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The Reverse View: Greece and Greek Myths in Modern French Theater MARC ELI BLANCHARD We have been using Greek drama as if Greece had never existed. That modern theater, from Racine to H61derlin, T.S. Eliot and Sartre, is replete with allusions, tacit or overt, to Greek drama, is beyond discussion. Even Brecht, who craved for only a political theater reflecting the concerns of the present, and whose notes on Sophocles' Antigone Beck and Malina applied to a Living Theater perfonnance of Greek tragedy. sees Antigone as an international heroine defying Creon's formal edicts. Although geared towards maximum expressivity, twentieth-century theater, from Dada to Artaud, Grotowski and Paradise Now, cannot shake its debt to the myth of Greece. I am saying the myth of Greece and not Greek myths, because I am quite agreed with those who point to the survival of characters: Antigone, Electra, Orestes; to the use of plots basically unchanged since the fifth century; to a revival of the various agones between the heroes - and say that some of the forms of Greek tragedy survive in modern drama. I And yet repeated use of basic plots, with only minor changes, cursory reference to the gods, even cries and silences, all that is not enough to warrant an actual reference to ancient Greece., In the negative picture I am trying to develop here, I shall be concerned less with scholarly references than with a vision: a distorted vision of Greece in theater and modem French theater in particular. Because French culture prides itself on continuing to hold an umbilical cord to Athens and, before Athens, to Troy, 1 have chosen Giraudoux, Sartre and Anouilh, whose somewhat contemporaneous plays, Tiger at the Cates, The Flies, and Amigone, announce the midcentury and can also be read today in the context of France's own 1939 Aristotelian catastrophe. 1shall show how the misuse of Greek myths in those plays is a direct consequence of the loss ofthe inherently religious and political context of classical drama transposed on the modem stage and a good alibi for condemning the past in the name of humanism. Let me quote this long tirade by Sartre: 42 MARC ELI BLANCHARD Antigone, in Sophocles' tragedy, has to choose between civic morality and family morality. This dilemma scarcely makes sense today. But we have Durown problems: the problem of means and ends, of the legitimacy of violence, the problem of the consequences of action, the problem of the relationships between the person and the collectivity, between the individual undertaking and historical constants, and a hundred morc. It seems to me that the dramatist' s task is to choose from among these limited situations the one that best expresses his concerns, and to present it to the public as the question certain free individuals are confronted with. It is only in this way thalthe theater will recover its 10S1 resonance, only in this way that it will succeed in unifying the diversified audiences who are going to it in our time.2 I think Greece has proven such a hospitable ground to modem-day tragedy because it has provided much less than a cultural haven to playwrights in search of sources and symbols. It has given our three authors a neutral ground. Giraudoux, like Sartre and Anouilh later, take the space of antiquity for granted. They play with it. In Tiger at the Gates, Paris justifies eloping with Helen by reminding his bored audience that Menelaus was busy removing a crab pinching his toe when he and Helen happened to sail by and away.3 Later, Hector says he does not "care a fig" about Helen, and he accuses her of having the same "liking for men as [she has] for a cake of soap." In The Flies, Sartre paints a picture of Jupiter as a dubious salesman/entertainer put to flight by Orestes' decision to face the consequences of revenge; and in Antigone, Haemon makes light of Antigone's seriousness by telling her she is "idiotic.,,4 Humor is unknown to Greek tragedy. The exchanges can be ironic, but humorous never, because the tragic experience is one in which the characters-donot have the lUXUry ofdirect...

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