Fuochi d’Argolide: “Apollon tragique” e “Clytemnestre ou le crime” di Marguerite Yourcenar

Abstract

In Apollon tragique, an exercise in style written in the third person on the myth imprinted in the “brevitas”, which was written for a review of luxury voyages in Greece, Marguerite Yourcenar takes a temporal overlap that recalls the filmic overlays of Jean Cocteau. She shifts the centre of the fable of Agamennone’s murder from Clytemnestra to Cassandra, who is represented to us with the emphasis and energy of a vividly-coloured advertisement image, in her deadly relationship with the God that she spurned. The writer projects her unrequited love for André Fraigneau on the clash between Phoebus and Apollo, the luminous apparition of death that shines in the sky of Mycenae at midday. Thus she undertakes the first stage of an initiatory inner voyage. By means of the fire of passion that feeds a psychic alchemy (C. G. Jung) which is dear to Marguerite Yourcenar both as a woman and an author; she reaches a point of self-identification through the integration of this acute narcissistic wound, a Socratic self-knowledge which she had constantly researched.

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.