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Postscript: Response to Mehlman
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84 Postscript Response to Mehlman Stanley Cavell I do not doubt that Jeffrey Mehlman, in his elegant and exuberant response to my remarks, has successfully demonstrated “the Phèdre intertext” in Stevens’s “Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” text. When I said that I assumed the obvious candidates—Ariadne and Phaedra—for Stevens’s provision to the young poet of a successor to a “mystic muse,” one characterized by the poet as“a kind of sister of the Minotaur,”were ruled out, I did not regard myself as taking the play Phèdre as a whole to be ruled out as bearing upon Stevens’s text. I gladly accept Mehlman’s sense and evidence that Racine’s play is strewn through Stevens’s essay. My reason for the exclusion of the halfsisters of the Minotaur as candidates for the poet’s muse was Stevens’s noting that the youth’s muse is “still half beast and somehow more than human.” Phèdre is called a monster by Hippolyte and by herself, and she calls her nurse a monster, and both she and Thésée call Hippolyte a monster, but none, I believe , take the epithet to mean that any of these candidates for monstrousness are half-beasts. It seems rather that their crimes (real or imagined) show them the more human. I might also have adduced for my claim Stevens’s characterizing the monster/muse as a kind of sister—which might be taken to mean that she is a half-sister, but equally might be taken to mean that she is like a half-sister, hence different; so either alone is arbitrary. When Mehlman initially in the discussion period after my talk expressed to me his sense of Racine’s presence in Stevens’s essay, finding it at least as pertinent as Racine’s source in Euripides’ version of the Hippolytus story, I accepted the theory he broached then with pleasure and predicted that the relative importance for me of the versions must be a function of their contributions to the question of the condition of a youth’s discovery or claim that he is a poet. In Euripides’ telling, the contribution can be said to be that accepting a promise,allegorically to give your words to poetry,can be fatal—you may be unequal to the prophecy and the poverty this vow implies. In Racine’s telling, the fatal promise is one Hippolyte’s father, Thésée, exacts from Neptune , not one the nurse exacts from Hippolyte. It is still the nurse who reveals the connection between Hippolytus and Phaedra’s passion that Euripides has her confide to Hippolytus and draw the promise of his silence—but Racine’s Postscript:ResponsetoMehlman 85 nurse reveals it by reversing the direction, the subject and the object, of the passion (somewhat as if the positions of the pair were seen in a mirror). I hadn’t read Racine’s Phèdre recently enough to consider the matter on the spot during the discussion at Mount Holyoke, a failure of preparation that I attribute not quite to overlooking or dismissing the play (as Mehlman tentatively suggests) but rather to simple fear of it: there is too much that I do not know, and should know, that stands between me and Racine’s text.Yet painful ignorance has not prevented me in the past from approaching, let’s say, other monsters of fame. In any case, I have now reread Racine’s Phèdre and find enough at hand to broach an initial response concerning its competing contribution to the figure or condition of the young poet. No longer a promise to a lethal burden of silence is at issue, but something like its reverse, namely, the burden or risk of speech, more precisely in the Racinian text, the issue of the right to speak, to speak from the heart, not in order to tell the secrets of others—unless this means to tell the secrets they do not know they harbor. What is at stake for me here is whether Racine’s Hippolyte in relation to the monster Phèdre is to be taken as the model for Stevens’s youth in relation to his monster/muse, the specific supposition Mehlman rightly charges me with having failed to engage. Let’s unfold the issue a little further. The young poet appeals to his new muse for recognition and for her words. These seem the last things Hippolyte would...