The Body and the Senses in Racine's Theatre
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The Body and the Senses in Racine’s Theatre Carolyn Hammond Rosen Royal Holloway, University of London PhD 1 Declaration Of Authorship I Carolyn Rosen declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and has been generated by me as the result of my own original research. The Body and the Senses in Racine’s Theatre ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… I confirm that: 1. This work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at Royal Holloway, University of London; 2. Where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated; 3. Where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed; 4. Where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work; 5. I have acknowledged all main sources of help; 6. Where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself; 7. None of this work has been published before submission. Signed: Carolyn Rosen……………………………………………………………… Date: ………20 December 2015……………………………………………… 2 Abstract The Body and the Senses in Racine’s Theatre Until now, critics have not made full use of the perceptual awareness with which Racine endows his characters. This particular consciousness lends itself to a study inspired by phenomenology. Racine’s characters are fascinating because their language and action speak to the dramatist’s sophisticated portrayal of embodied sense experience. I show that Racine uses the senses in an innovative way, and prefiguring modern articulations of the body, sense experience and the world. My first chapter looks at what Racine’s characters see and how they experience love, especially the coup de foudre. This ‘love at first sight’ experience is profoundly destabilising, and significantly impacts upon the entire body. In my second chapter I examine vision which, for various reasons, has gone wrong through hallucination, deception, premonition, and divine vision. By treating these more unusual forms of vision, I show how Racine plays with and reworks understanding of the senses. In the third chapter I focus on the sense of touch in the lives of the characters. While one might presume that the stage conventions of Racine’s time proved severely restrictive and therefore made sight the most important of the senses, such is not the case. The undeniable influence of these conventions means that the characters feel their own experiences even more powerfully and use tactile language to describe sensations which do not necessarily stem from a literal, physical interaction. The fourth chapter examines hearing and listening. I address language in the plays, and how verbal communication between characters—as well as the anticipation or absence of that communication— involves their bodies and senses. The presence of the divine in Esther and Athalie corresponds to a major emphasis on hearing and listening, and this chapter also examines the music of these last two plays. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………...p. 5 CHAPTER I ……………………………………………………… p. 23 CHAPTER II …………………………………………………….. p. 61 CHAPTER III ……………………………………………………. p. 95 CHAPTER IV ……………………………………………………p. 125 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………. p. 169 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………..p. 177 4 INTRODUCTION C’est justement mon corps qui perçoit le corps d’autrui et il y trouve comme un prolongement miraculeux de ses propres intentions, une manière familière de traiter le monde; désormais, comme les parties de mon corps forment ensemble un système, le corps d’autrui et le mien sont un seul tout.’1 Jean Racine’s theatre is phenomenal. Part of a holy trinity of early modern French dramatists that includes Corneille and Molière, Racine is nonetheless set apart by the sheer passion evoked by his characters and their dynamic, poetic language. The power of his deceptively simple vocabulary and the beautiful rhythm of the alexandrine verse combine in plays that are still performed after more than three centuries. However, scholarship on Racine tends to focus on a reading of the text as literature. This produces readings which contribute to a greater understanding of historical context, language, and poetry. What critics have missed, though, is the embodied experience of the characters themselves. When I call Racine’s theatre phenomenal, it is not merely to praise his achievement but to assert that, through his characters, Racine shows his audience a type of multisensory, embodied experience which shines a light on the way in which sensation is often more than a single sense at a time. I offer a reading of Racine that focuses on these fleshly encounters and is guided by phenomenological insights. One of the major roadblocks to this type of reading, which has prevented the appearance of a phenomenological study until now, is the understanding of early modern restrictions for the theatre. Discussion of the bienséances is well- documented, and critics such as Jacques Scherer, John Lough, and Michael Hawcroft have written about the prohibitions designed to conserve decorum by restricting physical contact and movement.2 This emphasis on a lack of movement or touch has led to the expectation for readers and spectators who engage with 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 411. 2 Cf. Jacques Scherer, La Dramaturgie Classique (Paris: Nizet, 1950), p. 402-403. See also the chapters on ‘Les vraisemblances’, p. 367-382, and ‘Les bienséances’, p. 383-421, John Lough, Seventeenth-Century French Drama: the Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) and Michael Hawcroft, Word as Action: Racine, Rhetoric and Theatrical Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 5 Racine that his characters are disembodied entities on a stage, merely there to recite poetic alexandrine verse. Recently, writing on the bienséances as an outright prohibitive concept has been re-directed by Michael Hawcroft toward a focus on the more general idea of respect for vraisemblance in early modern drama.3 This shift toward a broader notion of representing reality onstage is indeed helpful, and my project goes further and deeper, into the world perceived by Racine’s characters and experienced by those who engage with them via the text and the stage. I offer a phenomenological reading of both the Racinian character’s experience and the experience of the reader or spectator. For Racine’s characters, sensation is grounded in the body: they are constantly feeling and always in contact with the world around them. Even when certain aspects of their interaction are reduced or sublimated, these sensory experiences present themselves in new and interesting ways. My project uses phenomenology to study the characters’ accounts of their embodied experience, which reveal them to be three-dimensional and fleshly. In this way, when applied to theatre, phenomenology provides a useful corrective to the bienséances, helping to steer us away from intellectualising sense experience and toward emphasizing sensory and bodily interconnectivity. Characters onstage can demonstrate mutual involvement in a participatory, sensory world. The spectator, likewise, is no longer disembodied and engages with the world onstage in a fleshly way. To support my view of Racine’s theatre, my evidence is not only what characters say, but also what their bodies are doing onstage. Characters’ experiences do not become real only after they are verbalized and intellectually processed; rather, they are real in the very moment at which they occur. Merleau-Ponty What do I mean when I use the term phenomenology, or propose a ‘phenomenological’ reading of Racine? When I refer to phenomenology, my use of the term is rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, which repeatedly emphasizes the non-intellectualization of embodied experience. Whilst people have been writing about and grappling with the senses since the beginning of the Western 3 Michael Hawcroft, ‘The Bienséances and their Irrelevance to the Death of Camille in Corneille’s Horace,’ Papers on Seventeenth-Century French Literature, 38 (2011), 465-79. 6 philosophical tradition,4 phenomenology as a discipline really begins in the early twentieth century with Edmund Husserl’s Ideen in 1913. Merleau-Ponty comes out of a philosophical line of inquiry that includes Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Husserl’s phenomenology is generally considered epistemological, geared toward knowledge, with an end goal of reducing objects to their essences. Heidegger’s phenomenology is more ontological, focusing on states of being. Husserl’s main stumbling block seems to be the subject-object divide—or the relationship between the mind and what it perceives—and he misses out on the concept of embodiment upon which Merleau-Ponty seizes as fundamental. What primarily separates Merleau-Ponty from Heidegger is that instead of getting caught in the added layer of mental consciousness of experience, he celebrates embodiment and homes in on the importance of the body’s experience, in the moment, of taste, touch, hearing, smell and sight.5 In a departure from both Husserl and Heidegger, he does not attempt to pare down a perceptual process he considers irreducible.6 Instead, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology places absolute primacy on the body’s pure experience of sense.7 My approach deals with both the interpretation and understanding of sense experience, and with the lived, embodied sense experience for Racine’s characters. When I propose a phenomenological approach to reading Racine, I refer to a methodology which examines the characters’ and spectators’ sensory experiences from the Merleau-Pontian perspective of embodied experience, the interconnectivity of the senses, and one body’s relationship to other bodies. Merleau-Ponty rarely if ever discusses theatre; he is more interested in art, sensory perception, and the 4 Cf. Aristotle’s De Anima, in the version of William of Moerbeke and the commentary of St Thomas Acquinas, trans.