Etudes sur le XVIIe siècle (review)

This volume brings together five articles, all of which were published between 1989 and 1996, and adds an avant-propos in which René Pommier presents his material. By far the longest piece is an attack on Lucien Goldmann's Le Dieu caché (1956), a Marxist analysis of the phenomenon of Jansenism and of the two principal writers associated with that tendency, Pascal and Racine; and of the same critic's associated edition of the Correspondance of Barcos. Pommier's principal objection arises from the evidence that he accumulates to show that the identification of Barcos as an extremist is an invention of Goldmann, an 'homme à système', anxious to corset his subject into a shape that his body of writing does not fit. The refutation is detailed, sharply ironic, and wide-ranging in its reference to the Christian mainstream of the period. (A secondary target is Barcos himself, for whom Pommier makes few claims, and whose absence from post-Goldmann studies of Jansenism is tellingly noted.) The second, much briefer, chapter takes Goldmann on again, this time in his interpretation of Racine's Hippolyte (Phèdre), which was only possible in Pommier's view by means of '[le] degré presque incroyable [auquel] il pousse l'inintelligence ou le mé pris des textes'. Back to Le Dieu caché ('ce monument de stupidité s') for the next broadside, on Jansenism and the noblesse de robe, now with evidence from a range of historians stacked up against the hapless Marxist, in a clearly tenable counter-hypothesis whereby Jansenism has its origins in an enduring and insoluble intra-Christian debate rather than in any socio-political phenomena. The last two pieces move into a somewhat different idiom, and apply Pommier's preferred critical method, the explication de texte, first to a detailed analysis of the psychology of Auguste's conversion in Corneille's Cinna (though without making the potentially fruitful comparisons with similar moments of metanoia in other Cornelian dramatic texts); and secondly to Moliè re's Amphitryon, in which he dismantles the evidence for it to be considered as a pièce à clés. The tenor of his series of articles could perhaps most flatteringly be summarized by his own aphorism: 'Quand on voit dans un texte ce qui ne s'y trouve pas, c'est gé né ralement parce qu'on ne sait pas voir ce qui s'y trouve'; and even in the two relatively less bilious pieces that round off the collection, all contrary opinion is attacked with a ferocious intensity and an unflagging attention to detail. It is hard to know quite what to make of the whole. Much of the time the scholarly precision is persuasive, and the hypotheses advanced are certainly no less convincing than those that are demolished. The pieces are indeed often grimly entertaining, if the reader has a taste for gladiatorial combat. It remains that the most constructive reading of the series will be achieved if the frequent moments of insight and conviction can be extracted to some degree from the unremitting vituperation, to which the additional material in the introduction does nothing but add further and more recent targets.