Racine: Andromache (1)
critique by Dennis M. Hammes
It is said that Shakespeare's worst waffler is Hamlet (2).
But Hamlet "waffles" because he is caught on the horns of two
totally contradictory and equally binding moral imperatives:
"his father's ghost" (whether supposedly a real ghost or a
dramatic symbol of the recognised moral imperative) demands
vengeance upon his murderer, who is, in law, Hamlet's new father.
He can avenge his recent father, the king, only by killing his
current father, the king.
The principals in Hamlet's contemporary, Andromache,
face no such dilemmas. Indeed, that Orestes avenged his father
by killing his mother (who had killed his father), is never even
mentioned. Each of them faces only a single moral imperative,
duties the Japanese -- not to mention these Greeks and Trojans --
understood perfectly, and each of which would determine the
choices of a civilised man in any culture, without question let
alone any consideration of momentary personal pleasure. Yet all
four of the principals waffle to an extent found today only in
soap operas of the lesser sort, because each of the principals
(including Andromache herself) wants to bed somebody denied them
by their duties to their stations.
Orestes wants to bed the beautiful Hermione, Helen's
daughter, despite that she is officially betrothed to somebody
else, one of the most royal personages left in Greece. And
despite that she is his first cousin (though this would not have
bothered a Greek, a Trojan, or the French nobility, but only
someone who took his orders from the Book of Common Prayer).
But Hermione wants desperately to bed Pyrrhus, Achilleus'
son, partly because he is who he is, a hero in his own right and
son of the greatest of the Akhaian heroes, and her station
derives from him, and partly because it is the honorable thing to
do and she knows the honor of her duty: she has been given and
betrothed to Pyrrhus by her father. But there is more of the
Frenchwoman in her than there is of the Akhaian, because she is
being written by Racine and not by Homer, and so she wants to bed
Orestes if she can get away with it and if by doing so she
can get back at Pyrrhus, not for ignoring his duty, but for
ignoring her.
See, Pyrrhus has been putting her off for over a year
because he wants desperately to bed Andromache, part of his
spoils from Troy, despite that he is betrothed to Hermione, and
says that he fears Menelaus and the rest of the Greeks. None
of the characters recognises the real reason for his choice, for
Racine doesn't recognise it himself, despite that it must have
been known to many who survived the machinations of the Bourbons
(that it is well-known today doesn't count): Pyrrhus wants
"forgiveness" from Andromache for the excesses he practiced upon
the Trojans during the sack of Troy. Today, we call this the
"Hiroshima Syndrome," and it is as much the condition of a
juvenile delinquent as it was in Racine's time -- or Pyrrhus'.
It is bothering him of late, but he looks upon Andromache and
Racine calls it "love" despite that in every other respect,
Racine describes Pyrrhus as a juvenile delinquent incompetent of
the emotion, though horny.
So Orestes wants to bed Hermione, Hermione wants to bed
Phyrrus, and Phyrrus wants to bed Andromache.
But now here you have it: instead of closing the circle
into a nice French farce by wanting to bed Orestes, Andromache
wants to bed Hektor, her dead husband. And this, despite that
she must yield to Pyrrhus (and incur Hermione's wrath) to save
her son, who is Hektor's lineage and Troy's only royal survivor
(if we forget about Aeneas), and who is also part of Pyrrhus'
spoils and his prisoner. This salvage is of crucial importance
to Racine himself, because the Bourbon kings claim their descent
from the boy, somewhere along the line, and Racine puts this
royal plug in his Preface to the play. Both Prefaces.
Well, Andromache, after much waffling, and perhaps deciding
that she won't have much fun bedding the ashes of Hektor, agrees
to marry Pyrrhus to save her son and Priam's line to become the
kings of France (she doesn't know about France, of course, only
that royal lines must be preserved if there are to be Bourbons
over it). She, at least, has the greater duty, that to preserve
the line, to excuse her of the lesser duty to remain "faithful"
to a man who left her to flirt with Hades. Besides, Hektor told
her to before he died, so we wonder what it is she has to waffle
about. For she waffles.
The other three principals have only the conflict between
duty and rut, and the wonder is that Racine seems not to be aware
of any difference between them: apparently a typical Frenchman,
he sees rut to be the born duty of the French male. Particularly
one of the Bourbon Court.
Come on. These same characters had just been involved in
a long, expensive, and bloody war in which the best of Greece had
fallen solely as a duty to Menelaus, and the best of Troy had
fallen solely as a duty to Priam despite that Paris, the cause of
it, was totally unpopular among his own people and family, for
duty outweighed anything else among them, including who was in
the right. Along comes Racine, and says that these same Greeks
and Trojans suddenly have no more moral sense than the feral
swappings of the Bourbon Court, because Racine has been told off
by the Bourbon Court to justify the "morals" of the Bourbon
Court.
The play as plot? Let's see. The Greeks kill Pyrrhus for
betraying Greece by marrying Andromache to protect the boy.
Theirs is the only rational act in the play. Orestes, still
wanting to bed Hermione, claims the deed, and goes ga-ga with
guilt, but whether it is guilt over having done it or believing
he did it or not having done it after promising to do it, we are
not told. Hermione spurns everybody after egging them on against
each other, then spurns herself by committing suicide on the last
page. (Had she done so any earlier, there would be no play,
for she is still there, gettin in her licks on the page before.)
Anyway, despite its being a French play, nobody gets laid.
Maybe that is what makes it a "tragedy" to the French.
As literature? We are told by the translator that he cannot
hope to achieve in English what Racine achieved in the French.
But what he achieves in the English is enough to make me want to
be able to read the original, someday. If I have nothing else to
do in my dotage. For the language, not the plot; for the words
that I have read, well and succinctly furthered the actions and
emotions of the principals; I would have expected no less of the
Court Dramatist to Louis XIV, King of the Bourbons and of France.
My objection to the words is that the emotions and decisions they
describe are not those of the nobility of Greece and Troy; Homer,
a relative incompetent at psychology, did a better job of
describing the decisions of the that nobility 400 years after
their deaths, than Racine did in asserting the "nobility" of a
nobility he worked among daily. My objection is that Racine
describes the emotions of juvenile delinquents, and asserts to
excuse them by telling us that the old high nobility "from whom
they are descended" was in no better case.
It is probably the most common "technique," and the most
common failing, of moral "justification literature," which this
is no more than: if you can't demonstrate your principals to be
heroes, and Racine couldn't, then "demonstrate" that their
betters are really the same kind of clods. And if we know no
more of ancient Greece and Troy than Racine here allows us, he
succeeds.
____________
1. Racine, Andromache, tr. Kenneth Muir, New York: Hill and
Wang (1960).
2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Illinois
Benedictine College: Project Gutenberg (E-text) (1990-3).
Dr. Hammes is Robert Larson Professor of Poetry at FISHHOOK
Academy of Natural Philosophy.
(C)1995 by Dennis M. Hammes. All rights reserved.