Tarte à la crème–Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière’s Theater by Ronald W. Tobin (review)

B o o k R ev iew s obscurity; what they have neglected to analyze is the way Scève uses obscurity strategically in his struggle towards creating a new love aesthetic, one that reconstructs order out of chaos. Nash goes on to show how Scève overcomes the failure of logic and reason to measure Délie’s value (which represents an artistic impasse that is as much a source of anguish to Scève as is his unrequited love experience) by relying on his poetic imagination. Nash then discusses how the poet sees in Délie a divine essence who serves to uplift his condition. Here, Nash analyses Scève’s transfigured or transilluminated portrayals of Délie as para­ dise given human form and shows how the Bible becomes an intertext for his transcendent poetry. Next, Nash focuses on the unity of sensuous form and spiritual idea found in Scève’s portrait of Délie. The author explores the much-neglected Aristotelian aspect of Scève’s poetry that deals with the indivisibility of body and soul and that links his work to that of Speroni and Ebreo. Nash then discusses the chiaroscuro technique by which Scève pro­ gresses away from death, obscurity and anguish, making a painful ascent whose very pain adds to his achievement. Finally, the author describes the healing power of poetry, pre­ sented as a kind of therapy that also extends to the reader. In his epilogue, Nash shows how both Scève and Mallarmé are phenomenological symbolist poets of the ineffable who share a concern with “ sacralizing the secular.” It is on this interplay between the sacred and the secular that Nash gives his most sen­ sitive and complex analyses. This is why it is puzzling to find Nash comparing Scève’s love experience to that of Petrarch and Dante without adequately differentiating it from them. For these Italian love poets clearly place their stories in an explicitly Christian context while Scève’s “ spiritual” concerns about love are not specifically Christian or even necessarily “ religious.” A second minor problem is Nash’s repeated references to Scèvean “ progres­ sion” in coming to terms with the problems he faces; for, as Nash himself points out, the Délie contains moments of triumph sometimes followed by moments of failure. It is for this reason that it may be misleading to speak of Scève’s “ initial” anguish and “ ultimate” solu­ tion to the problems he faces. Nonetheless, this engaging study is thoroughly rewarding and is sure to take its place among the best books on the Délie. J o A n n D e l l a N e v a University o f Notre Dame Ronald IV. Tobin. T a r t e à l a c rè m e —C o m ed y a n d G a s tr o n o m y in M o l i è r e ’s T h e a t e r . Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 219. The academic world, which has fostered and nurtured all sorts of critical stances, has not been as kind to what Ronald Tobin calls gastrocriticism. Indeed, in this country at least, it may even be said that it has been taken seriously by only a handful of sympathetic scholars. Furthermore, while European literary critics have paid attention to the work of writers in the field such as Lange and Chatelet, American experts on French literature have pretty much given the cold shoulder to a field mined almost exclusively by anthropologists and sociologists—at least on this side of the Atlantic. Ronald Tobin, whose Littérature et gastronomie had already tried to bridge the gap, has now given us the first in-depth applica­ tion of gastrocriticism to an extensive dramatic corpus and, I hasten to add, a most success­ ful one. The work is pioneering in more ways than one. Not even the French have heretofore devoted an entire book to gastronomy in a single author, and no one to my knowledge has VOL. XXXI, NO. 4 81 L ’E s p r it C réa te u...