Art Baroque, Art d'Enfance (review)

When a senior fund-raiser of my acquaintance exclaimed pertly but dismissively, “Oh, what a baroque idea!” to a suggestion the other day, I realized that Jean Perrot’s extraordinary testament to the force of the Baroque in children’s literature over the past 150 years might encounter some resistance in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Moreover, it might be a bit awkward for many American readers to encounter a review of a book that is still not available in English translation six years after its publication. Although the author is responsible for three other books that Americans might be particularly interested in reading—a remarkable book on Henry James; another on Myth and Literature “under the sign of the twin”; and still another ground-breaking book on play, children, and books—none of these have been translated into English, and they are probably cited on but a handful of reading lists in colleges and universities in the United States. Why publish a review of a book whose author remains an obscure figure to all but the active members of the Children’s Literature Association and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature? To all but those lucky few who have traveled to the site near Paris where Rousseau wrote Emile, ou de l’Education, and where Perrot, a professor of comparative literature, who recently announced his retirement from the University of Paris-Nord, directs the Charles Perrault International Research Institute for Children’s Literature?

I will leave the answer to those who share the adventurous spirit of the editors of The Lion and the Unicorn. If there is any book that might reshape the way we view the historic importance as literature of works published in the name of the child since the 1850s, it is Perrot’s Art baroque, Art d’enfance. His work is not a simple matter of tracing sources and influences in order to explain the existence of certain tropes in modern children’s literature. It is rather an elaborate folding and binding (imagine an exquisitely fashioned, lacy wedding dress with many pleats and folds) of fundamental constructs of the Baroque era—represented in European art by the paintings of Velasquez, Murillo, and Tiepolo, and in European literature by the tales of Perrault and the plays of Lope de Vega—into a panorama of texts by primarily francophone and anglophone writers who address an audience of children and who stake their careers on a vision of the child. In the brief preface to Art baroque, Art d’enfance, written not long before his death, Marc Soriano, the leading authority on the tales of Charles Perrault in the twentieth century, sketches that vision:

But the flow (courant) of the baroque, the jolly madness (la folie heureuse), through its mirror games, its arabesques and its disguises, seems quite close to the mentality of the child, as the most recent research in psychology and psychanalysis has shown. The works (for children) which join themselves to this flow respect this creativity, this divine jubilation, this awakening of the critical spirit which will be the true trump cards of our children in life.

(8)

For scholars of children’s literature, then, this book constitutes a major resource, as it shines the light of Perrot’s remarkable erudition and playful spirit on a host of children’s books worth knowing, if not already known. Perrot’s humility, intellectual discipline, and playfulness redeem this book from the threat of abandonment on the shelf as simply another reference. Who would not enjoy reading a book in which illuminating accounts of picture books resetting the tales of Charles Perrault and of stories with parrots (les perroquets) in them abound, and for which the author Perrot provides but one sentence alluding to the end of his psittacisme (psittacus = parrot: a defect which consists of reasoning about words without having a sense of the ideas they represent), a defect “in...