Approaches to Corneille's Theatre

of the material on which the father drew for his talk and letters. William was also a major reason for John Butler Yeats having an audience at all. W.B. Yeats's reputation was an 'open sesame' used by his father in New York and so is it for this biography in which there is indeed a great deal to satisfy curiosity about W.B. However, William Butler Yeats is not only an overshadowing figure but also his father's most mordant critic. He does not complain about John Butler Yeats's economic incompetence or parasitism. John ButlerYeats's essential weakness, as diagnosed by his elder son, was 'an infirmity of will which ... prevented him from finishing his pictures and ruined his career.' This unkindest cut indicates the importance of John Butler Yeats as a very powerful negative example to William and probably to all the children, since all developed great strength of will. But can one describe the painter's career as 'ruined' with those superb portraits to show for it? This is a question that Murphy, mistakenly I believe, does not take up. He has in fact deliberately excluded the painter's features from the portrait of the man and th us left the biography unfinished. It is, nevertheless, a splendid biography that demands from the reader, yes, a criticism of life. Approaches to Corneille's Theatre DAVID A. TROTT Thomas G. Pavel. La Syntaxe narrative des tragedies de Corneille Paris: Klincksieck / Ottawa: Editions de l'Universite d'Ottawa 1976. ix, 159 Marie-Odile Sweetser. La Dramaturgie de Corneille Geneve: Droz 1977. x, 266 In 1970 the Revue d'histoire iitteraire de la France attempted to delineate the respective positions of historical and 'non-historical'literary criticism in an issue entitled 'L'Histoire de la litterature et les methodologies.' Although the volume editor saw this publication as a grouping of irreconcilably different critical perspectives, one contributor (A. Ubersfeld, 'Ruy BIas: genese et structure') attempted the 'impossible' synthesis 'des methodes traditionnelles de l'histoire Iitteraire ... et de l'analyse des structures internes de l'reuvre,' using a playas its point of reference. La Syntaxe narrative des tragedies de CorneiIIe and La Dramaturgie de Corneille attest to the difficulties of maintaining such a methodological dialogue. Although ostensibly dealing with the same corpus, each tends to ignore the premises of the other's approach, thereby giving rise to a fundamental problem for the student of Corneille, and of theatre in general: how do we 'read' dramatic texts? I ask this question, not in the belief that there is only one way to approach UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1979/ 80 0042-0247/80/o100-0183$oo.oo/o© UN IVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS plays, but rather in the hope that from different studies of the same object(s) something common will emerge. It does not arise clearly from the two studies being reviewed here because they do not go beyond their immediate critical spheres. Pavel, in accordance with the tenets of transformational linguistic theory, seeks to uncover the 'deep structures' of eleven Corneille tragedies, calling them variously 'justifications intuitives' and 'structures narratives sousjacentes : Sweetser also analyses structures, in the form of 'amours en chaine' or a 'denouement type ... aboutiss[ant] ala reconciHation: seeing in the recurrence of these and similar 'schemas ... situations ... types relativement simples mais combines chaque fois de fac;on differenle' (p 255) a key to the overall unity of Corneille's theatre. The notion of hidden logic implicit in 'deep structures' and the idea of overall unity suggested by recurrent patterns point in the same direction of a common principle underlying the complexities of the individual plays. Pavel schematizes and quantifies these complexities by means of narrative 'trees' made up of what he calls 'SN'S' ('structures narratives'). His method is a considerably modified version of Vladimir Propp's 1928 model for the description of the narrative structure of Russian folk tales. The extensive use of graphs, formulae, and tables is intended to render 'scientifically' the earliest stages of a creative process, prior to the coming into play of considerations of form or even of genre (Le. prior to what Pavel labels 'textualisation'). The...