Classical Themes in Giraudoux' Amphitryon 38

Classical Themes in Giraudoux' Amphitryon 38 by Lewis W. Leadbeater* When Plautus, the great Roman playwright, introduced his Amphitryon, he presented it as a tragicomedy, primarily because, as he says, his drama dealt to a great degree with the intrusion ofJupiterand Mercury, the divine machinery, into the affairs of men and hence qualified the play for its tragic designation.1 Later critics, of course, were to see the tragic aspect ofthe play more in terms ofits effect on the character of Alcmena than in the mere presence of the divine machinery on stage.2 Whatever the genre of the play, however, the important element for later treatments of the drama was the interplay between the divine and mortal levels and the physical and metaphysical associations developed in terms of those levels. Indeed, this is precisely the case with Giraudoux' Amphitryon 38. Any attempt to define it in terms of genre will be fruitless, since the elements of comedy and tragedy are so preciously interwoven that generic identification, especially in terms of irony and characterization , seems to have been of no concern to Giraudoux whatsoever. What did concern him, however, was that very association of levels mentioned above, and on this most critics agree. D. Inskip, for instance, sees in the character of Alcmena Giraudoux' search for the harmonization of the real with the ideal,3 while for R, Cohen the tragedy of Giraudoux' characters lies in the fact that they are caught between their roles as members of world humanity and the more natural world ofdestiny, a more pure, unified, comprehensible world.4 •Professor Lewis W. Leadbeater is currently chairmaD ofthe Department of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary and director of the College's Comparative Literature program. Professor l.eadbeater's main areas of research include Greek and French drama. Greek Neo-Platonism. and^omparative epic. Among his latest publications is an article emit led "Social Themes in MenanderVDyskolos'. appearing in the Winter I97K edition of Par Rapport 1 Amph. 63. -' For example. George b. Duckworth. 7Th- Nature of Roman Cometh (Princeton 1952) 150. 'Donald Inskip. Jean (iiruudou.x: The Making of ? Dramatist (London 1958) 61. 'Robert Cohen, (¡irautltntx — Three Faces of Desiim (Chicago 1968) 2. 222VOL. 32. NO. 4, 1978 Leadbeater Throughout the criticism one is constantly confronted by Giraudoux' interest in the force of fate or destiny and its relationship to the human condition.5 "11 semble bien que Giraudoux admette le déterminisme universel de Spinoza, ou celui d'un monde régi par les nombres comme chez Pythagore. La liberté de l'homme se réduit a là possiblité de méconnaître ce déterminisme, et, en le refusant, de vivre par ignorance dans le malheur et la souffrance. Toujours est-il que Giraudoux croit en un mécanisme du monde, dans lequel l'homme devrait trouver, s'il le connaissait et l'amait, la satisfaction de ses besoins et de ses angoisses. . ." So R.M. Albérès.6 What most critics seem to be saying, without actually saying it, is that Giraudoux has resurrected for his own troubled age not only the play of Plautus, but the play of Plautus replete with those metaphysical issues so painstakingly developed by the Greek tragedians and philosophers of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., upon whom Plautus perhaps drew when he wrote his Amphitryon. The examination of man as a creature of limitations, as an object of dehumanization, as a participant in the human condition, indeed the very definition of that human condition as it involves the questions of being and non-being, real and ideal, subject and object, man and god—all of these issues developed by the Greeks find a new outlet in the works of Giraudoux, and especially in the A mphitryon 38. Hence the ideological novelty, though not necessarily the poetic, of Giraudoux rests firmly on the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle, perhaps fostering Sartre's remark that Giraudoux is, for his tastes anyway, too Aristotelian.7 It is, then, with the Greek influence on Giraudoux that this paper will deal, in hopes of clarifying his approach in the Amphitryon 38 to the dilemma...