A propos de Racine et Shakespeare: tradition, réforme, et révolution dans le Romantisme

While Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare (1823-1825) offers a key for defining and understanding the profound motivations of Romanticism, this text's dual tenets – of absolute freedom as a means to combat Classical dogmatism and of a Romanticism of invention – create an ambiguity insofar as they might constitute, on the one hand, merely a demand for specific theatrical reforms, or on the other, a general call for literary revolution. Although Stendhal's terminology suggests both positions, what is clearly revolutionary in his polemical stance is the affirmation of an "interior" poétique versus the Classical "exterior" set of rules, linked to the corollary affirmation of freedom for the "regenerated" creator's invention, respecting only those precepts that conform to his own movement, resources and genius. Stendhal thus makes specific demands for the liberation of dramatic creation from Classical restraints in a theater "of the heart" destined for a virtual audience of a younger, "liberal" generation. Furthermore, Stendhal calls for a revolutionary dramatic spectacle of "total illusion," one that transcends both the distance between stage and theater and the difference between audience and actor. It is through this audience that a "duality of perception" emerges in Stendhal's argument since the total dramatic freedom he demands reduces the importance of the rhetorical arrangement of speech, especially as a means of producing pleasure for the audience. There then appears in Stendhal's thought a nostalgia for the homogeneity of ancien régime literary taste, a nostalgia that led Stendhal to the novel as the genre that could engender both emotive and spiritual pleasures, contrary to the productions of the newly "liberated" theater. Finally, the paradoxical reflections of Nietzsche reveal Stendhal, one of the last incarnations of French esprit, as creating his role and acting the truth through a "rhetoric" that is both the tool of hypocrisy of the rhéteur and the writer's tool in the fundamental task of accomplishing and suppressing hypocrisy. (In French) (Written by Charles J. Stivale.)