Guilt and Extenuation in Tragedy: Variations on Racinian Excuses. By Edward Forman

Abstract

This comparative literary study seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between tragic drama and current approaches to guilt and extenuation. Edward Forman aims to place side by side ‘ancient stories with modern attitudes’, ‘the deadly serious against the cynical, the defensive and the legalistic’ (p. 3), and thus bring further insight into how we think about responsibility, justification, and guilt. Although Forman explicitly states that this is a work of literary criticism and not moral philosophy, the book clearly draws on ethics. However, it also engages with performance and reception theory. The book ranges widely but its springboard is Racine’s tragedies. The seven chapters wrestle with modern judicial concepts such as diminished responsibility, provocation, trauma, ignorance, and scapegoating by examining specifically how the characters in tragedy respond and justify their actions. Forman, interestingly, maps these onto the tragic explorations of such issues, considering ‘Helplessness’ (with fatalism, divine authority, and genetic determinism) in Chapter 1, ‘Theories of Harmartia’ in Chapter 2, and blindness and credulity in Chapter 3. Tragic archetypes such as Phaedra, Oedipus, Clytemnestra, and Medea are studied, and case studies of ancient models, seventeenth-century texts, and more modern interpretations are presented in contrast with one another. Chapter 5, for example, considers different portrayals of Clytemnestra: in Racine’s Iphigénie, in which Clytemnestre shows her boundless resentment towards Agamemnon and seems to justify what she goes on to commit; in Jean Giraudoux’s Électre, where she is by no means a sympathetic character; and in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches, where she is presented as a more passive accomplice. The chapter also explores Marguerite Yourcenar’s depiction in Électre ou La Chute des masques, in which Clytemnestre argues for her diminished responsibility, as well as examining the different inflections of the character in works by Jean Anouilh, the lesser-known dramatist Jean-Jacques Varoujean, and Jean-Pierre Giraudoux, all of which emphasize her status as a damaged victim. Showcasing these variations in degrees of blame and accountability reveals how playwrights and audiences do not simply judge the characters for their crimes but constantly attempt to make sense of their behaviour within the particular worlds they inhabit. The figures used as vehicles for such explorations are generally from ancient Greek myths, but Chapter 6 also productively engages with the biblical figure of King Saul who, as Forman notes, recurs in plays ‘from the Classical, Enlightenment, Romantic and modern periods, all of which probe the extent to which Saul was in control of his actions’ (p. 153). At times, it feels as though the book is trying to cover too much terrain and one suspects that longer studies of particular plays might have been more fruitful. Forman repeatedly asks to what extent modern understandings of criminal behaviour ought to point towards a reinterpretation of ancient myths and dramas, but his answer is ultimately that it is somewhat inevitable that contemporary ­experience and debate will bring a different perspective to plays ­written in different ethical and legal contexts. Rather frustratingly, he does not extend this reflection on the illuminating potential of such juxtapositioning.