Racine: From Ancient Myth to Tragic Modernity (review)

One may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but there are precious details just inside. The lack of any Acknowledgment by Mitchell Greenberg says much about the nature of his monograph, which is a synthesis of Greenberg's work on Racine intended principally for that rapidly disappearing creature, the general literate reader. Early on, the author sets out his point of view, which has been known to spark controversy: 'the entire Racinian endeavor would be the rescription of the Oedipus legend as it becomes intertwined with the ideological dilemma of the nascent absolutist state' (p. 15). Racine's tragedies are thus the locus where politics and sexuality coalesce. Racine scholars will not be long to remark that there looms over Greenberg's study an absent presence: the Anglo-American critics who, since the 1990s, have been enlightening us about Racine's theatricality and even doubting the very possibility of generalizing about 'Racinian tragedy'. Greenberg does not deal with them because he sees recent Racinian criticism as mostly sociological or biographical. 'Recent' appears to be a pliable word for Greenberg. Clavreul, whose work appeared in 1967, is declared a 'recent theorist' (p. 96), and Greenberg continually hearkens back to Barthes, Goldmann, Mauron, André Green, and lesser known psychoanalysts and anthropologists who were active (and alive) before 1990. Nonetheless, the criterion for evaluating Greenberg's approach lies not in the dates but in the data. In this respect Racine offers insights and formulas that dix-septiémistes will not fail to recognize, if in a specialized lexicon, such as the precarious state of civilization where chaos threatens culture at every turn; the importance of the visual in Britannicus; the voyeurism in Bajazet; the return of the father in Mithridate; 'Clytemnestra [representing] the antihistorical, anti-progressive femininity that refuses the abstract reasoning of (masculine) politics' (p. 181); and a chapter on 'Phèdre […] and the Birth of Democracy?' that offers a novel interpretation of the political consequences of the denouement. Greenberg's paradigms are useful explanatory tools for Racine's pièces noires but less so for the pièces roses, like Mithridate, whose ending seems to disappoint the author. Racine closes on a reasonable proposal that 'Racine was one of the first artists to portray the conflicts that Freud would theorize three hundred years later' (p. 246). Precisely because of the 'conflicts' that have beset Freudian psychology from at least Frederick Crews's articles in the 1970s through the internecine wars of psychoanalysts of the 1980s and 90sto the 2010 book by Michel Onfray (Le Crépuscule d'une idole), Greenberg might have begun by offering the reader an overview of the challenges posed to the science of depth psychology in 'recent' times and by suggesting why the approach still deserves consideration today.