Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature.

Julia Reinhard Lupton. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996.4 figs. + xxxii + 269 pp. $39.50. ISBN 0-8047-2643-4.

RQ promises our specializations will join rather than alienate us, a promise tested when an historian reviews a book intended for experts in comparative literature. I am trained to evaluate argument from historical context; Lupton, following Benjamin's beautiful, sad philosophy of history as ruin and Lacan's isolation of language, rejects contextualized narratives. I am wary of arguments slippery in time; Lupton works in a psychoanalytic future-past where the word "reader" has no referent. I attend to minor, even failed literature; Lupton, worrying that such attention "increases the burden . . . on humanity's back" (36, quoting Benjamin), addresses the canon. But our disagreements are almost superable because Lupton is often persuasive and usefully provocative; she synthesizes a great variety of material; and, given the discursive traditions of my own discipline, her self-conscious exposition is impressive. Lupton's post-structuralist vocabulary will, however, discourage all but the converted. And in RQ we should pause when, for whatever reason, a study of the Renaissance represents the Middle Ages largely through one text.

So Lupton defends the canon - but only to criticize the Renaissance. Given this aim, the thesis of Afterlives is surprisingly mild: the structure of typology and the tropes of hagiography have constructed the Renaissance as a canon and as a period (xxi). Since this is not an obviously adversarial position, I gather Lupton's psychoanalytic critique takes the sympathetic form of guiding the West to a degree of self-knowledge: our literature confronts its guilty reliance on Christian typology, and our philosophy acknowledges aesthetics as the symptom of this theological repetition-compulsion. That hagiographic fragments are embedded in our literature, that typological reading has cast a long shadow, that Hegelian aesthetics are fundamentally Christian: none of these is news. Lupton is original in arguing that they are not isolated phenomena, that their unity is, in some sense, our consciousness. The final aim of Afterlives, however, appears to follow Benjamin's as Lupton describes it: when the monuments of secular culture are seen to contain the tropes and methods of Christianity in its typological triumph over Judaism, then the Jewish "remainder" (what unpredictably but necessarily escapes the grasp of the dialectical Aufhebung or sublation) can be recognized, and Judaism restored as a component of modernity.

Afterlives introduces the exegetical task with great skill. The seven following chapters are divided into three interpretative parts. The first of these parts, "Typology and Hagiography," is the most important for those not teaching Comp Lit. In a propaedeutic chapter, Lupton describes how typology works structurally, erecting such thorough formal similarities between medieval typological reading and nineteenth-century dialectical logic that "typology" and "dialectic" come to be used interchangeably. Thus the structural force of Hegelian dialectic in Burckhardt's philosophy of history reveals Kulturgeschichte as Christian typological historiography. Warburg, also Jewish, recognized this dilemma. His program of pagan iconography, however, offers only "passive resistance" to the triumphalist world-narrative begun by the Renaissance about itself, continued in Burckhardt, and still powerful in the self-understanding of, for example, Cultural Studies. Benjamin, who saw that direct attacks strengthened this world-narrative, responded by collecting typological-dialectical "remainders" from largely abandoned literary sites. Though Lupton's sites are populous, she too seeks remainders: as pure (and sole) contingency, they deny the Renaissance narrative total explanatory power.

The second chapter of the first part borrows female martyrs' passions from Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century Legenda aurea, extracts from them three structurally-defining or "algebraic" moments, and applies Lacan's concept of the symptom. Reading narrated traumas as traumas in narrative, Lupton describes equivalences between martyred body and hagiographic narrative, interchangeable as icons in tortured display, as canonized authorities in the moment of decapitation, and as relics in post-mortem cult. Here Lacan supports Lupton's effort to solve our canonical and historiographical predicament. But he is not always so helpful. Lupton's devoted explication of Lacan's sinthome contrasts painfully with her choice of the Graesse edition of the Legenda and with her pointed neglect of the manuscript tradition. Many such moments - I note the puzzling assumption, required by her argument, that Jacobus's martyrs' passions display and create cause for mourning rather than celebration - reveal the presentist bias of the psychoanalytic future-past.

Parts two and three of Afterlives are close readings of most use to professors regularly teaching the texts. "The Novella and Its Renewals" sifts a sentence from Chaucer's Legend of Good Women through Mosaic Law and Levinas, accounting for Chaucer's exclusion from the Renaissance canon. Lupton then gives more extended readings of the Decameron (1.1, 10.10, and 4) and of Measure for Measure. The third part of Afterlives, "Iconographies of Secular Literature," examines fragments of Vasari's Lives (the introductory paragraph and images from Cimabue, Giotto, and Michelangelo), and The Winter's Tale. Lupton graciously acknowledges her predecessors in each analysis. That the psychoanalytic approach may contribute to existing interpretations of these works is suggested by the reversibility of martyr and hermit positions in Measure for Measure; the concept of creation ex nihilo drawn from the Lacanian martyrological trauma and rediscovered in Vasari's Lives; and the possibility, in The Winter's Tale, of an unsynthetic Renaissance fixed on the Mosaic prohibition of idolatry, all suggest that it might.

Afterlives has no conclusion. My own is that Lupton's success is partial. While the last chapter discovers a Jewish "remainder," a formal conclusion would clarify its relation to Benjamin's project. Lupton may fail Benjamin because she so clearly loves the canon she claims to undo, as we all love our symptoms; or because recovering the theological basis of aesthetics entails, as Lupton recognizes, strengthening just that typology which sought to read the Jew out of history.

Afterlives succeeds in setting the terms of a psychoanalytic rethinking of the Renaissance as canon and period-concept, defying historicisms old and new. If I practice suspension of disbelief - overlooking the blindness in Afterlives to hagiography's geographic and chronological situations; to medieval typological reading as a depth and variety of practice; to readers' place in the recognition of "genre" - I can see real methodological success. This is not irony: we differ on the representation of time, and we share the truth that our representations cannot succeed alone.

ALISON K. FRAZIER University of Texas, Austin and American Academy in Rome