A PROTESTANT POETICS
Calvinism confronted Protestant authors with a new problem in literary creation. Catholics, propogators of the medieval continuity between divine Word and world, wrote within secular reality. The emerging Protestant consciousness, on the other hand, experienced a rupture between Word and world due to the Protestant rejection of secular existence and to their emphasis on the transcendance of the Bible as opposed to Catholic aflirmation of the absolute authority of the Church. The Protestant Reformation placed the emphasis squarely back on Scripture. Such a shift posed a literary dilemma for the Protestant writer. Scripture could neither be duplicated nor supplemented, for the only legitimate form of writing was, in the Calvinist view, Scripture itself. Consequently, the Protestant writer was forced to find his justification for literary creation within himself. Literary self-consciousness and a new relationship between author and text thereby developed as a Protestant phenomenon during the second half of the sixteenth century.
The Word and the Text Agrippa d'Aubigne's Les Tragiques exemplifies the tension preliminary to the elaboration of the new Protestant theory of literary creation. The rupture with the Catholic tradition initially takes place at the level of theological interpretation. The separation and alienation of the Creator from the creation is mirrored in the Protestant writer's highly ambivalent, extremely self-conscious relationship to his text, as well as in his ambivalence toward his predecessors. This theological tension becomes literary, however, with the disjuncture between orality and textuality. Protestant doctrine holds that the Biblical text is a faithful transmission of the divine Word or spirit. Because it is divinely-inspired, the Bible as a text is not suspect. However, the Bible was a unique and unrepeatable event. Therefore, any other text is an unacceptable and unauthorized deviation from it. Calvinism encouraged preaching, but disparaged fictional literature. Thus, the individual voice could confess or amplify Scripture, but the individual text, both because of and despite its extensive borrowing from the Bible, would deviate from the truth of the Incarnate Word. The parole of the Bible could not, and should not, be supplanted by the lettre of d'Aubigne's derived text. In addition, the Calvinist establishment discouraged writers from any but the most simple and unadorned style, so as not to attempt to rival the text of God's revealed word. Literary creation seemed to be prohibited by the Protestant emphasis on the Biblical text, for no secondarily-created work could ever attain Biblical status.