Des Rats et des ratières. Anamorphoses d’un champ métaphorique de saint Augustin à Jean Racine by Jacques Berchtold (review)

L ’E sprit C réateur Jacques Berchtold. D e s R a t s e t d e s r a t i è r e s . A n a m o r p h o s e s D ’u n c h a m p m é t a p h o r i q u e d e s a i n t A u g u s t i n à J e a n R a c i n e . Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, vol. 311. Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 1992. Pp. 273. The sub-title of this witty and ingenious book somewhat misleadingly suggests a systematic tracking of its subject from the 5th to the 17th century. It consists, however, of a group of loosely connected essays. After an introduction presenting the rat (or mouse— classical Antiquity did not recognize a distinction and indeed may not have known the rat) as enemy, rival, and at times secret accomplice of the writer, the first chapter examines the metaphor of the mousetrap (muscipula) used in St Augustine’s commentaries on the Psalms (where most Latin versions have laqueus) and its theological implications. Knowledge of Latin is useful here. The next chapter is mainly iconographical, looking at paintings which show St Joseph in his workshop with incomplete or finished mousetraps and at manuscript illustrations of St Gertrude who is portrayed reading or spinning while rats climb up her. St Gertrude and her rats lead to a chapter which tries to construct a coherent reading of Hamlet (and Queen Gertrude) based on the six references in the play to mice, rats or mousetraps; this involves linking Polonius to the Polish king Popiel who killed his uncles and was eaten by rats. This is at least as convincing as most other attempts to for­ mulate a unified Hamlet-theory, although several points of detail are strained. For exam­ ple, it is unsatisfactory to describe Claudius as “ une victime du ‘mousetrap’ ” when he talks about his “ limed soul” ; mousetraps are baited, not limed. Chapter IV proposes several interpretations of Marot’s version of the rat/lion fable in the Epître “ A son amy Lyon.” Here the ingenuity is less strained, and the poem emerges enhanced from Berchtold ’s analysis. In the last chapter, Racine’s elimination of the rat from his family’s canting arms (rat/cygne) is the pretext for an attempt to find the rat in Phèdre. Berchtold is good on the internalization of the labyrinth, and gives an excellent Spitzerian analysis of the récit de Théramène. He does not however quite prove his hypothesis that “ une réflexion de fond sur l’écriture racinienne pouvait avec beaucoup de profit prendre appui sur l’antagonisme du rat et du cygne.” A good deal of metonymic agility is required to follow Berchtold’s argument at times: thus he illustrates the theme of the femina-mmcipula by quotations identifying woman not as the mousetrap but as the toasted cheese which baits it; reference to Hamlet as the child wanting to regain “ ce ‘mousetrap’ maternel qui jadis fut son bien propre et tout son royaume” is accompanied by footnotes on “ le rat comme symbole de la matrice féminine.” Rat, trap, and bait are blurred or differentiated to suit Berchtold’s arguments, but the reader is disarmed by wit and word-play as well as by the evidence of wide reading throughout this engaging if sometimes far-fetched book. G i l l i a n J o n d o r f Girton College, Cambridge Marie-Hilene Huet. M o n s t r o u s I m a g i n a t i o n . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. 316. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $19.95. From antiquity through the eighteenth century, philosophers and other theorists associ­ ated anomalies such as Siamese twins, dwarves and hermaphrodites with the obscure and disorderly side of creation. Seen as enigmatic creatures, these “ monsters’” very existence challenged revered notions of normalcy. As a result, thinkers who proposed theories on the origin and significance of these exceptional beings were anything but...