I was reading Mary M. Wiles’ Interview with Jacques Rivette (yes, I’m still on my Rivette kick; I recently saw his late sort-of-thriller Secret défense and posted a rant about the folly of calling it “Secret Defense” in English) and was struck by this passage:
mw: Why did you feel the need to return to the theater after La bande des quatre?
jr: After La bande des quatre, I was so pleased with the work we did with the actresses that I wanted to continue. And since they also wanted to do some theater, we got together a small group like that to work with each other on some classics; Corneille, Racine, and Marivaux, is what we were working on. And then at the end of a few months, they wanted to do a real performance, and that’s when we dropped Marivaux, which was too hard. But we kept—and we should have just kept Corneille. Because, it was already too much, Corneille and Racine. It was just that we wanted to continue to work on those classics … on Corneille, which was the driving force. And besides, the work that I did with them and with the guys who had joined them was much more interesting to me, the play by Corneille, that is, Tite et Bérénice [1670], than working on Racine’s plays, on Bajazet [1672]. Bajazet is fabulous, I can’t speak ill of Racine, but you grasp it all in the very first reading. That’s it, we said, we understand it all, but then, afterwards, what were we going to do with it? Whereas Corneille is hard, even for the French, he’s hard.
mw: You can imagine that for us …
jr: It’s like Latin for us. It isn’t French. All of those authors were fluent readers of Latin and Greek, but Corneille couldn’t read Greek, and that’s a big difference between them. Racine read Greek, and Corneille read Latin. And he read so much Latin that it’s almost Mallarmé, it’s so dense. Corneille’s Bérénice, it’s true that it’s a hard play, it’s overloaded, each verse says three things, and its characters are infinitely rich. Infinitely more things are happening between Titus and Bérénice, infinitely more things are happening in Corneille’s play than in Racine’s, where nothing happens. Bérénice isn’t the Corneille play that I like the best though, even if it’s got fabulous language. It’s fabulous as a poem, but it’s like Shakespeare for you. As a matter of fact, I gather it’s hard to translate, like Goethe is untranslatable, like Pushkin is untranslatable, like Dante is untranslatable, well, like all the major poets. I don’t know, but, in any case, it was difficult to stage.
mw: I’ve read a few of Corneille’s plays but have never seen them performed on stage.
jr: In France, I’m not the only one, once you get hooked on Corneille, you’re lost. It’s very deep. He’s an author I find very dense, so full of history, of thought. He’s a very rich author.
It makes me wish I’d kept up the French literature I studied almost sixty years ago with the imperious Mme Ruegg; we read Corneille and Racine and I loved them both, but I can no longer remember them well enough to know whether I agree with what Rivette is saying. It doesn’t matter, though; when somebody expatiates like that about literature they love, it’s the loving attention that matters, I don’t really give a damn whether they’re “right.” (I often have that reaction to Dmitry Bykov’s essays about Russian lit.) Anyway, I should give Bérénice a try.
Me too; me too. I love this kind of enthusiasm.
Technically, Bérénice was by Racine, and Corneille’s was Tite et Bérénice. They premiered the save year, like Armageddon and Deep Impact.
Armageddon had I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. Deep Impact, nothing.
If you want to read somebody enthusing about Bérénice — Racine’s version — check out Florence King’s memoir, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. It was her favorite in high school French:
Her French teacher suggests a career in translation: “I would be like the lady named Constance Garnett whose name appeared on all the Russian novels.” Later, looking for a way out of grad school, she starts writing true confession stories, and finds plot inspiration:
I bet we’ve all got overgrown books like that!
We do, and thanks — I’m now inspired to read both the play and the memoir!
I’ve never read the play, but that’s a great memoir.
“I bet we’ve all got overgrown books like that!”
Overgrown or outgrown? I in my arrogance like to think I’ve got books I’ve outgrown, and not just the “retold for younger readers”.
If we’re with French literature, I think I’d put Balzac in that category.
And only a year after Dante’s Peak and Volcano co-premiered!