Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet-Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism.

Roger Kuin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xi + 289 pp. $50. ISBN: 0-8020-4188-4.

If academic life has got you down, listen to Chamber Music.

If, however, you are content - or searching for a quick read on the sonnet sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare - you might wish to do your listening elsewhere. By his own admission, Kuin has written "an odd book" "really two books: a book about sonnet-sequences using a modern method, and a book about modern criticism using three Elizabethan sonnet-sequences as an example. The unity of such a book depends . . . on the inseparability of its 'manner' from its 'matter'" (233). Kuin means it: the book's "chapters . . . are not chapters" but "movements in a quartet" (233).

The second movement, for instance, is "a rigorous application of Riffaterrean semiotics to three sample sonnets" (AS 29, Am 15, and Son 61) in "an equally rigorous expository discourse" (234). Yet movement 7, "From the New World: Will Archer's Diary," uses the language of "myth" to allow Eros, "the only myth that really matters" in sonnet sequences, to speak in his own person (235): "Saturday: Interrupted by Mother. She has taken to this age better than I: she is, in fact, enjoying herself" (115).

For readers in a hurry, this will not do. But that is Kuin's point: we have lost the pleasure of criticism (233-34). In effect, Kuin is trying to re-invent academic discourse, and what better menu than "one of the great gourmet pleasures of Western literature": the chamber music of sonnet sequences (ix).

Kuin knows that he is at risk. This is at once the book's courage and its danger, its originality and its limit. Different readers will hear different sounds. "[T]he book's voice can best be heard as an intimate one, comfortable, amused at times, sharing the excitement of thinking beloved texts in new ways. . . . [T]his is . . . a French book in English. It attempts to cater . . . to the challenging pleasure of thought. Pleasure is, ultimately, what it is about: a difficult pleasure, a committed pleasure, a risk-taking pleasure" (xi).

Indeed, I have derived a good deal of pleasure from Chamber Music. I have also learned a lot, including about the sonnet sequences. Kuin's theoretical acumen is prodigious: Barthes ("the most seminal influence" [p. x]), Riffaterre, Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, as well as Foucault, Eco, Veyne, Ricoeur, Aries, Goldberg, and Hartman. His intellectual content is disciplined: "What I want to sketch and plead for is a modern criticism." If we think Kuin "a little late," he reminds us that "criticism has not yet had its modern revolution" (9). To sketch in a modern criticism, he draws on three "principles": "pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty": the "truths we arrive at concerning a text are multiple, discontinuous, and uncertain. . . . Moreover, they are not discovered . . . but accomplished . . . in the person of the critic" (10). Accordingly, a "modern criticism would communicate . . . thinking of the text by the critic" (11). Kuin's Barthesian-based point merits emphasis: "the accomplishing of a text . . . is the aim of reading and . . . of criticism": "the text" is to "become" a "partner in the living of [a] . . . life" (18). In this, readers will recognize Kuin's attempt to demystify recent political criticism: "critical activity . . . belongs in . . . the lexis . . . of otium, not of neg-otium" (22): "the terrifying freedom of pleasure" (25).

Readers interested in pleasurably productive criticism on Astrophil and Stella, Amoretti, and the Sonnets will be rewarded. For instance, Kuin's argument that "Behind SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS stands . . . the shape of Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion" (88) is both fresh and convincing. His chapter on Will Archer's diary should be required reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare and sexuality; this sublime discourse deserves to be printed in an anthology of Western representations of desire. The chapter on "Death and the maiden: architecture" begins as a novel I long to read: "Shortly after 6 a.m., a slow hand closed her eyes" (150). He means Beatrice - but you should see what he can do with Laura. Indeed, this chapter superbly maps an evolution for the Renaissance sonnet sequence by tracing Death in the architecture of each sequence and thus in the genre as a whole. In Dante and Petrarch, "the Beloved's death" (152) is an architectural principle that gives birth to and defines the sonnet sequence as "a major literary genre" (155). Thus "the chief architectural problem facing Sidney lay in that . . . virtually irreplaceable element, the Death": the fact that Penelope Rich "did not die" created "a serious problem," which Sidney solved by "let[ting] go" the "integrity of the Poet/Lover" (163-64). Spenser inherited Sidney's solution: "At the core of the new poema, the gap left by the Death is filled instead with . . . the birth of a new flesh, sacramentally created out of the 'old' man and the 'old' woman" (166-67). Finally, Shakespeare counters Spenser's solution by staging "the death of Love itself' (172).

As Kuin clarifies in his "Appendix: Discourse and its choices," his book's title "is a metaphor: the great sonnet-sequences take, within their poets' oeuvre, the place of chamber music within a composer's" (233). As Kuin pleasurably accomplishes, that place is considerable.

Pennsylvania State University