UNE LECTURE PLURIELLE DU THÉÂTRE CORNELIEN
A PLURAL READING OF CORNEILLE’S THEATRE

Summary/Abstract: We strongly believe that the meaning of a literary creation is not unique, it is not established once for all by the author in his work. Therefore, the different aspects of Corneille’s prolific personality, as well as the numerous controversies arisen by his work inspired us to search for multiple models of reading to be applied to The Cid. It is not accidentally that we have chosen the masterpiece of Corneille. The idea came to us while observing the denomination Corneille ascribes to this theatre play. The fact that the playwright himself places his creation between tragedy and comedy, by using the denomination of tragicomedy, prompted us to draw upon it to discover, through reading, a multitude of meanings hidden / exposed / explained by the author. We propose in our presentation the following possible methods of reading, having as reference one or more critical works, which we used to argue (more or less strictly, at least consciously) our successive points of view. The first model of reading that we have proposed in this paper is that of a thematic reading. We analyzed The Cid as an illustration of the theater of adventures, of drama or the theater of the will or of the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. We considered the theme of the struggle as a central one in the play: the struggle of the armies or the struggle of wills fill the content of this theme. In addition to this central theme of the play come the one of blood and that of love, which combine to create the thematic content. Although it dominates the whole play, the theme of the struggle cannot create by itself the general sense, it has to combine with the theme of love, with that of blood, with that of dreams or of reality in order to offer a deeper meaning to the theatre play. In illustrating some concepts of psychoanalysis by acts of the characters of The Cid, we achieved the psychoanalytic reading. Subsequently, we made a comparison between madness and language, following the approach that was suggested to us by Shoshana Felman, in his book Madness and literary matters. In the opinion of this critic, in any literary text there are various forms of madness. Following the reasoning of the critics, we have tried to present the Cid as a text of madness and at the same time as a text on madness. We have tried subsequently to specify the most important aspects of a phenomenological reading of the text, illustrating the four levels of a literary work set by Roman Ingarden and highlighting their combination. The aim of our approach was to specify how an object should be built into a literary work.

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