April 22, 2009
Shock Absorbers
The New York Review of Books piece on Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides links to the full text of translator Anne Carson's preface to Hippolytos.
Too bad it doesn't also include the book's intriguing final essay, "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra". In a first-page footnote, Carson explains that piece's backstory:
The Athenian tragedian Euripides (c. 484 - c. 406 BC) appears to have made two attempts to compose a tragedy on the myth of Phaidra and her disastrous infatuation with her stepson Hippolytos. We have one complete tragedy called Hippolytos (produced 428 BC) and some fragments of an earlier version called Hippolytos Veiled (date of production uncertain).The earlier production was a flop. It seems to have offended audiences by portraying Phaidra as a bold sexual predator who confronts Hippolytos directly with her desire. The later version reimagines Phaidra and her virtue: she agonizes about keeping her lust a secret; is shocked to find her feelings betrayed to Hippolytos by an old Nurse; recoils from addressing the young man face-to-face; overhears him saying bad things about her and hangs herself offstage.
In the essay, Carson imagines Euripides addressing his audience directly as he chews over the first version's failure:
I don't understand, I could never have predicted, your hatred of this woman. It's true she fell in love with someone wrong for her but half the heroines of your literature do that, Helen, Echo, Io, Agave, all of them. Phaidra's love was for her stepson, and it excited you badly, maybe not the incest so much as a question of property rights - ditch the old man, marry the son, keep the estate. Truth is often, in some degree, economic. Which isn't to say her passion for Hippolytos was fake. Women learn to veil things. Who likes to look straight at real passion? Looks can kill. I would call "feminine" this talent for veiling a truth in a truth.Euripides had to do a little veiling of his own to win his audience back. Refract those killer looks through a periscope, or one of those convex mirrors that give you a preview of what's lurking around a dangerous subway corner.
You didn't like Phaidra so I started over. Wrote another play, it took years. Called this one Hippolytos, no veil. To get rid of the veil I had to pull shame out of the inside of Phaidra and spread it on all her surfaces, on all the surfaces of the play, like a single hurt color. Shame is many things. In Hippolytos, shame is what the boy worships as a goddess in the form of Artemis, a pure uncut watergreen shame that reminds him of his own virginity. Shame is also the blush that dyes Phaidra so hot she cannot live in the same body with it. Odd that this virtue, also a vice, is one they share without seeing how."Shame lives on the eyelids" according to an old Greek proverb. I guess this means it makes you cast your eyes down, or that it blinds you. Both Phaidra and Hippolytos act in a blindness as they grapple, deflect and slide past one another into death. There is no moment of confrontation or truth between the two. They never exchange a touch, word or glance. Shame segregates them so effectively, they live and die within earshot of one another, out of reach on the same stage. Pathos like that could win me first prize this time, don't you think?
Jean Racine, in his 1677 preface to Phèdre, describes the nips and tucks he made to fit the story to his own era's moral squeamishness:
I am not surprised that the character enjoyed such immense success in Euripides' day, or that it still succeeds so hugely in our own century, since Phedra has all the qualities Aristotle required of the tragic hero - qualities apt to excite pity and terror....
I have even been careful to make her a little less odious than she is in the tragedies of the Ancients, where she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus. I felt calumny was a little too base and too black to put it in the mouth of a princess, one who, moreover, has such noble and virtuous feelings.
This baseness seemed more appropriate to a nurse who might have more of a slave's inclinations and yet who still only resorts to the false accusation to save her mistress's life and honour. Phedra goes along with it only because she is beside herself with mental turmoil....
In Euripides and Seneca, Hippolytus is accused of having actually raped his step-mother: vim corpus tulit ['My body has suffered his violence']. But here he is only accused of having intended to. I wanted to spare Theseus a vehemence that might have made him less acceptable to the audience.
As for Hippolytus as a character, I noticed with the Ancients that Euripides was attacked for having represented him as a philosopher-prince exempt from all imperfection - which meant the young man's death caused more indignation than pity. I felt I should give him some flaw that would make him slightly culpable in relation to his father without, however, detracting in any way from the greatness of soul whereby he preserves Phedra's honour and allows himself to be condemned without accusing her. I call a flaw the passion he feels in spite of himself for Aricia, who is the daughter and sister of mortal enemies of his father.
But the theatregoers of 17th-century Paris weren't the only ones reading over Racine's shoulder. Orphaned at two, he got his education from the Jansenists, who probably would've shut down the theatres like their Puritan neighbours across the Channel if they hadn't got themselves sent to the woodshed for heresy. Racine's former teacher Pierre Nicole published a public letter accusing novelists or playwrights of having no more redeeming virtues than a "public poisoner", so it's no wonder Racine concluded his preface with what might today be described as a little preemptive ass-covering:
What I can say is that I have never written a tragedy where virtue is made more abundantly clear as in this one. The smallest sins are severely punished. The mere thought of a criminal act is regarded with as much horror as the act itself. The weaknesses engendered by love are shown for what they are: real weaknesses.Passions are only paraded before our eyes in order to show all the chaos they cause; and vice is here depicted everywhere in colours that lead to understanding of and hatred for its moral ugliness. This is properly speaking the goal which any man who works for the public should set himself; and it is what was uppermost in the minds of the original poet-tragedians....
It is earnestly to be hoped that our works prove as solid and as full of useful instruction as those of these poets. This would perhaps provide a means for reconciling tragedy to a great many persons celebrated for their piety and their knowledge who have in recent times condemned it and who would no doubt judge it more favourably if authors thought as much of instructing their audience as of entertaining them - following thereby tragedy's real intention.
Anne Carson's Euripides isn't quite so sure about this "intention". She envisions him, if not kicking and screaming, at least muttering resentfully about the corset he had to cinch around his original heroine:
In general I like women. I like glossing around in women's language, so different from men's. But this one seized me as no other character ever had - that first Phaidra, the pure chainsmoking nihilism of her, pacing the cage of her own clarity. What rushed through her speech wasn't fuss about mirrors and chastity. Only a fool would have asked her for a moral position. Her people feared her. Her own spirit feared her. You feared her.So, Phaidra - a work in motion, surpassing her, surpassing itself - disappears again and again into Phaidra after Phaidra, but she is not gone, her disappearance in fact reverberates everywhere in this so-called second version. I wrote it to show how that feels. Phaidraless world. Her great soul withdrawn, the story goes through its tricks in a weak voltage of vicious reactions and bad piety, which I hope will amuse you but this fact remains, there is no shock in it anywhere except Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is pure shock. When she comes onstage in the prologue and tells you about a few simple stitches she is going to take in the lives of Phaidra, Hippolytos and Theseus, you feel the salt of absolute cruelty sting your face.
And what about now? Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love (1996), a reimagining of the myth after Seneca, pumps up the volume, bringing graphic violence and sex onstage. British theatregoers haven't had an official shock absorber since the Lord Chamberlain's Office stopped censoring plays in 1968. These days it's more or less up to us to decide how much we can take. How much salt are we willing to swallow?
Anne Carson points out that Hippolytos's name means "loosed by horses".
"Loosed" in the sense "unbound, unfastened, undone" and also "dissolved, destroyed, pulled apart" and also "opened, released, set free" and also "atoned for, paid off, made good." Aphrodite's justice requires that the man who refused the yoke of marriage should be dragged to death by the yoke of his own horses.
Are audience opinion and social morality a yoke? Or does too much freedom undo us?
