Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
121
2009
3671
Laurent Thirouin: L’Aveuglement salutaire: Le réquistoire contre le théâtre dans la France classique. Paris: Champion, 2007 (Champion Classiques). 289 p.
121
2009
Perry Gethner
pfscl36710577
Comptes rendus 577 power but in the tension between the two. Viewed from this point, even the famed engraving of the “Wheel of Immortals,” once studied by René Démoris in a groundbreaking article, can appear as an emblem of authorial affirmation. Concluding arguments are generally the place where a scholar can venture even bolder ideas. However, by explaining how “the culture of literary patronage gradually merged into practices of polite sociability and conversation” (p. 227), and even helped to create a public sphere, Shoemaker might have taken unnecessary risks. From the start, he is right to challenge idealistic and egalitarian notions of human interaction and assert the existence of power relations in conversation. That allows him to claim that the tension that he exposed in his first chapters was also at work when conversationalists in a salon had to relate to hierarchical superiors. For the author, conversation and the constitution of a public sphere through dialogue were born out of a tension and balance between competition and cooperation, inclusion and exclusion, in patterns similar to that of patronage. For this reader, on the other hand, the art of conversation in public circles was also about the “superior” seeking actively to create something in conversation with “inferiors.” That particular labor does not get recognized in Shoemaker’s book, where there are those who strive to level the conversational field, and the aristocrats who accept that leveling, as if that was a given. But that is not necessarily the case. High nobles were also fashioning themselves in progressive ways when they invited literati to their salons and were polite to them. Retrospectively, then, one might ask with regards to the entire book: what about the patrons themselves? What did they produce in these patronage relations? Shoemaker’s book provokes these many questions, and will be sure to have a staying power for many years ahead. Jean-Vincent Blanchard Laurent Thirouin : L’Aveuglement salutaire : Le réquisitoire contre le théâtre dans la France classique. Paris : Champion, 2007 (Champion Classiques). 289 p. Laurent Thirouin here dares to tackle a phenomenon that lovers of French classical drama tend to consider distasteful. The prolonged, and often vehement, denunciations of the stage on religious grounds, some of them coming from writers as distinguished as Pascal, Nicole and Bossuet, are often dismissed as demonstrations of inadequate literary sensibility or of PFSCL XXXVI, 71 (2009) 578 misplaced piety. This superb study invites us to reexamine the arguments, to place them in their historical context, and to understand that some elements of the critics’ positions have validity even though we may reject their conclusions. Originally published in 1997, the book has now been reissued in an affordable paperback format. One commendable feature of Thirouin’s approach is the arrangement by category of argument, as opposed to the strict chronological presentation used in some earlier studies. This allows him to explore in greater depth the philosophical and theological sources of each element in the quarrel. He is also careful to point out that the positions taken by the opponents of the drama are far from uniform and that some of the argumentation appears paradoxical. For example, enemies of the stage were often willing to accord it more influence over the spectators’ thinking and behavior than were the genre’s defenders. He also reminds us that much of the attack was directed against performers and performances, rather than against literary texts as such, and that the most vehement condemnations happened in an age when drama acquired not just a high degree of literary prestige, but also a hitherto unknown legitimacy from political authorities, social elites and the literary establishment. Even in areas where one might suppose that the opponents of the stage would be in total agreement there could be considerable variance between their positions. Although it was virtually a given to cite Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Augustine, who had issued blanket condemnations of spectacles, their authority could be used or ignored in a variety of ways. Likewise, the fact that the earliest Greek plays constituted part of religious festivals could be used either to defend drama as a whole (its original aim was to present religious and moral truths) or to condemn it (the founding link to paganism taints all future varieties of drama). Moreover, there was no agreement in either camp as to whether the plays of the current day were morally better or worse than those of antiquity. While many defenders took the drama from the period of the Roman Empire as the corpus to be used for comparison, noting that it was often obscene and scandalously immoral, attackers compared modern plays unfavorably with the great tragedies of the Greeks. Some even charged that flagrantly immoral plays present less of a danger to good Christians, because viewers find them repulsive and stay away, whereas superficially moral plays mask the underlying danger and can thus seduce us without our realizing it. Thirouin is also careful to counteract some of the standard oversimplifications. Far from there being a monolithic hostility to the stage from the Church, he shows that the opponents of the stage constituted a minority within the Comptes rendus 579 Catholic teaching and practice of the period, with some of them, especially the Jansenists, representing a dissident force. The most fascinating portion of the book is the extrapolation of the arguments to apply to issues of our own day. Some of the reservations that would now seem silly when applied to the theater have been revived in regard to newer media such as film and television. The current concerns that viewers, especially the younger and more impressionable ones, might be prompted to imitate the violent behavior they see depicted, or that people who see a steady diet of crimes and atrocities on television could become desensitized to such events in real life, make it more difficult to dismiss out of hand the charge that drama has the potential to corrupt. Another of Thirouin’s strengths is his ability to distinguish between moral, theological and psychological considerations with greater clarity than the Ancien Régime authors he is studying. For example, he argues effectively that spectators respond to plays on multiple levels. Thus, in addition to the purely intellectual response privileged by literary critics (processing the overall structure of the work and the moral lessons it is overtly trying to inculcate), there can be an emotional response in which individual scenes, characters or speeches resonate in a powerful and often unpredictable way with each viewer, sometimes in ways that conflict with the intent of the play as a whole. Thanks to our unconscious thoughts and feelings (a notion that is at times prefigured by Nicole), we could possibly identify with criminal behavior or with the erotic dimension of love, however chastely presented. At times Thirouin displays points of convergence between opposing positions that the writers themselves failed to perceive. An especially fascinating example is Pascal’s wager argument, in which the undeniably laudable goal of religious conversion could be assisted by a type of theatrical make-believe; thus, not all uses of hypocrisy and self-disguise can be dismissed as inherently immoral. The title of the book, “l’aveuglement salutaire,” a phrase borrowed from Nicole, illustrates the degree to which the Augustinian sympathies of the drama’s critics stemmed from a fundamental rejection of all forms of worldliness, which believers are urged to deliberately block out of their sight. Given that the views of human nature and of Christian values held by the two sides were so fundamentally divergent, the quarrel could not help becoming a dialogue of the deaf. Although Thirouin focuses primarily on the mid-seventeenth century, he includes Rousseau’s attack on the stage from a century later, carefully delineating how the Swiss thinker, although often reiterating arguments from Nicole, rejected the earlier critic’s world view in many areas. In particular, Rousseau accepted other forms of worldly sociability as positive, brought in political and economic considerations, PFSCL XXXVI, 71 (2009) 580 and substituted a strictly secular perspective for the Christian-centered view of his predecessors. The appendix, which gives a chronology of the major actions and publications comprising the quarrel throughout the course of the seventeenth century, is very helpful, as is the extensive bibliography. This is a superb piece of scholarship that deserves a place in every university library. Perry Gethner Theresa Varney Kennedy (ed.) : Françoise Pascal’s Agathonphile martyr, tragi-comédie, An Annotated Critical Edition. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008 (Biblio 17, 177). 239 p. It is remarkable that the year 2008 should see all six of Françoise Pascal’s plays finally back in print, with four of the newly reedited works, including this one, appearing for the first time since the seventeenth century. Theresa Kennedy provides some useful insights into Pascal’s first theatrical composition. Most notably, she shows how the young author tried to combine the two strands that would dominate her entire literary production, namely, a deep religiosity and a commitment to the précieux movement, with its promotion of a pro-female agenda. Pascal’s attempt to combine those two ideologies is not successful, despite the use of vocabulary that could equally pertain to both registers (terms like martyre, constance, divin, flamme); this leads to what Kennedy correctly calls “galimatias”. She notes how Pascal carefully emphasized or even invented episodes geared to glorify heroic women. Most notably, the heroine Triphine violates standard decorum by making advances to the man she loves, planning her own elopement, bravely defying her father and choosing martyrdom. Indeed, Triphine is more outspoken than most of her counterparts in drama of the period in that, once she is recaptured by her father, she publicly declares her rejection of parental authority and of forced marriage. Pascal’s determination to revitalize two dramatic subgenres that were gradually fading away in France, the martyr play and the romanesque tragicomedy, by fusing them, testifies to a clear familiarity with both traditions and a willingness to experiment. Unfortunately, the introduction is marred by a variety of problems. There are features that would be acceptable in a dissertation, but not in a printed volume, such as an overly detailed review of existing research, a plot synopsis of the play, and providing both English and French versions of
