Making Time: Memorializing History in Athalie

Marking Time: Memorializing History in Athalie Harriet Stone ATHALIE MARKS THE LIMIT of Racine's theatrical career. The play commemorates the historic end point of his dramatic efforts, the moment of rupture that catapults him into posterity as the distinguished author of a corpus now closed, a corpus forever identified by precisely twelve works. In Athalie, moreover, all of Racine's earlier plays continue to echo. Like Astyanax, Joas survives thanks to the efforts of those who revere what has come before. The son's inheritance of the father's place reflects society's respect for the law of succession as it ties son to father, present to past, the tensions of the here and now to a glorious heritage embraced by divine providence. Society conserves these children through its fidelity to an order of things so indelibly etched in time and tradition as to survive the enmity of families and nations. Joined together in this way, generations of Racine's characters transcend the specificities of Greek myth, Roman history, Orientalism, and the Bible that identify his individual plays.1 As represented on Racine's stage, however, the cycle of memory dulls but does not silence the curse of Athalie, Phèdre, Agrippine—the mother's curse that, in restricting the son, has sustained a history of revolt. Agrippine's efforts to govern Néron and Phèdre 's condemnation of Hippolyte before Thésée announce a pattern of violence that culminates in Athalie's execration of her progeny. Acting to silence her curse, the Jews murder Athalie. Their swords serve as the agents of memory, which protects the child Eliacin by restoring his true identity as Joas. Yet, along with the name that returns Joas to his origin , along with the many acts of worship that define the Jews as keepers of memory, Racine commemorates the oppressed throughout history who would deny memory's hold on them, those for whom the meaning of an event is a measure of its ability to disrupt the flow of time. Traces of Athalie survive in Joas's murder of Zacharie, the history that the drama prepares but does not perform. "Joas . . . après trente ans d'un règne fort pieux, s'abandonna aux mauvais conseils des flatteurs, et se souilla du meurtre de Zacharie, fils et successeur de ce grand-prêtre [Joad]," Racine recalls, an event so critical as to announce "la destruction du temple et la ruine de Jérusalem" (Préface). Racine's final tragedy mediates the Jews' triumph and their subsequent decline, the father's reassuring call from the past and the Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 95 L'Esprit Créateur mother's demands in and for the present. The play functions as what Pierre Nora terms a lieu de mémoire. What echoes there is not merely how the Jews, in putting Athalie to death, save memory from a history of annihilation but rather how the memory content— what they remember—becomes the locus for exploring the act of remembering as an arbitrary exercise of history, a critical exercise that is the power to forge a knowledge of the past. Nora insists on the something more than history in his designation of the lieu de mémoire: Considérer un monument comme un lieu de mémoire n'est nullement se contenter de faire son histoire. Lieu de mémoire, donc: toute unité significative, d'ordre matériel ou idéel, dont la volont é des hommes ou le travail du temps a fait un élément symbolique du patrimoine mémoriel d'une quelconque communauté.2 Lieux de mémoire thus are those things and ideas that allow us to reconnect the histoire vécue with "l'opération intellectuelle qui la rend intelligible."3 The focus on such lieux is necessary, Nora argues, because contemporary history has produced the discomforting rupture of event and meaning: Habiterions-nous encore notre mémoire, nous n'aurions pas besoin d'y consacrer des lieux. Il n'y aurait pas de lieux, parce qu'il n'y aurait pas de mémoire emportée par l'histoire. Chaque geste, jusqu'au plus quotidien, serait vécu comme la...