A.’s revisiting of Racine's relation to his chief Greek model, Euripides, is an ambitious project whose stated goals are tripartite: to inventory Racine's Greek, Latin and French sources in his ‘Greek’ plays, La Thébaïde, Andromaque, Iphigénie and Phèdre; to contextualise these works in literary-historical terms; and to offer fresh textual interpretations through the lens of Euripides’ works, seen as a ‘clé de lecture’ (p. 18).
The first two components of the project are impressive; the third yields mixed results. The discussion of the ‘génétique du texte’ will be extremely useful to Racine scholars interested in studying his sources, even though the French and Latin materials interrupt the flow of the central argument. A. also effectively contextualises Racine's oeuvre, including concrete matters like Corneille's irreverent view of Aristotle's Poetics.
It is about the project's third component, the readings of Racine, that I have reservations. Although I applaud A.’s broad synthetic approach, his hypothesis about Racine's use of Euripidean source material is not entirely convincing. He starts out well, postulating that Euripides’ complex characters, emblematic of the ambiguity of the Aristotelian tragic hero, ‘ni tout à fait bon ni tout à fait méchant’ (p. 20), influenced Racine's ‘revolutionary’ emphasis on character development rather than plot, a better established dramatic element in French Classicism. This much seems reasonable; less compelling is the idea that to please the public, Racine ultimately ‘betrayed’ his revolution by simplifying the characters of Iphigénie and Phèdre in his final two secular plays. The two main problems here are that insufficient attention is paid to Euripides’ relation to his predecessors and that the readings of Iphigénie and Phèdre seem forced, the need to mesh with the central thesis oversimplifying the texts.
A. never fully addresses the underlying implications of Euripides’ ‘complexity’ of character: the fact that what Paul Bénichou famously called Racine's ‘démolition du héros’ parallels Euripides’ undermining of Aeschylean and Sophoclean heroism. For Aeschylus and Sophocles, the conflict between heroism as a form of affirmation and tragedy as a genre dealing with irresolvable conflict is inclined in favour of heroism; even dreadfully beset characters generally retain their base-line nobility. Euripides, by contrast, focuses on the internal mechanisms of the tragic conflict, portrayed with greater psychological substance – in modern terms, more realistically. He allows audiences to glimpse the psychic processes demonstrated by his characters’ struggles, weakening their heroic images. The conceptual framework of the volume would gain by integrating the idea that for both Racine and Euripides character complexity is inseparable from the fact that both playwrights are latecomers to the flowering of tragedy: because heroism as a form of idealism is a simplification of a complex reality, the deconstruction of heroism lays bare the kind of moral ambiguity that heroism struggles against recognising.
As for the readings of the plays, those of La Thébaïde and Andromaque are more convincing than those of Iphigénie and Phèdre, the two plays A. associates with Racine's ‘betrayal’ of character complexity. In these later plays, psychological mechanisms like doubling and internalisation that might undermine the idea of Racine's reversion to simplicity are themselves oversimplified. In Iphigénie, A. uses the doubling of the characters of Iphigénie and Ériphile as evidence that Racine has simplified Euripides’ character; Racine's Iphigénie, A. posits, is too purely virtuous to be complex. But while at a literal level it is possible to construe doubling as a way of eliminating ambiguity by attributing conflicting traits to the doubles in turn, writers do not generally introduce doubles to lessen ambiguity but to exacerbate it. The radical moral polarisation of the two Iphigénies – Ériphile is also secretly named ‘Iphigénie’ – who love the same man and potentially share the same fate, sacrifice, is suggestive not of a clean break between a heroine and a villain but rather of two characters to be considered in tandem, expressing together a single psychological conflict. Their characters are less opposite than complementary, each providing exactly what the other lacks; they are seamlessly connected. Has Racine truly pulled back from Euripidean ambiguity in his portrait of this doubled character?
The most problematic reading is of Racine's masterpiece, Phèdre. Racine's preface depicts his protagonist as virtuous, and the majority of critics emphasise her conflict between morality and illicit desire, but A. views her as utterly consumed by her passion and indifferent to virtue. We are told she demonstrates little internal conflict, her actions determined by the presence (or absence) of two external models of virtue, her husband, Thésée, whom A. reads as Phèdre's conscience, and Œnone, her nurse, whom he sees as a virtuous figure trying to keep Phèdre on the straight and narrow: ‘Racine, qui, nous l'avons vu, a renoncé à la complexité de la caractérisation grecque de Phèdre, transpose le devoir moral vers la nourrice et la répression chez un agent externe, Thésée’ (p. 356).
While this reading supports A.’s hypothesis that Racine sacrifices the desire to impress the ‘doctes’ via his ongoing connection to Euripides to the need to ‘plaire au public’, it leaves out crucial aspects of the play. A. overlooks the fact that Phèdre herself is the source of Thésée's conjugal virtue, having tamed his youthful womanising when they married: ‘Et fixant de ses [Thésée's] vœux l'inconstance fatale, / Phèdre depuis longtemps ne craint plus de rivale’ (I, i, v. 25–6). The chronology of the play's events supports Phèdre's ongoing moralising role: Thésée embarks upon fresh philandering exploits only when, arriving in Trézène, Phèdre sees the exiled Hippolyte for the first time in years, can no longer resist his allure and decides she must die to preserve her virtue; small wonder she also loses control over her husband at the same time. Given that in the very same time frame both Hippolyte and Aricie also fall in love for the first time, Phèdre's suicidal surrender of her heroic struggle to maintain her virtue in spite of her family curse seems to allow not only Thésée but all those around her to (re)discover passion.
If this chain of events is embedded by Racine in the plot, what it drives is not plot development but character development. It does not support the claim that Thésée is Phèdre's conscience but rather suggests the reverse: that Phèdre had long been serving as Thésée's moral guide until she herself gave up struggling against Venus. As for the interpretation of Œnone as the central moral force of the play, the most puzzling of A.’s many observations about the character states that Œnone is simply ‘telling the truth’ when, after the false report of Thésée's death, she characterises Phèdre's love for her late husband's son as having become an ordinary passion (‘[elle dit] la vérité lorsqu'elle constate qu’à la suite de la mort de Thésée, la flamme est devenue ordinaire’ [p. 342]), as if the many-year struggle against a love characterised in the play as ‘incestueux’ from the start (V, 7, v. 1624) could be rendered harmless in that way. I am no more persuaded by the reading of Thésée and Œnone as the sources of Phèdre's virtue than by Phèdre's depiction as a character without concern for honour, reputation and virtue.
In his introduction, A. refers to the important distinction R. Barthes makes in Sur Racine (1963) between historical and psychological approaches: ‘deux postulations: l'une historique, dans la mesure où la littérature est institution; l'autre psychologique, dans la mesure où elle est création’ (p. 16 n. 13). Barthes, rather than attempting a synthesis of these two approaches, set off a famous literary querelle by presenting provocative psychological readings of classical texts without extensive socio-historical considerations. That A. aims to synthesise ‘génétique du texte’, sociohistorical and aesthetic contextualisation, and psychologically informed readings is laudable, but his more scholarly goals overshadow his textual analyses. I submit that more alert readings might actually illustrate a hypothesis opposite to his own, that of a ‘révolution aboutie’: Racine's realisation of an extraordinary psychological complexity unprecedented in French Classical tragedy, but of a complexity that must be rooted out precisely because it is masked. Perhaps Racine's ‘revolutionary’ impulse to show his talents as a Hellenist does in the end get eclipsed by his desire for the broadest possible public acclamations. But does his revolutionary nature, like many subversive movements made to go underground, not become the more compelling for having been forced into hiding?
