Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève's Délie, and: A Scève Celebration: Délie 1544-1994 (review)

Book Reviews The characters' pursuit of dialogue reflects the writer's pursuit of an aesthetic form, which, to some degree, has the form of a quest for truth (une recherche de la vérité). Asso artfully shows the contradictions Sarraute poses for criticism ("la recherche de l'écrivain défie l'interprétation"), which she nonetheless manages to reconcile with her own critical objectives. This global reading of Sarraute displays a degree of intimacy with the author's writings which is entirely exceptional. With remarkable ease and clarity, Asso draws from virtually every part of a literary production often perceived as fragmented and disjointed, showing unmistakably the formidable coherence of the work. Reginald McGinnis University of Arizona Nancy M. Frelick. Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève's Délie. Lexington , KY: French Forum, Publishers, 1994. Pp. 176. Jerry C. Nash, éd. A Scève Celebration: Délie 1544-1994. Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri (Stanford French and Italian Studies 77), 1994. Pp. 189. Scève's Délie continues to attract readers of different critical persuasions. There are "traditional" readers who seek to discern in the text traces of the author's emotional life and "experience." There are readers who, clinging to the somewhat discredited notion that the "author is dead," prefer to speak of a "subject" whose voice resonates across the 449 dizains and 50 emblems that make up the text. Still other readers are interested in the historical or philosophical dimensions of the work. Although Scève's main "sources" have been identified, or so we like to think, several critics continue to discover hitherto undetected intertextual echoes in the poem. Structuralists and postmodernists have had a go at the Délie. So have readers who, persuaded that psychoanalysis is the royal road to truth, approach the text armed with an arsenal of terms derived from Freud, naturally, but more often than not from Lacan. Nancy M. Frelick's approach is mainly psychoanalytic. Indeed, she lays her cards on the table in the first sentence of her preface: "In this book, I have tried to elaborate a set of reading strategies for the Délie inspired by Lacanian and (post-)structuralist theories" (9). She works diligently to fit the Scevean text into the Lacanian system, or—for Lacan's complex thought resists systematization at every point—the reductive categories (the mirror stage, the Other, the petit a, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, and the like) that popularizers of Lacan have often presented as the essence of the Master's "system." Thus, the innamoramento is experienced by the Lover as a moment of rupture: "This initial shock in which the Poet-Lover feels himself split up is like the trauma of the primordial moment when the three orders (the Imaginary, or the realm of images, the Symbolic, or the realm of language, and the Real) are perceived as falling apart" (108). Driven by Desire, which is insatiable, "the poetic persona always seems to fall back into anguish and despair as he confronts the impossibility of attaining the object(s) of his desires" (63). Everywhere in the text Frelick sees failure, defeat, despair, hopelessness. Having set up the Lacanian framework in the first half of her book, she moves, in the second half, to a study of the mythic subtexts (usually Ovidean) that inform the Délie. Here she weaves intertextual with psychoanalytic criticism, offering several striking and provocative readings of individual dizains. In accord with her premise that the poetic persona is a Lacanian subject, split and destined never to find satisfaction, she pays special attention to the story of Actaeon, a split and fragmented subject if ever there was one. The volume edited by Jerry C. Nash demonstrates the wealth, diversity, and vitality of recent Scevean criticism. Several chapters deal with intertextual matters and focus on the VOL. XXXVI, No. 2 119 L'Esprit Créateur way the Délie incorporates or responds to earlier texts (Gérard Defaux, Joann Dellaneva, François Rigolot). Two chapters deal with music: Cynthia Skenazi studies the philosophical underpinning of music in the Délie, and Edwin M. Duval, in a particularly striking study, points out...