The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France by Jeffrey N. Peters

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France by Jeffrey N. Peters Roland Racevskis Peters, Jeffrey N. The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France. Northwestern UP, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8101-3697-7. Pp. xii + 260. In Plato's Timaeus, the concept of the chora shades toward spatiality while remaining irreducible to straightforward definition as space or thing. In an introductory chapter, Peters explores Derrida's reading of this platonic dialogue to evoke chora as "an ineffable principle of cosmology that gives shape not only to the universe itself but also to the stories that tell of the world and its becoming" (19). As this book argues, those stories changed significantly in seventeenth-century France, as did the relationship between humanity and the physical world, whether perceived or imagined. Early modern notions of place and space were in flux, and literary authors sketched the conceptual contours of new thinking about the ontology of becoming. Starting with an analysis of Boileau's Art poétique as a kind of geography, Peters traces the significance of what he calls "the chorological imagination" (20) through works by La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, d'Urfé, Scudéry, and Lafayette. A discussion of Molière's L'école des femmes in the light of Lucretian materialism interestingly underlines the particularizing force of a comedy that privileges the local over the universal. Lucretius's atomism points to gaps, infinitesimal spaces between particles. Like chora, gap space is both ineffable and originary, as in the stitching, connecting activity of La Fontaine's bees in"Les frelons et les mouches à miel."Corneille's L'illusion comique, an often underestimated play, contains key insights into poetic and theatrical invention as an irreducible spatial dynamics of becoming in Alcandre's magical grotto and the multiple geographical and conceptual places evoked therein. Racine's dramaturgy constructs the stage as an in-between space of becoming, rather than the claustrophobic enclosure to which it has often been reduced. As the book effects the [End Page 204] transition from poetry and theater to narrative prose, the "chorological" approach remains the same while the problematics of the readings reveal differences in spatial representation (and its alternatives). In L'Astrée, description and narration simultaneously create bucolic landscapes of enclosure and retreat while also expanding space indefinitely toward neoplatonic reflections that take on a cosmic dimension. In other words, the pastoral in d'Urfé takes shape at the intersection of cartography and cosmology. The reading of Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves that concludes the book's body chapters provides the most intriguing insight into how changes in narrative structure track changes in spatial conceptualizations in early modern France. Whereas the pastoral represents landscape while expanding the reflection on space into a cosmic epistemology, the new form of Lafayette's novel accedes to yet another level of abstraction and indeterminacy. Space becomes no longer represented, but rather hinted at, much in the same way that Plato's chora evokes space, and indeed its origination, without constituting it: "[N]arrative prose is supported by the pictorial force of description to formulate dramatic spectacles that evoke the world, that imply it, without directly representing it" (195). Peters's command of not only the early modern primary and theoretical literary sources but also their underpinnings in antiquity culminates in a wide-ranging and carefully documented scholarly study. Roland Racevskis University of Iowa Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French