A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  So what could have happened in the intervening centuries to make these works seem so distant? In the 1820s, as we have seen, all Stendhal could muster for Racine was cool admiration, not the tears earlier audiences had shed. Roland Barthes, surveying postwar productions of Phèdre, concluded bleakly: “I am not sure that it is still possible to stage Racine today.” Is this state of affairs explainable through anything else besides the truism that time lays all convention bare, and that one season’s naturalness is the next’s affectation? Barthes’s diagnosis was that Racine’s theater was an uneasy mixture of the properly tragic—themes of guilt and destiny and the gods—and a distinctly more modern and bourgeois aesthetic in which characters became psychological individuals, motivated by purely human desires. Twentieth-century productions, he found, accentuated this psychological dimension, drawing the work further toward bourgeois drama, further from what it contained of true tragedy. The only possible remedy was to attempt to distance Racine, notably through a type of antipsychological diction that would avoid falling into the trap of assuming that words must be a kind of translation of thought; instead of trying to motivate psychologically each utterance, actors would do better to embrace the rigor imposed by the alexandrine verse. But precisely because Racine’s tragedy is at bottom heterogeneous, Barthes did not seem sure that this would work. The problem was not simply that we now project a psychology onto work that is not psychological. It is that Racine is a meeting point where, according to Barthes, “elements of true tragedy mix inharmoniously with the seeds, already growing, of the bourgeois theater of the future.” Barthes thinks it is better to estrange the work than to modernize it; but he also recognizes that in fact Racine is every bit as modern as he is archaic.

  Barthes’s diagnosis was intended as polemical, and as such it contains much that is debatable, sometimes even plain wrong. (For instance, to say that the alexandrine was intended to impose distance directly contradicts what people at the time said—that, on the contrary, it was the form of verse that most resembled ordinary human speech.) But he does grapple seriously with the real question hiding under the truism that “tastes change”: why should plays with their contemporary reputation for naturalness be so hard to put on today? For Barthes, the reason lies in the historical hybridity of Racine, who has one foot stuck in true tragedy of the past and the other in a bourgeois drama to come: his modernity is incomplete, and so our efforts to treat him as if he were fully modern can only backfire. But I would suggest two other possibilities.

  The first is that Barthes may be overestimating the extent to which Racine’s “language of the heart” marks an incursion of specifically bourgeois values into literature. It is understandable why one might want to trace an arrow from Racine (or from a novelist like Lafayette) to the effusive bourgeois sentimentality of the next century, and there is a certain logic in assuming that identificatory relations between character and consumer must be the mark of a bourgeois public, whose ideology is that of the Everyman. Even in the absence of a good history of identification—a reading mode denigrated by professional critics, and thus understudied—it seems dubious to suggest that all discourses of fellow-feeling can be reduced to a common bourgeois cause. In his fifth-century BCE Defense of Helen, Gorgias wrote, “Those who hear poetry feel the shudders of fear, the tears of pity, the longings of grief. Through the words, the soul experiences its own reaction to successes and misfortunes in the affairs and persons of others”; surely he could not already have been expressing a “bourgeois” aesthetic. To understand Racine’s passions, maybe instead of looking forward we should look back—back, say, to Renaissance debates on the proper manner of depicting emotion, debates that can be chased further upstream still, to their various Greco-Roman sources. From this point of view, modern Western literary history would present a series of competing techniques for presenting interiority: the sonnet, the tragic monologue, autobiography, the epistolary novel, free indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness. The types of plots Racine developed, and the verse he wrote, were part of this long history, rather than a symptom of epochal change.

  The second possibility, not unrelated, is that the ideological assumptions underwriting this interiority are in fact many and distinct. It is no doubt true that Racine wanted to craft “relatable” characters; but it is equally true that relatability for him meant something it no longer does. If we follow the critic Raymond Williams, for example, our current view of tragedy is determined by the fact that modern literature is inescapably a literature of the individual: “Our most common received interpretations of life put the highest value and significance on the individual and his development, but it is indeed inescapable that the individual dies. … Tragedy, for us, has been mainly the conflict between an individual and the forces that destroy him.” As doomed individuals, we relate to the situations represented individuals find themselves in and the emotions that arise out of those situations. “We think of tragedy as what happens to the hero,” continues Williams, but in much of the Western (Aristotelian) tradition, “the ordinary tragic action is what happens through the hero” (my emphasis). Admittedly, Phèdre, via the centrality of Phèdre, allows us to read it according to our modern obsession with the individual. Yet we should weigh this against the fact that, as a playwright steeped in the Aristotelian tradition, Racine viewed Hippolyte’s death as the tragic action, an action that the poet needed to produce through a concatenation of factors of which Phèdre’s desire (like Oenone’s counsel) is but one. Her desire is not, to be precise, tragic; it is the means by which the tragic action is precipitated. To see here a meditation on the human condition as such is thus something of an optical illusion, generated by our historically peculiar vantage point.

  From the vantage point of Racine’s audience, Phèdre acted as a host for the viewers’ identification by having passions they could share—quite literally. The job of the dramatist was to bring before that audience passionate heroes; with skill, those passions would be felt by the audience. Variations existed in the way theorists of the time thought about this transfer of emotion; and as they did before and have since, people puzzled over Aristotle’s cryptic remarks on catharsis and over the paradox Sir Philip Sidney summed up as “sweet violence” (how do we take pleasure from the representation of sometimes unpleasurable emotions?). Racine himself had given a formulation of that paradox in his introduction to Bérénice, where he speaks of “majestic sadness” as being the sought-after product of the tragic poet’s art—the “majesty” being the je ne sais quoi that distinguished it from just plain sadness, which no one would want. Small differences aside, however, the general opinion did not vary a lot: we did not go to the theater to see meditations on humankind’s fate; we went to have our emotions aroused by seeing heroes and heroines who were similarly aroused. (If this sounds a little unsavory, it’s because in the wake of the new brand of aesthetic philosophy introduced by Immanuel Kant and Hegel, this type of explanation for the emotions produced by art went downmarket, applying only to supposedly debased genres like horror and pornography.) Moderns might say that we identify with Phèdre because, caught in a no-exit snare, she represents the dilemma of the human condition. But for someone like Longepierre, what is marvelous about Racine is his ability to so accurately represent the labyrinth of human emotions that we are “touched” by them. Arguably, both formulations are types of identification, but they do not describe the same reading experience. In one (Longepierre), you recognize your own feelings in a character; in the other, you imaginatively enter into a character’s situation. A small difference, perhaps—but enough to explain why Racine’s vaunted naturalness no longer quite comes across.

  Such are two explanations for Racine’s apparent distance that at least have the advantage of resisting the idea of some crystalline classical aesthetic, now inaccessible. And we should also resist the idea that Phèdre’s relatively happy fate—it’s still staged and translated, and still on a lot of reading lists and course syllabi—is entirely b
ased on misconceptions. Initially called Phèdre et Hippolyte (Phaedra and Hippolytus), the tragedy was, after all, rebaptized Phèdre by none other than its creator on the occasion of the play’s second edition in 1687: this would seem an acknowledgment that in the end it is Phèdre’s not quite unavowable desire that constitutes the real heart of the tragedy. And if this is so, then surely it can’t be too wide of the mark to conclude that when Racine comes upon the formula for making tragedy out of amorous passion gone wrong, he also invents, with the same stroke, a tragic vision of human desire. For us to pronounce Racine difficult to stage, we first have to want to stage him; that is, a play like Phèdre beckons to us before it pushes us away. Unquestionably, Racine is of a different age; but he is just as unquestionably part of a history from which we are not, in fact, separate. The fact is that French classicism is nearer to us than we usually think, even if it remains a little too far away for total comfort.

  NOTES

  1. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

  2. This is why the playwright could both be appreciated for his modernity and, in the “battle of the books” that pitted Ancients against Moderns, find himself in the Ancient camp.

  3. I use accepted English spellings of figures of ancient myth and history when referring to the figures generally, and French spellings in reference to Racine’s own characters.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Barthes, Roland. Sur Racine. Paris: Seuil, 1963.

  Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of Renaissance Italy. Translated by S.G.C. Middlemore. 1860. Reprint, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1935.

  Bénichou, Paul. Morales du grand siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

  Chaouche, Sabine. L’art du comédien: Déclamation et jeu scénique en France à l’âge classique (1629–1680). Paris: Champion, 2001.

  Corneille, Pierre. Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique. In Oeuvres complètes III. Edited by Georges Couton. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.

  Dissertation sur les tragédies de Phèdre et Hippolyte (anon.). In Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes I: Théâtre-poésie. Edited by Georges Forestier. Paris: Gallimard, 1999.

  Donneau de Visé, Jean. “Lettre écrite sur la comédie du misanthrope.” In Molière, Oeuvres complètes I. Edited by Georges Forestier. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

  Flowers, Mary Lynn. Sentence Structure and Characterization in the Tragedies of Jean Racine: A Computer-Assisted Study. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979.

  Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.

  Gorgias. Defense of Helen. In Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations. Edited by D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.

  Longepierre, Hiliare-Bernard de. “Parallèle de M. Corneille et M. Racine.” In Adrien Baillet, comp., Jugement des savants sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs. Paris: Charles Motte et al., 1722.

  Pavel, Thomas. “Between History and Fiction: On Dorrit Cohn’s Poetics of Prose.” In Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. Edited by Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

  Racine, Jean. Phaedra. In Three Plays. Translated by George Dillon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

  Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.

  Stendhal. Racine et Shakespeare: Etudes sur le romantisme (1828). Expanded ed., Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854.

  Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.

  Readers have a number of English translations of Phèdre to explore, from the sober Dillon version I quote from here to Richard Wilbur’s rhyming couplets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) and Ted Hughes’s “amplification”-translation (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). For most purposes, there are no significant differences between available French texts of the plays. Georges Forestier’s critical French edition of Racine’s works, Oeuvres complètes I: Théâtre-poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) is a mine of historical information on the plays and their literary and cultural context.

  Balanced introductions to Racine’s tragedies are relatively plentiful; Odette de Mourgues, Racine, or the Triumph of Relevance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) is a good place to start. R. C. Knight, Racine: Modern Judgements (London: Macmillan, 1969) reprints some important older scholarship, including English translations of classic essays by Leo Spitzer, Georges Poulet, and Jean Starobinski. Lucien Goldmann’s “Jansenist” interpretation can be found in The Hidden God (New York: Humanities Press, 1964); Roland Barthes’s structuralist On Racine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) remains a tour de force. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), sees classical theater (Racine, but also Molière) as a rejection of serious realism. A representative cross-section of more recent criticism can be found in Edric Caldicott and Derval Conroy, eds., Racine: The Power and the Pleasure (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001). For a bracing and contrarian tour of scholarship old and new, see John Campbell, Questioning Racinian Tragedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). For wider studies of French classicism, see Christopher Gossip, An Introduction to French Classical Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1981) and John Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); the latter is the best English-language study of classical “doctrine.” And in The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), George Steiner situates Racine’s work both in the local context of French classicism and with respect to the Western tradition of tragedy in general.

  Lafayette

  La Princesse de Clèves and the Conversational Culture of Seventeenth-Century Fiction

  KATHERINE IBBETT

  An anxious husband asks his wife why she has left the court and insists on refusing all social interaction; at first, embarrassed, she tells him only that she longs for the tranquillity of the countryside, and then, as her disbelieving husband presses her further, she announces that she will tell him something no wife has ever told her husband: that she cares for another man, but that nothing has ever taken place between them and that she will not name him.

  Little do they know that the countryside retreat in which this painful conversation takes place is not, in fact, a tranquil retreat; indeed, the unnamed man in question is present and listening in to their conversation. The wife does not name the man; the husband is unable to get her to identify him, despite his best efforts; and the man listening in does not know that he is the person of interest. Only the reader is privileged enough to know both the identity of the man and that he is eavesdropping at this most intimate marital moment. We lean in, eager to see what will happen, but uncomfortably aware that as readers we too are engaged in a form of eavesdropping.

  This is the central scene of a novel by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, the comtesse de Lafayette (1634–93), known in French as Madame de Lafayette but in Anglo-American scholarship as Lafayette. The novel, La Princesse de Clèves, flouted expectations even before its publication, and the history of how it has surprised and sometimes annoyed readers is part of what makes the novel exceptional. La Princesse de Clèves was electrifying to French readers on its publication in 1678, and has stayed central to arguments about fiction and its value since then; most recently, its defenders took to the streets against then President Sarkozy, who had questioned the usefulness of studying such a text.

  Before even the publication of the novel, its singularity had been touted by another new genre: the newspaper. Donneau de Visé, the proprietor of a circular called the Mercure Galant, published a similar story as a teaser; the paper then solicited the opinion of the public on the princess’s strange confession, going on to produce three issues of a special supplement and a review all devoted to the novel. An entrenched battle between fans and critics ensued,
making this novel into an event, or what the French call a querelle, from its initial appearance. To further the debate, two scholars of the novel—one for, one against—went up against one another in lengthy published discussions, which argued again about the propriety or otherwise of the princess’s confession. Even the form of this criticism was conversational, since literary criticism had not yet been sequestered in the academy: the critic who attacked the novel, Valincour, framed his assessment as a series of chatty dialogues between imagined readers.

  This central eavesdropping scene of the novel, and the reading public’s reaction to it, placed the public consumption of private conversation at the heart of this emerging genre. Readers were charmed by an imagined entry into private and hitherto inaccessible conversations: novels were spaces in which readers listened in to conversations between people—especially women—who imagine themselves to be talking in private, and they were also objects about which conversation raged. The novel as a genre pushed private life into the open, and, moreover, told its readers that they should consider private life to be publicly significant.

  Before we can take on the significance of that dynamic for both Lafayette’s novel and other texts of the period, we’ll take a detour through the plot and novelty of the Princesse. A beautiful young woman, heiress to a great fortune, is brought to court by her mother, who watches over her with great care. After much negotiation, the daughter is eventually married to the prince de Clèves, a man who loves her even though this is not required of such marriages. Moreover, he wants her love in return; this proves impossible, since she has as yet no idea of what love means. She remains unmoved by her husband, who deeply regrets this. But she then meets a fabled figure, the duc de Nemours, and throughout a series of carefully managed scenes discovers what it means to care for someone, who, events suggest, is also inclined toward her, as the French term puts it. Almost every intimacy is refused by the princess. Eventually, in the scene described above, the princess confesses her feelings for an unnamed other to her husband, without realizing that Nemours is listening in. Later, she hears this story relayed back to her in court gossip, and accuses her husband of having spread the story, not knowing that it is Nemours who is responsible for the gossip. The husband is unable to get over both what he has heard and his wife’s suspicion of him; soon he becomes ill and dies. Now, the reader feels, a different novel is beginning, and after a decent interval of mourning we imagine the union of the two lovers. But this does not happen. After much anxious reflection, the princess retreats to the country, rejects Nemours’s attempts to intrude on her retreat, and eventually moves into a convent. Some years later, we are told in brief lines at the end of the novel, Nemours’s love diminishes. The princess never returns to court; in the abrupt ending of the novel, we learn only that she lives part of the year in a convent, and part quietly at home.