théâtre de chambre". And the imagery, especially in the similes, traffics often in the jarringly unexpected. Sometimes it is lyrically tender (clouds are "like splendid fins/Of chameleonic fish of the sky" [12: "The Clouds"]); sometimes it is shockingly brutal (Pierrot's thought of his "last mistress", the gallows, "is like a nail/That drunkenness drives into his head" [17: "The Gallows' Song"]). At its most dreamlike, it has a disturbing obscurity of reference ("sinister"—and unexplained—"black butterflies" swarm in the sky and blot out the sun [19: "Black Butterflies"]); at times it suspends all laws of materiality (a moonbeam penetrates the "varnished case" of a violin to caress its "soul" with its "irony"—"like a luminous white bow" [32: "Lunar Violin"]). The result is Dalí-esque: a series of sharply etched transcriptions of proto-Surreal visions. "With its Baroque intensity of detail and its fin de siècle aura", as Giraud's American translator writes, "Pierrot Lunaire is a work not to be forgotten." Because the rondel is such a tightly "closed" form, each poem seems to stand as an independent unit, isolated from the other poems around it. Giraud heightens this sense of disconnection by eschewing sustained narrative, presenting Pierrot's situation as a series of stark vignettes. Sometimes these vignettes are clustered rather coherently (as in those dealing with Pierrot-as-modern-Christ—27: "The Church", 28: "Evocation", 29: "Red Mass", and 30: "The Crosses"), but, more often than not, they seem random in their placement (and thus may be explained, at least in part, Schoenberg's not scrupling to change their order in his song-cycle). The effect of all these structural and stylistic techniques is both comic and unsettling, as the poem "Disappointment" (4: "Déconvenue") suggests: The scene is completely without context: the poem that precedes it, 3: "Pierrot-Dandy", is about Pierrot's making up his face with moonlight; the poem that follows it, 5: "Moon over the Wash-House", identifies the moon as a washerwoman. Nowhere else in the cycle is this party revisited; it is impossible, therefore, to understand the import of the gathering or the identity of the guests. (Are the "Gilles" among the guests? or are they part of the entertainment? Is it Pierrot who has whimsically stolen away the viands? or is it stingy Cassander?) The frozen gestures ("their forks in their fists"), the air of blank incomprehension (shared as much by the reader as by the guests), the finicking nicety of the language ("elytra" [pl. of "elytron"