FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
scholars, below the nobles and the clergy, he practiced his profession
with a good conscience, convinced that he had come too late, that
everything had been said, and that the only proper thing to do was
to re-say it agreeably. He conceived the glory which awaited
him
as
a feeble reflection of hereditary titles, and if he expected it to be
eternal it was because he did not even suspect that the society of
his readers might be overthrown by social changes. The permanence
of the royal family seemed to guarantee his own renown.
Yet, almost in spite of himself, the mirror which he modestly
offered to his readers was magical; it enthralled and compromised.
Even though everything had been done to offer them only a flatter–
ing and complying image, more subjective than objective, and more
internal than external,
this
image remained none the less a work of
art,
that is, it had its basis in the freedom of the author and
was an appeal to the freedom of the reader. Since
it
was beau–
tiful, it was made of glass; aesthetic distance put it out of reach.
Impossible to be delighted with it, to find any comfortable warmth
in it, any discrete indulgence. Even though it was made up of the
commonplaces of the age and that facile complacency which united
contemporaries like an umbilical cord, it was supported by a freedom
and thereby another kind of objectivity. It was
itself,
to be sure, that
the elite found in the mirror, but itself as it would have seen itself had
it gone to the extreme of severity. It was not congealed into an object
by the gaze of the Other, for neither the peasant nor the workingman
had yet become the
Other
for it, and the
art
of reflective presentation
which characterizes the art of the seventeenth century was a strictly
internal process; however, it pushed to the limits each person's efforts
to see into himself clearly; it was a perpetual Cogito.
To be sure, it did not call idleness, oppression, or parasitism into
question, because these aspects of the ruling class are revealed only
to observers who place themselves outside of it; hence the image which
was reflected back to it was strictly psychological. But spontaneous
behavior, by passing to the reflective state, loses its innocence and
the excuse of immediacy; one must be responsible for it, or one must
alter it.
It
was, to be sure, a world of courtesy and ceremony which
w.as offered to the reader, but he was already emerging from this
world since he was invited to know it and to recognize himself in it.
In this sense, Racine was not wrong when he said apropos of
Phedre
321
