Racine’s Bérénice: Orientalism and the Allegory of Absolutism

Racine’s Bérénice: Orientalism and the Allegory of Absolutism Mitchell Greenberg A LTHOUGH THE EUROPEAN WORLD had lived in fear and jealous envy of the Ottoman east for at least two hundred years, 1670, the year in which Racine wrote Bérénice, witnessed, with the official Turkish embassy to Paris, a paroxysm of interest, a turning point, if we are to believe R. Picard, in neo-classical “ orientalism” : On le sait: les turqueries faisaient fureur. Une ambassade de la Sublime Porte avait rendu visite à Louis XIV en 1670 et ces vrais Turcs en avaient fait naître une foule d’imaginaires. Cet exotisme anodin et de bonne compagnie permettait une sorte de revanche du rêve et libérait un goût de fantaisie, de folie, qui n ’avait pas tellement l’occasion de se satisfaire par ailleurs...1 Both Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme of that same year and Racine’s 1671 Bajazet bear witness to a purely picturesque fascination with the east. These exotic fantasies are “mises-en-scène” of a cultural appropriation of the more spectacular aspects of foreignness, both an exterior extravagance—the foreign costumes, the bejewelled, and enturbaned servants—and, on another level, the interior projections of a dark, threatening eroticism—the sexuality of the seraglio, of beautiful, avail­ able, passive women, of mute slaves and perverse eunuchs.2These pic­ turesque appropriations should not, however, turn us away from the more profoundly ideological sorting out, the tremulous “ othering” that is at work in late seventeenth-century Europe and of which the theatrical is only the most “ spectacular” of the many symptoms. It would appear that although the Ottoman empire, at least since the catastrophic fall of Constantinople, had been a subject of fear and respect in the West, and that although its social, political, and sexual mores had been minutely detailed, particularly in the long reports, the “ relazioni” that the Venetian ambassadors gave in public audience upon their return from their posting abroad, the particular form of govern­ ment, the Turkish state, was not described as “ despotic” with the over­ tones that word was to bear in Montesquieu, during either the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.3Neither Machiavelli nor Bodin, those two essen­ tial theorists of Absolutism, describe the Empire of the Turk with Mon­ Vo l. XXXII, No. 3 75 L ’E sprit C réateur tesquieu’s dark tones.4It is during the seventeenth century, through the reports of embassies, missionaries, and savants, that the image of the East shifts, going from one of respectful admiration of a powerful, but “ rightful” monarchic state, to the description of an “ unnatural” des­ potism. The word, in fact, makes its appearance into European vocabu­ lary during the first decades of the century: “ A partir de 1634, le mot (‘despotique’) est lancé: l’adjectif sera régulièrement utilisé, en associa­ tion avec ‘governo,’ ‘dominio,’ et 'autorité’ ” (Valensi, p. 99). From the word to the thing: in its most powerful, that is, culturally charged, defi­ nition, a despotic state is a monarchy which “ . . .is ruled by the passions and by self-interest.” 3There is, in the western imaging of the Orient, of the Oriental despot, a strong dose of sado-masochistic projection, in which sexuality, a cruel, absolute desire, an unquenchable, unyielding pursuit of pleasure, becomes the image and definition of the Oriental other. In this definition, as A. Grosrichard has brilliantly suggested, the chief defining character of the Oriental, of the despot, would be situated in the involution of the political and the sexual; pleasure, unlimited sexual pleasure, becomes, tautologically, the definition of despotism, as a tyrannical, that is political, structure: Les souverains mahométans étant élevés dans des sérails avec des Femmes et des Eunuques, ils sont si peu capables de régner, q u ’il faut, pour le bien des peuples et pour la sûreté de l’Etat, qu’on mette quelqu’un sous eux pour gouverner en leur place ... et comme ces Rois de l’orient ne songent d’ordinaire qu’aux plaisirs des sens, il est d’autant plus nécessaire qu’il y ait quelqu’un qui pense à la conservation et à la gloire de...