The Idea of Rococo by William Park (review)

Book Reviews209 arrived in Perú in 1785, wrote "Lima por dentro y fuera" ("Lima inside and out"), a poem that vividly recreates the self-destruction of Lima alongside the corrupting power of money. Through the use of grotesque and macabre imagery, the City of Kings is depicted as riddled with prostitutes who embody its physical and moral state. Society at large is in a class turmoil involving race and national origin which threatens destruction. Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, the only mestizo intellectual to use satire, was one of the leading reformists who introduced French Enlightenment in Ecuador. He used his various satires—El nuevo Luciano (1779) (The New Lucían), El Retrato de un Golilla (1781) (Portrait of a Magistrate), and others—as vehicles for social and educational reform directed at the creation of an informed citizenry. He affirms the social responsibility of the writer and orator while attempting to modernize tradition with new concepts of a progressive society. In Johnson's view colonial satire reflects the crumbling of the empire's ideological foundation by representing the viceroyalties as heterogeneous multiracial and multilingual societies which were deeply divided. Applying her insights on this literary mode to the present, she argues that the development of Spanish America's fiction is tightly connected to satire and its search for social justice and integration. In the twentieth century, according to Johnson, those who have been marginalized or exiled still resort to satire to critique ideological systems. Johnson's book is a very thorough and comprehensive study of satire in colonial Spanish America, a crucial text for anyone interested in the period. BERNARDITA LLANOS M. Denison University WILLIAM PARK. The Idea of Rococo. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. 138 p. 1 here are many strengths to Park's book. Clearly a man who loves the rococo in art, he attempts to apply the term to as many aspects of eighteenthcentury culture as he possibly can, all the while acknowledging that, of course, "rococo" was not a term in use in England until the nineteenth century . (This is no particular liability to his argument, as Chaucer did not know he was living in the "Middle Ages" nor did Montaigne realize he was a "Renaissance" man; terms of periodization mostly became popular in the nineteenth century, partly in response to Hegel's historical theories.) There is, then, a pleasing tentativeness in many of Park's ascriptions of "rococo" to a painting, or building, or (especially) work of literature, a tentativeness which does not deteriorate into wishy-washiness or fatuity, as he is a man who is both passionate about his subject and who realizes that not everyone else will be. 210Rocky Mountain Review Park proposes the dates 1700-1760 as the time during which the rococo flourished (Congreve's The Way of the World, published in 1700, is a "fully realized rococo work"), although he is sensitive, almost to a fault, in looking outside the confines of these years to find evidences of the style. It is one of his purposes, for example, to suggest the affinities the rococo has with modernism , and while these may be tenable, the book is strongest when focusing on the eighteenth century and especially on its fine arts. The book is well-illustrated, and Park does a good job of conveying in few words what is relevant to the rococo about the painting or statue or building that he is discussing . The typical Rococo architect, for example, did not design churches which contained epiphanies but which rather themselves became epiphanies : "The white light of the sun, which represented God, is not transformed by colored glass into prismatic colors but pours through the clear windows into the inner space of the church itself, where the believers may transform it into their own interior light" (57). He is also not afraid to hazard some generalizations about the rococo, such as that it is an artistic style illustrative of the democratization of society and congenial to the feminization of the arts: "no subsequent period, despite strenuous, at times hideous, efforts in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been able to reestablish the male, heroic ideal" (34). Looking...