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Human and Suprahuman: Ambiguity in the Tragic World of Jean Giraudoux
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Behind the apparent diversity of subject matter in Giraudoux's plays there is a central unity, the persistence of the great Romantic theme of the search for a suprahuman ideal. Typically, the hero of a Giraudoux play is seeking some image of beauty, power, and mystery that lies beyond the range of human experience. But this ideal world, however attractive, has its opposite in the limited human world of daily existence with its own beauty, grace, and comfort. Moreover, each of these worlds has a negative aspect; the human world may be characterized by greed, hatred, and vulgarity just as the ideal may be cruel, inhuman, fatal. As a result, Giraudoux's plays are marked by a profound ambiguity and express deeply divided attitudes not only toward the suprahuman but toward its human opposite as well. The four tragic works from the great series of plays of the nineteen thirties form a natural group and, because the conclusions toward which they drive are at once desired and feared, they reveal this essential ambiguity more directly than any others. Judith, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (Tiger at the Gates), Electra, and Ondine all show, by means of a dramatic image of destruction through a quest for the ideal, those central attitudes and concerns which characterize Giraudoux's art.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972
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1 Giraudoux draws his subjects from so wide a variety of sources—contemporary life, classical legend, folklore, the Bible—that the variety of material, coupled with the ambiguity of the writer's attitude, tends to mask the regularity of theme. Jacques Guicharnaud suggests this apparent diversity in describing Giraudoux's plays as great debates “between war and peace in La Guerre de Troie, the love of a young man and an old man in Cantique des cantiques, the human and the supernatural in Ondine and Intermezzo, English morality and natural amorality in Le Supplément au voyage de Cook, sensual love and saintliness in Judith, man and woman in Sodome et Gomorrhe.” Modern French Theatre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 20. But behind these antitheses (and others, sacred and profane love in Pour Lucrèce, e.g.) stand Giraudoux's persistent opposites of which these are aspects.
2 In the Introduction to his volume of adaptations of Giraudoux, Four Plays (New York: Hill, 1958), Maurice Valency notes the conflict of ideal and real in some of the plays, though he seems to suggest that it is largely a metaphor for the condition of marriage. He does not point out that in Giraudoux the ideal is dangerous as well as alluring, and that to see it is to look down as well as up.
3 This ambiguity is reflected in Giraudoux's celebrated style, the elegant whimsicalities of which are not ornamental but essential to his meaning. The typical Giraudoux witticism depends on the incongruous juxtaposition of the commonplace and the exotic. Thus, in Ondine, Hans, the knight errant who has been searching for giants in an enchanted forest, enters and at once complains that the rain has been running down his neck and getting into his armor. When we laugh, we are recognizing the disparity between the Romantic, visionary world toward which one aspires and the pedestrian world to which one is confined.
4 To make this study easily accessible to students inter ested in the modern drama, I have placed in the footnotes English versions of the longer speeches. Since many English translations of Giraudoux are either adaptations or extremely free versions, I have made translations following the text of the Edition Bernard Grasset, Theatre, 4 vols. (Paris, 1958), from which the French citations are also taken. Hereafter references to this edition will give the volume and page numbers as follows: i, 231. JOSEPH. “Sacred! Why sacred ? I hope this place will never be sacred. This is the sitting room where my father had his first attack, where Judith marshalled her dolls and lost her first tooth, where her mother had the first sickness of her pregnancy . . . Here one eats, one weeps, one spits. Look, I spit ! Its sanctity is to be a place that is human, and not sacred …” 6 1, 277–78. HOLOPHERNE. “This is one of those rare human corners that are truly free. The gods infest our poor universe, Judith. From Greece to the Indies, from North to South, there is not a country where they do not swarm, each with his vices, with his odors . . . The air of the world, for one who likes to breathe, is that of a roomful of gods . . . But there are still some places forbidden to them; I alone know how to see them. They subsist on the plain or mountain, like spots of terrestrial paradise. The insects that inhabit them do not have the original sin of insects; I plant my tent upon these places … By chance, directly in front of the city of the Jewish God, I recognized this one, by a bending of the palms, by a call of the waters.”
6 I, 298. “Everything was already the past, everything was yesterday. … In me, enveloped already in my eternal death, he inspired a pity without limit, so little protected by his ephemeral death against the threats of the coming day ! . . . can the sight of a sleeping body call forth anything other than murder as the supreme tenderness!”
7 La Guerre de Troie dates from 1935. As a member of the French diplomatic corps with a special interest in Ger-many, Giraudoux was in a position to understand the coming catastrophe with particular lucidity.
8 II, 300. “. . . the backside of a monkey. When the she-monkey has climbed into the tree and shows us a red bottom, all scaly and glazed, ringed by a filthy wig, war is exactly what one sees, that is its face.”
9 A very different view of this play is presented by René Marill Albérès in his exhaustive study, Esthétique et morale chez Jean Giraudoux. Citing Giraudoux's admiration for Tolstoy, Albérès writes: “… la guerre est fatale non tant à cause de son prétexte anecdotique, le rapt d'Hélène par Paris, mais parce qu'elle est inscrite dans les conditions économiques et sociales du monde humain, qui ne se séparent pas de la marche générale de l'univers. Cette pensée est celle de Tolstoï dans La Guerre et la Paix” (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1967), p. 396. When generalizing about Giraudoux's work as a whole, Albérès seems to recognize its central theme and the ambiguous attitude evoked (see, e.g., such comments as those on pp. 329 and 416–17), but when dealing with individual plays, he tends to make each a special case, as here, and to lose the sense of continuity.
10 in, 15–16. “A conscience!! Is that what you think! If the guilty do not forget their faults, if the conquered do not forget their defeats, the victors their victories, if there are curses, quarrels, hatreds, the fault does not lie with the conscience of humanity, which has every propensity toward compromise and forgetfulness, but with ten or fifteen women who make trouble!” “I know Electra! Let us admit that she is what you say, the embodiment of justice, generosity, duty. But it is with justice, generosity, duty and not selfishness and indulgence, that one ruins the state, the individual and the best families . . . because these three virtues embody the only element truly fatal to humanity, tenacity. Happiness has never been the lot of those who are tenacious. A happy family is a local surrender. A happy epoch is a unanimous capitulation.”
11 An intriguing sidelight is cast on this moment of Electre's self-realization by Jean-Paul Sartre in his study of Giraudoux's novel Choix des Elues. Describing Giraudoux's world as “le monde d'Aristote,” one in which things exist in a series of absolute states independent of exterior determinism, Sartre says that in this world man “est à l'origine des commencements premiers: ses actes n'émanent que de lui-même. Est-ce la liberté? C'est du moins un certain genre de liberté. Il semble en outre que M. Giraudoux en confère une autre à ses créatures: l'homme réalise spontanément son essence.” “M. Jean Giraudoux et la philosophie d'Aristote,” Nouvelle Revue Française, 54 (March 1940), 351. It is doubtful that Sartre's view is very generally applicable to the plays, but certainly Electre's instant of spontaneous self-realization is by far the most existential moment in them.
12 iii, 57. “Electra, then, did not push Orestes! That means that everything she says is legitimate, everything she undertakes unchallengeable. She is the truth that leaves no residue, the lamp that needs no oil, the light without a wick. So that if she kills, as she threatens to, all peace and all happiness about her, it is because she is right!”
13 iii, 89. “And it was forever! . . . This morning I re ceived my city forever, as a mother her child. And I asked myself with anguish if the gift was not a larger one, if I had not been given much more than Argos. In the morning God does not measure his gifts: he could as well have given me the world. That would have been dreadful. That would have meant for me the despair of one who expects a diamond for his birthday and who is given the sun.”
14 iii, 98. “And it was this morning at dawn, when you were given Argos and its narrow frontiers, that I saw it [the ”universe“ she has been given] thus immense and that 1 heard its name, a name which is not pronounced, but which is at the same time tenderness and justice.”
15 iii, 265. “I am very wrong to wake you! Why waken him whom one loves? In his sleep everything pushes him towards you! As soon as his eyes are open, he escapes you! Sleep, sleep, my lord Hans …”
16 iii, 311. “Oh! do not believe that. It is very small—that realm in the universe where one forgets, one changes one's mind, or one pardons, humanity as you call it . . . With us, it is as with the wild beast, as with the leaves of the ash tree, as with the caterpillars, there is neither renunciation, nor pardon.”
17 iii, 332. “What I demand? I demand what these servants, men and girls, demand! I demand for men the right to be a little bit alone upon this earth. Surely what God has accorded them is not very grand, this surface with six feet of height, between heaven and hell! . . . Surely human life is not so attractive with these hands one must wash, these colds one must nurse, these hairs that leave one! . . . What I demand is to live without feeling, swarming about us as they insist on doing, these extra-human lives, these herrings with women's bodies, these bladders with the heads of children, these lizards with spectacles and the thighs of nymphs … On the morning of my marriage, I demand to be—in a world empty of their visits, of their humors and their couplings—alone with my fiancée, alone at last.”
18 Not only do four years pass between the production in 1939 of Ondine, with its wit, its pathos, its rich development of the characteristic Giraudoux fantasy, and the presentation in 1943 of Sodomeet Gomorrhe, with its darkness, its astringency, its harsh focus on a perverse destructive-ness, but in Giraudoux's life, and the life of the world around him, major events occur. Giraudoux himself becomes Minister of Information in the Daladier government, and his beloved France is defeated and occupied. Under such circumstances Giraudoux's work, perhaps inevitably, lost the strength and richness that had marked it previously.
19 See Agnes G. Raymond, Jean Giraudoux: The Theatre of Victory and Defeat (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1966), pp. 99–121, for a discussion of the play as a political allegory.
20 One critic suggests that we may consider Lucile, Judith, and Electre “as moral figures, tragic for being excessive, and their dramas as moralities teaching moderation.” To do so, however, is to limit Giraudoux's scope of perception and ambiguity of feeling. See Laurent Le Sage, Jean Giraudoux: His Life and Works (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1959), p. 162.