Barthes Gets Involved: How (Not) to Perform Racine

A digital resource developed by Dr Paul Earlie (University of Bristol), Dr Dana Lungu (Cardiff University / University of Bristol), Chloe Laborde (University of Bristol). Funding for the reproduction of this video was provided by the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences, University of Bristol, UK, with the assistance of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, France.

In February 1969, Roland Barthes appeared on the television programme En toutes lettres, in an episode devoted to writers and money.¹ His appearance featured in a 15-minute segment on the seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine (1639-1699), a figure praised by the programme’s narrator for his ability to draw huge audiences, even if his box office power seems on the wane in late 1960s France, particularly amongst younger generations. Barthes’s intervention on the programme, reproduced in the video above, aims to address the reasons for this decline and to explore potential ways of reviving interest in the work of a dramatist whose stature in France is often compared to that of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world.

Barthes had already written about Racine’s legacy in the collection, On Racine (1960), a text harshly critical of the takeover of Racine’s legacy by the dominant bourgeois culture.² In the nineteenth century, Racine’s plays became an increasingly essential part of French cultural patrimony, studied on the Baccalauréat secondary school exam and regularly staged at the Comédie-Française, one of the oldest national theatres in the world, which views a key part of its role as safeguarding France’s classical theatrical repertoire. For Barthes, although this consecration has brought Racine closer to audiences, the moderately pleasurable and often predictable experience of seeing a Racine play performed today has come at the cost of stripping away the more provocative and aesthetically demanding aspects of the playwright’s work.

Barthes’s television appearance on En toutes lettres reprises some of these themes from On Racine, almost a decade after that book’s publication, but it also goes beyond them in a number of intriguing ways. For the first time, we see Barthes getting involved in a series of animated exchanges with actors in training as they debate strategies for reinvigorating Racine’s 300-year-old legacy for a new generation of theatregoers, from novel approaches to staging his plays to different ways of delivering Racine’s oft-cited verse. With its staging of a lively confrontation between Barthes and a group of young actors, this television appearance—made freely available in digital form here for the first time—is a reminder of how Barthes’s singular way of thinking can continue to nourish critical debates today.³

Barthes’s Anti-Bourgeois Theatre

*Barthes co-founded the Sorbonne’s Groupe de théâtre antique [Classical Theatre Group] and appeared in this 1936 performance of Aeschylus’* The Persians in the university’s courtyard.

Barthes’s relationship to the theatre is generally an ambivalent one, insofar as theatre’s entanglement with institutions makes it a less ‘pure’ form than, say, avant-garde literary writing.⁴ This impurity may well be the source of Barthes’s ‘progressive distancing’⁵ from theatrical performance, following the early enthusiasm of his involvement with the Sorbonne’s Groupe de théâtre antique (1936-1939) and his fascination with Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire and Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, documented in his critical writings for the magazine Théâtre Populaire between 1952 and 1960.⁶ The production of Brecht’s Mother Courage attended by Barthes at the Paris International Theatre Festival in 1954 was especially formative, with Barthes especially struck by the blindness of Brecht’s characters when faced with the larger historical forces that determined their fates. ‘The spectacle of unconsciousness,’ he would later conclude of this dramatic failure of vision, ‘is the birth of consciousness’, by which he meant the consciousness of the audience.⁷ Part of this coming-to-consciousness involves the audience’s critical distancing from what is unfolding on stage, its growing awareness that the theatrical traditions they have so far encountered have been saturated with the norms of the bourgeois culture in which they have grown up.⁸

It may well be that Brecht’s sudden death in 1956 led to a disillusionment on Barthes’s part with the very possibility of a non- or anti-bourgeois mode of theatrical performance. After 1960, as Timothy Scheie points out, ‘[Barthes] rarely mentions a specific moment of live performance again’.⁹ A key exception to this silence, however, is Barthes’s continuing interest in non-Western theatrical forms, such as Japanese Bunraku (puppet theatre) and Kabuki, forms that had also influenced Brecht. Another is this 1969 television appearance on En toutes lettres, where his dialogue with the trainee actors echoes several conventional Brechtian themes while raising a number of new questions, such as Racine’s continuing appeal at a time of changing social and sexual mores (late 1960s France).

*Roland Barthes discusses Racine’s legacy with actors training for television at the Studio d’entraînement de l’acteur (Studio Monflier, 21, rue Malar, Paris)*

Irrespective of the time of writing, the dramatic form at stake, or the medium of their expression, Barthes’s reflections on theatre are guided by a single, overarching aim: the de-bourgeoisation of France’s dominant theatrical traditions. The progressive embourgeoisement of French theatre since the nineteenth century has culminated, in Barthes’s day, in the highly popular, entertainment-driven productions of Parisian boulevard theatre (clustered around the Boulevard du Temple in Paris) and what he views as the performative sterility of more august institutions such as the Comédie-Française. (Barthes’s interest in a truly populaire theatre-to-come, with as broad a theatrical public as possible, seems to have precluded sustained engagement with more elite forms of avant-garde theatre, such as surrealist or Absurdist theatre.¹⁰) What boulevard theatre and the Comédie-Française share, at least in Barthes’s wilfully polemical argument, is that have both been degraded by the pursuit of profit, with audiences ‘chosen purely for their wealth’¹¹ and plays hand-picked for the narrowness of their bourgeois themes (marriage and adultery, the nuclear family, one’s good name, etc.). Barthes’s critique of these conventions aims at the progressive cultivation of a new kind of audience and a new kind of theatrical performance, one that would be ‘purified (purifié) of bourgeois structures, disalienated of money and its masks’.¹²

Inspired by Vilar’s theatre of dépouillement (stripping down), the motif of purification suggests bourgeois theatre’s broader tendency towards fulsome accumulation: its dialogues are fast-paced and verbose, its sets crammed with objects, its costumes embroidered with lavishly intricate details. All are conventional signifiers whose meaning is easily decipherable by audiences who are already well-versed in the dominant codes of bourgeois culture. Barthes’s counter-vision of a truly ‘popular’ theatre would be a theatre that eschews such lazy cognitive shortcuts in order to stimulate the reflexive engagement of theatregoers, echoing Brecht’s celebrated notion of the distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt). In Vilar’s 1951 production for the Théâtre national populaire of Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Prince of Homburg, for instance, Barthes identifies a laudable ‘sobriety’ in the use of costume, a ‘neutrality of clothing’ that liberates the stage from what he calls ‘its parasitical [i.e. bourgeois] values’.¹³

*Costumes from Vilar’s 1951 production of Kleist’s* The Prince of Hombourg © Laurent Moureau

(In a later essay, ‘Racine Spoken’, Barthes will turn on Vilar for cowing to the expectations of his bourgeois audiences, typified in the Théâtre national populaire’s disappointing 1958 staging of Phèdre, a performance discussed in more detail below.) In Vilar’s earlier 1951 production of Kleist, Barthes argues, costume is used in a reflexive way, that is, in a way that is not so much pre-coded as over-loaded with ‘powerful semantic value’, a strategy of dispersing rather than isolating meaningfulness.¹⁴ Barthes’s advocacy of this sober approach to costume design may indeed have influenced Patrice Chéreau’s 2003 staging of Phèdre, in which Moidele Bickel’s clothing design is plain and sombre, stressing block colours, neutrality, and a general lack of adornment.

In an early essay, ‘Powers of Ancient Tragedy’ (1953), Barthes contrasts contemporary bourgeois theatre, with its repetitive domestic themes and its focus on the psychology of the nuclear family, with Greek tragedy, whose conventions worked to cultivate critical distance between audience and stage, most famously through the de-personalizing use of tragicomic masks. In tragic performance, the chorus never loses sight of the importance of narrative for the life of the polis (Greek city state), a political sensibility that Barthes views as more or less nullified in contemporary bourgeois theatre. For him, this apolitical aim is indicative of bourgeois theatre’s underlying ideological purpose: to reconcile audiences to the bourgeois order by transmuting historical contingency into the fixity of unchangeable Nature.

One could question the accuracy of Barthes’s somewhat summary vision of the dominant bourgeois conventions of postwar theatre in France. Several productions of Racine in recent years have, for example, demonstrated a notable political dimensions in their critique of broader social issues. We can see this, for instance, in Christophe Rauck’s staging of Phèdre at the Théâtre du Nord Lille in November 2014, which explored questions of alcoholism, mental illness, and patriarchal violence. Arguably, such productions remain exceptions rather than the rule, since institutions such the Comédie-Française tend to privilege productions that emphasize the aesthetic, rather than political stakes, of Racine’s work. A better question to pose to Barthes might then be: what is the broader purpose of such a deliberately provocative vision of French theatre’s acculturation to bourgeois norms?

‘Racine is Racine’

In one of his lesser-known mythologies, Barthes argues that popular understanding of Racine’s universal and immutable genius is effectively a bourgeois bait-and-switch, in that it conceals a highly particularized (bourgeois) vision of Racine beneath the playwright’s mythic image as a timeless cultural monument. If ‘Racine is Racine’, according to the noxious tautology repeated by theatre critics and skewered by Barthes in the Mythologies, why tamper with perfection?¹⁵ Conservative cultural critics, he concludes, wield this circular logic like a charm to ward off any challenge to what is, in reality, a highly specific and ideologically motivated vision of Racine. A key part of Barthes’s efforts to de-mystify this ‘naturalized’ image of Racine will therefore involve, as with all of his mythologies, an historical account of this progressive process of acculturation to the dominant bourgeois culture.

Towards the end of On Racine, Barthes speculates that much of the ‘bourgeois myth’ of Racine¹⁶ stems from Voltaire, who began his career several decades after Racine’s death in 1699. While Racine’s plays were to some degree always divided between ‘genuine tragedy’ and ‘the already vigorous germs of the future bourgeois theatre’,¹⁷ Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) instantiated the founding myths of French classical theatre in its argument that it was Racine—together with Pierre Corneille and the Greeks—who taught the French how to think, how to feel, and how to express themselves. This trope was quickly established as a commonplace (doxa) of criticism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its purpose, Barthes argues, was

to domesticate Racine, to strip him of his tragic elements, to identify him with ourselves, to locate ourselves with him in the noble salon of classic art, but en famille; it seeks to give the themes of the bourgeois theatre an eternal status, to transfer to the credit of the psychological theatre the greatness of the tragic theatre, which at its origin, we must not forget, was a purely civic theatre: in the myth of Racine, eternity replaces the City.¹⁸

In Barthes’s discussion with the assembled actors on En toutes lettres, he offers an important qualification to this orthodox vision of Racine. The progressive embourgeoisement (becoming-bourgeois) of Racine’s legacy is suggestive of a blandly homogenous theatrical repertoire, one whose slow petrification tracks the growing gentrification, and thus uniformization, of popular culture in postwar France. What Barthes suggests in this television programme is that this embourgeoisement does not entail homogenization per se but depends—following the mercantile logic of capitalism—on the illusion of a diversity of choice. What bourgeois culture offers, then, is any shade of Racine you like, as long as the colour is bourgeois. This is why, as Barthes tells the assembled actors, over the last fifty years ‘we’ve been trying to play Racine in a thousand and one ways through very different styles’, a plurality of interpretations and visions that has never succeeded in shifting the monumental image of Racinian classical tragedy. This is because these apparently quite different interpretations of Racine were already bourgeois to begin with. Racine is always Racine.

The myth of Racine’s unchanging (and unchangeable) genius continues to proliferate today, despite the apparent diversity of productions on offer. Certain more tradition-minded critics, such as Georges Liébert, have been critical of twentieth-century adaptations of Racine in their various attempts to ‘modernize’ the time and place of his plays.¹⁹ Barthes’s vision of repetition-in-diversity in these different interpretations of Racine may seem overly simplistic, but it at least has the virtue of articulating a dialectical tension often felt by French theatre directors in recent decades, from Antoine Vitez to Jacques Lasalle, Roger Planchon and Jean-Marie Villégier, Patrice Chéreau and Eric Ruf. This tension is between the audience’s desire to recognize a Racine they have been taught to appreciate—by means of disciplined study on the Baccalauréat syllabus, performances enjoyed at prestigious theatres in major cities, or in editions dedicated to classical authors such as the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade—and the necessity of presenting a truly novel vision of Racine on stage. It was precisely by trying to play to both sides of this equation that Jean Vilar, in Barthes’s view, fatally ceded on his own aesthetic principles.

In the view of both Barthes and the actors who engage him in discussion in En toutes lettres, the consecration of Racine as a guiding light of bourgeois art occurs principally in schools, where Racine is encountered by students in a ‘petrified’ form, in an image conjured by one of the actors in discussion with Barthes. As he responds, the unassailability of Racine’s place on the lycée curriculum comes at the cost of domesticating the singular ‘universe’ we experience in his work. This Racinian universe is ‘revised and softened, acclimatised’ to a culture that is socially and institutionally rooted in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the 1789 Revolution, the triumphant bourgeois class solidified its ideological grip on education, the media, and the arts, hence Barthes’s reference here to ‘this great change that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century, […] which installed a naturalistic [i.e. natural, realistic] style of acting’. The accumulative realism at the heart of this realist aesthetic aimed to provide a perfect mirror of the idealized social order of the new governing class, allowing an audience schooled in this culture to recognize their image in the characters on stage

An instructive example of this approach to staging Racine can be found in a performance that took place just a few years after Barthes’s television appearance: Antoine Vitez’s staging of Phèdre in 1975 at the Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry adopted a hyper-realist approach to Racine’s most consecrated play. Costumes, including undergarments, were designed to mirror seventeenth-century fashions as closely as possible, down to the most minute detail, with actors requiring help to get in and out of their clothing. No doubt for Antoine Vitez the value of this approach, aiming to reproduce a distinctively seventeenth-century bodily movement through the use of heavy costumes, lay in providing a Racine who was at once familiar and strange. For Barthes, such attempts to get closer to the truth of Racine’s plays through a naturalizing realism is ultimately complicit with bourgeois ideology and will only ever end up betraying what is most unique in Racine’s legacy. ‘If we want to keep Racine,’ he writes at the end of ‘Racine Spoken’, ‘we must keep him at a distance’.²⁰ But what would such distance look like in practice?

Racine and Psychology

‘there are no characters in the Racinean theatre’²¹

A crucial element of the intensifying embourgeoisement of French theatre from the nineteenth century onwards is the emphasis placed on human psychology. Racine is a writer often lauded for the subtlety of his psychological insight, at a time when psychology and psychoanalysis were not yet established disciplines. The mythologization of Racine as a master psychologist is exemplified in the performance of one of the young male actors seen at the beginning of the En toutes lettres episode. The actor delivers the opening lines of Racine’s Mithridates, in which Xiphares, the son of Mithridates, has just learned of the death of his father. In the clip below, note how the actor pauses, with a pained and fervent expression, before uttering the word ‘meurt’ (dies), an example of how Racine’s twelve-syllable alexandrine line can be used as the metrical vessel of a character’s intense emotional state:

This portrayal leads one of the other actor-discussants to ask whether this method has come from the Conservatoire, France’s long-established academy for the dramatic arts:

Actor: it’s very good as a piece for the Conservatoire, but I think once again we’re […] missing the truth of Racine here. [What you’ve done is] marvellously well-spoken [bien phrasé]. I’m not talking about your acting here obviously, you can’t move, you’re frozen because… we’re used to performing it that way and because you have no room, all that goes without saying. But again I don’t think that’s the problem with Racine.

Looking at this analysis with a bemused expression, Barthes refers to the actor’s delivery of Xiphares’s speech as a ‘figuration’. This term points to the centrality of the face (figure in French) as a signifying nexus for the kind of psychologizing delivery exemplified by the performance of what Barthes terms Xiphares’s ‘sentimental reality’. The actor’s interpretation aims to embody the experience of someone who has just witnessed the death of a parent, with the alexandrine deployed as a medium for expressing a character’s complex affective interior.

When judged according with Barthes’s requirements, this kind of interpretation is continuous with the bourgeois myth of Racine: highly coded, conventional, predictable, and therefore cognitively unchallenging for the audience. Barthes is particularly critical of this emphasis on psychologization, which he views as a form of pandering to the expectations of the audience, whose projective identification with a character’s experiences (here, the death of a father) are openly courted by actor and director alike. Such identification is the opposite of the kind of theatrical distancing valorized by Barthes since it does not engender reflexivity on the self or on the broader social structures in which one’s selfhood is embedded.

In explaining his opposition to a psychologized and psychologizing Racine, Barthes provides the trainee actors with a précis of the origins of this bourgeois style. Rooted in the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the Ancien Régime, the new realist approach to performance supplanted existing traditions in its emphasis on ‘incarnation’, that is, on the ‘visceral expression of the role by the actor’. In the same way that this style flatters the audience’s acculturation to certain pre-established (bourgeois) codes, the actors are also guilty of identifying with the character they are playing, via suppositions they make about the psychological life of the character in question. The actor who acts in this way will be lavishly praised for the virtuosity of their interpretation, as if this expressive mode of performance were easily the most sophisticated, challenging, and thought-provoking way of delivering Racine’s singular verse. Worse still, the actor’s hypotheses about the motivations of their character are frequently derived from popular assumptions about deep psychological structures, as in those furnished by or about Freudian psychoanalysis. As one Guardian critic tellingly summed up Helen Mirren’s 2009 performance as Phèdre at the National Theatre in London: ‘id stamps on ego’. Barthes loathes this kind of psychological typecasting because it merely repeats (and repeats) the cognitive shortcuts of the stereotype, the hallmark of mass bourgeois culture.

Barthes is just as critical, however, of what he calls the audience’s ‘anthological’²² approach to seeing Racine performed. Many theatre-goers flock to Phèdre with the sole purpose of seeing one or two famous tirades (monologues), celebrated for their emotional intensity and performed by actors renowned for their virtuoso delivery of certain highly expressive speeches (‘how will she “do” it?’). The rest of the play then becomes something to merely sit through, to endure, with Racine reduced to a strange cocktail of ‘boredom and diversion’²³. Against a form of engagement with Racine that casts his characters as our contemporaries, Barthes advocates a de-familiarization, or making-strange, of the Racinean universe. As he tells the actors in En toute lettres,

I think that would be interesting, if we want to perform Racine, not so much to try and find out how we can resemble him or the characters in his plays, that is, not to project ourselves onto the stage, but on the contrary to find the greatest possible distance from that universe.

At the level of both genre and form, theatre may well seem to discourage this kind of distancing. Unlike the more self-referential semiotic code of the novel (i.e. language), the bodies we see on stage seem to be living and breathing, all the more so when they are dressed in the ‘authentic’ costumes of the period. But theatre, Barthes reminds us, is never congenitally doomed to the slavish imitation of actions. While it may seem predisposed to imitation through its staging of bodies in time and space, theatrical form also has the power to displace stereotyped habits (codes) of thinking via the intrinsic diversity of sensations and information it offers to the audience (through staging, colour, costume, make-up, lighting, etc). If theatre’s depiction of the body often aims at mimesis (the realistic imitation of action), as the actor’s performance of Xiphares’s speech above illustrates, it can also furnish what Barthes refers to elsewhere as a ‘celebration’ (fête) of the human body.²⁴ This relationship to the body would be quite different to the body used as a mere physical vessel for the signs of a character’s ‘deep’ psychological struggles, as in the profusion of sweating brows in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film Julius Caesar, decoded by Barthes in one of the most famous of his Mythologies (‘Romans in the Movies’).

In Barthes’s televised exchanges with the actors, a ‘critical’ and ‘responsible’ theatre is a theatre that would provide the distance necessary for recognition of—and reflection on—social ‘problems’. To achieve this, Barthes suggests the actor put their character ‘in quotation marks’, the better to inculcate a separation that ensures that ‘the audience is not unconsciously fascinated, poisoned, attracted’ by what is unfolding on stage, with characters reduced to mere avatars of the public’s own affective dysregulation. By rejecting the reduction of Racine to fixed developmental models, notably those of Freudian psychoanalysis, Barthes argues that the power of Racine stems from the irreducibility of his work to any single perspective, theoretical or otherwise.

This does not mean that certain approaches will not be more suited than others to bringing out the inexhaustible richness of the Racinian universe. Indeed, Barthes’s deployment of a structuralist-inspired reading in On Racine suggests an approach to character that would not be dominated by the dominant psychologizing tendency. On Racine shows how Racine’s characters can be understood as produced not by deep-seated drives but via dynamic structural relations: relations of difference and resemblance, opposition and substitution, or what Timothy Scheie memorably calls Barthes’s proto-algorithmic interpretation of Racine.²⁵ By drawing out the mutability of apparently fixed formal relations—of dominant to dominated, for instance, or of authority to submission—, On Racine reveals a dynamic open-endedness in how we view Racine’s cast of ‘characters’, with each role assigned a value on the basis of differential relations that are themselves always in a state of flux.²⁶

The structuralist approach of On Racine does not entail a complete break with psychology, however. Psychoanalysis, too, is interested in the deep unconscious structures that motivate our waking lives, which is why On Racine is interested in how certain concepts from Freud’s work, such as that of the ‘primal horde’, can shed light on the shifting network of structural relations between characters, many of which seem rooted in a primary paternal figure. This strategic reference to psychoanalytic theory is not reducible to a crude form of Freudian psychobiography, since what counts most for Barthes is not the individual history or psychological development of a specific character, but the way in which the value of ‘character’ is itself determined on the basis of changing structural positions vis-à-vis other characters.

*Patrick Chéreau’s 2003 production of Racine’s* Phèdre at the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

For all Barthes’s desire to question psychology as a privileged critical lens for reading Racine, the link between the two has been an enduring one. Patrice Chéreau’s celebrated 2003 version of Phèdre, staged at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, explicitly acknowledged a debt to Barthes’s On Racine, in a production that underscored the psychological and psychoanalytic motifs that seem so viscerally present in Racine’s text.²⁷ Chéreau’s staging foregrounded the psychoanalytical drives of the play’s cast of characters, who expressed their unconscious ambivalence towards each other through verse and through the body and its movements. In what might be seen as an après-coup illustration of Barthes’s prediction concerning the link between the ‘psychological’ Racine, audience identification, and theatre criticism, Chéreau’s staging was lauded by critics and hue audiences alike, garnering the play three Molière awards including one for the meilleur spectacle du secteur public.

Language in Racine

Language is vital to achieving the distance Barthes sees as critical to a non-bourgeois experience of theatre. As he points out during his discussion with actors on En toutes lettres, one way of obstructing the highly coded identifications of the audience is performing Racine’s work in what he calls ‘a formal way, yes, that’s the word’. By ‘formal’, Barthes seems to be suggesting a type of performance that would draw the audience’s reflexive attention not to the play’s realistic mirroring of reality, but to itself as an aesthetic object via the defamiliarizing use of language, décor (scenery and props), costumes, lighting, and so on. This reflexive approach rejects the expressive aim of bourgeois theatre in which, as we have seen, the play’s formal features are effectively pre-filled with content easily and swiftly decoded by the audience.

Instead of casting Racine as the supreme playwright of ‘passionate contestation’ , a formal approach to Racine would give pride of place to the subjective role of audience members in interpreting the play as a signifying system. One important way of moving beyond the dominant expressive approach to Racine is to refocus attention on the material qualities of his language, rather than on what this language putatively signifies beneath its surface. For Barthes, an ideal theatregoer would reflect on the sensuousness of Racine’s verse, on its rhythms or cadences—formal elements all too easily subordinated to conceptual abstraction when treated as signifying the psychological essence of a given character. This is something Barthes highlights in his critical account of Maria Casarès’s 1958 interpretation of the role of Phèdre at the Théâtre National Populaire in the essay ‘Racine Spoken’²⁸ As he puts it in his discussion with the actors on En toutes lettres, the aim should instead be to let

the great planes of discourse take hold [s’installer] thanks to the rhythm of the alexandrine, which is not an internal rhythm but a formal, highly technical one. We must let these great masses of speech take hold in front of us.

To do so, audience members should try to be attentive to the language of Racine as language in and of itself—and not as the expression or sign of something else, what one of the young actors refers to, for example, as Racine’s ‘grands sentiments’ (deep feelings).

Barthes’s formal vision also emphasises the actor’s responsibility not to cede to the temptation to express a pre-existing notion of their character’s motivations; instead, the performance must leave room for Racine’s language to be heard as an end in itself. Barthes suggests that this kind of delivery would not at all be neutral or robotically monotone, but would captivate the audience, insofar as a self-consciously formalist mode of diction would provoke the non-directive reflexivity of each individual theatregoer. As he notes in discussion with the actors,

there’s no such thing as a neutral way of saying a text. It doesn’t exist, it’s a utopia. Consequently, acting is first and foremost about trying to get rid of extremely positive ways that are in us, because of our culture, our memory, our recollection. That’s what it’s all about.

True acting begins with a radical disinvestment of the codes that our culture has seeded in us, thereby carving out a space for new and unpredictable interpretations to emerge. This imaginative space is perhaps closest to what Barthes calls, at the outset of the television programme, ‘a truly living theatre’.

Such a reflexive approach can be illustrated with reference to the alexandrine verse form. Racine’s use of this iconic 12-syllable French line, usually balanced between two hemistichs (half lines) of six syllables, is the ideal vessel for communicating the full complexity of human emotions, at least according to long-established critical orthodoxy:

Phèdre: Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue ; /

Un trouble s’éleva dans mon âme éperdue (Phèdre I, 3, 273-74).

[Phaedra: I saw him: I blushed and grew pale seeing him;

Then in my mind what turbulence arose!]²⁹

In practice, Racine’s use of the alexandrine is far more flexible and inventive than the critical or pedagogical clichés often suggest, as the following exchange between Phèdre and her confidante Œnone shows:

Œnone: Songez qu’une barbare en son sein l’a formé.

Phèdre: Quoique Scythe et barbare, elle a pourtant aimé.

Œnone: Il a pour tout le sexe une haine fatale.

Phèdre: Je ne me verrai pas préférer de rivale. (III, 1, 787-790)

[Oenone: Remember that his mother was a savage.

Phaedra: A Scythian savage perhaps, but she loved.

Oenone: He has a savage hate for the whole sex.

Phaedra: So I shall not see some rival preferred.]³⁰

This back and forth between Phèdre and her confidante Œnone functions like an internal monologue, with Œnone cast as a double who embodies the reflexive rationality of the queen. It may well be the case, as Barthes suggests, that teaching the alexandrine as a uniquely ‘musical’ verse form with an intrinsic power to convey intense states of passion is what gives rise to the tedium experience by lycée-aged readers of Racine, a recurrent concern of both Barthes and the actors who engage him in discussion throughout the En toutes lettres programme. This ex-pressive delivery leaves little room for more subjective, individual, or ‘writerly’ appreciations of the alexandrine.

As mentioned above, the latter approach is embodied by Maria Casarès’s 1958 performance of Phèdre:

In Barthes’s rather hasty assessment of the theatrical landscape of 1950s and 1960s France, the expressive approach is typical of ‘the Racinean delivery’ (la diction racinienne)³¹ we find at both the Comédie-Française and at the Théâtre National Populaire. This approach tries to ‘flatter’ the public’s coded expectations through performances that restrict meaning through ‘artificial voice production’.³² The bourgeois actor ‘ceaselessly intervenes in the flow of the language, “brings out” a word, suspends an effect, constantly signifies that what he is saying now is important, has a certain hidden meaning’.³³. The artificiality of this method of using words to ‘translate’ a character’s inner thoughts is illustrated in the recording of Casarès’s delivery above. For Barthes, it is based on two key errors. The first is the belief one must wrangle ‘clarity’ of meaning from the complex movements of diction that characterize the alexandrine form.³⁴ The second is a mistaken belief that the verse itself must be received as musical, with the line’s ‘melodic continuity’ used by the actor to compensate for ‘psychological discontinuity’. The result of these confusions is ‘embarrassment’ for both actor and audience because the resulting diction is pulled in two contrary directions: between the conceptual simplicity of a psychological state and the formal complexity of a character’s oratory.

For the bourgeois actor, ‘each word’ represents a ‘task’ to be laboured over³⁵ with the ultimate aim of revealing an underlying ‘analogy’ between ‘musical substance’ and ‘psychological concept’. As Casarès’s performance illustrates, this approach means that certain words or details are unduly accentuated, in what Barthes refers to as a ‘hypertrophy’³⁶ that crushes the materiality of the verse in favour of the harmony of a more ‘general melody’. This focus on the unifying melodiousness of the line runs roughshod over what he views as the true musicality of the twelve-syllable alexandrine line. To try to render this intrinsic musicality in an even more musical way is to suppress the former in favour of a second-order melodiousness imposed by the actor or director.

Barthes rejects this artificial musicality as pandering to bourgeois expectations of experiencing, in person, the virtuoso talent of the celebrated actor. Properly speaking, the alexandrine form, when delivered at the zero degree of melodiousness, ‘excuses the actor from having talent’.³⁷ There is thus an inherent tension between traditional theatre’s reliance on star-actors and the ascetic minimalism of the alexandrine line, which ‘sings by itself’—if only it were allowed to do so. To ignore the latter is to risk a result that is both deeply un-aesthetic and ‘didactic’³⁸ in that it cognitively castrates the audience. ‘The actor undertakes to do [the audience’s] thinking for [them]’.³⁹ by regurgitating a ‘pre-digested’ interpretation that is then eagerly and passively consumed by assembled public. Despite these temptations, when used correctly, the alexandrine remains for Barthes at least a privileged instrument for achieving precious reflexive distance, for both actor and audience alike: ‘the truth of the alexandrine is neither to destroy nor to purify itself: it is in its distance’.⁴⁰

The Future of Racine

The censorious tone of many of Barthes’s assertions about the state of postwar French theatre suggests that we read his remarks not in terms of a utopic desire for a theatre-to-come, but as an attempt to provoke theatre in France to interrogate its inherited traditions and leave behind some of its most cherished givens. It is strange, in this sense, not to see more interest on Barthes’s part in contemporary attempts to do precisely this, of which Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty is only the most obvious and striking example.⁴¹ In his reflections on Racine, Barthes is more interested in demolishing the sacred cows of theatrical art and criticism than in furnishing a positive vision of what Racine’s theatre might look like in the future.

This wilful indecision in terms of the possibilities of theatrical form is captured in Barthes’s engagement with the actors in En toutes lettres. At the outset of their discussion, he speaks of the potential of a ‘truly living theatre’, one that would escape the double threat of pedagogical sedation and assimilation to the cognitive fast-food of bourgeois culture. ‘Truly living’ is itself a curious phrase. In Barthes’s work, the figure of life or the living is often coterminous with change, with mutability, with thinking as a volatile and plastic force for self-transformation. Death, conversely, is associated with intellectual sclerosis, with unchanging or unchallenging cliché, with the static myths disseminated by the dominant bourgeois class in the wake of the Revolution. A truly living Racine would be very different, then, to the petrified corpus we find in ‘school exercises’ and ‘great performances’ alike.

At the conclusion of the segment of En toutes lettres, Barthes reflects on what the discussion—or ‘confrontation’, as he calls it—has accomplished. A number of received ideas have been scrutinized, chief among them the pervasive reliance on ‘psychological verisimilitude’ in contemporary performances of Racine. One reason for rejecting a psychologizing approach to Racine’s greatest roles, he suggests, is that it is very hard today to know where pathology ends and normality begins. A key characteristic of the bourgeois art of theatre is, we have seen, precisely this focus on normalization, on moulding the pathological or the transgressive to fit the stable productivity of the nuclear family.

A further point of contention of the discussion is whether Racine can ever be performed outside of the naturalizing or realistic tradition that has dominated performances of his plays for a period of a century and a half. Here again, Barthes cautiously demurs. Refusing to commit himself to any simple or prescriptive vision of what Racine might look like in the future, his conclusion might surprise us: he has no skin in the game, no vested interest in whether Racine survives or perishes. We might see in this hyperbolic disinterest the degree zero of that surplus of interest (in all senses of the word) that drives the commodified bourgeois myth of Racine as the greatest of French tragedians. Barthes ends his television engagement with a statement that is at once an assertion, a question, and a provocation, inviting the reflexivity of viewers at home: ‘I don’t see who can revive it, and above all, for whom’.

Intellectuals and the Media in France

An online exhibition from the University of Bristol

Barthes Gets Involved: How (Not) to Perform Racine

Barthes’s Anti-Bourgeois Theatre

‘Racine is Racine’

Racine and Psychology

Language in Racine

The Future of Racine

Further Reading

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Barthes’s Anti-Bourgeois Theatre

‘Racine is Racine’

Racine and Psychology

Language in Racine

The Future of Racine

Further Reading

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