The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (review)

In The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England Hassan Melehy considers the way in which four authors — Du Bellay, Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare — redirect and transform writing from canons other than their own. His focus is on emergent national literatures as they address problems of translation and cultural specificity. He offers some nuanced analyses of these authors’ intertextual relationships, as all four explore past and present, nation state and new world, returning again and again to the difference between ancient and modern Rome as a figure for the tensions that motivate their own work. Melehy’s book, and especially his Introduction, is characterized by its informality: ‘I don’t see as big a problem as some commentators do with the mixture of Christian and pagan texts in Du Bellay’ (p. 4); I’m not getting at some historically transcendent notion of political power’ (p. 7), and so on. One assumes that this initial section originated as an oral presentation: it probably worked better in the seminar room. Melehy is indebted to New Historicism, and his title is chosen by analogy with the formalism of Greenblatt’s ‘cultural poetics’, according to which all written and visual traces of a culture can be treated as a coherent network of signs, observable and explainable by the present-day critic. However, Melehy does offer some criticisms here, ‘sympathetically and with the aim of suggesting a few correctives’ (p. 10): his own study of formal discursive operations will privilege the literary text over other cultural activity as a site of particularly concentrated energy. Du Bellay’s destruction of ancient poetry, as it sets the desire for consolidation against the need for poetic expansion, is by its very nature a lively form of creation; Spenser in turn borrows the notion of poetic imitation from the Pléiade in order to effect his own imitative reworking of Du Bellay on time and durability; and Montaigne’s ‘De l’institution des enfans’, ‘De la vanité’, and ‘Des cannibales’ find a brisk pleasure in disrupting notions of origin, permanence, and identity. Shakespeare’s Sonnets demonstrate their relationship with Spenser’s translation of Du Bellay, while Julius Caesar’s investigation of constancy and The Tempest’s debt to ‘Des cannibales’ complete a circle of ‘mutual regards and intermeshings’ (p. 12). All these texts, states Melehy, are simulacra, in a sense of the term that he borrows from Deleuze: they are images whose relation to their model calls into question any notion of stable representation. The works under discussion display a continual interest in a venerated past in order to bring about all the more effectively a break with it, thereby recognizing and engaging with their own movement towards the future. The leaps and bounds in argumentation that come along with Melehy’s own critical energy are at times stimulating, but also a source of frustration. There is no overall conclusion, the secondary bibliography is overwhelmingly North American (Terence Cave’s Pré-histoires is one notable omission), and the book tends throughout to come across as hastily written, hastily proofread, and hastily produced.