This very interesting and complex book is based on the intelligent and sane proposition that literary theory can assume no safe and stable metalinguistic distance from its object, providing at the outset the answers to the questions it poses, but must engage texts actively in a process that Mathews calls 'creative intervention'. What emerges is analysis in the most productive sense, a releas ing of meanings; analysis, the dictionary reminds us, suggests a loosening up, a releasing. The ambiguities of Apollinaire's poetry are particularly wellsuited to Mathews's approach, since they constantly recruit the interpreter's desire to seize upon accessible meanings and at the same time remain delight fully elusive to that masterful gesture. Mathews eschews thematic or semiotic decoding and engages Apol linaire's writings in ways that remain open to its ambiguities, paradoxes and opacities. Taking seriously the jibe that Apollinaire was a brocanteur, he finds in that term a valuable insight into the tensions in Apollinaire's experi ence and his literary anxieties. Like the treasures in a pawn shop, the objects of the modern poet's experience are both cherished and much used ('un medaillon toujours ferme' (xiii)); they are both familiar to the writer and estranged from him, circulating in a general economy of meaning. As Walter Benjamin reminded us, writing of Baudelaire, the modern lyric poet cannot write with assurance that lyricism is an authentic experience, shared by writer and public. The poet must problematize the lyric stance even while writing within the major motifs of lyricism: memory, transience, desire. Mathews's readings discover again and again instances in Apollinaire when the poetic moment is fraught with anxiety when 'the text is discovered as textlanguage uncoupled from its producer' (xiii). As language seeks entry into the world, it is revealed to be intensely idiosyncratic, personal, opaque. The self of the poem is a self fragmented in and by language, its 'place' never secure and stable, 'it dissolves into the forms of its articulation' (xv).The chapter on Alcools traces the configurations of two simultaneous and divergent experiences emerging in the space of the poems. On the one hand, the poems are among the most lyrical of Apollinaire's texts, seductively appealing to a profound sense of 'nostalgia, frustration and loss' (xii). On the other hand, they are impenetrable, full of shifts in register, disconcerting, unexpected turns, very similar, one might add, to the shock effects which Paragraph Volume 13
