L'Invention lyrique: visages d'auteur, figures du poète et voix lyrique chez Ronsard (review)

In the preface to his 1550 Les Quatre premiers livres des odes, Ronsard claimed to be 'le premier auteur Lirique François'. Precisely what underlies assertions of this kind and the extent to which entire corpuses of work might be interpreted in their light are rarely investigated; it is more common to dismiss them as self-promoting claims whose historical validity is questionable at best. Benedikte Andersson's project to illuminate Ronsard's understanding of being an 'auteur Lirique' is therefore refreshing and original. In broad terms, her answer is that Ronsard confers a lyric identity on to much of his poetic output primarily, though not exclusively, through the creation of the impression of the presence of a lyric subject. She also makes the interesting suggestion that this lyric subject is of central importance to his establishment of his work as a foundational text in French poetry. This response is articulated in four sections of equal length, which broadly follow the chronology of Ronsard's work. In the first, following a useful discussion of lyric's emergence in antiquity, the focus is on the Odes. In relation to these, Andersson brings out how Ronsard carefully constructs the impression of a lyric subject in a work indebted 'hypertextually' (that is, via formal considerations) to the likes of Horace and Pindar. In the second section, Andersson looks at how the impression of a lyric subject comes to be of greater importance than hypertextuality in a range of genres (chansons, odelettes, Les Amours, Continuations des Amours), and how at the same time Ronsard broadens the canon of lyric writers on whom he draws. The third section demonstrates how Ronsard, despite apparently turning away from lyric after the 1550s, persists in engaging with it. A lyric subject continues to appear in genres not traditionally associated with it (epic, for example) through the actual presence of a lyric subject or, intriguingly, an echo thereof. Yet he also confers lyric identity, in a way that generates tension but also supports his apparent claim that lyric underpins his entire corpus, by returning to lyric's origins as performance. In the final section, Andersson looks directly at the varying ways in which Ronsard constructs himself as a lyric poet of reference to future writers. As the foregoing implies, her book ambitiously proposes an account both of the importance of lyric to Ronsard and of the centrality of lyric to his self-sacralization. My one criticism of the work is that the rationale for the particular characteristics adduced as being generative of a lyric identity is sometimes not fully addressed. This is particularly the case in relation to the tropes and images presented as contributing to a lyric subject; one wonders whether they were always or inevitably regarded as such. However, this detracts neither from the interest of Andersson's demonstration of the centrality of the complex constructions of subject to much of Ronsard's writing, nor from the value of the analysis of the varying inflections that lyric genres undergo in Ronsard. As such, the work will be of very great value.