Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality edited by Richard E. Goodkin (review)

248Rocky Mountain Review should also contribute to a better knowledge ofvery contemporary French literature in North America. LUCIE ROBERT Université du Québec à Montréal RICHARD E. GOODKIN, éd. Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality . Yale French Studies 76. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 316 p. The photo on the cover ofthis collection shows in the foreground a sign indicating the direction to the Théâtre National de l'Odéon Théâtre de l'Europe. Behind the sign is the street name: rue Racine. This cover, at once whimsical and informative, yet suggestive of artistic universes larger than the national, is an extremely appropriate emblem for the essays contained in this volume. Autour de Racine is as much about intertextuality as it is a three hundred fiftieth birthday celebration for a dramatist and his works. The editor, Richard Goodkin, proposes a broad understanding of intertextuality, "a space, a locus of interaction" where texts come together and affect one another in a variety ofways. He refers to this interaction between and among texts as "pointings," and justifies his use of the plural by arguing that one of the premises of intertextuality is that "a text cannot point in a simple way" (iv). Goodkin provides his collaborators with considerable latitude, and the result is a series of essays that are often contestable, but always fascinating and provocative. To cite several examples: Antoine Compagnon discusses Proust's use of Esther and Athalie as homosexual leitmotifs in Sodome et Gomorrhe; Elissa Marder suggests a similarity in the language of "errancy and exile" (59) between Phèdre and Frankenstein ; Thomas Pavel discovers Racinian theatricality in Stendhal; and William Levitan analyzes Racine's uneasy relationship with Senecan theatrics. Goodkin's essay, "Killing Order(s): Iphigenia and the Detection of Tragic Intertextuality ," is the most daring in the collection, and as such it reflects the brilliance, strengths, and possible weaknesses of the volume as a whole. His linking of Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis with Racine's Iphigénie will shock no one, but some eyebrows will doubtless raise when he adds a third text, a contemporary mystery novel by Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders (1985). Eyebrows may well remain extended when he mentions that, although the novel's main character, a woman detective, lives for most of the time on Racine Avenue in Chicago, the author told him she had no knowledge of Racine's play. The absence of authorial intention does not deter Goodkin who believes that the novel and the play share a similar reading of the Euripides text which leads to endings consistent with both the genre ofthe mystery novel and Racinian tragedy. He argues that each work unfolds a process which begins as "a transformation of apparent disorder into underlying order, but ultimately becomes a recognition of the nature (and limitations) of any order" (83). Goodkin shows that in Book Reviews249 both texts the family order is necessarily at odds with the social one, and that in each instance society demands and receives the sacrifice of one Iphigenia (Agnes/Euriphile) in order to restore the semblance of stability. Goodkin's essay contains its own mise en abyme; he turns his scholarly essay into a mystery story about the functioning of detective novels and about the mystery of tragedy itself. His conclusion, that both works contain a protest against society's need for sacrifice, sheds light on the two texts in question. In a more general context, his essay illustrates the imaginative possibilities inherent in intertextuality and is typical of the others that appear in Autour de Racine. Few people will agree with everything this volume contains, but I doubt anyone will be able to put it down without being convinced of the infinite expansion of even the most canonical literary text. Racine is well served on his birthday. WILLIAM CLOONAN Florida State University GEORGE KANE. Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 302 p. In a discussion of "good" and "bad" manuscripts, Kane comments, "the terms have moral overtones; but do such overtones intrude in discussions of good or bad wine or cheese? They express valuejudgements; but so does the whole study ofliterature, for if...