Exorcising the Beast: Attempts at Rationality in French Classicism

Abstract

French classical literature betrays not the reason by which it is usually characterized, but a largely unsuccessful striving for rational control of the irrational. The literary treatments of the beast and monster in seventeenth-century works indicate both the power of the irrational and the similarity of various authors' responses to it. Descartes's beast-machine theory and Pascal's adaptation of it represent efforts to mechanize and regulate unreason. The failure of this attempt in Pascal's Pensées is signaled by the “monster,” an expression of that incomprehensibility which compels human reason to abdicate. The monster in Racine's Phèdre is an irrational force which the protagonists dream of conquering, but by which they themselves are finally conquered. Continued belief that French classicism flourished in an “age of reason” is in effect a prolongation of the same illusion found in the literature of that time.