the souverain bien, which can be seen as a strategy emanating from the tradition of negative theology.