Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Nina Ekstein, Corneille's Irony Corneille's Irony . Nina Ekstein . Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2007. Pp. 210.

2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/658876

1545-6951

John D. Lyons,

Historical and Literary Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNina Ekstein, Corneille's Irony Corneille's Irony. Nina Ekstein . Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2007. Pp. 210.John D. LyonsJohn D. LyonsUniversity of Virgina Search for more articles by this author University of VirginaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePierre Corneille is sometimes considered to be the most straightforward of the seventeenth-century French playwrights, fervent, patriotic, somewhat moralistic, and at times bombastic. His heroes and heroines too have seemed to many to be steadfast and passionate—but perhaps not exceedingly complex. It may, therefore, come as a surprise to find Corneille the dramatist and many of his major characters described as persistently ironic, as Nina Ekstein so convincingly does in this original and thorough study. At the outset she suggests several reasons why Corneille is not widely associated with irony. Key among them is the persistent habit of viewing most of the author's work with reference to the dominant value of heroism, and, as Ekstein writes, “Heroism depends on universal admiration for a single set of values, while irony calls into question what it targets and thus implies the possibility of alternative values” (2). Thus, there is a lot at stake in Corneille's Irony insofar as Ekstein threatens the stability of a canonic picture of French classical theater in which Corneille plays the patriotic and optimistic straight man, Molière the rebellious, somewhat cynical rationalist, and Jean Racine the demystifying, world-weary tragic ironist. For an early twenty-first-century public, one that is often described as valuing irony above all (despite fleeting attempts to invoke a “postironic” America), Corneille can only gain by this refreshing and long-overdue examination. And it should be said right away that Ekstein does not attempt to update or modernize the author of Le Cid (1637) simply to suit contemporary tastes. Instead, she works patiently and methodically to show cases of essentially indisputable irony in the plays (and also in the prefatory and critical writings) and to consider possible instances of irony that remain for thoughtful readers, directors, and performers to interpret.Ekstein's book is divided into two parts. The first part, “Evident Irony,” in four chapters, defines and illustrates three modes or categories of irony: dramatic, verbal, and situational. The second, “Signals of Possible Irony,” devotes greater attention to a variety of clues that permit the spectator or reader of Corneille's work to recognize the three modes when they occur, separately or together, in the text. This organizational scheme is a complex response to the complex problem of giving appropriate weight to both theoretical and hermeneutic aspects of such a study, and in my view this arrangement works well. Ekstein has placed the virtually indisputable cases of irony in the first part, where each instance can help elucidate each of the modes, and this permits both the critic and her readers to adventure into the less clear-cut examples fortified with well-developed concepts.Dramatic irony, as Ekstein defines it, “involves a significant discrepancy of awareness between an onstage character and the audience,” and this discrepancy involves “the opposition between…two channels of communication…from one onstage character to another and from playwright to audience” (16). It requires three entities: one or more receivers (who recognize the irony), an ironist, and the ironist's victim. The receivers necessarily include the theatrical audience but may also include knowing characters in the play. When the ironist is a character in the play as well, the result, in Ekstein's terms, is “stage-centered dramatic irony,” but when none of the dramatic characters is in the know, the source of the irony is the playwright, and this produces “authorial dramatic irony” (17). The latter is based on information that the audience knows and that has not been conveyed with ironic intent by any character. One type of such irony occurs when the dramatist counts on the audience to recognize allusions to history, mythology, or other textual sources of the story so that the spectator or reader will know, for instance, about some impending event of which the characters are ignorant. But Ekstein cleverly points out (21) another authorial irony when such a result occurs on the basis of the information provided by the play alone yet without any ironic intent on the part of a character: Auguste in Cinna (1642) tells Cinna and Maxime, who are conspiring to assassinate him, “Je vois trop que vos coeurs n'ont point pour moi de fard.”1 This is an especially interesting case because it raises another theoretical issue brought up later in Ekstein's treatment of verbal irony, the boundary between irony and lying. Cinna and Maxime were lying to Auguste about their fidelity to him and hence were not ironic, but an irony is produced for the audience by the emperor's ignorance.While verbal irony is a fairly straightforward matter in theoretical terms, the issues Ekstein illuminates in her chapter on “situational irony” are of a much higher order in ideological terms. One can, as Ekstein says, following the lead of Linda Hutcheon in her Irony's Edge: the Theory and Politics of Irony (1994), focus on reception rather than intention and define as ironic what is simply perceived as ironic, or one may “credit the irony to a superior or superhuman source, whether it be God or fate” (55). Ekstein notes that the best-known form of situational irony, irony of fate, is not characteristic of Corneille's tragedies (61); indeed, she finds that the “fondness for surprise in his plots runs directly counter of irony of fate”(62). In describing the role of oracles in Corneille's plots, Ekstein provides interesting insight into the dramatic function of this device.The second part of the book, on signals of irony, has separate chapters on reduplication, exaggeration, gaps, and margins. This last category of signal refers to a specific type of gap or incongruity, one that goes beyond the represented dramatic world. Under margins, then, are treated the relationships between an individual play and its paratextual elements, such as the prologue, or between a play and its source, or between two plays by Corneille himself, or finally between Corneille's writings and other contemporary critical or theoretical writings.While the theoretical foundation is important and useful in itself, Ekstein's many original and insightful readings of Corneille's plays are, for me, the highlight of the study. Though she shows how various forms of irony are pervasive in his work, she identifies several in which irony takes on a truly central role: especially Nicomède (1651), Oedipe (1659), and Rodogune (1645) but also Cinna, Horace (1640), and numerous others. Because irony thrives on the hesitation between meanings, a hesitation that verges at times on the undecidable, the result of these new readings is not to simplify but rather to complicate interpretation in productive ways. To what extent is Sabine in Horace a character who speaks ironically? Ekstein's pages on Sabine (in chap. 5 on “reduplication”) will unsettle many readers' understanding of this character, who might easily be taken for the embodiment of a rather straightforward pathos. And how can we reconcile Nicomède's widely recognized heroism with his persistent use of a rather subversive irony?Although I confess that I began Ekstein's study already inclined to see Corneille as highly ironic (particularly in his critical and theoretical writings), Corneille's Irony helped me discover new vistas within the ironies of his dramatic creations. I strongly recommend this book not only to those who are interested specifically in seventeenth-century French tragedy but to anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of irony on the stage. Notes 1 Pierre Corneille, Cinna, 2.1.628, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Couton, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 19, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 1:930. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 3February 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/658876 Views: 247Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.