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Reviewed by:
  • Jean Racine 1699–1999: actes du colloque Île-de-France—La Ferté-Milon 25–30 mai 1999
  • Amy Wygant
Jean Racine 1699–1999: actes du colloque Île-de-France—La Ferté-Milon 25–30 mai 1999. Actes réunis par Gilles Declercq et Michéle Rosellini . Paris, PUF, 2003. 800 pp. Pb €35.00.

Now that publishing houses favour 'history' and often refuse point-blank to consider manuscripts deemed to be 'literary criticism', the author, whose death has been a constantly recurring event since Mallarmé, is back. Biography is flavour of the month. Under these conditions, those interested in posing again or still Foucault's old question, 'What is an author?', must be subtle, clever, and intellectually weighty. The present volume, representing more than forty contributions to the Racine tercentenary celebrations, is all of these things. It is cunningly dressed up like a biography, with the Mignard portrait in full colour and the name of the 'author' in large-point type on the cover. But open it up, and you will find a kaleidoscopic and productive questioning of who and what, exactly, this 'author' is. The construction zone that is 'Racine' is here a busy and industrious site. Unbelievably, after 300 years of the most [End Page 107] serious panning for biographical gold, new details emerge. More predictably, given certain episodes in the reception history, a beautifully precise emphasis on the music of Racine, be it his own texts written to be set to music or the fundamental musicality of his poetics, apt to be elaborated by the likes of Benjamin Britten, here registers and contributes to a shift in our practice of reading his texts. On the one hand, the virtuoso formalists take on Racinian verb tenses, his lexical magic, the miracle of pure poetry. On the other, the patient contextualists point to Racine's rhetoric, his dramaturgy, and the fluidity of myth as determining. But one of the most fascinating aspects of this volume is its questioning of how Racine ever came to be 'Racine'. Here we learn that at the bicentenary in1899, Racine was constructed as a poet, a Christian, and the glory of France. At the Comédie-Française, Mounet-Sully, dressed in black, read Valincour's Académie française inaugural lecture with the set of Bérénice and a bust of Racine as backdrop. The whole thing, occurring as it did prior to the creation of Racine-the-academic-industry, was funereal: The great and the good trooped out to La Ferté-Milon and heard Vincent d'Indy conduct a Lassus motet and Mozart's Ave verum corpus in memory of Racine. We learn as well that Louis Racine's famously dodgy biography had a template, the lives of the saints; we can have a look at some of the costumes for Esther in the late eighteenth century; and we can read the account of the round table on stagecraft that featured some of the greatest of our contemporary metteurs en scène of Racine. One of the most precious lessons of this great door-stopping brick of a volume is that, as Roland Barthes knew perfectly well, Racine is in fact not Racine, any more than Freud is Freud or Marx is Marx. Racine, it seems, has become a founder of discoursivity. Like Chinese capitalism, Racinian 'literary criticism' is currently transforming its own object, and itself. This properly and powerfully 'historical' trajectory should be of interest to all.

Amy Wygant
University Of Glasgow
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