Indiscernible Counterparts

Braider, Christopher. Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Pp. 387. 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. In the introduction, Braider develops this argument with a good deal of theoretical background in an extensive apparatus of footnotes. This opening section and the book as a whole are marked by a fundamental ambivalence in regard to theory. Braider's initial approach to all reading methods is highly and at times reductively skeptical. In what reads like a simplified send-up of Lyotard's "grands récits," approaches ranging from psychoanalysis to postmodernism fall under the strawman of "narrative": [W]hichever narrative we endorse, the net effect is the same. Seen as symptoms of a main event that unfolds as by definition elsewhere, beyond the scope of aesthetic agency, the plays lose the authority once enjoyed as canonical monuments to become mere documents of the larger cultural movements that condition them. By contrast, I hope to show that what fundamentally makes classical drama, engendering just those monuments it is our habit to deface and dismantle, is an unexpected autonomy and clairvoyance that allow period dramatists to explore the constructions and elisions the culture imposes. (17-18) [End Page 141] While Braider's awareness of the potentially distorting effects of latter-day theories and methods applied to early modern works is salutary, his summary dismissal of the specificity of each approach actually undercuts his critique of these techniques. Theories and methods they may all be, but they remain nonetheless quite distinct, with their respective objectives, methods, aftereffects, leanings, and influences. In a series of developments that belie the claim that all theories amount to the same kind of distorting hermeneutic machinery, Braider shows throughout the rest of the book a keen interest in the specificity of a number of approaches, and indeed uses them extensively to pursue his literary readings—Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Austin's speech act theory, to name but a few. Though many of the insights of these readings are valuable, and the introductory critique thought-provoking, a more forthright approach to the uses Braider himself makes of latter-day methods of reading, to operate his own kind of distortion on the texts of classical theater (but for their own good, as it were—to let them speak to us differently), would have made for a clearer, more convincing central argument. There is much to learn from Braider's analyses and from his knowledge of theory, philology, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and dramaturgy. The array of sources he puts to use is impressive, and though the book lacks an index, its bibliography serves as a valuable reference tool for students of the period. The first text to test the author's approach is Corneille's Le Cid. Starting with a rigorous rhetorical analysis, particularly of hypotyposis in Chimène's speech about her dead

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