Les héros manqués. Pour une dramaturgie racinienne des possibles
This article seeks to characterise the agency of confidant characters in Racine’s plays. It begins by analysing the bond of vassalage and trust between the confidant and his master, which tends towards a desire for hybridity and even fusion between the two bodies. It then characterises the confidant...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Institut du Monde Anglophone
2025-03-01
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| Series: | Etudes Epistémè |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/20611 |
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| Summary: | This article seeks to characterise the agency of confidant characters in Racine’s plays. It begins by analysing the bond of vassalage and trust between the confidant and his master, which tends towards a desire for hybridity and even fusion between the two bodies. It then characterises the confidants’ agency as more powerful than that of those they serve. These characters do not inhabit quite the same space or time as their masters – and their importance is authorised precisely by this displacement. The confidant opens up the space. Unlike the hero, who is trapped, the confidant can move from one space to another. The confidant also opens up time. By unravelling the threads of teleological fatality, the confidant proposes rational bifurcations, unrealized possibilities. This last point is embodied in the prophetic power of the confidant, but also in the distinct tone with which he addresses his master. While heroes invoke destiny, duty and passion, confidants respond with contingency, compromise and sentiment. These many bifurcations could give rise to dramatic rewritings and generate alternative variations. More modestly, the article posits that the discourse of the confidants itself embodies an alternative possibility, an elsewhere of tragedy. It is the arrangement of contradiction, in the present time of a single text, that keeps its tension active, this gap of space and time. In short, the confidant dialectizes, mediates, and creates a third way that ‘de-fatalizes’ tragedy, even in its evil power. |
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| ISSN: | 1634-0450 |