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Hand, Heart, and Mind: The Complexity of the Heroic Quest in Le Cid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

William O. Goode
William O. Goode*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
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Abstract

Critical reactions to the denouement of Corneille’s Le Cid are generally divided between the comic notion of a complete and happy union of Rodrigue and Chimène and the tragic notion of the impossibility of their marriage. However, it is possible to incorporate the two views into an interpretation of the play that emphasizes in the ambivalence of this ending the complexity of Corneille’s vision of man’s possibilities and limitations. Rodrigue represents the heroic order of humanity; Chimène and her mirror image, the Infante, exemplify the common order. The representation of the heroic quest in Le Cid not only portrays Rodrigue’s triumph but also depicts the women’s failures. Heroism and frailty coexist and interact; and it is essential to note that in the different outcomes of Rodrigue’s, Chimène’s, and the Infante’s efforts to unite hand, heart, and mind respectively, Le Cid offers a complex vision of humanity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 44 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1976

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References

Notes

1 “Le poëte, voulant que ce poëme finît heureusement, pour suivre les règles de la tragi-comédie, fait encore en cet endroit que Chimène foule aux pieds celles que la nature a établies,” Les Sentiments de l'Académie Françoise sur la tragi-comédie du Cid. rpt. in Charles Marty-Laveaux, éd., Œuvres de P. Corneille, 12 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1862–68), xii, 482. Corneille's adversary Scudéry is equally convinced of the scandalously happy ending (“il est vrai que Chimène épousa le Cid, mais qu'il n'est point vraisemblable qu'une fille d'honneur épouse le meurtrier de son père”); therefore he concludes that “Chimène est une parricide,” Observations sur Le Cid, rpt. in Œuvres de P. Corneille, xii, 443, 444.

2 Œuvres de P. Corneille, iii, 93. All quotations from Corneille are taken from the Marty-Laveaux ed. Georges Couton has studied Corneille's changing attitude in his critical writings toward his own drama and concludes: “En vérité, le Cid a comporté deux dénouements successifs: celui de 1637 … implique après délai le mariage. Celui de 1660 laisse —dit Corneille—le spectateur dans l'incertitude': à lui de prendre les responsabilités de l'auteur et de choisir pour les amants entre le mariage et la séparation,” Réalisme de Corneille: Deux éludes—La Clef de Mélite. Réalités dans le Cid (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1953), p. 102. However, Gordon Pocock, studying Corneille's textual revisions, arrives at the opposite conclusion: “Corneille revised Le Cid more radically than any of his other tragedies, and it is noteworthy how often he diluted statements which made the separation of the lovers appear inevitable.” Corneille and Racine: Problems of Tragic Form (Cambridge, Eng. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), p. 34. A divergence between Corneille the author and Corneille the critic or between Couton's and Pocock's readings need not bother us. Instead, this serves as another reminder of the basic dichotomy of critical reaction to the denouement of the play and as a suggestion that an explanation for this dichotomy perhaps lies elsewhere than in Couton and Pocock's notion of a hesitant, uncertain author.

3 Le Sentiment de l'amour dans l’œuvre de Pierre Corneille (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 178, 179. This tragic viewpoint is shared by Harold C. Ault: “the real tragedy of le Cid, at least to modern eyes, lies in the fact that in spite of Corneille's ambiguous ending, Chimène and Rodrigue are for ever separated” (“The Dénouement of ‘Le Cid’: A Further Note.” Modern Language Review, 48, 1953, 54).

4 Corneille et la dialectique du héros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p. 128.

5 “The Denouement of Le Cid,” French Studies, 14 (1960), 147. This article is the basis for Nelson's discussion of Le Cid in his Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); and although the sentence cited does not appear in the book, the general argument there remains one of the transcendence of natural love over love-as-honor. Also convinced of the victory of love over duty in the character of Chimène is P. J. Yarrow: “After every effort to do what she thinks she ought, she makes, in reaction, increasingly greater concessions to her love, so that the final concession, the acceptance of the marriage, is only the logical conclusion of the series” (“The Denouement of ‘Le Cid,‘ ” Modern Language Review, 50, 1955, 272). The same sentence appears, only slightly altered, in his Corneille (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 182.

6 The word “ambivalent” is used here in the sense employed by Lawrence E. Harvey in his “Corneille's Horace: A Study in Tragic and Artistic Ambivalence,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature Presented to Morris Bishop, ed. Jean-Jacques Demorest (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 65–97. For Harvey it is impossible to term the hero of this drama either a hero or a villain, and for this reason he sees “ambivalence as essential to the very meaning and structure of this tragedy” (p. 71). The same complexity of the human condition is also depicted in Le Cid, I believe; and this ambivalence would seem to be a more satisfying esthetic explanation of the denouement of the drama than Couton's idea of two separate endings.

7 See A. J. Krailsheimer, Studies in Self-Interest from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 56. Critics like Krailsheimer tend to derive their view of the Cornelian world from a consideration of the hero alone, thus ignoring the lesser inhabitants of this world. It may well be true that for the solipsistic hero these inferior beings have no existence, but this attitude should not be shared by the critic concerned with the totality of the drama.

8 The word “mind,” as I use it here, might well be replaced by the word “reason” in the sense assigned to it by Krailsheimer: “The Cornelian character is not a philosopher seeking for abstract truth, but a person urgently requiring guidance in a course of action which brooks no delay. What comes to such a person through ‘raison’ is a recognition that, for instance: ‘L'amour n'est qu'un plaisir, l'honneur est un devoir,‘ a realization and acceptance of a categorical imperative, not a reduction of love or duty to clear and distinct ideas” (p. 58). However, it should be emphasized that this recognition of duty is always a personal one. E.g., the imperative cited here by Krailsheimer expresses Don Diègue's vision of duty, not Rodrigue's. Individual characters, therefore, often present idiosyncratic views of what they should do, which may well be at variance with views held by other characters in the play or by the audience. In fact, in certain cases—witness Camille in Horace and Cléopâtre in Rodogune—the mind fully accepts a path of conduct which is labeled criminal. Consequently, the notion of duty, of what one should do, is highly variable in the Cornelian universe, and the reader must be wary of treating it as a constant from character to character and from play to play.

9 Tile et Bérénice iii.iv.893. This aspect of Corneille's heroes has not of course gone unnoticed by the critics. One excellent statement, among others, of this question is that of Jean Starobinski in his L’Œil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961). Citing lines from Attila, Starobinski concludes: “On voit alors très clairement comment l'idée de gloire, au même titre que les injonctions de la bienséance et du devoir, contraint les êtres à se dédoubler entre un ‘dehors’ et un ‘dedans,’ entre un moi secret et un moi offert à tous les regards” (p. 47). However, the truly heroic stance is one that goes even further and seeks to eliminate this opposition between the private and public beings: “Tout se passe comme si l’âme héroïque ne pouvait supporter à la longue la division du manifeste et du caché, comme s'il lui était intolérable de vivre en état de dédoublement; l'effort par lequel elle réprime ce qu'elle ne consent pas à laisser paraître culmine dans un acte à la fois destructeur et unificateur. Le héros peut alors à nouveau se montrer tout entier, une fois consumé en lui tout l'inavouable, c'est-à-dire tout ce qui était autre que son plus haut moi. Ainsi l'intériorité héroïque vise sa propre destruction et triomphe lorsqu'elle s'ouvre sur une extériorité totale” (p. 49). This heroic elimination of the antithesis between the interior and the exterior, then, is what 1 term the union of hand, heart, and mind.

10 E.g., the heroism of many of Corneille's female characters becomes manifest through a consideration of their unity of hand, heart, and mind. For a well-argued reminder of the importance of this female heroism, see Harriet R. Allentuch, “Reflections on Women in the Theater of Corneille,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 21 (1974), 97–111.

11 Nadal remarks: “Ensemble la vengeance et l'amour ont poussé Rodrigue à tuer; ils ont milité dans le même sens. On ne peut parler de conflit entre le devoir de vengeance et l'amour. La contradiction est dans l'amour même” (p. 164). And this contradiction between natural love and love-as-honor in Le Ciel has been lucidly analyzed by R. J. Nelson (Corneille, pp. 77–81).

12 “Le premier mouvement de l'amour rappelle invinciblement à Rodrigue la personne de Chimène non comme un objet d'estime et d'adoration, mais comme une promesse de jouissance” (Nadal, p. 166). Nelson, noting the triumph in the play of natural love over love-as-honor, points out the “sensuous strain” which persists from Corneille's earliest plays to Le Cid(Corneille, p. 80). And Doubrovsky remarks: “Pour Chimène aussi bien que pour Rodrigue, et pour tous les cornéliens, d'ailleurs, l'amour est, d'abord désir” (p. 106).

13 Here my reading of the play diverges from Nadal's, which portrays Rodrigue at the conclusion as fully aware of the painful division within Chimène: “C'est qu'il garde le sentiment que l'irrémédiable a été accompli, qu'il ne peut plus être pour elle qu'un grief et un désir, qu'une tentation et un tourment” (p. 179). I see no textual justification for Nadal's viewpoint; instead I see Rodrigue's insensitivity to Chimène's suffering as a characteristic shared by others of Corneille's heroes—Horace and Polyeucte are 2 notable examples—who from the heights of their heroic repose often seem cruelly unconcerned by the anguish affecting their loved ones. Indeed, their own unity of hand, heart, and mind necessitates a certain emotional separation from their companions.

14 Couton asks this question: “Chimène a-t-elle pour son père l'amour filial qu'on est tenté de supposer?” (p. 96). And Maria Tastevin sees in Chimène the natural case of a young girl who has reached the age of leaving home and family for a new life with her husband : “Elle veut faire son devoir, et elle le fait en somme, mais elle ne peut s'empêcher de préférer, elle aussi, à tout et à tous, celui qu'elle avait choisi pour son époux,” Les Héroïnes de Corneille (Paris : Edouard Champion, 1924), p. 35. However, a discussion of the nature of Chimène's emotional attachment to her father is somewhat beside the point. The dramatic conflict of Chimène's role does not stem from a heart divided between Gomes and Rodrigue, but rather from a division between her heart, which belongs to Rodrigue, and her intellectual awareness of her position as her father's daughter, the avenger of the family name. On an esthetic plane, therefore, the basic dilemmas of Rodrigue and Chimène are exactly the same.

15 The theme of hope in the play has been studied by J. A. Dainard, “The Motif of Hope in ‘Le Cid,‘ ” French Review, 44 (1970-71), 687–94. Dainard concludes that the “orchestration” of this theme still permits both the optimistic interpretation of union and marriage and the pessimistic interpretation in which the espoir of Rodrigue and the King can be seen as tragic irony. I am arguing, however, that the 2 interpretations coexist as part of the ambivalence of the play; and I would go further and underscore the separation and estrangement between Chimène (and the Infante as well), who harbors no illusions about the future and those who surround her, and hope.

16 Much critical effort has been spent in justifying, generally on thematic grounds, this “unnecessary” character. See, e.g., Donald A. Sellstrom, “The Role of Corneille's Infante,” French Review, 39 (1965-66). 234–40; Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr., “The Role of Corneille's Infanta,” Romance Notes, 7 (1965–66), 42–45; and Eric Leadbetter, “Corneille's Infante: An Explanation of Her Role,” Romance Notes, 11 (1969-70), 581–85. It is my intention to show that the Infante not only faces the same emotional-intellectual dilemma as Chimène (a correspondence noted by Jean Boorsch, “Remarques sur la technique dramatique de Corneille” in Studies by Members of the French Department of Yale University, ed. Albert Feuil-lerat, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1941, p. 121; Yarrow, “Denouement,” p. 272; and Doubrovsky, p. 535), but that her solution to the dilemma offers a third alternative to those posed on the one hand by Chimène and on the other by Rodrigue.

17 I am basing my remarks here on R. J. Nelson's excellent synthesis in “Tragedy and the Tragic,” Arion, 2, No. 4 (1963), 86–95: “the tragic is that relation of values in which a higher value is sacrificed to a lesser value or in which a value is sacrificed to a non-value” (p. 88); “the comic is that relation in which higher value triumphs over lesser value or in which value triumphs over non-value” (p. 93).

18 This thought is repeated in Horace when, toward the end of the play, the old Horace remarks: “Nos plaisirs les plus doux ne vont point sans tristesse” (v.i.1407).