Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet by Svetlana Boym (review)

66Rocky Mountain Review "bourgeois individualism" (142). This furnishes some incisive analyses, as when one ofLa Rochefoucauld's maxims, on the currency or value which kings give to their favorites, is used to elucidate Clitandre (46-47), or when woman is shown to be an "erratic object of trade" in Othon (133-35). Nevertheless, the foregrounding of socioeconomic elements detracts from Baker's insightful arguments on characterization. The coordination of two rich codes, personation/impersonation and generosity/Machiavellism, is disrupted and its effect diffused by the addition of a third set of coordinates, based on the distinction between essence and commodity. This reservation does not mitigate Baker's perspicacious and stimulating interpretation ofeach ofthe plays. Her theory ofpersonation and impersonation is delineated well and argued strongly. It would provide a useful frame for studying both Corneille's more successful plays and works ofother playwrights. VAN KELLY University of Kansas SVETLANA BOYM. DeaiA in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 291 p. Svetlana Boym's intriguing title with its emphasis on death belies the liveliness ofher radical reassessment ofthe poetic—and the critical—enterprise in terms of the tension between the work and the persona of the poet, the "uncanny relationship between artistic corpus and corps" (2). What she offers here is nothing less than a scathing reexamination of the most cherished assumptions, shibboleths, and sacred cows that French, Russian, and American literati have cultivated since the last century. Although Boym is obviously very much at home in the labyrinthine intricacies of structuralist and poststructuralist theory (not to mention various pre-structuralist critical approaches such as the New Criticism) and although her underlying intent is a serious one, she pursues a refreshingly light-hearted "back-to-basics" approach in her skillful use of etymological word plays. For example, after pointing out that fashion originates from the same verb aspoetry, (to make—faceré in Latin and poein in Greek), she observes that, though the transiency of fashion seems to defy serious analysis, her interpretation will "explore how clothes signify in poetry and in the development of the biographical legend [and] will combine clothes reading and close reading, demonstrating the impossibility ofa complete 'disclosure' or laying bare of the poetic text" (34). In her introduction, she reveals that "the metaphor of the theater will be crucial in my examination of the cultural self of the poet," and, indeed, she inquires into the manner in which the poetic enterprise is a process ofassuming or avoiding roles, rehearsing, and ultimately dying, whether metaphorically or metaphysically, on or offstage. She observes that "the relationship between life, art, and culture is not that of a mimesis, or a hierarchy, but rather that of a chain of rehearsals based on a certain limited repertoire" (29). She adds that "my focus will be precisely on the tension between the cultural Book Reviews67 image/mask/myth and the individual practice of writing [which is] one ofthe outstanding everyday practices that both contributes to and resists selftheatricalization ." What interests her in all this is not biography, she concludes, but rather "life in quotation marks and biographical legend" and the need to show how poets "articulate the relationship between their life and art and how the poet's writing both depends upon and challenges his or her intentionally created, unintentionally assumed, or forcefully imposed, cultural mask" (34). In each ofthe chapters, the author examines a specific instance ofthe death of the author—whether literal or figurative—that challenges the practice of close reading. In the first chapter, "The Death ofthe Author: Stopping Living and Stopping Writing," she focuses on the example ofMallarmé and the legend ofhis "defacement" according to which he literally and figuratively "stopped living," thereby assuming the mythical identity assigned to him by Paul Valéry of "pure poet," a writer without a biography (80). (Mallarmé's actual death by asphyxiation was accidental but, for Valéry, symbolically appropriate.) From Mallarmé's self-effacement in text she moves to Rimbaud's decision to "stop writing" and explores the ambiguity of the transition from "the text that anticipates Rimbaud's departure from literature to the letter that anticipates his departure from life" (105). In "The...