Racine, Mauron, and the Question of Genre

Racine, Mauron, and the Question of Genre Claire Carlin University of California, Santa Barbara The notion that certain of Racine's tragedies contain comic elements is not a new one. The suggestion that Andromaque has a latent comic structure has been proposed by Harald Weinrich; at least two other critics, Philip Butler and Armand HelmreichMarsilien , have written of isolated comic incidents in the play.1 In an article that replies to what he considered to be a disturbing trend, Raymond Picard points out that no situation or gesture should be considered inherently comical.2 Picard sharply criticizes Bergson's theory of laughter along with the arguments of Weinrich et al., and he stresses the importance of perspective — both the audience's and the author's — in determining whether a play is a comedy or a tragedy, or whether it can be given a genre designation at all. Picard ends his article by calling for an exploration of one of the essential problems of the concept of genre in the theatre: why do the same psychological postures, the same sorts of behavior, show up in both comedies and tragedies? Curiously enough, although his article appeared in 1969, nowhere does Picard mention one theory of comedy that attempts to answer his question, Charles Mauron's Psychocritique du genre comique (Paris: Corti, 1964). Perhaps Picard chose not to mention Mauron's work because Mauron's definition of genre emphasizes the unconscious origins of both tragedy and comedy, whereas Picard insists on the conscious intentions of the author as well as the conscious preparation of the spectator as the most important determinants of a play's genre. Although Mauron's classic study is devoted to comedy, he has published two books on Racine, neither of which commit the Picardian mortal sin of assigning comic elements to Racinian 1.Harald Weinrich, Tragische und komische Elemente in Racines "Andromaque " (Munster: Aschendorff, 1958), claims that Racine has used the comic structure of the love chain in Andromaque. Philip Butler, Classicisme et baroque dans l'oeuvre de Racine (Paris: Nizet, 1959), pp. 134-135, sees Oreste's discomfiture when Pyrrhus changes his mind about the marriage with Hermione as potentially comical . Armand Helmreich-Marsilien, "Un Inspirateur paradoxal du tragique racinien: Corneille comique," Australian Journal of French Studies, 2 (1965), 291-312, sees Eraste in Corneille's Mélite as the model for Oreste. 2.Raymond Picard, "Les Tragédies de Racine: comique ou tragique?," Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 69 (1969), 462-472. 26ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW tragedy.3 But if Mauron's theory of comedy can in fact be applied to a Racinian tragedy, his definition of the comic genre would seem to lose some of its validity and thereby confirm Picard's thesis that conscious intention can be the only real starting point in any examination of the problem of genre. The play to be examined here will be Britannicus rather than Andromaque. Mauron refers quite often to Molière's L'Ecole des femmes which has a certain structural resemblance to Britannicus: although Néron is about the same age as Britannicus, he is nonetheless a father figure in his role as emperor, as he himself says when admonishing Junie for not consulting him about her marriage plans.4 In both plays the authority figure (Arnolphe-Néron), or barbon as Mauron calls him, possessively hides the young girl (Agnès-Junie) who is the love object for both the innocent young man, or blondín (Horace-Britannicus), and for the barbon. Mauron summarizes this basic plot structure in the formula "Ie blondin berne le barbon." The young hero's triumph over the negatively drawn authority figure is a recurring theme in comedy since antiquity. This fantaisie de triomphe is inspired by the same unconscious desire that produces the Oedipus complex: the desire to supplant the father in a competition for the mother's love. The young woman who is a more appropriate mate for the son than for the father becomes the mother figure, and the spectator of comedy shares the exaltation of the young hero who wins the game without a trace of guilt. The culpability inherentin the Oedipus complex has...