"The Second Time Around" - Louise K. Horowitz L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 38, Number 2, Summer 1998, pp. 23-33 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins ...

"The Second Time Around"
   Louise K. Horowitz

   L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 38, Number 2, Summer 1998, pp. 23-33 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2010.0009

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264057/summary

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

"The Second Time Around"

                                   Louise K. Horowitz

                     "Mais enfin je consens d'oublier le passé." (4.5.1344)

       PYRRHUS'S STATEMENT IN THE FOURTH ACT of Andromaque,
       wherein he agrees (at least with himself) to forget a disturbing past, is
       the point of departure for an analysis of the attempted suppression of
memory, an effort that leads, in ostensibly paradoxical fashion, to the exact
opposite result: a wholesale replication of the earlier scarring, traumatic
moment. My focus is therefore on the concept of antériorité, as it structures
and controls Racinian theater.
   In fact, what does it mean to consent to forget the past? And what, exact-
ly, is the "past" that one would forget? In Andromaque, is it merely the
decade-long Trojan War, which has concluded one year earlier? Or is it rather
an entire "mythohistorical continuum"1 that conditions and restricts the char-
acters, even as they claim a freedom from its labyrinthine hold, and that is fur-
ther developed and amplified, again paradoxically, in plays that Racine cre-
ated after Andromaque!
   For, while it is surely the immediate guilt over the horrors committed dur-
ing the Trojan War that consumes Pyrrhus, the "past" is no less the era of pre-
war barbarities of Iphigénie, and, yet earlier along the continuum, of the prim-
itive, bestial, sexually violent world of Phèdre. Hermione and Eriphile are
half sisters, both daughters of the infamous Hélène, who enjoyed an adulter-
ous relationship not only with Paris—thereby occasioning the Trojan War—
but also with Thésée, father of Eriphile, husband of Phèdre, whose past is
defined by the type of abductions and abandonments that mark Iphigénie and,
in attenuated form, Andromaque. This thread of familial, mythic, and histori-
cal relationships is one sure hallmark of Racinian tragedy, described by
Georges Poulet in his writing on Andromaque as "une immense et infiniment
complexe répétition d'un drame plus ancien. C'est un drame qui se joue pour
la seconde fois."2
   Ironically, a fixation on "the second time around" occurs in a work depict-
ing an effort at the mental cancellation of "the first time around." The play of
Andromaque, centered on Pyrrhus's guilt-induced wish to liberate himself
from the binds of Trojan memory, is nonetheless wholly committed to replay-
ing, again and again, that war. For not only Ménélas and the Greeks seeking

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to maintain their power by the elimination of the Trojan son, Astyanax; not
only Andromaque bound to Hector's image; but also Pyrrhus, Hermione, and
Oreste fantasize a second Troy formed out of the ashes of the old, Ilium itself
sometimes the imagined locus, but sometimes, too, Epire. Cleaved to the
image of a second Trojan War, the characters ineluctably reenact the funda-
mental schism of human existence, riveted by their obsessive hope of "start-
ing over" and by an equally powerful drive to repeat.
     No wonder, then, that Andromaque is marked by so many verbs of anteri-
ority and repetition. Rejoindre, rechercher, retrouver, réveiller, revivre,
renaître, reprendre, relever, convey a present whose essential characteristic is
the recreation, the duplication of the past. Moving backwards in chronologi-
cal, if not creative time, Racine tackled first the era of the aftermath of the
Trojan War, before undertaking his drama of the pre-war days; and not find-
ing yet in Iphigénie the answer to his underlying question concerning knowl-
edge and original causation—"How far back shall we go?"—shifts in Phèdre
to his depiction of a still chaotic cosmos, at the dawn of its emergence into
culture. But the "civilized" advancements of the present, suggested through
the advent of the Greece of Andromaque, can never, finally, repress the mem-
ory of the primitive, untamed time-before-culture, as Hermione's murderous
claims on behalf of her regressive self, rather than of the culturally progres-
sive State, clearly reveal: "Qu'on l'immole à ma haine, et non pas à l'Etat"
(4.4.1268). Such essential anteriority conveys the dominance of the Racinian
past over an always suspended present (there are only the times of pre-war
and post-war, of prophecy and memory), and over a future wished desperate-
ly as transcendent, but which is finally depicted as merely a static reproduc-
tion.
   The opening lines of Andromaque herald a consuming drive towards a
"new beginning," but one that is ironically vitiated by a pitiless past:

                   Oui, puisque je retrouve un ami si fidèle,
                   Ma fortune va prendre une face nouvelle;
                   Et déjà son courroux semble s'être adouci
                   Depuis qu'elle a pris soin de nous rejoindre ici. (1.1.1-4)

   The sinuous circularity of this series of Alexandrine verses installs, rein-
stalls, the past, depicted shortly thereafter by both Oreste and Pylade as a
death-bearing depression that continues to mark the present, even as Oreste
makes claim to an inaugural moment of change. Pylade, symbol of old times,
becomes the curious sign of the "new face" of Oreste's life. For the present in

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Racinian tragedy can be neither viewed nor articulated except by its ceaseless
reference to an earlier moment in time. The discovery, hence, of "une face
nouvelle," is from its inception contaminated by a controlling past, reflected
in Oreste's terminology: retrouve ¡ma fidèle.
   Thus, the play's initial moments unambiguously counter the type of opti-
mistic critical views of Roland Barthes and Leo Bersani, eager to fixate on a
"free" Pyrrhus.3 Oreste's earlier melancholia, and his quest for a sacrificial
death (itself a "return" to a pre-cultural moment among the bloodthirsty "peu-
ples barbares"), are never transcended but, in fact, are only interminably
replicated at the play's draining conclusion, in explicit "new" references to
madness and a violent demise. In this theatrical universe, the dramatist offers
characters obsessed with a driving vision of change and liberation, but who
are finally doomed to "play it again," to replay the past at the very instant they
announce their freedom from its paralyzing hold. To will an escape from the
binds of memory is only to ensure its determined preservation in the present,
as reiteration ceaselessly memorializes the act that would be forgotten.
   Thus, it is scarcely surprising that the fantasized renaissance of a dismem-
bered Troy exists everywhere in Epirus. Despite Pyrrhus's endlessly repeat-
ed desire to move beyond the guilty memory of the war's slaughter and rape,
he is forever cleaved to its compelling images. Envisioning liberation through
a seemingly contradictory expression of reenactment and replication, he pro-
poses to Andromaque a reborn Troy:

                   Animé d'un regard, je puis tout entreprendre:
                   Votre Ilion encor peut sortir de sa cendre;
                   Je puis, en moins de temps que les Grecs ne l'ont pris,
                   Dans ses murs relevés couronner votre fils. (1.4.329-32)

   In this inverse image of the destroyed city-state that phoenix-like (and one
cannot escape the seeming coincidence of names between the mythological
creature known for its capacity for rebirth and Achilles's and Pyrrhus's tutor)
will rise from its own ashes, Pyrrhus, circumscribed by images born of the
telling, simply redoes Troy.
    Yet, the projected "new" entity is strangely fluid, its geographical bound-
aries remarkably porous. The second time around, the war may transpire not
only in a reconstructed Troy, but in Epirus itself! The most famous war of
Antiquity, whose identity is enduringly and specifically geographic, may now
know a second life in a remote state cleaved to the Greek war machine and to
a political entity whose victory over Troy is a longstanding subject of Western

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myth and history. Inviting the yet vengeful and persecuting Greeks onto his
lands, Pyrrhus consents, yet again, to a refabrication:

                        Non, non. J'y consens avec joie!
                  Qu'ils cherchent dans l'Epire une second Troie;
                  Qu'ils confondent leur haine, et ne distinguent plus
                  Le sang qui les fit vaincre et celui des vaincus. (1.2.229-33)

    In this promiscuous version of warfare, wherein conqueror and conquered
mesh indistinguishably and the next "Trojan War" may occur in Epirus, that
is, in Greece, something tantalizing is at stake. Pyrrhus's articulated wish,
which finds an almost literal echo in Hermione's words to Oreste—"Qu'on
fasse de l'Epire un second Ilion" (2.2.564)—is the rendering of a complex
obsession to repeat. It is the revelation that, in Poulet's words, "la durée tout
entière d'un être n'est plus à ses propres yeux que comme un recommence-
ment sans fin de ce qui le souille et de ce qui le tue" (120). No matter, then,
that Hermione on a conscious level (if, indeed, such a term can ever be
applied to the subterranean forces that this character incarnates) scarcely
wishes for Pyrrhus to be annihilated by the Greeks in a "second" Trojan War,
occurring this time in Epirus. Her "empty" wish and words must be viewed,
finally, as just that. Copying Pyrrhus virtually word for word, Hermione is a
mere echo, her verse devoid of substance; but by virtue of reiteration it serves
to return them both to the scarring moment, to the searing naming of death.
For here, Troy is Troy, Epirus is Troy, Troy is death: it is the name of death.
   This strange production and reproduction of the Trojan time and the Trojan
place is only heightened by Racine's determined reliance on verbs marked by
the prefix re-. From Oreste's opening words to Pylade, heralding the new as
a form of the old, and locating change in repetition—retrouver, rejoindre—
Andromaque steadfastly returns to this linguistic mark of redundancy. In a
play that emblematically proclaims its significant moments as occurring for
"la dernière fois," closure of such a definitive sort is consistantly denied.
Most emphatically, the prefix re- attaches itself to terms that create the image
of a second-time-around Troy. Thus, Pyrrhus proposes to Andromaque that
Astyanax will be crowned "dans ses murs relevés," identifying the son that
would live with the city that is death. And Hector's image as Trojan hero may
be borne by that very same son, whose identity, the father had once pro-
claimed, might be refashioned in Andromaque herself: '"Je te laisse mon fils
pour gage de ma foi:/S'il me perd, je prétends qu'il me retrouve en toi'"
(3.8.1024-25). Céphise, too, fantasizes a reborn world for Astyanax: "Quel

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plaisir d'élever un enfant qu'on voit croître/Non plus comme un esclave
élevé pour son maître,/Mais pour voir avec lui renaître tant de rois!"
(4.1.1069-71).
   Yet, the recreation, the rebirth that would be Troy's and that of its kings, is,
in the Racinian universe, a project inherently contaminated from its inception.
For to say Troy, and only that, is to name death. In Andromaque, the dead, too,
demand their due, signaling their powerful anteriority via the same dominat-
ing prefix:

                   Quoi donc? as-tu pensé qu'Andromaque infidèle
                   Pût trahir un époux qui croit revivre en elle,
                   Et que de tant de morts réveillant la douleur,
                   Le soin de mon repos me fit troubler le leur?
                                           (4.1.1077-80, my emphasis)

Bearer of the reborn, which is ineluctably the old in the guise of the new, death
in the guise of life, the Racinian moment is doomed to replay itself ad
infinitum.
    The extraordinary circularity of this time, contrasted with the false linear-
ity of the desperately anticipated "dernière fois," receives its most dramatic
expression in Hermione's accusing words to Pyrrhus. The fluid Alexandrine
verses become the ideal vehicle for conveying acts that turn in on themselves
in labyrinthine fashion, denying closure:

                   Quoi? sans que ni serment ni devoir vous retienne,
                   Rechercher une Grecque, amant d'une Troyenne?
                   Me quitter, me reprendre, et retourner encor
                   De la fille d'Hélène à la veuve d'Hector,
                   Couronner tour à tour l'esclave et la princesse,
                   Immoler Troie aux Grecs, au fils d'Hector la Grèce?
                                          (4.5.1317-22, my emphasis)

   The old and abandoned "explication de texte" might have best revealed the
rhythm of these serpentine verses that, while denying fixity and cessation,
also conjure up a strangely undifferentiated world of parallel and equivalent
elements—Greek and Trojan, captive and princess, daughter of Hélène and
widow of Hector—where circulate oddly indistinguishable selves trapped in
the prison house of the past.
    Moreover, Hermione's self-description as "la fille d'Hélène" summons up
the full scope of the Racinian past and makes a mockery of Pyrrhus's will to
deny it. She is not, of course, the first to label herself in this fashion.

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Andromaque, in an early exhortation to Pyrrhus, draws on such essential ante-
riority as she exclaims, "Retournez, retournez à la fille d'Hélène" (1.4.342),
and thereby illuminates for him his entire past in one vision of doom. As
Charles Mauron and Roland Barthes have written, Hermione represents for
Pyrrhus a complex contractual past (at once familial, legal, and religious) that
he now seeks desperately to negate. His ties to Hermione, Ménélas, and to
"tous les Grecs" form in this critical perspective a series of promises to which
he now chooses to be unfaithful.4 But Hermione's fundamental identity with
the past transcends these socially and culturally sanctioned binds, however
significant they may be. Hermione is Hélène 's daughter, and it is this past, too,
that she seeks to both preserve and match:

                   Quoi? sans qu'elle employât une seule prière,
                   Ma mère en sa faveur arma la Grèce entière?
                   Ses yeux pour leur querelle, en dix ans de combats,
                   Virent périr vingt rois qu'ils ne connaissaient pas? (5.2.1477-80)

     Hélène, like Troy, is death, and that alone is what Pyrrhus hears in
Andromaque's entreaty to return to "la fille d'Hélène." She is that figure, and
Troy is that place where sex and death indiscriminately commingle, repeating
spiraling images of massacre, rape, and abduction in the nationalistic, tribal
warfare that ensures the slaughter of father and brother, the assault and abduc-
tion of mother and daughter.
   But while Hermione is indeed the daughter of Helen of Troy, bearer of
desire and death, she is only, like Astyanax, "le reste," the vestige. It is final-
ly her mother whose powers mark not only Andromaque, Racine's post-war
tragedy, but equally so Iphigénie, his pre-war drama. Moving backwards in
the continuum of myth and history, while pushing forward in his literary pro-
duction, Racine appears to have been struggling for an understanding of first
causes, of origins, creating in his character of Eriphile not only "une autre
Iphigénie," but also "une autre Hélène," "un autre sang d'Hélène," another
born of the blood of Hélène, and half sister to Hermione. Seeking to avert the
sacrifice of Iphigénie, Clytemnestre utters the words that bind the Spartan
women—"Si du crime d'Hélène on punit sa famille/Faites chercher à Sparte
Hermione sa fille" (4.4.1265-66)—and thereby evokes the whole poisonous
atmosphere that leads from the abduction of Hélène, to the decade-long
slaughter of the Trojan War, to the ceaseless replaying of that war through
Pyrrhus, Andromaque, Oreste, and Hermione, the replaying that is, finally and
always, a return to death. It is therefore not surprising that in Iphigénie events

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that are yet to occur—above all, the war—are incorporated as a strange hybrid
of prophecy and memory. Avenir and souvenir become indistinguishable, as
the awaiting slaughter is envisioned as a fait accompli. Thus, Raymond Picard
can state with no apparent irony that, "[Ulysse et Achille] sont tous deux pris
d'une sorte de nostalgie de cette guerre de Troie, Terre Promise de la légende,
qui fait encore partie de leur avenir . . . ,"5 in a strange conjunction of past
and future that signals, ultimately, only their equivalent redundancy.
  Hélène appears then as the ostensible "source" of two distinct plays, a post-
war drama and a pre-war one, which, in terms of the order of Racine's com-
positions, is the "sequel." Her abduction by Paris, her abandonment of
Ménélas for her pleasure, obsessively imprint themselves on Racine's two
Trojan War plays; and her two daughters, Hermione and Eriphile (the latter a
necessary element in the playwright's unyielding exploration of the binds of
the past) are the marking elements of both tragedies. Hermione is the atavis-
tic force of desire and death, who wills the murder of Pyrrhus in her name
alone, and whose ultimate incorporation as Erinnye, as retribution, as ven-
detta, provides the full measure of her incarnation of the Past.
   There is, however, yet the other daughter of Hélène, Eriphile, whose story
creates a redundancy out of Hermione's, who may then only be a "second-
time-around" player. Or perhaps it is Eriphile who is the reiteration of
Hermione. Or they are both mere replicas of the infamous mother, ostensible
source of desire and death. Paris had surely abducted Hélène, engendering by
his act the Trojan War, mythohistorical fixation of two Racinian plays, and
seeming point of departure for all the misery that is prophecized, on the one
hand, in Iphigénie, and recalled, on the other, in Andromaque. Yet, that abduc-
tion, the determining act for the most scarring war of Greek story-telling, may
itself be not a source, but only a twice-told tale, the reiteration of an earlier
abduction of Hélène, as Clytemnestre recalls for Agamemnon's benefit:

                  Que dis-je? Cet objet de tant de jalousie,
                  Cette Hélène, qui trouble et l'Europe et l'Asie,
                  Vous semble-t-il un prix digne de vos exploits?
                  Combien nos fronts pour elle ont-ils rougi de fois!
                  Avant qu'un nœud fatal l'unit à votre frère,
                  Thésée avait osé l'enlever à son père.
                  Vous savez, et Calchas mille fois vous l'a dit,
                  Qu'un hymen clandestin mit ce prince en son lit,
                  Et qu'il en eut pour gage une jeune princesse,
                  Que sa mère a cachée au reste de la Grèce. (4.4.1273-82)

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     It seems, then, that in Racine, as Hélène's two abductions and seductions
convey, every act is always played a second time around, the incarnation of an
earlier moment, one further back along the continuum of genesis and causa-
tion; and each such vision, or memory, temptingly provides, for a brief instant,
the illusion of a definitive beginning. The flight of Hélène and Paris, source
of all the ensuing misery, may be finally less a point of origin than an already
tired redundancy.
    This indeterminacy of origin is only intensified in Phèdre, where the play-
wright has ostensibly quit the haunting world of the Trojan War. Hippolyte
unsparingly recounts to Théramène his father's long licentious life, as Racine
incorporates in this late play, the final one in the Euripidean series, a specific,
intertextual reference to the character who had motivated the two earlier
works:

                    Mais quand tu récitais des faits moins glorieux,
                    Sa foi partout offerte et reçue en cent lieux,
                    Hélène à ses parents dans Sparte dérobée,
                    Salamine témoin des pleurs de Péribée,
                    Tant d'autres, dont les noms lui sont même échappés,
                    Trop crédules esprits que sa flamme a trompés;
                    Ariane aux rochers contant ses injustices,
                    Phèdre enlevée enfin sous de meilleurs auspices; (1.1.83-90)

    The "rapt d'Hélène," a quintessential moment of Western myth and histo-
ry, becomes, instead, in two different but parallel episodes, a rehashed thrice-
told tale, recounted in Andromaque, in Iphigénie, and in Phèdre, and matched,
moreover, by the other iterated accounts of Thésée's many violences with
women. Paris's infamous kidnapping has thus become merely one more
episode in the cultural production and reproduction of sexual abduction.
   For, in Racine, everything is always and already "old." Oreste's allusion
to his death quest at the hands of the bloodthirsty, sacrificing barbarians, is the
diluted, reduced, but no less powerful version of human sacrifice that is the
principal focus of Iphigénie. And it is the modern playwright, Racine, who
rejoins the sacrificial death of a human, where the ancient Greek, Euripides,
had substituted a doe, thereby echoing the averted Biblical sacrifice of Isaac
by Abraham, the traditional originary moment of civilization's triumph,
through symbol, over the primitive world. Moving backward along the
mythohistorical continuum from Andromaque to Phèdre, Racine pauses
momentarily in the chaotic, voracious world of beasts and deities before
falling silent. But that violent, undisciplined, not yet civilized universe, seem-

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ingly transcended in a monster-free, Greek Andromaque, reveals itself finally
as eternal. The sheer anteriority of Hermione, atavistic force of passion (itself
always regressive) and of death, is the ultimate sign of the controlling domi-
nance of the Racinian past, however elusive its point of origin may be. And
that past, of course, did not begin nor end with Helen of Troy. With her cousin
Oreste, Hermione shares ancestral ties to the violently mad House of Atreus.
The king who bore that name, father to Agamemnon and Ménélas, vengeful-
Iy served up to his brother a meal of the latter's own children, the "horrible
festin" (4.4.1248) that Clytemnestre replays in Iphigénie, as she identifies
Agamemnon, Oreste's parent and the father willing to sacrifice his daughter,
with the child-ravaging monsters. In this, he is wholly joined by the "monster"
Oreste, grandson of Atreus, son of Agamemnon, a label he accepts as he lucid-
ly analyzes his violation of all the standards of civilization:

                   Je viole en un jour les droits des souverains,
                   Ceux des ambassadeurs, et tous ceux des humains,
                   Ceux même des autels où ma fureur l'assiège:
                   Je deviens parricide, assassin, sacrilège....
                   Elle l'aime! et je suis un monstre furieux! (5.4.1571-74; 1579)

   Incarnating the forces of monstrosity and rage, Oreste "returns" (and, of
course, Ie retour d'Oreste is a prominent leitmotif of the play) to the self nei-
ther he nor any other had ever quit, leaving in the interstice the unmentioned,
but not, for either playgoer or reader, unforgotten, murder of Clytemnestre,
and the complicity in that matricide of his sister, Iphigénie, idealized virgin in
the play that bears her name.6
   It is not, of course, Oreste who kills Pyrrhus, but rather "tous les Grecs,"
who also are returned here to their fundamental barbarity after the would-be
triumph of their superior civilization, whose greatness had needed only the
winds and currents of Iphigénie to vainquish a recalcitrant Troy, as already
Lesbos and Thessaly. Here, at the end of Andromaque, but in fact, from its
earliest scenes, they, too, "return," to a shared identity with the House of
Atreus, monstrous devourer of children. They do not slay the "foreign" son,
Astyanax, but rather their own, "le fils d'Achille." For in Racine, it is always
the time of the barbarians, and the violent seeds are planted firmly in the
"superior" Hellenic culture, while a regression toward an elemental, original
monstrosity is the direction the playwright chooses as he advances his literary
production.
   There is, then, no small amount of irony in Oreste's speech to Hermione in

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Act IV, identifying them both forever, eternally, with their parents; for what
might sound on the surface like a call to glory represented by Oreste's father
and Hermione's mother, ultimately is nothing more than an echo of their mon-
struous, devouring, killing appetites:

                                Eh bien! allons, Madame:
                     Mettons encore un coup toute la Grèce en flamme;
                     Prenons, en signalant mon bras et votre nom,
                     Vous, la place d'Hélène, et moi, d'Agamemnon.
                     De Troie en ce pays réveillons les misères,
                     Et qu'on parle de nous ainsi que de nos pères.
                     Partons, je suis tout prêt. (4.3.1157-63)

   "Allons," "partons," urges Oreste, as if movement and departure were ever
possible in this immobile, static world, where change is once more paradoxi-
cally figured as a return to the past of the Trojan War. Such fundamental stasis
Hermione fully grasps as she replies: "Non, seigneur, demeurons" (4.3.1163).
And Andromaque, becoming queen of Epire at the conclusion of the play,
may, in Pylade's words, indiscriminately and identically avenge the two hus-
bands representing the two cultures that an entire universe and epoch had
promised to distinguish for time immemorial:

                     Andromaque elle-même, à Pyrrhus si rebelle,
                     Lui rend tous les devoirs d'une veuve fidèle,
                     Commande qu'on le venge, et peut-être sur nous
                     Veut venger Troie encore et son premier époux. (5.5.1589-92)

   Her "promiscuous" and redundant widowhood suggests the heart of
Racinian drama fixated on immutable patterns. In such a world, the talents of
the priest Calchas in Iphigénie—"Il sait tout ce qui fut et tout ce qui doit être"
(2.1.458)—are perhaps far less grand than we might have thought at first, for
the priest only "sees," finally, what should be evident to all who would go
"back to the future."

Rutgers University—Camden

                                             Notes

     Philip E. Lewis, "Jansenist Tragedy," in Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French
     Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 320-27. Lewis's brief but excellent study served
     as the point of departure for my own.
     Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Pion, 1953), 109. Poulet's study

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     remains a formidable contribution to understanding Racinian time and memory.
3.    Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris; Seuil, 1963), 78-86; Leo Bersani, A Future for
     Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976), 17-
     50.
4.   Barthes, Sw Racine; Charles Mauron, L'Inconscient dans l'Âœuvre et la vie de Racine (Paris:
     Corti, 1969), 52-69.
5.   Raymond Picard, ed., Jean Racine, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 1160.
6.    That Racine obliterates any references to the murder of Clytemnestre by her children
     demonstrates more than a desire to portray a sympathetic Oreste. Rather, the writer's
     choice—in light of what every playgoer and reader already knows about Oreste's matricide,
     which crime, therefore, can scarcely be concealed—is formal testimony to the significance
     of Racine's primary thematic direction: the total impossibility of repressing the representa-
     tion of the past in the present.

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