Explications littéraires: Bossuet, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Baudelaire (review)

This is a peculiarly ill-balanced volume and the title is misleading. There are four explications de texte: two on Bossuet (passages from the 'Sermon sur la mort' and the 'Oraison funèbre d'Henriette d'Angleterre') and one each on Racine (opening of Phèdre) and Baudelaire (the sonnet 'Les Aveugles'). Molière and Voltaire feature only tenuously with the reprint from the Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France of two notules by the author, one dealing with the apparent invraisemblance of Argan's readiness to play dead in the last act of Le Malade imaginaire and the other with two allegedly real invraisemblances in chapter 3 of Candide (Voltaire has added up wrongly the total number who die in the war and he has left us with a biologically curious picture of old men watching their wives breast-feeding their infants), evidence, according to Pommier, of Voltaire's speedy composition. The result is that, whereas Molière and Voltaire occupy only 2.5% of the volume each, Bossuet takes the lion's share with 45%. As to the explications themselves, they reveal what is best about this exercise: namely that in all careful reading it is worth pausing to ask why particular words have been chosen and why they have placed in a particular order. My reading of 'Les Aveugles' has been positively enriched by Pommier's lengthy discussion of the verb 'contempler' in the opening hemistich, 'Contemple-les, mon âme'. Similarly his attention to the manuscript variants of the 'Sermon sur la mort' offers fascinating insights into Bossuet's creation of a maximally sonorous phraseology. There is a wealth of persuasive detail in his readings. Given this, his caricaturally rude comments on other critics in the preface and in some of the commentaries are quite unnecessary. In addition, his confident belief that he is able to 'rétablir le vrai sens du texte' (p. 7) does not sit easily with the rather eclectic nature of his own readings. So, for instance, Bossuet is dismissed as unconvincing and uninteresting with respect to any Christian message he may be trying to express, but is said to be entirely admirable as an orator, writer and poet, and Pommier pays a very great deal of attention to the rhythm of Bossuet's phrases and to his sound-patterning. He writes about Racine, on the other hand, as if Phèdre were written in prose. His commentary is an excellent account of the dramatist's expository technique in the first fifty-six lines of the play, but he offers no sense whatsoever that Racine is a dramatic poet, skilfully manipulating the alexandrine to express and modulate emotion. However useful they may be, Pommier's are not the only possible readings of these texts.