Racine's Oedipus: Virtual Bodies, Originary Fantasies

Racine's Oedipus: Virtual Bodies, Originary Fantasies Mitchell Greenberg Tout mythe se rapporte à l'origine. Toute question d'origine ne saurait ouvrir que sur un mythe. (Jean Paul Valabrega, Phantasme, mythe, corps et sens, p. 52) ACENTRAL PARADOX exists at the heart of any discussion of Racinian dramaturgy. While the tragic dilemma of Racine's theater is profoundly anchored in the passionate, forbidden sexuality of its characters, passions that are inextricably tied to the desiring body, this body is absent, banished from the lexical construction of the Racinian text. In its plots and peripeteia, Racine's theater ingeniously reconfigures how his protagonists are to negotiate the difference between the generations and between the sexes without referring, except in the most oblique terms, to the body. Tragically, death intervenes, in extremis, to remind us of the body's presence, but only, so it seems, when it is most definitively erased from the dramatic stage. Instead of the body, what we have on stage, before our eyes, are bodies reduced to being but "talking heads," bodies that are there and yet curiously absent. Or rather, the presence of the body is not in the body, but of the body, the body transformed into language. And paradoxically, this language, in order to be proffered, must, of course, be embodied, spoken to an audience whose participation in the passion and tragedy of the Racinian hero returns the body to itself but in a different place. For, confronted with a tragic world from which the body is effaced, Racine's audiences, so he repeatedly tells us, respond corporally; they weep. Yet, the question remains: Why are these eyes weeping? What have they seen or come to see that induces tears? Or perhaps a more pertinent question, since we are dealing with "affect," would be: What have they heard? What have the remains of the body, traduced into the voice of the actors, told them? Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 105 L'Esprit Créateur And how has this telling moved them to tears? There is something compelling about voice in general, but the voice that carries the affect of Racinian tragedy is particularly seductive. What does the young Marcel, that precociously overstimulated theater-goer, desire of "la Berma's" rendition of Phèdre but to be transported out of his straitened bodily reality, moved, changed, by the way the famous actress will give voice to Racine's verses? The "golden" voice of the actress, incarnating the sensuality of Racine's poetry, carries the audience out of its own body, back to a place it remembers but where it has never been. This sensuousness interpolates the spectators, seducing them, drawing them out of their daily existence and, like a pied piper, leading them down roads that, although unrecognized by them, they have traveled before: voice's extremely primal affect directs the audience , out of the present and back to a more primitive, less contingent fantasy of the body.1 It is a quest that begins with Echo's sad query, a query that reverberates throughout Racine's tragic universe, the "Qui suis-je?"of the anguished protagonist. This question takes us to the heart of each character's tragic dilemma at the same time that it reflects the larger socio-historic situation of the nascent absolutist subject. The Racinian question "Qui suis-je?" proffered by the tragic voice is the most poignant of questions because no satisfactory answer is ever forthcoming. In its very demand, which is ultimately a cry for a grounding, an "origin," it always contains within itself the illusory fantasy of the "perfection of an original unity" that would establish once and for all an absolute identity, and that, at the same time, by the very presuppositions of the question, precludes any satisfactory response.2 Instead of an answer, culture, on the one hand, and the human psyche, on the other, respond with myths, with fantasies.1 These fantasies, these myths, always return to the body, to the most basic questions of the body, the difference between the sexes, their conjunction in producing new bodies, and the concomitant and conflicted desires that constantly exceed the limits that any particular society with its laws and...