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RACINE AND THE AUGUSTINIAN INHERITANCE : THE CASE OF ANDROMAQUE - JOHN CAMPBELL






To stress the unrelenting intensity of Racine's tragic vision, however, is not to surrender to an Augustinian interpretation : on the contrary. It is paradoxically because Andromaque presents such a vision that it is difficult to ascribe 'Jansenist' qualities to it. We have seen that it is possible to identify certain cognate themes, such as characters' lack of freedom and control, their common implication in inherited misfortunes, and an ensuing sense of guilt and exile. Once this is accepted, however, an obvious question arises. Is there anything specifically 'Jansenist' or 'Augustinian' here ? Even a limited acquaintance with pre-Racinian forms of tragedy makes us aware that these were haunted by similar concerns. A straightforward example is Racine's insistence on human weakness in the face of passion. Any desire to demonstrate that this is evidence of an embedded message from Port-Royal should be tempered by the mass of similar evidence that can be taken at will from the literary commonwealth : 'It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul' [31]. It might, of course, be relatively easy to prove that Shakespeare was an Augustinian too, though thankfully we know little about his schoolmasters and their catachetic intent. Even then we would only need to turn to the Greek tragedies, such as Euripides's Hippolytus, and after that, as Jacqueline de Romilly reminds us, to what preceded them :
    "Bien avant la tragédie, les poètes ont insisté sur le fait que ni les hommes ni les dieux ne peuvent résister a l'amour [...] Ce thème devait, naturellement, trouver sa place dans la tragédie, ou les maux causés soit par l'amour soit par le refus de l'amour offraient une illustration éclatante de la faiblesse de l'homme et des souffrances auxquelles il est voué" [32].

     What is true of the portrayal of love also holds for the general picture of humanity which can be constructed from readings of Andromaque. It is manifest, for example, that Oreste's picture of man as a plaything of the gods ('Oui, je te loue, ô ciel, de ta perséverance' (1. 1614)), is an age-old sentiment, so memorably expressed by Gloucester in King Lear (Act rv, scene 1) : 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to th' Gods ; | They kill us for their sport'. Similarly, the sense of entrapment that invests the characters of Andromaque is a permanent and identifying feature of the tragic genre. Characters are concerned through the workings of the tragic plot, 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd' (Macbeth, Act in, scene 4). Though attempting to escape, they must face up to the inescapable, within themselves and beyond. There is nothing more or less 'Jansenist' about this than for the Lear 'bound | Upon a wheel of fire' (King Lear, Act IV, scene 7). In all great tragedy the machine infernak seems to acquire its own momentum and drives forward with awesome anonymity. In the unity and intensity of one dramatic action are played out our own typically dispersed and unfocused encounters with what has been called the problem of evil. The genre is older than St Augustine, as is our need to explore the dark side of the human planet. In Rohou's diagnosis of Racine, the writing of tragedy operates as a kind of subconscious ontological transference, permitting the expression of an Angst created or revealed by a Jansenist education which stressed the vanity of human endeavour and the world's insubstantiality : 'Il lui faut en effet substituer à son être de néant une image avantageuse, qui permet le transfert de la problématique de l'être sur des rôles où il développe l'art de plaire' [33]. Perhaps. However, such hypotheses are not reinforced by any evidence that there is a particularly 'Jansenist' cast to Racinian vocabulary, if only because the words he uses reflect a more Catholic inheritance. It was Chateaubriand, with his own italics, who pronounced that "les sentiments les plus touchants de l'Andromaque de Racine émanent d'un poète 'chrétien' ?" [34] For a seventeenth-century world in which the writings of St Augustine were a reference for the whole Western Church, language alone does not allow the theological geographer to trace an isogloss which might clearly distinguish the spiritual territory of Jansenism from that of Catholic orthodoxy. An obvious example is the eagle-eyed Bossuet. Who was more ready than he to swoop on the tiniest mouse of heterodoxy ? Yet when we surrender to the pleasure of his prose, again and again we find a discourse grained with those same elements which, in Racinian tragedy, we can be so quick to label 'Jansenist'.
     Vivons-nous, Chretiens, vivons-nous ? Cet âge que nous comptons, et ou tout ce que nous comptons n'est plus à nous, est-ce une vie ? [.. .] Le repos et la nourriture ne sont-ils pas de faibles remèdes de la continuelle maladie qui nous travaille ? et celle que nous appelons la dernière, qu'est-ce autre chose, à le bien entendre, qu'un redoublement, et comme le dernier accès, du mal que nous apportons au monde en naissant ? [35]

    Those selfsame images of human weakness plucked from Racine, as evidence of the Jansenist roots of his inspiration, may be found in all those writers who draw from a common Christian inheritance. Even here, however, the abiding influence of stoicism should make us hesitate to single out Christianity itself as a source [36]. The idea that humanity toys with the shadows of its transient desires instead of engaging reality, that human beings are caught up in situations not of their own making, and are as though trapped in a world from which they feel alien, is too universal and general a human experience to be identified as 'Augustinian'. This point cannot be as evident as it seems, given that it is implicitly repudiated by all those who have hit the Jansenist button on uncovering, in Racinian tragedy, a similar vision of the world. Yet Western literature brims over with representations of this vision. We see it clearly, for example, in what L. C. Knights calls the 'insistent and unresolved questioning' that emerges from the Shakespearean tragedies that precede King Lear. 'Is there any escape from appearance and illusion ? Why do both the public world and the world of intense subjective experience seem somewhat flawed and unsatisfactory ? What is the status of human values in a world dominated by time and death ? On what, in the world as we know k, can man take his stand ?' [37] This sense that 'life's but a walking shadow' {Macbeth, Act v, scene 5) is doubtless more neoplatonic than specifically Augustinian, and even here, Plotdnus was preceded by Sophocles. It is significant that at the moment of Oedipus's fateful discovery, the great chorus should sing, not of this unfortunate king, but of mankind itself : 'Ah, race of mortal men, | How as a thing of nought | I count ye, though ye live' [38]. What Racinian tragedy might owe to Jansenism, therefore, is much less obvious than what the Augustinian-Jansenist worldview owes to a common Western tradition. It was Nietzsche who called Augustinianism 'Platonism for the people' [39]. The humanistic tradition of the West nourished Augustine as surely as it nourished Racine.

    This same principle holds true for those tempting parallels between the fall of Troy and the fall of man, or between the suffering inflicted on the vanquished Trojans and that which is visited on lapsed humanity. If we shift our focus from 'Jansenism' to tragedy and its perennial concerns, Troy then becomes a burning metaphor for that universe of suffering, waste, and evil which is the homeland of the tragic genre. The real continuum is that of the human predicament and of our engagement with it in art, as Marguerite Yourcenar illustrated poignantly in 1943 : 'Une génération assiste au sac de Rome, une autre au siège de Paris ou à celui de Stalingrad, une autre au pillage du palais d'Eté : la prise de Troie unifie en une seule image cette serie d'instantanés tragiques, foyer central d'un incendie qui fait rage sur l'histoire' [40].

    Similarly, the representation of guilt in literature long preceded the writings of the bishop of Hippo [41]. It is also important to distinguish between the Augustinian-Jansenist idea of guilt, which is a consequence of the Fall, and the guilt felt by Oreste or Andromaque. This latter is manifestly connected with decisions, taken or to be taken, and the consequences of those decisions, rather than with some metamorphosis of original sin. Oreste chooses to follow Hermione's bidding, just as Andromaque initially chooses to sacrifice her son : it is these choices which provoke expressions of guilt (11. 1015-16, 1570-74). This is a reminder that the typical tragic plot is constructed from choices, often impossible choices, that must be made in fast-evolving situations created by other choices. Even Phedre, the supposed cas d'ecole of Jansenist guilt, does not feel guilty simply because she exists. She has feelings she cannot suppress, which lead to actions she will regret, in a situation caused by her husband's decision to bring her to Trezene and then to leave her. Such a structure is by definition not Augustinian, as Kolakowski points out :
    'In the Augustinian worldview we are always morally wrong if we act by our own will and always morally right if we are guided by grace. Unlike the tragic situation, this doctrine contradicts our moral intuition about guilt. In this sense, the Augustinian and Jansenist world is not tragic, it is only sad. [. . .] It may be called 'tragic' only in the loose sense in which any irreversible disaster is so called' [42]. There are therefore many reasons which should make us hesitate to stick the label 'Jansenist' on Racinian tragedy. The caveats entered above have further implications, concerning the obscure relationship between literature, ideology, and society. In this respect Jansenism has often seemed to function as a golden key unlocking the door to a treasure-house of glittering socio-cultural generalizations. Blumeau, for example, argues that her interpretation 'a l'avantage de restituer a l'oeuvre de Racine sa tache premiere, qui est celle de lire son epoque' [43]. There are already, however, reasons to doubt the very basis of Goldmann's claim that there is a necessary link between Jansenist theology and the interests of a specific class [44]. If, in addition, it proves impossible to isolate specifically 'Jansenist' characteristics in Racinian tragedy, this can only increase scepticism about any logical chain leading from social class to ideology to literature, and vice versa, at least in this particular case. Applied to the theology of grace, or to French seventeenth-century history, the term 'Jansenist' refers to a particular phenomenon with specific, identifiable characteristics. Applied to literature, the word becomes so vague as to function only as a synonym for 'pessimistic'. It is a splash of local colour rather than an attempt at accurate delineation, less a brushstroke than a pot of paint spilled on the canvas of meaning.

    There is a final argument against any 'Jansenist' reading of Racinian tragedy, which will perhaps seem trivial to those who stress the homiletic function of literature. In past discussions the major roles have fallen to history, ideas and language. It is perhaps time to bring on stage two elements too often neglected as beneath the debate, though they support the whole stage : imitation and pleasure. For St Augustine, famously, the pleasure derived from a play, especially when that pleasure came from the spectacle of suffering, was essentially unnatural and thus by definition immoral : 'My longing was not to experience myself miseries such as I saw on stage. I wanted only to hear stories and imaginary legends of sufferings which, as it were, scratched me on the surface. Yet like the scratches of fingernails, they produced inflamed spots and repulsive sores' [45]. This lead was followed, in the seventeenth century, not just by Jansenists such as Nicole, but by many mainstream churchmen, most notably by Bossuet when he gorged on the easy kill of the hapless Fr Caffaro [46]. An eloquent example, from 1697, is the very title of Ambroise Lalonette's Histoire de la comedie et de I'opera, oil Von prouve qu'on ne peuty aller sans pecher. In this context, then, it is salutary to remember the furious debate with Port- Royal in which Racine was engaged just before composing Andromaque. Picard is one of many to have dismissed the playwright's contribution as a piece of facile polemic, unworthy of such a serious subject : 'on s'attendait à un débat sur la signification morale, religieuse et métaphysique de la tragédie' [47]. We have been here before. Houdar de la Motte, as Paul Hazard reminds us, sought to express more clearly what Racine wanted to say by translating the poetry, that unreliable messenger, into prose : 'Ses amis et ses semblables espéraient que, plus tard, tout le monde comprendrait que l'exposé des faits doit compter seul ; qu'alors on abandonnerait les fantômes pour n'exprimer que la vérité, on renoncerait à gêner le langage uniquement pour flatter l'oreille ; et les poètes deviendraient des philosophes : il n'y a pas de meilleure façon de les utiliser' [48].

    It is pleasingly apposite to find a rejoinder to the serious-minded in Racine's own playful polemic : 'Qu'est-ce que les romans et les comédies peuvent avoir de commun avec le jansénisme ?' [49]. For the ground on which he chooses to fight is not that of transmitting truth but of giving pleasure. As Picard remarks dismissively, 'il fait du théâtre un simple divertissement' [50]. Racine reminds his opponents that the Lewes provin- ciales only succeeded because of the enjoyment Pascal gave, and that the pleasure gained from novels and plays is a constituent part of normal, healthy life in this world : 'Enfin, je vous demanderais volontiers ce qu'il faut que nous lisions, si ces sortes d'ouvrages nous sont défendus' [51]. In other words, pleasure is not just a particular sauce, which may or may not be added, but a vital ingredient of the dish itself. This point is stressed in Racine's own translation of Aristotle's Poetics : 'Cette imitation se fait par un discours, un style composé pour le plaisir' [52]. We do not value Andromaque primarily because it teaches truths, unless, that is, we wish to take hold of imaginative literature and, in Seamus Heaney's words, 'barber its luxuriant locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical goads' [53]. There is, therefore, something essentially anti-Augustdnian in the notion that playwrights might bend all the resources of their craft and invention to give pleasure to their fellow human-beings. After all, the theatre was denounced not only because it encouraged moral depravity, but because, through what St Augustine called 'fictitious and theatrical invention', it could reconcile men and women to a world thereby given a value in itself [54]. This was a danger clearly signalled by Bossuet : 'C'est le monde, avec tous ses charmes et toutes ses pompes, qu'on représente dans les comédies. [. . .] On y fait aimer toutes ces choses, puisqu'on ne songe qu'à y faire trouver du plaisir' [55].
     The pleasure associated with participation in the mimetic action is inherently subversive of any system of ideas which denies intrinsic dignity and worth to a world viewed at best as a place of temporary exile, and at worst as a cesspool : 'Que le coeur de l'homme est creux et plein d'ordure' [56]. For it is impossible to separate the 'truth' of a play such as Andromaque from its aesthetic beauty, or separate that beauty from the emotions aroused by the tragic action. This tragedy is a seamless web or it is nothing : that is the most important 'unity'.

     We are here within that eternal paradox of tragic mimesis. The pleasure given by the representation of suffering was, for St Augustine, an 'amazing folly' implicating the person who enjoyed the play : 'if he feels pain, he stays riveted in his seat enjoying himself' [57]. A tragedy represents blind unreason, frailty and disorder. Yet to engage our attention it demands a rational ordering of material, a strength of creative purpose, a clarity of insight and a harmony of emotion and idea, form, image and sound. These qualities Andromaque displays in joyful abundance :
    'Hé bien ! filles d'enfer, vos mains sont-elles prêtes ?
    Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos têtes ?
    A qui destinez-vous l'appareil qui vous suit ?
    Venez-vous m'enlever dans l'éternelle nuit ?' (1637-40)
    The daughters of Hell crown a heavenly moment of human creative endeavour the ordering of the material to arouse emotion, the use of metaphor and allusion, the exploitation of rhythm and rhyme in a harmonious correspondence of sound and sense. Emotion and idea, form, image, and sound, subtly interfuse in a powerful exploration of our vulnerability to the acid of unconsoled desire and to the ever-tightening grip of the irreparable act. The sheer human triumph of it is a vibrant reaflfirmation, if not of the values, then of the value of the world. Here we have a continuing city. And at this most fundamental level, the tragedies of Racine are literally a world away from a Jansenist vision of our common human inheritance.

    John CAMPBELL
    University OF Glasgow