Barthes on Racine

Racine's theater is highly stylized and formulaic. As formulaic and rule-driven as a soap opera. All Barthes does is point out the patterns. He is not even that psychoanalytic, considering Racine's obsession with kinship, incest, and rivalry (once again, like the soap opera plots). It is hard to see what Barthes would have seemed so controversial: he isn't even applying a structuralist method to Racine, as much as he is pointing out parallelisms and recurring structures. I'm almost finished reading Sur Racine, with only the analyses of the individual plays remaining. Here he intelligently discusses each play and looks for its distinctiveness within the rule-bound structures. Like any intelligent critic ought to do. He never seems to be forcing a plot into a particular interpretative straight-jacket.

What was all the fuss about? Was there really that much difference between Barthes and his detractors?

Picard

Picard in his attack on Barthes says that using the language of a discipline without practicing this discipline is reducing this critical language to a set of metaphors (with reference to psychoanalysis). Is this not the entire problem with the edifice of literary theory? Starting with structuralist linguistics as the supposed basis of a scientific structuralism applied to literature.

We find this elsewhere too: any metaphorical, non-rigorous use of the terms of another discipline...

Similarly, any reference to "zen," to "relativity" used outside the contest of actual zen practice, actual physics...

Gratuitous

My Racine project is wholly gratuitous and has no logical purpose. It will lead me wherever it leads me, and not connect with anything else.  I read an article by Pere Gimferrer about him and now am reading Barthes's Sur Racine, which postulates Racine as the zero degree of criticism: the classic author who is simply blank and thus susceptible to any kind of critical metalanguage. Gimferrer treats  Barthes simply as an anomaly.  I'm half way through Brittanicus now. Then I'll re-read Phèdre and go on to the other plays.

Barthes also has an interesting point about the way Racine is spoken in the theater. This ties in with my interest in the performance of poetry. I don't follow what Barthes says completely.

Maybe I'm looking for the antithesis of Lorca?

Thébaïde

I read my first Racine, an early work reputed to be be weak called Thébaïde.  (I've read Phedre before too, but I mean with my new Racine project.) My idea is to be a silent expert on Racine. In other words, just do everything an expert would do except write about it (except on this blog).

I guess I'll have to read other neoclassical dramas, since a Racine specialist would have done this. The logical first step though would be to read the primary texts in chronological order, then figure out what Racine scholars think about it.

The characters just sit there and talk. They argue their positions. Everyone dies in the end, ignoring the incidents in Sophocles's Antigone. The women pursue peace (Jocasta, Antigone); the men war.  Creon is in love with Antigone and kills himself after she kills herself, so all the major characters are gone.  Not an elegant solution, since then you can't write another play in which Antigone tries to bury Polynices.

The vocabulary is easy. Everything is pretty clear and self-evident.