L'Invraisemblance du pouvoir: mises en scène de la souveraineté au XVIIe siècle (review)

It makes perfect sense to organize discussions of vraisemblance around representations of the exercise of power, since this is the subject, implicitly or explicitly, of seventeenth-century French tragedy. Our awareness of this immensely tricky term centres mostly on oppositions between the positions of Corneille and d'Aubignac, although this collection of essays broadens the perspective to include early seventeenth-century tragedy and the description of royal entries. D'Aubignac's unimaginative and somewhat pedantic stance has tended to give a bad name to classical dramatic theory, but his central focus on what should or should not be represented on stage in order to mantain the credibility of the action lies behind many of the essays, not in precisely aesthetic terms but in the ways in which texts deconstruct the frontiers of vérité and vraisemblance. Rooted in the notion of vraisemblance is a sense of expectation, of 'what should rightly be the case'. Most crucially, we expect this to be forthcoming from those in power or from the system of justice which they oversee. In the seventeenth century, the strongest view on the matter might be Thomas Hobbes, and in the twentieth century, John Rawles, two figures markedly absent from these pages. They are, however, not far from Christian Biet's dense and intense study of Scédase where the central character is forced to confront the realities of power and justice with the justice of his own case which the king fails to uphold. The spectator becomes the powerless witness of justice traduced, the 'invraisemblance du pouvoir' of the collection's title. John D. Lyons continues the theme of the 'knowing' witness in his cultured exploration of power in Pascal and Corneille. Central to their work is the 'incredible truth' of tyranny contrasted with vraisemblance defined as the truths to which we are accustomed. For Pascal, this is the hidden but tyrannical truth: for Corneille, it represents the revealed logic of tyranny. In a clearly argued essay, Bénédicte Louvat-Molozay opposes the refusal of d'Aubignac precisely to contemplate the revelation of the invraisemblance of power, to Corneille who demonstrates power as the guarantor of such invraisemblance, basing much of her argument on the king's imposition of marriage on Chimène. Marie-France Wagner broadens the notion of vraisemblance to include two cases of royal entries, one of which did not actually happpen but is described in terms of how it should have happened. The preceding essays are the best and most focused of the collection. In a rather long and descriptive piece, Derval Conroy explores the relation of vraisemblance to ruling queens and whether a queen in love challenges the notion of vraisemblance. Ralph Heyndels contributes an incomprehensible and unsubstantiated argument on Bérénice as 'homotexte'. Daniel Vaillancourt mentions vraisemblance and invraisemblance as his first two words and then gets on with what he really wants to discuss, namely concepts of 'police'. Overall, in the attention given to vraisemblance in relation to political realities rather than as purely aesthetic categories, these essays demonstrate interestingly how the argument can effectively be moved on.