A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Needless to say, once the play’s action gets in full swing, the emphasis shifts from the deep social questions raised in the opening scene to the comic spectacle of Alceste’s defeat at the hands of his own self-contradictory moral intransigence. Though he wants Célimène despite the fact that she is the epitome of everything he claims to despise, he contrives to make union with her impossible even when, disgraced by the public discovery of her double dealings with other men, she finally consents to give her hand. For what he demands at that stage is not merely marriage but joining him in rural seclusion—an exile from social pleasures she rejects, because even public embarrassment is preferable to life in what Alceste calls “the desert” of the countryside. However congenitally predatory human beings may be, they are also social animals incapable of surviving without each other’s company.

  Where, then, Don Juan and, in its more ambiguous way, Tartuffe assert Molière’s outraged defiance of the prevailing order, Le misanthrope counsels the ironical acceptance and moderation Philinte enjoins—yet at significant conscious cost. If it is true that, in the end, we need to learn how to live with each other, we manage to do so only on condition of ceasing to be honest with each other in just the way the code of worldly honnêteté suggests we should. Accordingly, when Alceste stomps off at the final curtain, we laugh, getting back to the game along with everyone else.

  But, especially when we recall that Molière himself played the role, Alceste’s huffy departure represents something more. The sunny normativity that, in subsequent denouements, makes the Molièresque comedy of character the progenitor of the modern TV sitcom would not be without its darker moments. Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman) (1670) and Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) (1673) would close with spectacles of utter madness in which an Erasmus-like “praise of folly” offers glimpses of true torment and insanity. Nevertheless, Molière would never again attempt anything like what he accomplishes in Tartuffe or Don Juan. With Alceste’s proudly self-defeating exile, Molière in effect agrees to play, in his own person as a man as well as actor, director, and playwright, the role of public scapegoat—but only on condition that the social order in whose behalf he makes this sacrifice acknowledges the duplicity of the culture of good manners in whose name peace is restored.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  The French source for Molière is Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). All translations are the author’s, except for Tartuffe and Le misanthrope, where Richard Wilbur’s wonderful versions are used from the Harcourt Brace paperback edition of 1993. For two excellent accounts of Molière’s career, see Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Joan De Jean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). On the wider metaphysics, see Christopher Braider, The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). For a handy biography, see Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  Racine, Phèdre, and the French Classical Stage

  NICHOLAS PAIGE

  For English-speaking readers, one tragedy alone has escaped the shipwreck of what is usually called French classicism: Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677). The fussy austerity of “classicism” itself, a word that is often made more forbidding still by the addition of the prefix “neo-,” may go some way to explaining why we have let the rest of the production—with a few exceptions—sink. If Racine and the rest of the period’s dramatists all signed on to the same stony manifesto, packed with prescriptive rules and a set of rationalized formal constraints—well then, it’s hardly any surprise that the works don’t speak to a post-Romantic age. Phèdre is the tragedy we can keep around, the classical play that gives the lie to classicism by smuggling in, in the breast of its heroine, a desire so monstrous that measure, reason, and rules don’t stand a chance.

  We keep it around, but even Phèdre is not an easy sell nowadays. Anglophones might assume that they are simply on the other side of a cultural and linguistic divide: surely the French instinctively understand those “rules” and grasp the arcane and untranslatable beauties of the twelve-syllable rhyming couplets—alexandrine verse—used by dramatists of the time. In fact, the French will tell you as readily as anyone else: Racine, Phèdre included, is difficult to stage. And it’s not just our postmodern world that’s to blame. Already, in the early part of the nineteenth century, far closer to Racine in time than he is to us now, Stendhal was saying much the same thing in his Romantic manifesto Racine et Shakespeare. Racine was a Romantic in his day, claimed Stendhal, but time has made him classical; if he returned to 1820s France, and made use of modern rules, he would have everyone dissolving in tears, locked in delicious illusion, instead of inspiring merely the “rather cold feeling” of admiration.1

  So Phèdre is perennial, but also, maybe for two centuries now, historically estranged. What has happened? Have we simply misplaced the mindset of Racine’s contemporaries? Perhaps we moderns lack the “ancient tragic sense of life” that playwrights used to tap into, and that the noted critic George Steiner once saw disappearing after Phèdre. Maybe our bourgeois world demands grit and realism, whereas aristocratic audiences of the time expected entertainments more ceremonial, more stylized, disciplined by classical doctrine. Yet Racine’s situation is considerably more complicated. Stendhal was right, in that the dramatist was indeed considered modern in his day—an innovator celebrated for the unsurpassed naturalism of his representations of human passion. But somewhat in the manner of religious reformers of the time, he packaged his innovations as a return to a better past.2 Which is to say that Racine’s plays, rather than being manifestations of a coherent and discrete mindset to which we no longer have easy access, are historically heterogeneous, built of materials we sometimes recognize and sometimes do not. Such is their particular challenge: not quite foreign enough to forget about or exoticize, and not quite modern enough to embrace.

  Phèdre opened in Paris on New Year’s Day 1677. In retrospect, the play takes on the aura of the capstone, as it turned out to be Racine’s last tragedy for the public stage: soon after, Louis XIV named him royal historiographer, a glory that far outshone even the reputation he had earned as France’s foremost tragedian. But it’s also right to say that even at the time the play was intended as something of a summum, a deliberately major literary event. For in the mid-1670s, tragedy was on the defensive. It was hemmed in on the one side by Molière’s new brand of urbane comedy, which rejected the stock plots of farce and held instead a mirror to the upper classes, avid for what we would now call relevance. And it was threatened on the other side by the fashion for French opera, the rapidly developing genre of “lyric” tragedy that that relied on song to pull heartstrings and on stagecraft to dazzle the eyes. The twin threats, comedy and opera, explain why in these years Racine started to fish for subject matter with extra tragic gravitas. Turning away from the more or less historical plots that had been tragedy’s mainstay since the 1630s, he found what he needed in myth.

  And what he needed was gods. In 1674, he adapted the story of Agamemnon’s appeasing sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia; and then it was the turn of Phaedra and Hippolytus, victims of Venus’s mischief and Neptune’s wrath.3 Steiner might say that Racine’s tapping into the tragic sense of life of the ancients was a last gasp before the unstoppable encroachment of the secular in Western culture spelled “the death of tragedy.” But Steiner himself recognized that conjuring the gods did not come naturally to Racine, who bathed in a literary culture that was already secularized. Drama had to be believable: “No belief, no feeling,” repeated the period’s theorists, who found support for their conviction in the work of Aristotle and Horace; accordingly, the vast majority of the period’s tragedies featured historical subject matter. The pagan g
ods, from such a perspective, could only be problematic subjects: Tragic with a capital T, certainly; but dangerously unmodern, because seventeenth-century Christians did not share the superstitions of the ancients. In Iphigénie and Phèdre, then, Racine needed to steer a difficult path, tapping the sublime subject matter for an appropriate dose of awe while keeping divine agency thoroughly in check.

  So what might appear at first glance as a sensitivity to sacred dread—supposedly now lost to a modern audience—was the result of a calculated choice. Racine was performing a balancing act, turning belief in divine agency into something that his protagonists subscribe to but that his audience need not. Phèdre certainly has a lot to say about the gods. Where is her raison (her “senses”), she rhetorically asks her nurse, Oenone, toward the start of her opening scene. She answers her own question: “Je l’ai perdue. Les Dieux m’en ont ravi l’usage.” (They are lost: the Gods have spoiled me of their use.) A few lines later, as the avowal of her desire for Hippolyte sticks in her throat, she accuses one goddess in particular of a multigenerational grudge: “O haine de Vénus! O fatale colère! / Dans quels égarements l’amour jeta ma Mère.” (O enmity of Venus! Fatal anger! / Into what errors love impelled my mother!) (The reference is to her mother Pasiphae’s mating with Zeus in the form of a bull.) Then finally, when the cat’s out of the bag, she delivers one of the play’s most famous couplets, describing in the historical present the beginnings of her infatuation for her stepson: “Ce n’est plus une ardeur en mes veines cachée / C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.” (No more an ardor in my veins concealed, / it is Venus, wholly fastened on her prey.) Of course, mythologically speaking, all this is right. Venus is all to blame. Such is the plot as given to us by Euripides. There, Aphrodite herself announces at the play’s start that she intends to use Phaedra to destroy the hero Hippolytus, for the latter has spurned the goddess of love and chastely dedicated himself to the service of Artemis. But no goddess prefaces Racine’s version with claims of responsibility for the coming calamity. And so as far as Venus’s enmity is concerned, we have only Phèdre’s word to go on. Sacred dread there is, but it is experienced by spectators only through the prism of the heroine and other characters.

  Yet how often we hear about the crushing weight of “destiny,” with respect both to this particular tragedy and—by extension—to classical tragedy in general. G.W.F. Hegel, no fan of Racine for doubtless many reasons, claimed that his Phaedra made for a bad tragic character because she had no agency, and generations of critics who have not necessarily seconded Hegel’s blanket dismissal of the French playwright have been happy to sign on to the idea that human volition has no place in this universe. In a particularly famous reading from the 1950s, descended from Hegel via György Lukács, Lucien Goldmann claimed that Racine’s view of the human will followed from his Jansenist upbringing—the Jansenists being the heterodox sect whose main tenet was the inability of believers to advance the cause of their own salvation, which instead depended on divine grace. Tragedy, by this reckoning, became the expression of an entire metaphysical worldview in which individuals could only cower under the gaze of a inscrutable hidden deity. Goldmann’s attempt to read Racine’s oeuvre through the doctrine and experience of the Jansenists is much more subtle than many accounts of the playwright’s so-called fatalism, but it does not square any better with the basic fact that seventeenth-century French tragedy generally tried to steer well clear of deities, hidden or otherwise. It was a genre that was all about human choices. Which is why, moreover, Racine’s choice of subject for his 1677 play was such a bold one, as we can see from an analysis published just days after Phèdre’s own appearance in print. There, an anonymous critic opined that the heroine’s incestuous desire was particularly problematic on the modern stage because audiences could no longer believe that she was tyrannized by a pagan divinity: “attributing vice to the will of the criminal alone, [we moderns] can find no pretext, no mask, and no excuse for this horrible act.” The myth of Pheadra was a bad one for a modern tragedy, then, precisely because it did not allow for the free exercise of human will.

  Racine recognized the danger, certainly, which is why he constructed the play as he did, cannily allowing us to have our gods and our reason too. On the one hand, the pagan characters believed in their pagan divinities, and their dread suffused the play with a tragic awe. On the other, Racine did all he could to make that belief the very subject of his tragedy. Racine’s careful work is particularly evident in the tragic denouement, recounted by the messenger Théramène. The inherited myth runs as follows. Theseus, believing his son to have made incestuous advances on his wife, calls upon Neptune to avenge the insult; immediately thereafter, Hippolytus, trying to escape his father’s wrath, is attacked at sea’s edge by a monster from the deep; the master horseman is dragged to death by his own coursers. Even Seneca’s version, in which the nurse can already be found warning Phaedra that men use the gods as an alibi for their lust, gives us a monster with a divine mission: the beast hotly pursues the hero and his frightened horses, which finally throw their master down. By contrast, Racine’s monster has morphed into something more like a public menace, one that happens to frighten off everyone but the hero. Hippolyte alone steps forward to fight, mortally wounding the creature. Unfortunately, the beast’s terrific death throes—spurts of fire, blood, smoke—then frighten the team of horses. We wonder: mightn’t this be an example of wrong-time-wrong-place coincidence? Of course, the monster does come ashore right after Thésée’s imprecations: one must ask if this can only be bad luck. But that’s just it: divine agency becomes a question—one that Racine encourages us to entertain with another detail present only in Théramène’s description of the uncontrollable horses: “On dit qu’on a vu même en ce désordre affreux / Un Dieu, qui d’aiguillons pressait leur flanc poudreux.” (Some say / one could even see, in the dread hurly-burly, / a God stabbing with goads their dusty flanks.) Some say, yes: some always claim to see the supernatural. Racine’s is thus a delicate rationalization of the myth, one that leaves us suspended between the world of the characters and a more modern, disenchanted frame of reference.

  In the end, this rationalization helps explain why this play is now known as Phèdre, and why we think of it as its heroine’s tragedy. Euripides didn’t write a Phaedra; he wrote a Hippolytus, whose main tragic action was the destruction of the titular hero. Seneca in his version did a lot to develop the role of Phaedra, so much so that manuscripts come down to us under the titles of both the queen and her stepson; but the Latin poet’s imitators in the Renaissance reverted to prioritizing, in their titles, the fate of Hippolytus. Surely there was some difficulty in making Phaedra the center of the play, given what legend provided poets to work with: she was, after all, but a cruelly used tool of a goddess’s revenge; the tragic “fault” was Hippolytus’s, that is, his public and ill-considered disdain for Aphrodite. But once Aphrodite’s overt intervention was removed, the queen herself could become a suitably Aristotelian tragic heroine—“not quite guilty, not quite innocent,” says Racine in his preface to the play, and therefore able to excite our compassion and horror in the manner claimed by the Poetics.

  The playwright points, in this preface, to one of his efforts on Phèdre’s behalf: whereas previous versions had her denouncing Hippolytus’s advances directly to her husband, Racine spares her such base calumny by attributing it to Oenone’s initiative. But beyond this scapegoating of a plebian Machiavel—a common tactic for relieving tragic princesses and princes of responsibility for heinous acts—Racine makes Phèdre herself dramatically interesting through sustained attention to the heroine’s attempts to contain or repress her desire. “To speak or not to speak?” This, for Roland Barthes, in his famous book On Racine, was the question of Phèdre. Indeed, speaking is at the center of this purportedly mythological tragedy, which is at the same time a purely human drama of avowal, of words that cannot be stifled and that once proffered cannot be recalled. Phèdre confes
ses her desire first to her nurse, then to the man she loves, and finally, after having poisoned herself, to her husband. Only the last of the avowals, the purifying one, is forthrightly executed: “Les moments me sont chers, écoutez-moi, Thésée” (Moments are precious to me. Listen, Theseus), she says, before taking ownership of her actions: “C’est moi qui sur ce fils chaste et respectueux / osai jeter un oeil profane, incestueux” (I myself dared to cast upon that chaste, / respectful son, profane, incestuous eyes). (Ambiguous ownership, perhaps, since she follows the admission with a displacement of guilt toward “heaven” [le Ciel] and Oenone.) The other admissions are oblique, partial insinuations that must be midwifed by interlocutors savvy enough to fill in the words that she cannot pronounce. Her first periphrastic reference to the object of her love is the stuff of anthologies:

  OENONE: Aimez-vous?

  PHÈDRE:     De l’amour j’ai toutes les fureurs.

  OENONE: Pour qui?

  PHÈDRE:     Tu vas ouïr le comble des horreurs.

  J’aime … à ce nom fatal je tremble, je frissonne.

  J’aime …

  OENONE: Qui?

  PHÈDRE:     Tu connais ce fils de l’Amazone,

  Ce prince si longtemps par moi-même opprimé?