The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical.

S.K. Heninger, Jr., has written an erudite, sometimes polemical study of the formal component underlying different modes of representation in the Renaissance. The book is compact, yet the five chapters range very widely, juxtaposing discussions of periodization, logocentrism, Plato's Aesop, the quatorzain, Leon Battista Alberti's On Painting, Rene Magritte's La Condition Humaine, and several other substantial topics. At times this associative style works brilliantly, as for example in the linking of the rime-royal stanza to cathedral architecture and then to abstract expressionist Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross (92-118). At other times the associations are more strained, particularly when "the subtext of form" is made to do more work than seems necessary. I found that the extended discussion of companion poems (complete with diagrams) fell into this latter category. But this may simply be a matter of taste - or distaste for exactly the kind of formal signifying power which, as Heninger is at pains to show, would have been integral to the conscious interpretation or subconscious understanding of contemporary readers. In the final analysis, one is inclined to agree with Heninger's contention that we ignore the influence of form at significant risk to the accuracy of our idea of the Renaissance.

Heninger argues that there was "a major shift in the dominant ontology" during the Renaissance, "a relocation of reality" (62). (He uses the term "Renaissance" advisedly, rather than "early modern," because he resists annexing the Renaissance onto the modern as a kind of prologue.) The shift occurs in the new emphasis on the hylocentric over the logocentric: hylocentric culture is grounded in the perception of natural objects (from hule, Greek for "wood" and thence "matter" in philosophical terminology); logocentric culture is grounded in Platonic essences and the immutable attributes of God (see 62; also 23). According to Heninger, the Renaissance constitutes the threshold between a logocentric past and a hylocentric future, an "epistemological space" (he borrows the term from Foucault) that "is not a status quo, but an interval, a potential susceptible to incursion" (20). Heninger objects particularly to the use of deconstruction in analyzing this epistemological space because of deconstruction's absolute iconoclasm, its rejection of all predecessors and tradition, and its abuse of the epistemological realities of the period. His objective is to demonstrate that understanding Renaissance culture requires the integration of logocentric and hylocentric norms and practices. The absolute rejection of one or the other skews the interpretation.

Chapter 3 ("The Origin of the Sonnet: Form as Optimism") provides the book's dearest model of the integration of the logocentric and the hylocentric. Poems, and sonnets especially, merge the two ontological realities, as the invention of the sonnet by Giacomo da Lentini and its subsequent development in Petrarch, Surrey, and Shakespeare reveal. The formal mode of signifying in the quatorzain - the rhyme pattern, the repetition of the number 7 (as in the 4/3 stanzaic structure) - represents a "proportion poetical" that confirms the presence of God; indeed, Heninger posits the identity of sonnet structure and the floor plan of a church (80). In contrast to the formal mode of signifying is the linguistic, in which the hylocentric (even painterly) experiential mode is cast. In Giacomo's poems "the form and the verbal system mutually confirm one another. . . . Verbal and non verbal signs coalesce" (78-79). But later sonneteers recognize that form and language constitute two different systems, and they experiment by playing one mode against the other: the subtext of form becomes important as a means of exhibiting both conflict and, as in Petrarch, resolution in the sonnet's closing lines. By the time we reach Shakespeare, Heninger notes, the resolution of the conflicting modes is passe and "[w]ith increasing frequency what the sonnet said through its words began to question and even refute the optimistic message of its form" (88).

This is a neat evolutionary history, but its credibility depends on our accepting that the representation of conflict between religious optimism and material experience is clearly a Renaissance development. Heninger does not address the possibility that similar conflicts, and a similar tension between formal and verbal modes, might have obtained in other epochs. Moreover, there is something tendentious in the absolute division of hylocentric and logocentric when analyzing imaginative works. Even in Heninger's careful discussion, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the material from the ideational content (and context) of poems and paintings.

Finally, however, the book will be judged on its strength - the nuanced and magisterial interpretation of formal modes of signification.

RAPHAEL FALCO University of Maryland, Baltimore