The word esprit has proved problematic for English translators of Racine. A sample of four separate lines—which will be analysed in detail in a moment—threw up no fewer than ten alternative English equivalents in published translations¹: in no case were the translators unanimous as to the most appropriate English word to use, and no translator used the same English word in all four contexts. In the light of Cotgrave's treatment of the word esprit, we may have some sympathy with their dilemma, but this initial observation does clarify the nature of our investigation. The question: “What contribution does the notion of esprit make to Racine's portrayal of human consciousness?” is a question not about anthropology, still less about biochemistry: it is a question about language, and it is hard to think of a better example with which to illustrate the Lacanian notion that the development of language consists not of finding words to encapsulate human experience, but rather of finding functions for words to fulfil. What does the French language need the word esprit for, if âme covers those aspects of human experience that can be labelled “spiritual” and raison those that can be labelled “intellectual”?

Consider first Agamemnon's cry: “De quel frivole soin mon esprit s'embarrasse?” (Iphigénie, 1453). We must not, to be sure, seek to read too much into isolated words. Many considerations of sound and metre enter into the poet's creative process, and it is unlikely that Racine agonised consciously over his decision to use esprit here (still less that he consulted his Descartes in considering which term was most appropriate) although it may be noted that several different potential versions of the line would still scan. If Agamemnon said “mon âme” or “mon ombre” instead of “mon esprit”, the image would be clarified of a temporary emotional lapse, subsequently overcome by an intellectual process (since it is after all the mind that must deliver the judgment “frivole”). If he said “ma raison”, the line would specify that his dilemma was above all a mental tussle². British and American translators find it harder to retain an ambiguity between intellectual and spiritual interpretations of the word esprit—it is generally necessary to make a firm choice between “mind” and “spirit”. In the given example, Knight and Solomon opt for “mind”, Lockert prefers “soul”, while Cairncross avoids the problem by taking esprit as a metonym for the whole self: “But in what petty cares am I embroiled?”—a solution which may seem like a cop-out, although the problem of translating French Alexandrines into English pentameters must make such increased condensation tempting. Of course, if it had been what he meant, Racine could have said: “De quel frivole soin, hélas, je m'embarrasse?” which does seem tame in comparison with the dramatic representation of a split personality conveyed by Racine's actual line, although no tamer, perhaps, than Pauline's expression of a similar sentiment in Polyeucte (749): “Mais que je me figure une étrange chimère.”

In translating the line “Jamais de tant de soins mon esprit agité” (Iphigénie, 1087) where the sense of the word esprit is broadly similar, Solomon uses “spirit” instead of “mind”, while each of the other three translators cited above uses the same word as before, Cairncross again condensing the thought to produce “Never by such worries buffeted Was I [so jealous …]”. That sort of solution is not available to the translator in the more interesting cases where the use of esprit is not precisely a metonymy, but is presented as one part of human consciousness that can be conceived as separate from the whole personality, as in Phèdre's: “Où laissé-je égarer mes vœux et mon esprit?” (Phèdre, 180). Here, all the translators agree that it is a mental lapse which distresses the heroine: esprit is translated as “wits” (Muir), “reason” (Cairncross) and “mind” (Knight), while in Solomon's phrase “thoughts and feelings” it is legitimate to assume that “thoughts” is the semantic equivalent of esprit, the order of the ideas having been inverted for reasons of rhythm. Later in the play, when Phèdre makes it explicit that it is her intellect that has failed her—“Où ma raison se va-t-elle égarer?” (Phèdre, 1264)—the translators, whether instinctively or deliberately, feel the need to use a different word: Cairncross, having used “reason” in line 180, makes Phèdre rather flatly state “I have lost my mind”, while the other three switch to “reason” for line 1264. In dealing with line 180, only Solomon retains the clear sense that Phèdre's wandering wits have escaped from the proper control of the ego: “Where do I let my thoughts and feelings wander?” The other published versions consulted present the mind more simply as straying, without any reference to assumptions about what should control it:

Where have my wits been wandering?

(Muir)

Whither have my desires, my reason strayed?

(Cairncross)

Where are my thoughts, my wandering mind?

(Knight)

A final example, “Et déjà son esprit a devancé son âge” (Athalie, 176) provides a more genuine ambiguity between the English senses of “mind” and “spirit”, although the versions consulted all tend towards the former: it is Joas's “mind” (Muir), “wisdom” (Cairncross), “understanding” (Knight) or “ability” (Solomon) that has outstripped his age. Again, the emphasis is on one integral part of the human personality that can be identified as separate from the whole, and indeed this image of the self as divided into separate, often conflicting, parts is not uncommon in Racine:

Je sentis contre moi mon cœur se déclarer.

Iphigénie, 499

Burrhus conduit son cœur, Sénèque son esprit.

Britannicus, 1470

Lorsque j'ai de mes sens abandonné l'empire.

Phèdre, 761

Racine is even guilty at times of mixing metaphors in his presentation of such a division. It is of course our own look-out, and not Racine's fault, if we interpret a figure of speech in an inappropriately literal sense, but the poet does have a certain duty to avoid the ridicule that might arise from misunderstanding, as in “D'un éclat si honteux je rougirais dans l'âme” (La Thébaïde, 1124) or “Est-ce donc votre cœur qui vient de nous parler?” (Iphigénie, 284). Oreste, too, in his moment of agonised anagnorisis, exclaims: “Quoi? j'étouffe en mon cœur la raison qui m'éclaire …” (Andromaque, 1569)—a conception of which it would not be easy to make an anatomical drawing, although (as Alain Viala pointed out in discussion of this paper) it is less alien to seventeenth-century than to modern medical understanding.

It is precisely in the context of anagnorisis that the questions about consciousness and motivation raised by this separation of the moi into discrete elements come into sharpest focus. Racine, as an almost obsessive disciple of Aristotle (or as someone anxious to project such an image), was clearly influenced by all the master's critical concepts, peripeteia, catharsis and of course hamartia, but the effect on him of anagnorisis does seem to have been more haunting and creative. All Racine's greatest tragic creations agonise above all about their sense of identity, and do so frequently in speeches in which they quite consciously set against each other mental, emotional and instinctive impulses—mon cœur, ma raison, mes sens, mon âme and somewhere in the midst of them mon esprit—and pose, at times quite explicitly, the question: “Which of these impulses represents ‘the real me’?” It is no doubt the essential ethical task of tragedy to explore such questions of individuality, autonomy and will, and the related question of responsibility for action. A striking example of a speech of this sort is Agamemnon's first explanation of his dilemma to Arcas and to the audience in the opening scene of Iphigénie (63-89).

                                                            Surpris, comme tu peux penser,
Je sentis dans mon corps tout mon sang se glacer.
Je demeurai sans voix, et n'en repris l'usage
Que par mille sanglots qui se firent passage.
Je condamnai les dieux, et sans plus rien ouïr,
Fis vœu sur leurs autels de leur désobéir.
Que n'en croyais-je alors ma tendresse alarmée?
Je voulais sur-le-champ congédier l'armée. (70)
Ulysse, en apparence approuvant mes discours,
De ce premier torrent laissa passer le cours.
Mais bientôt, rappelant sa cruelle industrie,
Il me représenta l'honneur et la patrie. […]
Moi-même (je l'avoue avec quelque pudeur) (79)
Charmé de mon pouvoir, et plein de ma grandeur,
Ce nom de roi des rois et de chef de la Grèce
Chatouillait de mon cœur l'orgueilleuse faiblesse.
Pour comble de malheur, les dieux toutes les nuits,
Dès qu'un léger sommeil suspendait mes ennuis,
Vengeant de leurs autels le sanglant privilège, (85)
Me venaient reprocher ma pitié sacrilège,
Et présentant la foundre à mon esprit confus,
Le bras déjà levé, menaçaient mes refus.
Je me rendis […]

On the surface, the speech expresses Agamemnon's confidence in an integrated decision-making personality: first-person pronouns—strikingly in a context which is supposed to consider le moi to be haïssable³—occur ten times, once strengthened by “moi-même”, and first-person possessives a further ten. Yet in his mental turmoil, Agamemnon is divided into segments even more dramatically than in the briefer extracts already considered: moi, corps, tendresse, cœur, esprit—who, as we asked before, is the real Agamemnon? His initial reaction to the oracle is identified as a physical one (64), and leads to an emotional assertion of will (“Je condamnai”, “Je voulais”). This instinctive position is overcome by a mixture of reason and of other, conflicting, emotions: a sense of honour, patriotism and shame aroused by Ulysse's arguments; Agamemnon's own ambition and sense of self-esteem; and finally the fear engendered by nightmares. Both impulses, curiously, are defined in terms that suggest emotional weakness: the desire to save Iphigénie is personified as Agamemnon's “tendresse”, while the urge to feed his ambition at her expense becomes the “faiblesse de (son) cœur”. As he remembers the opposition between them he distances himself with an expression of shame (79) from an impulse which he nevertheless emphatically (almost, dare one say it, ungrammatically) ascribes to “himself”. Subsequently, he expresses distress at the outcome: it is his mind, as he speaks line 69, which regrets the triumph of argument over impulse⁴.

The use of the word esprit within the speech raises a slightly different sphere of reference, closer to the English word “spirit”. Agamemnon's dreams are visions presented to his mind, when it is not under the control of his will, by active, hostile and calculating supernatural forces (83-8). This use of the word esprit—that bit of human consciousness that supernatural forces get at in dreams—is common enough in Racine and elsewhere: “Hélas! l'état horrible où le ciel me l'offrit Revient à tout moment effrayer mon esprit” (Athalie, 242) or “Et mon esprit troublé le voit encor la nuit” (Esther, 436). In the “Preface” to Athalie, too, Racine states that Joad “voit en esprit le funeste changement de Joas”, and we shall return shortly to that experience.

Agamemnon's decision is expressed (89) in a formula, “Je me rendis”, which seems natural enough, but which takes on more complex and tantalising overtones in our context. He (some part or parts of his consciousness) has overcome himself (some other part or parts), but it remains hard to pin down which combination of emotional, spiritual, intellectual or even physical impulses have given rise to a decision which is in any case provisional. It is at any rate very different from the Stoical notion of self-control exemplified by Cornelian characters. Félix, in Polyeucte, facing a similar dilemma, also expresses a division of his personality: “On ne sait pas les maux dont mon cœur est atteint: De pensers sur pensers mon âme est agitée” (1004-5). He is better than Agamemnon at producing stark antitheses:

J'en ai de violents, j'en ai de pitoyables.

(1010)

[…]
J'aime ce malheureux que j'ai choisi pour gendre,
Je hais l'aveugle erreur qui le vient de surprendre.

(1013-4)

And the climax of his speech certainly evokes a divided personality: “Ainsi tantôt pour lui je m'expose au trépas, Et tantôt je le perds pour ne me perdre pas” (1019-20). In the end, Agamemnon and Félix reach equivalent decisions, but what for Agamemnon is a defeat—“Je me rendis”—is for Félix a triumph:

Je me fais violence, Albin, mais je l'ai dû
[…]
Et certes, sans l'horreur de ses derniers blasphèmes,
Qui m'ont rempli soudain de colère et d'effroi,
J'aurais eu de la peine à triompher de moi.

(1685, 1696-8)

His reason and will-power need the support of an emotional impulse to carry out the action which his conscience dictates, but his defiant joy that he has achieved this contrasts with Agamemnon's continuing anguish. Félix has remained a self-contained personality, prey to an external temptation which he successfully resists, whereas Agamemnon portrays the disintegration of his sense of self, and what is essentially the same outcome is presented from a totally different, and much more tragically haunting, perspective.

A different part of Racine's context, as he ponders the nature of human consciousness and decision-making, is provided by Descartes, even though Racine's allegiance to the mind-set of antiquity may at first seem to imply a resistance to much of what is essential to cartesianism. Antoine Artaud in 1641 claimed that Descartes's arguments ran the risk of being associated with the platonic definition of a human being as “un esprit usant ou se servant du corps”⁵, and this seems to support the conventional analysis of cartesian dualism. Descartes himself, however, took pains to deny the accusation⁶: “Dans la […] sixième Méditation, où j'ai parlé de la distinction de l'esprit d'avec le corps, j'ai aussi montré qu'il lui est substantiellement uni”. Elsewhere he grapples with the definition of this union⁷:

J'avais décrit l'âme raisonnable […]; il ne suffit pas qu'elle soit logée dans le corps humain, ainsi qu'un pilote en son navire […], mais qu'il est besoin qu'elle soit jointe et unie plus étroitement avec lui pour avoir des sentiments et des appétits, et ainsi composer un vrai homme.

“Un vrai homme”, then, consists of a body plus a soul (which here incorporates the intellect—“l'âme raisonnable”) plus something else, a source of sensation and appetite beyond the purely physical. Descartes does not at this point use the word esprit⁸, but he has a concept struggling to find expression, while Racine, as we began by suggesting, has a word looking for something to mean. Senecan Stoicism had preached that desires could and should be controlled by a will that was somehow conceived as separate from the material appetites and sensations of the body: “Les surprises de sens que la raison surmonte”. Descartes seems to anticipate Racine in denying this separation: what defines human experience is our inability either to escape from or to control our material functions, and esprit is that which anticipates stimuli as well as responding to them, whether gloriously as in the perspective of Corneille or destructively as in that of Racine.

This element of control, or the perceived need for it, complicates still further the anxiety Racinian characters feel about the nature of their identity. It is not enough to have a secure sense of self: Racinian characters, like the rest of us, cling also to the belief that this self should in some sense be under their own control, and feel, more acutely than most of us, that the whole world is liable to disintegrate when that sense of control is lost. Whatever combination of mind or intellect, soul or spirit, reason or instinct, constitutes the personality, the individual attaches fundamental importance to a sense of autonomy and freedom, even though this may be incompatible with equally strongly-held intuitive beliefs in cause-and-effect, in the fixity of the past and of the laws of nature, or in other forces inhibiting our genuine control over the outcome of our actions⁹. Racinian characters are particularly aware of the fear that if they do not control their consciousness, something else will, and they are therefore particularly prone to the sensation that some outside force has indeed seized hold of them—or else, as some spectators may prefer to put it, they are particularly prone to present such an experience as an excuse for actions or feelings about which they feel shame. The balance between these two reactions—on the one hand, “Poor things, they behaved badly but they couldn't help it”, versus on the other hand, “Silly things, why could they not see what they were doing?”—is of course crucial for the operation of Aristotelian hamartia, without which Racine and Aristotle agree there can be no catharsis. There is a close relationship between the tone in which Racine's characters express such a sense of helplessness and the degree of sympathy which we feel towards them. At one extreme, Agamemnon expresses fatalism as pompous self-justification: “J'ai fait ce que m'ordonne un devoir légitime” (Iphigénie, 1161). At the other, Oreste honestly, if subconsciously, admits that in submitting to destiny he is actively embracing fate as though he were a helpless blind man—which his mind knows he is not: “Je me livre en aveugle au destin qui m'entraîne” (Andromaque, 98). Somewhere between the two come Eriphile, who tries to distance herself from her decision to let fate take its course, but avoids giving a specific definition of the nature of the necessity which compels her to do so—“Au sort qui me traînait il fallut consentir” (Iphigénie, 515) and Joad, the subjugation of whose will to a supernatural force is actually witnessed: “Est-ce l'Esprit divin qui s'empare de moi?” (Athalie, 1130).

Although this sounds like a rhetorical question it is of course answered: “C'est lui-même!”, so the human spirit is in this case categorically taken over, made very publicly aware of its helplessness in the face of the supernatural. And this—if anything does—turns Joad into a sympathetic character, crushed by the sudden perception of responsibility allied to impotence, and becoming a weak shadow of his former arrogantly secure self, weeping and hesitating every bit as much as Josabet and (at times) Athalie¹⁰. This contrasts with the effect of the Holy Spirit on Polyeucte, who is transformed by it from a mere mortal to a superman.

What began as an academic exercise, an almost playful discussion of the correlation between English and French ways of expressing intangible concepts, has become a discussion of ethics, Emboldened by François Lagarde's opening remarks about the need for societies such as NASSCFL to ensure that their work is perceived as relevant to the concerns of contemporary society, I would end by reasserting the value of classical—élite—literature, if properly used and integrated, in helping society to face such questions as have been raised here about human individuality, responsibility and freedom. These are questions which deeply exercise the public and the media in contemporary Britain. Many kinds of selfish and evil behaviour are excused, condoned, exonerated or mitigated on the basis of appeals to genetic or environmental determinism, or to the manipulation of the individual by more powerful forces. What was until recently looked down on in Britain as the American habit of suing tobacco companies for the effects of their products when knowingly purchased by adults, is catching on across the Atlantic. At the same time, activites like the human genome project provide scope for widespread intervention in the manner in which human consciousness may in the future be allowed to operate, even to exist. While I would not claim that readers of this publication would necessarily make better contributions than trained lawyers or scientists in consideration of these issues, I do not want any legislators or sociologists to operate in those fields who have not, as a compulsory corequisite of their training in jurisprudence, social science or biochemistry, received a thorough grounding in the investigation of the human spirit as revealed and analysed by Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine.

Notes

1. Jean Racine, Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah, translated and introduced by John Cairncross (Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963); Jean Racine, Four Greek Plays (Andromache, Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah), translated, with an introduction and notes by R. C. Knight (Cambridge: CUP, 1982); Racine's Mid-Career Tragedies (Bérénice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iphigénie), translated with an introduction by Lacy Lockert (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958); Jean Racine, Five Plays (Andromache, Britannicus, Berenice, Phaedra, Athaliah), translated with an introduction by Kenneth Muir (Macgibbon and Kee, 1960); Jean Racine, Complete Plays, translated with a foreward and notes by Samuel Solomon (2 vols., New York: Random House, 1967).

2. The statistically minded reader may note that in the tragedies, Racine uses the word esprit 36 times, esprits a further 25 times, raison 41 times, and âme 160 times. The word esprit occurs 21 times in the nine non-biblical tragedies, 15 times in the two biblical ones and 33 times in all the other works. See B. C. Freeman and A. Batson, Concordance du théâtre et des poésies de Jean Racine (2 vols., New York: Cornell UP, 1968).

3. Rousseau noted (La Nouvelle Héloïse, seconde partie, lettre xvii) that Molière and Racine were indeed exceptional in this regard: “[…] les pièces de Racine et de Molière exceptées, le je est presque aussi scrupuleusement banni de la scène française que des écrits de Port-Royal”. (J.-J. Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (5 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1961), II, 253.)

4. It was during this session of the Austin conference that Jean Emelina pointed out how sad an outcome it would be if a conference of academics were forced to conclude that the esprit was a disruptive force, undermining the tranquility of the cœur and the âme!

5. Part of the Fourth Set of Objections to Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. See Descartes, Œuvres et Lettres, ed. A. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 426.

6. Ed. cit., p. 446.

7. Discours de la Méthode, cinquième partie, ed.cit., p. 166.

8. Discussion here is of course complicated by the intrusion of Latin into the linguistic problem defined at the beginning of the paper. J. Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) lists neither esprit nor spirit as a headword; references in his index are confined to “animal spirits” which (p. 13) he admits is a “misleading name” for “purely physical items”. For a fuller discussion of Descartes's treatment of the notion of esprit, see also J. Cottingham, “The Self and the Body: Alienation and Integration in Cartesian Ethics”, in Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 17 (1995), 1-13.

9. See J. M. Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 13. Of the enormous philosophical bibliography on free will and moral responsibility, that work and J. Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) have proved particularly useful and accessible.

10. On this parallel, see E. Forman (ed), Racine: appraisal and reappraisal (Bristol, 1991), p. 107.