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130ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Albert Cook. French Tragedy: The Power of Enactment. Athens: Ohio University, Swallow Press, 1981. 124p. This is the third volume of a trilogy on drama. After treating Greek tragedy and the theatre of Shakespeare, Albert Cook has concluded his series not, as the title would have us believe, with the totality of "French Tragedy" but with a lengthy analysis of Racine, followed by a final chapter in which he compares Racine and Corneille . Moreover, the concept of "enactment" is never clearly defined. The absence of definitions is in fact a source of constant frustration for the reader. One must piece together an idea of the meaning of several key terms after seeing them used in different contexts. Throughout the book. Cook speaks of "displacements ," "enactment," "managing ambivalences," and "plenums" as if these were common literary terms. One has the impression that Cook is attempting to invent a personal critical language to which he refuses to initiate the reader. This impression is augmented by the chapters on "The Presentness of Power" and "The Pastness of Power" (which becomes in mid-paragraph "the power of pastness," p. 66). None of these hazy concepts serves to illuminate his central thesis, which does ¦ propose an original, if inaccurate, view of the tragedies of Racine. Cook believes that Racine's theatre represents an exaltation of the nobility (social and spiritual) of his characters, in which the seventeenth century aristocratic audience, as well as bourgeois social climbers, must have participated. The same celebration of nobility is evident in Corneille's grandes tragedies, but after Theodore , Corneille in effect sold out to Louis XIV. Cook considers Racine the true promoter of an elite sector of humanity whose positive qualities are illustrated by the Racinian vision of love: Ideal love triumphs in his tragedies, while the lovers of Corneille's later plays are manipulated by royal authority. Racine's lovers go to the grave still absorbed by their passion, still true to it. The problem with this sort of analysis is, of course, its misunderstanding of the Racinian view of passion. Love is a destructive emotion which takes control of the individual will, paralyzing it, rendering it incapable of functioning other than in the service of the passionate obsession. To suggest that the final scene of Andromaque, wherein Pylade prevents Oreste from committing suicide, creates a "restoring idealism" (p. 61) misses the point. The fundamental optimism which Cook finds in Racine's theatre is a falsification of its spirit. Cook's remarks on Corneille are too sketchy to be truly objectionable, but the conclusions to which these remarks lead him are questionable at best, as, for example, the statement on the last page that in the sense of "envisioningpossibilities, while radicalizing faults, all tragedies are Christian" (p. 118). The "method" Cook employs fosters such surprisingdeclarations. He relies on "a perspective encompassing the historical, psychological, and mythical environment," as the book jacket says. Cook moves in and out of these domains with little or no transition, so that it is often difficult to follow his line of reasoning. This dilemma is compounded by Cook's prose: his style can often be described as irritating. A pedantic vocabulary and twisted syntax constantly obscure his thoughts. The use of words such as "purposiveness" and "perfuses" on the first page of the book signals what is to come. The designation of Bajazet as "an amorous harem betrothed" (p. 66) is certainly unnecessarily ambiguous. It is as ifCook's prose were a code which the reader must decipher. Examine as an example one typical passage from the paragraph preceding the "all tragedies are Christian" statement: Book Reviews131 The will mediates itself into a future that is always in the process of becoming what the present has made of the past. Consequently the will only preponderates towards the finality of self-realization (grace and virtue) or self condemnation (fault; the nonrealization of nothingness). A classic tragedy sets finality at the outset, by the convention of tautening ("unifying") the causality of the action in time and space. It gives the future the attributes of the past and present by ironing out all three; and it makes the future as definite as only...

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