L'Apotheose d'Orphee: l'esthetique de l'ode en France au XVI siecle Sebillet a Scaliger (1548-1561).

Orpheus's apotheosis, understood as the aesthetic eclat or brilliance of ode-writing, enjoyed special prominence in mid-Renaissance France in the hands of poets such as Baif, Belleau, Denisot, Des Autels, Du Bellay, Grevin, Jodelle, Magny, Ronsard, and Tyard. No other poetic or literary genre was attracting such attention and such talent. What the best of Renaissance France's poets did with this most formal, ceremonious, and complexly organized form of lyric poetry, and how they adapted and transformed it are the subjects of this comprehensive and significant study by Rouget. One of the critic's primary claims is that the reader of the ode is not just instructed by it, nor even made better as a result of reading it, but is utterly seduced or "charmed" aesthetically through reading it. Composing the noblest and oldest of genres, "le poete d'odes lyriques, comme Orphee, grand voyageur, ne se contente pas de parcourir l'univers; il l'enchante, le traverse et cherche a le cultiver, le circonscrire. Amphion acheve, civilise, ce que charme Orphee" (123). Such moments of seduction await the reader of the literally hundreds of odes contained in this study and of Rouget's masterful, extremely scholarly presentation and discussion of them.

The study contains three large sections, after an introduction that traces the origins of the French ode to Greek, Latin, Italian, biblical, Horatian reflective or philosophic, Pindaric, and Epicurean Anacreontic sources. The first section has to do with the fundamental tension between lyricism and order, and with Boileau's haunting impression of the ode as having a "style impetueux [qui] souvent marche au hasard:/Chez elle, un beau desordre est un effet de l'art" (34). This "beautiful disorder" and the "effects of art" that the ode is destined to convey and which in turn energize it signal, above all, "le refus du chant de se laisser facilement capturer, de livrer une parole route faire, prete a la consommation immediate de la lecture" (195). The French ode's poetic resistance resulting from its primary features of discontinuity, digressive movement, and non-closure - in short, from its semi-determined form whose major tendency is to "differer son achevement" (193, Rouget's italics) - is what occasions, in a true Valeryan sense, the active participation of the reader. As Rouget states so often, in the relationship between reader and ode text (not unlike that between poet and ode creation), "l'ode invite le lecteur i une lutte au terme de laquelle il se l'appropriera." That is, the reader is left to come to terms with the ode text, to "lier les ruptures de sens." He/She must "tisser le reseau d'analogies [thematic and structural] disseminees ca et la, pour achever par l'imagination et la reflexion la fin sans cesse differee du poeme" (195).

The second section is a detailed account of the metatextual, descriptive, narrative, allegorical, and argumentative rhetoric(s) underlying the ode. In its diverse rhetorical configurations, the ode is, in essence, a linguistically performative, speech-act discourse in its purest form: "usant d'une copia de performatifs, l'ode souligne que son action porte autant sur la communication (la genese de l'ecriture, le mode de transmission du message) que sur l'information delivree. C'est dire que ce discours vise l'actio autant que la scientia." In the final analysis, ode discourse is, rhetorically and aesthetically, the "chant energique" par excellence for expressing the sublime (281). The third section of Rouget's study delineates the rhythmical elements of the ode - including its stanzaic systems and sequences, versification, and rhyme patterns - all of which promote either the poem's sense of stability and stasis or, more often, its irresolution and continual movement, the "deux forces contraires" governing and defining the nature of the ode (346).

In the book's conclusion, Rouget summarizes what he had so carefully explored in the previous 347 pages. The ode's seduction of the reader is a consequence of its being "variable, souple, inconstante" and of its aesthetic penchant for "discontinuite" and for "inachevement." The French Renaissance ode thrives on "une parole ouverte" and thus encourages "[une] lecture plurielle d'un lyricisme qui s'est voulu integral, eternel, enchanteur et mythique, comme son createur Orphee" (348). No subsequent serious study of French Renaissance poetry, regardless of the specific poetic genre under consideration, can be complete without reading Rouget's Apotheose d'Orphee.

JERRY C. NASH University of New Orleans