"The Second Time Around"

"The Second Time Around" Louise K. Horowitz "Mais enfin je consens d'oublier le passé." (4.5.1344) PYRRHUS'S STATEMENT IN THE FOURTH ACT of Andromaque, wherein he agrees (at least with himself) to forget a disturbing past, is the point of departure for an analysis of the attempted suppression of memory, an effort that leads, in ostensibly paradoxical fashion, to the exact opposite result: a wholesale replication of the earlier scarring, traumatic moment. My focus is therefore on the concept of antériorité, as it structures and controls Racinian theater. In fact, what does it mean to consent to forget the past? And what, exactly , is the "past" that one would forget? In Andromaque, is it merely the decade-long Trojan War, which has concluded one year earlier? Or is it rather an entire "mythohistorical continuum"1 that conditions and restricts the characters , even as they claim a freedom from its labyrinthine hold, and that is further developed and amplified, again paradoxically, in plays that Racine created after Andromaque! For, while it is surely the immediate guilt over the horrors committed during the Trojan War that consumes Pyrrhus, the "past" is no less the era of prewar barbarities of Iphigénie, and, yet earlier along the continuum, of the primitive , bestial, sexually violent world of Phèdre. Hermione and Eriphile are half sisters, both daughters of the infamous Hélène, who enjoyed an adulterous relationship not only with Paris—thereby occasioning the Trojan War— but also with Thésée, father of Eriphile, husband of Phèdre, whose past is defined by the type of abductions and abandonments that mark Iphigénie and, in attenuated form, Andromaque. This thread of familial, mythic, and historical relationships is one sure hallmark of Racinian tragedy, described by Georges Poulet in his writing on Andromaque as "une immense et infiniment complexe répétition d'un drame plus ancien. C'est un drame qui se joue pour la seconde fois."2 Ironically, a fixation on "the second time around" occurs in a work depicting an effort at the mental cancellation of "the first time around." The play of Andromaque, centered on Pyrrhus's guilt-induced wish to liberate himself from the binds of Trojan memory, is nonetheless wholly committed to replaying , again and again, that war. For not only Ménélas and the Greeks seeking Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2 23 L'Esprit Créateur to maintain their power by the elimination of the Trojan son, Astyanax; not only Andromaque bound to Hector's image; but also Pyrrhus, Hermione, and Oreste fantasize a second Troy formed out of the ashes of the old, Ilium itself sometimes the imagined locus, but sometimes, too, Epire. Cleaved to the image of a second Trojan War, the characters ineluctably reenact the fundamental schism of human existence, riveted by their obsessive hope of "starting over" and by an equally powerful drive to repeat. No wonder, then, that Andromaque is marked by so many verbs of anteriority and repetition. Rejoindre, rechercher, retrouver, réveiller, revivre, renaître, reprendre, relever, convey a present whose essential characteristic is the recreation, the duplication of the past. Moving backwards in chronological , if not creative time, Racine tackled first the era of the aftermath of the Trojan War, before undertaking his drama of the pre-war days; and not finding yet in Iphigénie the answer to his underlying question concerning knowledge and original causation—"How far back shall we go?"—shifts in Phèdre to his depiction of a still chaotic cosmos, at the dawn of its emergence into culture. But the "civilized" advancements of the present, suggested through the advent of the Greece of Andromaque, can never, finally, repress the memory of the primitive, untamed time-before-culture, as Hermione's murderous claims on behalf of her regressive self, rather than of the culturally progressive State, clearly reveal: "Qu'on l'immole à ma haine, et non pas à l'Etat" (4.4.1268). Such essential anteriority conveys the dominance of the Racinian past over an always suspended present (there are only the times of pre-war and post-war, of prophecy and memory), and over a future wished desperately as transcendent...