‘Greece as Inscape’ in Daphne du Maurier's The Flight of the Falcon

Abstract

In The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Doody explains that among the Greek rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic, ekphrasis had acquired the specialised sense of ‘exploring and explaining (supposed) graphic works’ (1998). This paper will explain how Daphne du Maurier's The Flight of the Falcon (1965) could be said to be a modern variant of this ancient device. In du Maurier's novel, Armino Donati becomes haunted by two Renaissance paintings. These have been fixed in his imagination from childhood by the force of personality of his elder brother Aldo. The Flight of the Falcon thus becomes, in effect, an extended ekphrasis on two works of art–the ‘Raising of Lazarus’ and the ‘Temptation of Christ’. This essay will explore the novel as a whole through the overt (Christian) themes provided by these paintings, but will also draw on the hidden subtext of Greek archetypal images (in particular Apollo, Dionysus and Hermes) that the novel seems to imply. It will become apparent that I am viewing these imagined paintings (and the novel itself) as palimpsests, whereby a heterodox, pagan message has been obscured by a dual layer of heterodox and orthodox Christian ideas. My analysis will utilise ideas from Plato's The Republic concerning the parable of the cave, Luce Irigaray's criticism of ‘Plato's Hystera’ in Speculum of the Other Woman and the thoughts of Nietzsche on Greek mythology as expounded in The Birth of Tragedy. By way of conclusion, I will raise some of the metatextual ideas hinted at by the subtext, which can be gleaned if we view the (supposed) artworks as substitutes for du Maurier's own literary output.