Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (review)

Christopher D. Johnson’s impressive, expansive Hyperboles marks an important contribution to the study of the Baroque as a literary phenomenon. Johnson accomplishes this by deliberately and fruitfully sidestepping the thornier questions of what is meant by the term “Baroque.” Johnson defines the term broadly, as “at once a literary style, a period concept, and a fundamental Weltanschauung that describes the transitional period in European culture from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment” (2). Rather than engaging the extensive critical debate surrounding the appropriate terminology, Johnson aims to trace the development of the hyperbole from the classical period through the twentieth century via Cavell and Wittgenstein’s writings on the sublime. His goal, using this approach, is to provide a “voluminous, wide-ranging defense” of the “most infamous of tropes” (1), one that has frequently been—unjustly, in Johnson’s opinion—maligned as the epitome of bad taste. Johnson is not alone in this venture; recent work on the monstrous or grotesque—David Castillo’s Baroque Horrors comes to mind—shows that the defense and celebration of some of the literary Baroque’s more unsavory aspects is fast becoming a defensible critical position.

Hyperboles is divided into five rough sections. The first section, which consists of the first three chapters, discusses the origins of the major theories of hyperbole in the classical period, the Renaissance, and the historical Baroque. The second section, chapters four through eight, analyzes how the theories of the first section are interpreted in the Spanish Baroque, with particular attention to the Petrarchan influence on Góngora, Quevedo and Sor Juana. The third section, chapters nine through eleven, considers hyperbolic speech and hyperbolic silences in King Lear. Next, in chapters twelve through fifteen, Johnson closely reads the hyperbolic rhetoric of Descartes and Pascal. Finally, the last chapter considers Wittgenstein and Cavell’s rejections of hyperbole as expressed in the Kantian sublime.

Throughout the book, Johnson seeks to expand our understanding of hyperbole. Rather than viewing it as a mere rhetorical trope—as one trick among many available to the skilled rhetorician—he argues for its recognition as “a sophisticated, discursive figure of thought” (44), or, following Kenneth Burke, a “master trope” (52) that makes use of other tropes in the service of expressing “a mode of thought, a way of being” (4). In the first section, his analysis of Quintilian’s lasting influence convincingly supports this thesis. For Quintilian, hyperbole is acceptable for describing extraordinary circumstances or an incredible state of emotion because ordinary modes of expression become insufficient. Unlike Aristotle and Longinus, whose opinions on hyperbole are difficult to pin down or circuitously self-justifying, Quintilian provides a clear defense and treatment of hyperbole’s uses that many Renaissance and Baroque theorists and writers drew on. In particular, Johnson reads Erasmus’ De Copia as an affirmation of Quintilian’s influence on Renaissance rhetoricians over Ciceronian styles. Johnson’s discussion of medieval theories of hyperbole is perhaps understandably brief; relying on E. R. Curtius’s work on the Überbietung or “outbidding” topos, he quickly highlights the importance of bearing in mind the “philologic and stylistic genealogies” (73) of each instance of the topos. (Johnson cites the competitive milieu of troubadours.) Although I am hesitant to suggest any increases to the book’s already substantial breadth, more attention to this topic would be welcome; it seems relevant especially in the competitive context of the Spanish baroque poets and dramatists.

The second section, focusing primarily on the Spanish Baroque, begins with a chapter on the Plus ultra topos. Spanish hyperbolists of the period, poetic overreachers, critique imperial ambition in a number of ways. In Gracián, for example, the “extreme, conceited rhetoric against imperial overreaching” serves “as the moral counterpart to the ideology of the Plus ultra” (137). Johnson sets up a schema of four worldviews that characterize the Spanish hyperbolists that he discusses in the three subsequent chapters:

[T]he Icarean, or the desire to soar toward the celestial sphere, a desire often...