By Jean Racine
" L'idée de Narcisse, d'Agrippine et de Néron, l'idée si noire et si terrible qu'on se fait de leurs crimes, ne saurait s'effacer de l. a. mémoire du spectateur ", écrit Saint-Evremond en 1670. Si Britannicus a de quoi décontenancer, tant au XVIIe siècle qu'aujourd'hui, c'est que los angeles violence et l. a. noirceur des personnages mènent le tragique à son paroxysme, et l'humain à ses dernières limites. En nous montrant le début du règne de Néron et sa perversité terrifiante, Racine nous fait en effet assister, selon ses propres termes, à l. a. naissance d'un " monstre ".
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Extra resources for Britannicus
Sample text
The force of baroque blood It may strike us as readers of Cervantes’s fiction that his work—and his Exemplary Novels are exemplary of just this—shuttles back and forth between the conventional (or even downright conservative) and the subversive. We modern literary critics naturally appreciate the latter, and feel somewhat embarrassed by the former. Hence the debates over the value of the Persiles I cited above, and the tradition of apologies for Cervantes’s first foray into fiction, the pastoral Galatea.
The paradoxical nature of the honor code achieves its full expression in these two sentences, and is displayed in even greater detail when they are mapped against the preceding formulation. 15 According to this strategy, the world of appearances is denigrated with respect to the true world of sin and virtue, damnation and salvation. Honor is translated out of its worldly context and into its otherworldly context, and thus made dependent on these truths known to God and to our souls. The sentence immediately preceding it, of course, expresses exactly the opposite sentiment; an ounce of public dishonor is worse than a sack full of secret dishonor.
Artifice, in other words, adopts the duplicity and all the trappings of deceit in order to save man from its allures. Indeed, the final instrument needed to break Falimundo’s spell is nothing other than a mirror; not because it mirrors nature as it is, but rather because, by forcing us to look at nature awry or in a denatured way, nature is revealed in its primordial deceit: “the things of the world must be seen backwards, turning one’s back, in order to see them straight” (182). Finally, there is what Andrenio sees in the mirror: “I see a monster, the most horrible I have seen in my life, because it has neither feet nor a head; what a disproportionate thing, its parts do not correspond” (182).