Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (review)

This wide-ranging study of the French classical era’s most eminent dramatists—Corneille, Molière, and Racine—proposes a complex critical re-evaluation of the texts of canonical plays that we may think we know all too well. Through close readings and a variety of theoretical approaches, Braider brings his earlier work on textuality and painting (Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 [Princeton UP 1993]) to bear on works of seventeenth-century theater, shedding considerable new light on the latter field. The central thesis holds that the plays in question, while they were initially intended as performances, also constitute texts that stand as their indiscernible doubles. The textual counterpart to performance proves more complex and, for Braider, essentially more significant in transmitting the meanings encoded in each work. While we may imagine that we exercise a kind of interpretive agency on the artifacts of classicism, taking to them our methods, ideologies, and hermeneutic preoccupations, Braider contends that these texts are also operating on us. In fact, they are one step ahead, having anticipated and in a sense already constructed our critical and interpretive reactions to them.