Une Poetique de crise: Poetes Baroques et mystiques (1570-1660).

Michele Clement. Paris: Honore Champion, 1996. (Bibliotheque Litteraire de la Renaissance; Series 3, 34.) 434 pp. FF 440. ISBN: n.a.

Baroque pas mort, livre suit . . . Between an excessively hasty overview of the various attempts to define baroque poetry in the last half-century, and an equally hasty summation of her own contribution to the subject, the author of this often thought-provoking reassessment proposes a coherent, strongly argued, though excessively reductive definition of her own.

Not unexpectedly, this proposed redefinition of the baroque emphasizes a particular world-view which some poets and most mystical writers of the period happen to share, rather than stylistic or thematic considerations which had hitherto dominated the critical discourse surrounding the phenomenon of the baroque. According to Michele Clement, baroque are those poets who most clearly break with the Renaissance and its optimistic view of the world as a system of signs denoting God's presence within it, and of man as a microcosm of God's creation. For the baroque poet as for the mystic, the world is essentially evil. It is a theater of diabolical forces which must be resisted, rejected, transcended in texts whose function is no longer that of confidently praising Creation as a manifestation of God's presence, but of denouncing the world with all the vehemence at the poet's command. This redefinition in terms of the writer's conception of God, of the world, and of language, rather than on the basis of stylistic and thematic considerations hitherto prevailing in baroque studies, leads to a reclassification wherein such important figures as Sponde and Chassignet still manage to hold on to their baroque label, whereas others are less lucky. Montaigne, for instance, is at best a mannerist. D'Aubigne, as the author of Les Tragiques, remains a baroque poet (although "profondement marque par la Renaissance et l'humanisme" [210]); as the author of Le Printemps, however, he too is merely a mannerist; as for Du Bartas, he is repeatedly and unequivocally barred from the fold. (Indeed Clement's book sometimes gives the impression of having been written for the sole purpose of excluding Du Bartas from the baroque canon.)

In some respects, Une Poetique de crise does not break entirely with the past. For example, it retains as essentially baroque such thematic and stylistic characteristics as the prevalence of movement and metamorphosis, paradox and verbal prolixity, but where baroque theoreticians of the premiere vague tended to see a source of pleasure, a tendency to wallow complacently in the contemplation, and subsequent representation of the shimmering diversity of Creation, Clement sees a source of anguish: for the baroque poet as she defines him, this ever-changing world is terrifying when it is not merely absurd, and the poet's verbal prolixity merely bears witness to the inability of language to express with greater economy this terror and this contempt. Other traditionally baroque characteristics are questioned and ultimately rejected. Affectation and wit, a taste for every form of stylistic excess, an unbridled display of extravagant imagery and a tendency toward fragmentation are here ascribed to mannerism rather than to the baroque. The latter is seen to the contrary as characterized by relative simplicity of expression, a directness labeled as "moderne," a search for coherence and unity bordering on obsession, a predilection for copia rather than varietas ("rarement discours s'est fait plus obsedant, et partant, plus pauvre, contrairement au lieu commun qui exalte la richesse et la profusion de la litterature baroque" [255]). The author further sees in the poets she chooses to call baroque a new approach toward intertextuality (whereby texts are ruthlessly appropriated and made to serve the poet's purpose rather than serving as examples of another culture), an equally new approach towards imagery (which is no longer merely ornamental or symbolic, but deconstructs the physical world and leads the reader to an apprehension of the divine), and above all a new conception of the the ultimate purpose of the poetic act, which subordinates aesthetic considerations to a rhetorical manipulation of the reader's will.

Much of Clement's book is thus devoted to the search for an apocryphal set of aesthetic principles that might provide a new definition of literary baroque. But to dwell on this aspect of the book may be ultimately misleading. For in her conclusion the author refuses to define the baroque in its essence, and claims to offer instead, and more humbly, a definition arrived at a posteriori, by merely comparing a group of texts written between 1570 and 1660, related by their refusal to subscribe to the aesthetics and the metaphysics underlying the poetic works of the Renaissance, their equally strong refusal to adhere to the principles of emerging Classicism, and by their resemblance to the mystical literature written within the same chronological space. Ultimately, the author's concept of the baroque is that of a literary movement devoid of any particular metaphysical or aesthetic presuppositions, and characterized only by its use of poetic language to express its rejection of the world and its yearning for God.

The author's determination to focus on literature and ignore as irrelevant the manifestations of the baroque in other spheres of artistic activity is both her weakness and her strength. Among the strengths the reader will no doubt acknowledge with gratitude a number of perceptive explications de texte and a wealth of insights into a variety of topics more or less closely related to her main thesis. But it seems safe to predict that the thesis itself, reducing as it does the application of the term "baroque" to a small group of mostly minor and exclusively religious poets, is not likely to meet with the same unequivocal approval.

BRUNO BRAUNROT Georgia State University