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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
French classical literature betrays not the reason by which it is usually characterized, but a largely unsuccessful striving for rational control of the irrational. The literary treatments of the beast and monster in seventeenth-century works indicate both the power of the irrational and the similarity of various authors' responses to it. Descartes's beast-machine theory and Pascal's adaptation of it represent efforts to mechanize and regulate unreason. The failure of this attempt in Pascal's Pensées is signaled by the “monster,” an expression of that incomprehensibility which compels human reason to abdicate. The monster in Racine's Phèdre is an irrational force which the protagonists dream of conquering, but by which they themselves are finally conquered. Continued belief that French classicism flourished in an “age of reason” is in effect a prolongation of the same illusion found in the literature of that time.
1 René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. Etienne Gilson (Paris: Vrin, 1966), pp. 119–25. See also Descartes, “Sixième méditation,” in Œuvres, ed. Victor Cousin (Paris: F.-G. Levrault, 1824–26), i, 331–32, 336, 341–45.
2 Discours, p. 121. See also his letters to Henry More, 5 Feb. 1649, and 15 April 1649, both in Descartes, Correspondence, ed. Charles Adam and Gérard Milhaud, viii (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 137–38, 210–11.
3 In his “Discours à Madame de la Sablière,” La Fontaine expresses his puzzlement at this union:
Tout obéit dans ma machine
A ce principe intelligent.
Il est distinct du corps, se conçoit nettement,
Se conçoit mieux que le corps même:
De tous nos mouvements c'est l'arbitre suprême.
Mais comment le corps l'entend-il ?
C'est là le point: je vois l'outil
Obéir à la main; mas la main, qui la guide?
Eh! qui guide les Cieux et leur course rapide?
Quelque Ange est attaché peut-être à ces grands corps.
Un esprit vit en nous, et meut tous nos ressorts :
L'impression se fait. Le moyen, je l'ignore:
On ne l'apprend qu'au sein de la Divinité;
Et, s'il faut parler avec sincérité,
Descartes l'ignorait encore.
La Fontaine, Fables (Paris: Garnier, 1962), pp. 269–70, ll. 156–70.
4 See, e.g., Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), vii, 619–20; George Boas, The Happy Beast (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 85, n. 189. Pascal's machine à calculer cannot be viewed as a simple coincidence. Hobbes's image of the leviathan is a concrete expression of the new state-machine. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1968), p. 81.
5 See Leonora C. Rosenfleld, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 19–23; Descartes, Discours, p. 125, n. 1.
6 Essais (Paris: Garnier, 1962), p. 497.
7 “Apologie,” p. 504.
8 For an enlightening discussion of this aspect of Descartes, see Nathan Edelman, “The Mixed Metaphor in Descartes,” RR, 41 (Oct. 1950), 167–78.
9 See, e.g., Rosenfleld, pp. 53–54; Boas, pp. 95–96. Pascal's famous and highly controversial “Naturellement même cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira” (Br. 233), mentioned below, is interpreted by Etienne Gilson and Emile Baudin, among others, as an indication of Pascal's Cartesianism. Etienne Gilson, “Le Sens du terme ‘abêtir’ chez Blaise Pascal,” in Les Idées et les lettres (Paris : Vrin, 1932), pp. 263–74. Emile Baudin, La Philosophie de Pascal (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1946), i, 64–65.
10 See, e.g., Br. 342, the fragment usually cited to demonstrate Pascal's acceptance of the Cartesian theory.
11 Blaise Pascal, Pensées et opuscules, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1953), No. 252, pp. 449–50. Brunschvicg numbers will hereafter be given in the text.
12 Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), pp. 182–89.
13 “Comme, en effet, je veux bien qu'on sache que le peu que j'ai appris jusqu'ici n'est presque rien, à comparaison de ce j'ignore [sic], et que je ne désespère pas de pouvoir apprendre; car c'est quasi le même de ceux qui découvrent peu à peu la vérité dans les sciences, que de ceux qui, commençant à devenir riches, ont moins de peine à faire de grandes acquisitions qu'ils n'ont eu auparavant, étant plus pauvres, à en faire de beaucoup moindres” (Descartes, Discours, p. 133).
14 Pascal explains the nostalgia inherent in his human animal by the anteriority of reason. Since the fall of man, his reason is a survival. His animality is a degeneration, the origin and cause of which remain beyond the reach of the mind: “… ce qui est nature aux animaux, nous l'appelons misère en l'homme; par où nous reconnaissons que sa nature étant aujourd'hui pareille à celle des animaux, il est déchu d'une meilleure nature, qui lui était propre autrefois” (p. 409).
15 A reason for the ultimate inadequacy of Pascal's epistemology may be found in the above quoted section of fragment 72. The late Lucien Goldmann holds that the knowledge at which Pascal aims is one of totalities. Man as an integral part of the whole that he seeks to know is thereby limited in his ability to attain such knowledge. Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 267.
16 The interrelationship of reason and madness is explored in some detail by Foucault. See Part ii, Ch. iv, “Médecins et malades,” pp. 359–411.
17 Foucault chooses 1656, the year when the founding of the Hôpital général was decreed, as a decisive date (p. 58).
18 “A ne considérer le corps humain que comme un assemblage de fibres plus ou moins tendues, abstraction faite de leur sensibilité, de leur vie, de leur mouvement, on concevra sans peine que la musique doit faire le même effet sur les fibres qu'elle fait sur les cordes des instruments voisins.” Encyclopédie, article entitled “Musique.” As quoted by Foucault, p. 393.
19 References are to Racine, Œuvres, ed. Paul Mesnard, iii (Paris: Hachette, 1865). Judd Hubert and Eliane Jasenas have discussed the significance of Thésée's double role. See Judd D. Hubert, “La Révélation du monstre,” in his Essai d'exégèse racinienne (Paris: Nizet, 1956), pp. 201–21; and Eliane Jasenas, “Le Thème de la chasse au monstre dans la Phèdre de Racine,” Symposium, 21 (1967), 118–31. See also Leo Spitzer,“Le ‘Récit de Théramène,‘ ” in his Linguistics and Literary History, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 97–98.
20 Charles Mauron, L'Inconscient dans l'œuvre et la vie de Racine (Aix-en-Provence: Publications des Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, 1957), p. 147.
21 Cf. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 120: “ . . . le monstrueux menace tous les personnages, ils sont tous monstres les uns pour les autres, et tous aussi chasseurs de monstres.” Cf. also Hubert, p. 203; Jasenas, pp. 122–23; Spitzer, p. 98.
22 Thésée addresses his son thus: “Monstre, qu'a trop longtemps épargné le tonnerre” (iv.ii.1,045). Cf. Spitzer, p. 99.
23 Hubert thinks the monster was killed (p. 217); Jasenas does not (p. 127). Whether or not the beast finally died, Hippolyte did die in the attempt to kill it.
24 “On se contente de régler et de punir, avec les moyens qui servaient autrefois à conjurer la faute, à dissiper l'erreur dans la restitution de la folie à l'éclatante vérité du monde” (Foucault, p. 390).
25 Spitzer points out the presence in the “récit de Théramène” of the four elements of nature, signifying the abhorrence of the whole of nature for the monster (p. 116).
26 “An Interview with Sartre,” NYRB, 26 March 1970, p. 23.