Theme and Technique in the Philoctetes and Oedipus of André Gide

THEME AND TECHNIQUE IN THE PHILOCTETES AND OEDIPUS OF ANDRE GIDE D. J. CONACHER WITHIN the past few decades, French authors have produced a surprising number of new dramas based on those ancient myths which the Greek tragedians first made famous. This phenomenon is all the morc interesting in that the idea of man which appears in these contemporary productions is at the farthest remove from the idea of man expressed in the Greek tragedies from which, for the most part, they take their plots. Aeschylus and Sophocles, despite the radical differences in their conceptions of the tragic, both produced tragedies based on a view of man as part of a larger system over whose fundamental operations he had little control. Limited areas of freedom, limited possibilities of right and wrong, of happiness and misery, were allowed to man within that system, but the ultimate ordinance and the ultimate directive were considered the prerogative of a higher order; whether, in individual cases, that governance was regarded as "the gods," "a certain god," "the God" or an allaccomplishing Moira, matters little in the present argument. Aeschylus , at his most cosmic level (in the Prometheus Bound, for example, and, presumably, in the lost sequence of the trilogy ) presented imaginative conceptions of the origins and the development of this universal order ; for the rest, he devoted himself to dramatic demonstrations of the essential justice governing the relations of God and man within it. Sophocles, it is true, was more interested in man "for his own sake" but the new humanism of the Sophoclean hero was still strongly qualified by the divine framework-the god-given circumstances and the god-given laws-within which, still with a measure of freedom, that hero must act and suffer. Even Euripides, iconoclast though he was, in many respects, did not quite abandon the idea of a system beyond man's control, within which his heroes must operate. His iconoclasm was directed against the traditional and literal understanding of Greek mythology rather than against the meanings of that mythology itself. Hence, he provided a better understanding of those forces, no longer in Euripides theologically "divine," with which man must come to terms or be destroyed! IThey might be called "divine" in the broader sense in which the Greeks used the word of anything marvellous, particularly for things in life observed to be constant and enduring and thus reminiscent of that immortality by which the gods, particularly, were distinguished. On the other hand, when Euripides indicated that the reality which an Aphrodite or a Dionysus represented was not that of a god, he was not necessarily being atheistic. In showing what could not be "gods," he gives us a fair picture, at least by implication, of what he thought a god should be. 121 Vol. XXIV, no. 2, Jan., 1955 122 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Thus the classical treatment of Greek myth stresses the limitations of man and presents his destiny within a system to which he must, at worst, submit with groans or, at best, be reconciled. Most contemporary French treatments, on the other hand, seek to express the freedom of man, in spite of circumstances which make that freedom only heroically attainable. This recurrent theme takes many forms, depending both on the philosophical position and on the dramatic conceptions of the author. Sometimes we find our mythical heroes engaged in revolt against an unholy alliance of divine and temporal powers or against a priestly conspiracy which seeks to impose a false image of God' Again, if the issue of freedom be approached from a different direction, we may find a Kirkegaardian Greek upholding a private ethical ideal in the face of a public moral sanction.' The anti-clerical tradition dies hard in France. With such differences between the modem and the classical temper, the current fe-adaptations of Greek myths as embedded in the plots of classical Greek tragedy may seem perverse. But the richest myths are fields which may be sown again and again, yielding, on different occasions, crops as varied as the different seeds which are sown in them. Thus, each of the moderns is, in this respect, using myth in the way that each...