Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 422-423

Jean Weisgerber, La Muse des jardins: Jardins de l'Europe littéraire (1580-1700). Bruxelles: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, 2002; 217 pp.; ISBN: 9052019738; LC call no.: PN56.G3 W45

Three large groups of international scholars — specialists in eighteenth-century studies, in modernism, and in relationships with artistic media — think of the distinguished Belgian comparatist, Jean Weisgerber, as one amongst their most respected coworkers. Modernists continue to find his two-volume Les avant-gardes au XXe siècle (1986) to be their indispensable encyclopedia and have more recently been stimulated by his comprehensive picture of Le réalisme magique (2000). Eighteenth-century experts value highly his examination of ludism and theatricality of rococo style across Europe in Les masques fragiles (1992). Each of these sets shares in turn with students of intermediate phenomena in admiring his Le rococo, beaux-arts et littérature (2001) and Les avant-gardes et la Tour de Babel: Interactions des arts et des langues (2000). And now Weisgerber has applied his special talents of appreciation and synthesis to the cultural period which, by the end of the 20^th century, has come to wear the overall label "baroque," but is understood to blend into the Renaissance, mannerism, and the rococo in various ways.

This new book is simultaneously a pilgrimage around Europe, a tour seen through the sensibility of key poets, and from within the plenitude of those created environments, the gardens and parks, which expressed so much of the aspirations and world view of the individuals and societies who created them. Here Weisgerber skillfully spins threads linking literary themes and intellectual history, because the structures of actual and imaginary gardens embodied almost every level of reflection on nature from that of the exploring individual to the highest range of mythological representation and cosmological conjecture. The energetic Renaissance restarting of garden culture as an idealization of nature was, of course, one of the ways Europe reached back to its ancient heritage, both biblical and classical. The rebirth of the locus amoenus, both in literature and in actual preserves (places ancestral to our modern city parks and national parks), was a significant breakthrough. Partial enumeration in this review can scarcely do justice to the delightful assortment of topics with which we are treated.

The better to understand their topographical and symbolic features, we are furnished with a dozen plates of magnificent gardens of the age, and we are informed about the influence of science and technology on them and the role which painters' thoughts regarding light and the depiction of landscape played. But the reviewer confesses a predilection for the [end page 422] intensively literary parts of this book in which Weisgerber discusses poets who (like Opitz) conduct us through "topological" meditations, who (like Tasso and Spenser) create magical spaces where principles contend, who (like Huygens and Marvell) examine the possibility of a restored "paradise," a meaningful earthly order, who (like Du Bartas, Vondel, and Milton) attempt to conjure the Edenic state, and numerous writers of romances who exploit these real and imagined gardens in their fictions. An extended analysis of Versailles illustrates one of the most elaborate fusions of political and aesthetic statement involving gardens on the grand scale. Readers will eagerly chase through the Index among the enormous range of figures from antiquity and the early modern period (all areas except Scandinavia and Eastern Europe are represented) for specific anchor points in the rich offerings.

What is the importance of this kind of book for comparative literature today? Weisgerber himself gives a crucial answer in his conclusion regarding the "inexhaustible" material. Just as churches contain strata and much of the repertory of European culture as internalized elements, so do the surviving great gardens of Europe. Thus, investigating them and the garden culture as a conscious realm in literature permits us to uncover a high order of cross-referentiality. La muse des jardins exemplifies how productive it can be to cut across genres and media, and to see literature in its successive historical frameworks alongside other developments such as the scientifical and the philosophical. To such invaluable "synchronic" moments, Weisgerber adds the "diachronic" dimension. While flowing out of the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, his book judiciously notes how certain deep "constants" seem to survive. It does so with a "Horatian" gracefulness we associate with the rococo. Based on great erudition, this is a book on cultural history that convinces without shouting or arm-twisting.

Gerald Gillespie

Stanford University