PARTISAN REVIEW
Some witty scientist (Laplace, I think it was) remarked about a
performance of Racine's
Phedre, «Qu'est-ce que cela prouve?"-What
does that prove?-and everybody seems to have taken for granted
what at least this famous remark is supposed to prove. Assuming what
is known and obvious about this question, we may wonder whether it
would not have occurred to Racine to think that
Ph'edre
did "prove"
something, since he wrote with the conception widespread in the seven–
teenth century that a work of art was intended, as Horace said,
«ut
doceat, ut placeat."
Proof and disproof are not the right words; the
point is that in Racine the effort is to state a very complex emotion
in the simplest possible way, and in this sense to distill a "lesson" from
experience. The extreme case in this direction would be moralists like
La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, who struggle to bring their complex
experience to expression in some simple and general formula or aphor–
ism. Now, the distance between La Rochefoucauld and Racine; between
La Rochefoucauld and Constant, Stendhal, or Gide is not the same as
the distance between La Rochefoucauld and-well, choose your own ex–
ample from our contemporary novelists of atmosphere and sensibility.
(Proust might appear to be a different case, since he pursues complica–
tion within complication, but, as Cocteau has said, at every step in
the complication Proust will be found hitting the hull's eye directly
and simply; and because he is always attempting to distill the lesson
from his experience, he belongs in this line of writers.) The contem–
porary American fiction that depends chiefly on atmosphere and texture
moves in just the opposite direction: the trick is to take some very simple
and banal emotion or idea and surround it with the greatest possible
complications of decor and furniture-the best stories in
The New Yorker
would be the most convenient illustration. And-just _to throw a last
stone at Laplace and his wisecrack-remember that Nietzsche spoke
of
learning
from Stendhal (and Dostoevsky), and there is no reason to
doubt that when he said this he really meant "learn."
If
I seem to have been using the occasion of a review as a spring–
board for a little lay sermon, it is because I know no recent book which
brings out so well this peculiarly French literary tradition, and my reason
for reviewing the book in the first place is to recommend it, not to
specialized students of Moliere and Racine, but to those readers who
might want to have a sense of this tradition, and of the resources it
might still have for contemporary use if there were any writers around
who wanted to avail themselves of it. Mr. Turnell is at his best in the
long remarkable chapter on Racine (whom he treats, and correctly, as
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