Racine, Mauron, and the Question of Genre

Abstract

The notion that certain of Racine's tragedies contain comic elements is not a new one. The suggestion that Andromaque has a latent comic structure has been proposed by Harald Weinrich; at least two other critics, Philip Butler and Armand HelmreichMarsilien, have written of isolated comic incidents in the play.1 In an article that replies to what he considered to be a disturbing trend, Raymond Picard points out that no situation or gesture should be considered inherently comical.2 Picard sharply criticizes Bergson's theory of laughter along with the arguments of Weinrich et al., and he stresses the importance of perspective both the audience's and the author's in determining whether a play is a comedy or a tragedy, or whether it can be given a genre designation at all. Picard ends his article by calling for an exploration of one of the essential problems of the concept of genre in the theatre: why do the same psychological postures, the same sorts of behavior, show up in both comedies and tragedies? Curiously enough, although his article appeared in 1969, nowhere does Picard mention one theory of comedy that attempts to answer his question, Charles Mauron's Psychocritique du genre comique (Paris: Corti, 1964). Perhaps Picard chose not to mention Mauron's work because Mauron's definition of genre emphasizes the unconscious origins of both tragedy and comedy, whereas Picard insists on the conscious intentions of the author as well as the