Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France by Neil Kenny (review)

The title of Neil Kenny's stimulating new book plays on the saying that two things are inevitable: death and taxes. Kenny is not so sure about death. He notes that in early modern culture the dead are rarely definitively dead. They haunt the living, through memory, inheritance, reputation, apparition, exemplarity. To live in early modern society was to live constantly under the shadow of those who had come before and, like Old Hamlet's ghost or Socrates, never quite left. How could one speak of such presences? Kenny explores the question of posthumous presence by looking at grammar. His focus is the interplay of verb tenses, which, he shows, were themselves often quite unstable in their relationships to one other, and were very much in transition as new vernaculars took shape. From the time of Cicero, he notes, writers have evinced an uncertainty about which verb tenses to use in discussing those who are no more. In the early modern period this uncertainty was exacerbated, both by the humanists' fascination with the past, and by the fact that many of them made their living writing funeral orations, panegyrics, and moralized histories. The book begins with an account of contemporary discussions of time and tense. It then studies instances of temporal grammatical variation in a variety of different forms and genres across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the epitaph to the exemplum, from written speech to transcriptions of oral discourse. At issue is how to speak of the dead: how to recall their lives; how to bury them or keep them alive. The analysis draws on linguistic samples from a wide array of writers, ranging from well-known figures such as Ronsard, to lesser lights such as Philippe Desportes, Guillaume Du Vair, and Étienne Pasquier. The book ends with longer and more focused discussions of Montaigne and Rabelais. The analyses throughout are nuanced, elegant, and learned. Kenny has drawn upon a huge amount of reading in several languages to offer authoritative descriptions of how different tenses work in different discursive forms, and how the conventions of certain genres and forms are transformed under the pressure of temporal description. Yet at the same time the range of the material studied limits Kenny's ability to make dense interpretive arguments about most of the individual texts. That is, on occasion, literary works simply serve as illustration. This is inevitable, given the nature of the project, and, no matter how obscure the text, Kenny's commentary offers good insights into how historical sensibility is registered in the details of language. In the largest context, of course, the problem raised here is also the problem of how we moderns might speak of the distant cultural world of the sixteenth century. What language might we use to open a dialogue with a culture that is long gone yet still haunts us? In this regard, this fine book offers a meditation on the problems of philology itself.