Théâtre, tome 2 : Electre ou la chute des masques - Le Mystère d'Alceste - Qui n'a pas son Minotaure

by Marguerite Yourcenar

THEATRE II Electre ou la chute des masques, Le Mystère d'Alceste et Qui n'a pas son Minotaure? Constituent un groupe de pièces inspirées à Marguerite Yourcenar par la légende grecque. A son tour, et prenant la suite d'une longue chaîne d'auteurs qui se sont succédé à travers les siècles, elle imprime sa propre vision aux vieux mythes. Electre mariée à un paysan, vit avec lui dans une misérable hutte où elle attire sa mère pour la mettre à mort, avec l'aide de son frère Oreste. Mais tout changera de face quand elle découvrira qu'Oreste est fils, non d'Agamemnon, mais d'Egisthe, et de la race de l'assassin, de l'usurpateur, et non de la victime. Le Mystère d'Alceste, consacré à l'émouvante aventure d'Alceste, sacrifiant sa vie par amour conjugal et ramené d'entre les morts par Hercule, insiste sur les aspects tragicomiques de la légende, sur la ronde grotesque des importuns et des indifférents autour de la morte et du jeune veuf. Mais il souligne aussi les côtés sacrés de ce récit mythique, par lesquels il s'apparente aux mystères du Moyen Age. Il évoque le drame de la mort et le miracle de la résurrection. Qui n'a pas son Minotaure? divertissement allégorique, satirique parfois, s'inspire librement de l'aventure de Thésée au Labyrinthe. Les thèmes de l'imposture et de l'erreur, du destin et du salut s'entrecroisent. Thésée aux prises avec le Minotaure combat sans le savoir avec soi-même. Ariane finit par rencontrer un étrange personnage appelé Bacchus-Dieu.

231 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Marguerite Yourcenar, original name Marguerite de Crayencour, was a french novelist, essayist, poet and short-story writer who became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (French Academy), an exclusive literary institution with a membership limited to 40.
She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947. The name “Yourcenar” is an imperfect anagram of her original name, “Crayencour.”

Yourcenar’s literary works are notable for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. In her most important books she re-creates past eras and personages, meditating thereby on human destiny, morality, and power. Her masterpiece is Mémoires d'Hadrien, a historical novel constituting the fictionalized memoirs of that 2nd-century Roman emperor. Her works were translated by the American Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s secretary and life companion.
Yourcenar was also a literary critic and translator.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the Greek Mythology-based plays I wish I had studied alongside Jean Giraudoux and Jean Anouilh. In other words, Marguerite Yourcenar should be in the Jean squad.

Yourcenar wrote these three plays between the 40s and 60s. Only the third brings up a direct connection to WWII, like Giraudoux and Anouilh's takes on the Trojan War and Antigone.

First, "Electra (or the Masks Come Off)":
Yourcenar puts a really interesting twist on the Oresteia story with a claustrophobic sense of us vs. them. Electra, Orestes, and Pylades plot with Electra's peasant husband to murder Electra and Orestes' mother, Clytemnestra. This is to avenge Clytemnestra's murder of her husband, Agamemnon (i.e. Electra and Orestes' dad), upon his return from Troy.

Yourcenar spends a lot of time on Electra's misgivings and certitude about various aspects of hidden resistance. Electra is determined when she talks to her brother or her cousin, but with her more hapless (and less informed) husband, she shows doubt and regret. Not about her actions, but about the life she has led in order to obtain revenge, and the life she might have had if circumstances had been different. Electra is painfully aware that she cannot trust anyone outside the small group of people who share both her trauma and her need for closure via revenge. Ultimately, though, she can't even trust her co-conspirators. She and her relatives hide the real plan from her husband, despite his awareness of the general murder plot, and Electra herself hides her misgivings and puts on a front when she talks to Orestes and Pylades.
Things only get worse when the us vs. them division separate the core duo: As it turns out, Orestes isn't his father's child. Instead, he's the son of Clytemnestra's partner in crime: Aegisthus. So even in their successful revenge story, Electra and Orestes are cut off from each other. There is no happy ending, and there are no clear lines between "us" and "them." There will always be a part of our life's arch-nemesis lurking in hidden places.

Second, "The Mystery of Alcestis":
This is Yourcenar's take on the tale of Alcestis, a young queen who sacrifices herself to save her husband Admetus from death. Hercules then stops by the house in between one of his Labors and rescues Alcestis from the underworld. The end.
The version presented here focuses on an uncomfortable (and therefore super interesting) aspect of self-sacrifice, namely: the moments lading up to Alcestis' death. Alcestis knows she is dying and resents this. She feels weaker and hates the fact that her husband does not seem broken up by her decline. Of course he is ( or is he?), but the painful fact is that he WILL continue to live without her, as will everything else. Yourcenar shows us an Alcestis who rages against her own mortality and the fact that she is willing to die while her husband is not. Alcestis will die for someone, but no one will die for her.
In turn, Alcestis' husband Admetus is angry that his last moments with his wife are full of rage. He wants to remember Alcestis the way he knew her before she became ill, and he literally ASKS her to try and put aside her anger so he can keep a nice image of her. Admetus is, more than anything, a man ravaged by guilt. He knows he can live without Alcestis, and he hates himself for it, just as he hates his own weakness and inability to save her from death. Hercules is the foil in all this: he's brutish and kind of a himbo, but at the end of the day, he's an outsider who can use his powers for good and restore the happy couple to a version of themselves destroyed by illness and grief.

Third and finally, we have "Who doesn't have a Minotaur?":
This is the earliest of the three plays, rewritten over several years but initially drafted during and immediately after WWII and the Nazi occupation.

A primer on Theseus, Greek Mythology's worst hero. Theseus kills the Minotaur in King Minos' labyrinth with the help of Princess Ariadne, then maroons Ariadne on an island and later marries her younger sister, Phaedra. Later still, he kills his son Hypolitus after Phaedra falsely accuses Hypolitus of attempting to assault her (or just flat-out assaulting her). Other asshole things Theseus did (b/c he has a pretty extensive set of myths) include: kidnapping & assaulting a pre-pubescent Helen of Sparta (future Helen of Troy), taking an amazon as a prisoner of war and forcing her to have his son (Hypolitus, remember him?), and also causing the death of his father by forgetting to put white sails on his ship home (his dad sees the black sails and kills himself out of despair, thinking Theseus is dead). It's debatable whether Theseus "forgot" or purposefully kept the black sails so he could inherit the throne.

Yourcenar's take explores Theseus' relationship to his hero status in light of his supreme dickishness. It also examines the concept of guilt, collaboration, and moral purity. "Collaboration" in French, especially during and post-WWII France, is a SUPER loaded word. It has a very negative connotation and is the key word to describe France's complicity during the Nazi occupation. The idea here is this: Phaedra works with her father King Minos to serve innocent victims to the Minotaur. Ariadne, who keeps back, instead chooses to help Theseus navigate the labyrinth with an escape route. Phaedra is the sullied one (whom Theseus sure loves to slut-shame) and Ariadne is the pure goddess (whom Theseus thinks is worthy of his attention but not his physical desires).
The key here is that there is no Minotaur. Rather, Theseus enters the Labyrinth and is confronted with the voices of his past and future selves. In the dark, he defends his actions but also calls out the villainy of the people he does not always recognize as himself. The monster is within him. He is both aware and ignorant of his monstrosity. Theseus lives in denial, basically, even after realizing he is a (to put it mildly) gross person.
But Ariadne, praised for her purity, gives us a key point of the play: is she really pure when she was never forced to collaborate? When Ariadne insists on Phaedra coming with them back to Athens and Theseus protests on the basis of Phaedra's complicity with her father, Ariadne retorts: "If Phaedra did not exist, Ariadne would likely be Phaedra." Ariadne wonders whether she would truly be morally upstanding and resistant if she were in Phaedra's place, or if she had not had someone else be there to be coerced into a morally contemptible situation. Ariadne could keep at bay because Phaedra existed.
Not to project too much of the author's life onto the play, but it may be worthwhile to note that Yourcenar left France in 1939, less than a year before its invasion by Nazi Germany. As a semi-openly bisexual, I doubt she felt safe staying in Europe. She moved to the United States to live with her English translator (and later life partner/wife), professor of literature Grace Frick.
I wonder if, in some way, Yourcenar felt guilt about the post-war situation in France, where a major cleanup took place. Men who collaborated with the Nazis were put to death, and women who had slept with Nazi soldiers & officers for extra money or rations were mobbed and had their heads shaved and marked with the swastika. They were deemed sluts and traitors.
I wonder if Yourcenar's play is a form of response to the eagerness of calling out the collaborator and making a big show of "othering" those who collaborated. Or rather, SOME of those who collaborated. France later recognized its much larger complicity in the Occupation, but at the time it was eager to make an example of a few people and otherwise minimize the systemic collaboration that took place on less visibly monstrous levels (see: anti-semistism in France even before and after WWII).
Away from it all in the US, Yourcenar didn't live in fear for her life. She didn't worry about having to denounce or rescue anyone fleeing Nazi persecution or the French authorities. She didn't have to worry about men controlling her access to food or resisting pressure from her community to obtain favors from authority figures. Did she wonder whether she, really, was a "purer" person compared to those who were condemned after the war? Did she wonder if the men hailed as heroes, like De Gaulle, were really as heroic as they claimed? Or were their flaws hidden for the sake of public morale, or maybe out of some public desire to have a hero carry them into a hopefully more peaceful era? The French government didn't recognize the Resistance's significant foreign component until as late as the 90s. There were, among others, atheists, communists, Italians, Poles, Jews, Armenians, Maghrebians, and Russians who stood up to the Nazis and fought for freedom. They weren't recognized in the immediate post-war, possibly due to a fear of the rise of communism. They were cast aside, in a manner reminiscent of Ariadne's marooning (although in this play, Ariadne realizes that Theseus is a monster and refuses to continue to Athens with him, effectively choosing to stay alone on an island rather than live a lie with a fake hero).

I don't think the last play fits exactly onto the post-war anxiety about moral purity and collaboration/culpability, but it certainly resonates with some core concerns of the period. It asks us to look at the monster inside and whether we and others are truly as morally "good" as we claim to be compared to those we condemn. It's not a moral relativism statement, but more of a point about monstrosity sometimes hiding behind the luster of heroic legends, or also a recognition of invisible privilege. The awareness of our own fallibility is important, even if it's not the only thing to consider. Lose that awareness, and you might fail to see the monster growing bigger inside of you, like Theseus and his interior Minotaur.

Overall, I'm really glad that I tracked down these three plays. Yourcenar's work here is thought-provoking and compelling on both narrative and thematic levels. I especially loved the individual introductions she wrote for each play, essentially including a master class on her writing process and the research done on the various mythical components (not to mention her ideas about previous playwrights' takes on the Oresteia).
I'm sad that I never got to read these plays at school. The French program includes so few female authors, and Yourcenar's plays are incredibly accessible and ripe for discussion, especially in the context of French high school programs' emphasis on WWII and Cold War periods.

Enthusiastically recommended to anyone interested in 20th-century adaptations of Greek drama and mythology, or alternatively, politically engaged drama from the same period with an emphasis on the effects of trauma, self-aggrandizement, and survivor's guilt.

[Guida Al·lès · Rating 3 out of 5]

ELECTRA O LA CAÍDA DE LAS MÁSCARAS

CLITEMNESTRA (sobre Agamemnon): "Se puede esperar cualquier cosa de un hombre embrutecido por diez años de guerra, de ocupación colonial y de rapiña, quemado por fiebres, podrido por enfermedades desconocidas (...) Sólo sus sueños ambiciosos y sus proyectos comerciales prolongaron durante diez años una guerra inútil. Aquí nadie ignoraba que cada derrota lo enriquecía tanto como una derrota."

Aquí Orestes és fill secret d'Egist. Pílades està enamorat d'Electra. I Egist és l'amant intelligent de Clitemnestra. El final, molt bo.

[Stars, and Such · Rating 5 out of 5]

MAGNIFIQUE!! Quelle pièce. Féministe et meurtrière comme Électre elle-même.

[Natalie Petchnikow · Rating 4 out of 5]

En réalité "Théâtre Tome 1" :
Rendre à César
La petite sirène
Le dialogue dans la marécage

[Donal · Rating 3 out of 5]

That's "Théâtre II". So far I've only read "Qui N'a Pas Son Minotaure?" which is on the Theseus legend.