Fire of Argolis: Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Apollon tragique” and “Clytemnestre ou le crime”

Abstract

The themes of fire and unrequited love return in Clytemnestre ou du crime. A new exercise in style rewritten in the first person, this text is a long confession based on the events which bring about the death of Agamemnon and Cassandra and the description of the horrid crime. The husband-killing queen (like Phaedra, and like the same Marguerite who suffer the fires of unrequited love) speaks before a tribunal/theatre of judges/spectators. The reconstruction of the crime (times, movements, gestures, looks, places and scenic objects) and the reflections/ meditations that accompany her monologue reveal themselves as a sort of autobiographic Ignatian exercise, which is both literary and psychic. Yourcenar gives herself a voice through one of her doubles, who penetrates her psyche profoundly by way of depersonalisation, identification, magic, metempsychosis, correspondence, universality, sympathy, connection, assembly, collage, overlapping, sedimentation, condensation, overlay of times of the fable, overlay of human personalities, and infinite self-rewritings.