Orientalism and the Heroic Other in Racine’s Alexandre le Grand: A Homeric Intertext (1992)

Orientalism and the Heroic Other in Racine’s Alexandre le Grand: A Homeric Intertext Richard E. Goodkin In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of pre­ vious imagining, or an amalgam of all these.1 A s Edward Said observes, orientalism has a strong affinity with intertextuality: a text representing the Orient is at least in part a reading of other texts representing the Orient. This general rule is certainly applicable to the works of Jean Racine, but—as is frequently the case with this neoclassical master of deceptive appearances—in a rather unexpected way. Bajazet, the most obvious example of an orien­ talist text in Racine’s œuvre and the play that has received the greatest amount of attention in terms of its representation of the Orient, does not lend itself to being read as a reading of other orientalist texts. Bajazet, a play set in Constantinople, is based on nearly contemporary events that Racine claims to have heard narrated by the French ambassador upon his return to France.2In her discussion of the intertextual relation of Bajazet with two subsequent works, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress, Kate Trumpener demonstrates the “ fundamentally intertextual nature of these stories” and links their intertextuality, following Said, with the texts’ orientalist content.3 But for obvious reasons, Trumpener connects Bajazet only with later works, for the play is unique among Racine’s tragedies in that its contemporary setting and its purported lack of written sources4 make it difficult to establish intertextual links with previous works, be they literary, historical, or sacred texts.5 In fact, the links between orientalism and intertextuality are far more interesting in a number of Racine’s tragedies that might not be immedi­ ately identifiable as orientalist texts. The Orient is a prevalent topos in Racine’s tragedy; five of his eleven tragedies are set in the Orient, and in the six plays set in Europe, several crucial characters are Asian, most prominently Andromaque and Bérénice. Even Eriphile in Iphigénie, although she turns out to be the daughter of Helen and Theseus, is Vol. XXXII, No. 3 63 L ’E sprit C réateur thought to be a Trojan until the very end of the play, and she fulfills the function of an Asian other, “ l’autre Iphigénie.” Although Racine did rework some contemporary material in his plays, most of his sources are Greek and Latin texts, and the heritage of the ancient texts Racine uses is crucial to an understanding of his orien­ talism. Edith Hall’s observation that “ right through until the seven­ teenth century” European representations of the Turks “ owed much to the ancient European view of Asiatics” 6is also applicable to the repre­ sentation of the Orient in Racine’s work. Consequently it is to the works of classical antiquity that I will be turning in my examination of Racine’s orientalism. In this article I would like to suggest an intertextual link between one of Racine’s least-studied plays, Alexandre le Grand, and Homer’s Iliad, and to demonstrate the importance of that intertextual link to the play’s portrayal of the Orient. While the story of Alexandre le Grand has no direct connection to the Iliad, it is quite possible Racine was reading the Iliad while composing Alexandre. Roy C. Knight speculates that Racine may well have studied the Iliad before writing Andromaque,1 perhaps during the time he was writing Alexandre'. Racine’s Andromaque, as well as his image of fallen Troy—“ Maîtresse de l’Asie” (199), as the Greek Pyrrhus calls it—certainly owes something to Homer’s extraordinary depiction of the Trojans in the Iliad. At any rate Racine, one of the most accomplished Hellenists of the French neoclassical period, knew the Iliad very well; his marginal notes to Homer’s epic of the fall of Troy—and also to the Odyssey...