Metamorphosis in Corneille’s Andromede

METAMORPHOSIS IN CORNEILLE'S ANDROMEDE JORNC.LAPP Ever since baroque first served to designate a certain literature, one of its most frequently cited characteristics has been metamorphosis. Yet we lack specific studies of this term as a literary phenomenon. For Jean Rousset it is evidenced in the changing setting of the court ballet Circe: "On insiste tant6t sur la soudainete du changement, tantot sur la pH>gression , toujours sur Ie mouvement qui ne cesse pas un instant d'animer Ie spectacle.'" This remark illustrates a frequent and perhaps misleading tendency to link metamorphosis with movement. Indeed, "Movement and metamorphosis" constitute one of eight baroque categories proposed :by Imbrie Buffum, who finds its best definition in Montaigne: "Le monde n'est qu'une branloire perenne. Toutes choses y branlent sans cesse: la terre, les rochers du Caucase, les pyramides d'Aegypte, et du branle public et du leur.'" But this is a statement abo':'t movement, not·change, in which the key word branler means something like to oscillate, or mOve in an indefinite way. Nor does "Je ne peints pas l'estre, je peints Ie passage" mean, as Buffum translates, "I paint transformation." Passage·signifies at the most a progression in time, which might of course even· tually work a transformation. Montaigne, who loved Ovid, had a very clear idea of metamorphosis, and could exclaim with feeling at the changes wrought by old age: "Quelles metamorphoses lui voy·je faire tous les jours en plusieurs de mes cognaissans!" Montaigne was writing about metamorphoses created by time: gradual, imperceptible, yet shocking in their apparent suddenness, as the phrase taus les iours suggests. Other kinds yield rewarding insights into lyric poetry, helping to emphasize the shifting beauties of the baroque vision in such poets as Theophile de Viau and Saint-Amant." Yet studies of baroque drama have made rather scanty use of the term. In Corneille's comedies Jean Rousset finds a Single manifestation, inconstancy in love - "Ie change" - of baroque metamorphosis. Buffum has studied three plays by Corneille, L'Illusirm comique, Clitandre, and Melite, showing how, in the first of these, metamorphOSis is exemplified by the various changes in rank and fortune through which Clindor passes as his father watches him on AIcandre's magic screen. In his chapter on Rotrou's Saint-Genest, Volume XXXIX, Number 2, January 1970 METAMORPHOSIS IN CORNEILLE'S Andromede 165 in which an actor playing the part of a Christian martyr becomes a Christian through the influence of his role, making the very subject of the playa metamorphosis, Buffum confines his treatment to the baroque phenomena of illusion and trompe-l'reil. Yet we have a play by Corneille that openly espouses the concept of metamorphosis on the level of both plot and setting and which has not so far, to my knowledge, been treated from this angle either in studies of the baroque or elsewhere. In Andromede, first played in 1650, the dramatist integrates characters, action, and setting into a single vision by making metamorphosis an essential part of the dramatic structure. Ovid's famous passage in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses provides the story.' Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, is to be sacrificed to a sea-monster to appease the Nereids, sea-goddesses her mother had offended by comparing her own beauty with theirs. Perseus kills the monster and . marries Andromeda, after slaying her fiance Phineus and his men by uncovering to their gaze the head of Medusa that turns all who look upon it to stone. In Corneille's version, vraisemblance dictated a few alterations, chief among them the fact that Cassiopeia boasts not of her own beauty but of her daughter's, since, as Corneille tells us in the wry tones of the Stances aMarquise: "i! est fort extraordinaire qu'une.femme dont la fille est en age d'etre mariee, ait encore d'assez beaux restes pour s'en vanter si hautement ..."6 Corneille makes it clear, however, that his inventiveness lay not in such minor changes, but in the settings and machines, inspired by the subject. Though he speaks glowingly of the stage.Jesigner and creator of the machines, Giacomo Torelli, who "s'est surmonte lui-meme...