The question of Andromaque’s capabilities as a mother has long been a source of scholarly debate. William A. Mould summarizes:
Maternal Andromaque is generally considered from one of two points of view. The most obvious interpretation holds that Andromaque is a "good" mother: tender, loving, protective, concerned for her son's safety, entirely virtuous-"la tendre mère du petit Astyanax," in the words of Marcel Gutwirth …. An opposing view typified by Roland Barthes in Sur Racine…emphasizes her love for Hector, her coquetry, certain of her violent remarks, to the exclusion of any maternal sentiment whatever: “Andromaque n'est pas une mère, mais une amante” (558). If Andromaque’s stalled position swerves from the norm expected of her, perhaps it is because her story and survival itself is founded upon a mis-reading. Telling the survivors’ story is made
possible only with the re-writing of the past, specifically the writing-in of a lack, of a missed encounter. In Racine’s preface, he admits that “Il est vrai que j’ai été oblige de faire vivre Astyanax un peu plus qu’il n’a vécu,”120
referring to the fact that in his version of the mythology, Astyanax is made to survive the destruction of Troy, as I have discussed previously. The
substitutive function that launches the action of the play (the placing of the wrong child for the proper child) is rhetorically encapsulated in the repetition and catachresis in the play-- in the interplay between the different valences of “fire” and “ash.”
Just as the wrong child standing in for the “real” one enables the survival of the main characters and the possibility to live-on and to tell their story, the substitution of the “wrong” word (the abusive trope or false metaphor) for a proper one (i.e. “cendres” for “Hector”) enables the language of trauma, mourning, and memory. Thus, both survival and the survival of
testimony are generated by improper wresting.Andromaque’s forced witnessing of her (false) child dashed to its death is played out in strange ways throughout the rest of the drama. As Abraham and Torok write:
Tous les mots qui n’auront pu être dits, toutes les scènes qui n’auront pu être remémorées, toutes les larmes qui n’auront pu être versés, seront avalés, en même temps que le traumatisme, cause de la perte. Avalés et mis en conserve. Le deuil indicible installe à l’intérieur du sujet un caveau secret (266).121
If we follow Abraham and Torok’s figuration of the “crypt” as a type of internalized, sealed-off desire which is unspeakable, we find two instances of past traumas which are never alluded to in the play, yet which drive the play’s action.
In the beginning of the play, as Oreste and Pylade reconnect, Pylade admits: “Surtout je
120 “It is true that I had to make Astyanax live for a bit longer than he actually did”
121 “All the words which couldn’t be spoken, all of the scenes that couldn’t be recalled, all of the tears that one
couldn’t cry—all will be swallowed, at the same time as the trauma, scene of the loss. Swallowed and preserved. The unspeakable mourning takes hold in the interior of a secret cave within the subject.”(136)
redoutais cette mélancolie/ Où j'ai vu si longtemps votre âme ensevelie” (I, i, 16-17).122
Greenberg remarks, “By his incisive use of the word ensevelie to rhyme with mélancolie, Racine immediately establishes, as Freud would do two hundred years later, the intimate relation of melancholia and death” (60). That which is buried, however, is not only Oreste’s “âme” but also the secret of his crime. Prior to the play's action. Oreste has murdered his mother, Clytemnestra to avenge the fact that she had previously slain Oreste’s father, Agamemnon. Clytemnestra viewed the murder of her spouse as just recompense for Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice their daughter Iphigénie in order to garner a favorable wind and launch ships toward Troy.
Although Oreste's past is never explicitly mentioned in the text, theatergoers in the seventeenth century would have surely been attuned to the mythological context.123 Jean Apostolides' summary of Oreste's situation bears more than a passing similarity to the structure of the “open secret” as analyzed by François;124
the murder remains buried, as knowledge of past crimes which remains known, but unsaid, and lingering without any pressing imperative to act upon this weighted knowledge: “Lorsque débute de la pièce, et bien que Racine laisse dans l'ombre tout cet aspect du personnage, Oreste a déjà vengé son père et Pylade était présent lors de l'assassinat de Clytemnestre”( 94).125
This weightless knowledge may be enabled by the fact that “Oreste garde Pylade comme un témoin muet de son passé d'Atride” (Apostolides 95) (Orestes keeps Pylades as a mute witness of his Atrides past). Pylade's status as bystander to the crime enables a particular type of testimonial vision; Shoshana Felman, in Testimony, suggests that “the victims, the bystanders, and the perpetrators are here differentiated not so much by what they
122
“I was especially afraid of this melancholia which, for so long, enveloped your spirits.”
123 Mitchell Greenberg writes, “Nowhere in the text of Andromaque is any mention made of this most famous and
most shocking of crimes attached to the Oreste legend. This does not prevent knowledge of his crime…like the Enrinyes who follow him everywhere from being inextricably attached to his persona, Oreste enters the play, whether acknowledged or not, with all the weight and opprobrium of his matricide” (Racine 61).
124 François' work suggests “the ways in which the open secret as a gesture of self-canceling revelation permits a
release from the ethical imperative to act upon knowledge”(3).
125
“At the beginning of the piece, and even though Racine obscures the rest of his character, Orestes has already taking revenge on his father and Pylades was present at the murder of Clytemnestra.”
actually see […] as by how they do not see, by what and how they fail to witness” (208). To this end, Felman suggests that the position of the bystander, as exemplified by the Poles in the film
Shoah (Lantzman 1985), is one of seeing-but-not seeing. This may be likened the ephemerality
elicited by Terada's “looking away” or similar in structure to the abusive figuration of catachresis, of figuring, but failing to figure: “The Poles, unlike the Jews, do see, but, as bystanders, they do not quite look, they avoid looking directly, and thus they overlook at once their responsibility and their complicity as witnesses” (208). Thus when Pylade admits, “Surtout je redoutais cette mélancolie/ Où j'ai vu si longtemps votre âme ensevelie” (I, i, 16-17)126
, the “mélancolie” that is seen (vu) condenses both the noted, superficial understanding of the performed melancholic affect as well as the over-looked traumatically-buried matricide.
Surely Oreste’s diplomatic voyage to Épire carries not only the evident pretext of wooing Hermione, but also the hidden, encrypted acting-out of the weight(lessness) of his murder. By making the move that he does—demanding Astyanax on behalf of the Greeks—he puts pressure on Andromaque both as a mother and as a wife, replicating almost perversely, in reverse, the same dilemma with which his mother was faced: does her fidelity as a wife take precedence over her identity as a mother? Clytemnestra felt that Agamemnon’s blow to her motherhood, killing her beloved daughter Iphigénie, assured her enough justification to murder her husband upon his arrival back home. The opening “chess move” performed by Orestes enacts and replicates an eerily similar re-iteration of the same questions his mother faced.
As previously analyzed, Andromaque’s reaction to this particular “chess move” is
released in a zero-velocity reaction. Indeed, her response to Pyrrhus’ ultimatum is simply “Hélas ! Il mourra donc (I, iv, 373) (“Alas, he'll die, then”). Obscured in this decisive indecision is her encrypted trauma experienced from the war—her apparent passivity and acceptance that
Astyanax would die indicates a deeper, buried guilt over the too-ready sacrifice of the false Astyanax. Indeed, the second and only other time that “ensevelis” is mentioned in the text, the word is made to rhyme with “fils”: “Il élève en sa cour l'ennemi de la Grèce,/ Astyanax, d'Hector jeune et malheureux fils,/ Reste de tant de rois sous Troie ensevelis”(I, i, 70-73).127 The child’s living-on, his status as son/child-- the “reste” of Trojan kings, is predicated upon Andromaque’s willing sacrifice of another child. The buried kings dictate the progress of futurity and lineage, but buried with these past kings are also the trauma and violent acts that make the apparently smooth transition of power possible, such as Andromaque’s complicity in the deception. Thus Astyanax’s very position as “son” (and that which makes Andromaque “mother”) is founded upon that which is buried and repudiated.
This “missed encounter”—the accident which was an enacted, fully carried-out threat, yet never touched Astayanax himself—is further traumatic because Andromaque was made to
witness the horror of it, but it was an event whose horror to which she could never testify, because it would be a testimony filled with “almosts”—“I almost saw my son die/ I willingly let my almost-son die before my eyes”. This “almost” is enabled by a duplicitous doubling: the twinning of the false son and the real son. Andromaque condenses all three of Shoshana Felman's witnessing positions at once: she is the bystander (who insists on overlooking her complicity in the event), the perpetrator (by seizing the false child) and the victim (of the actual event).
In a sense, Orestes as foil to Andromaque's situation, with his twinned bystander Pylade, amplifies the inarticulable trauma of the slippages. Pylade's mother, Anaxibie “fait partie du clan de Atrides […] elle est la tante d'Oreste et d'Hermione, qui sont cousins germains. Selon la tradition, Oreste et Pylade auraient été élevés conjointement à la cour de Strophios, leur lien de
127 “In this very court he is bringing up the enemy of Greece. Astayanax, Hector’s young and woe-burdered son.
parenté de doublant d'un lien d'amitié (Apostolidès, 94)128. Thus with the words
“conjointement,” “doublant” and “cousins germains,” Apostolidès wishes to emphasize the very twinning of the two, but only in order to establish Pylade as the witnessing bystander. We can extend this doubling further, by crafting a more elaborated picture of mere foils and mirroring through Patricia Parker's exploration of the equivocation and wordplay in “cousins germains:”
But the Shakespearean canon also plays repeatedly on the tension between the sense of german as honest, genuine or true and the doubled sense of cozen both as relative and kin and as cheating or cozening. Shakespearean playing on germane and german in contexts that sometimes evoke its closeness in sound to gemmen, or twin, conveys just such a sense of the potentially duplicitous, treacherous, or cozening 'german' (SM 129).
Although drawing upon Shakespearean wordplay here, Parker's notion still seems particularly apt for this buried, traumatic event: the question at stake here is the honest swindle (german cozening) of the false son for the real son, honest because earnest, and well-intentioned. Or else it becomes a case where the “duplicitous doubling” (129) itself becomes german, it feels entirely real, and the slippery nature of the swapping means that the traumatic loss of the false son feels no less false than the real (proleptic) loss of the real son.
Through the layers of doubling, of the shifting in and out of focus between reality, loss, and bystanding vision, this trauma remains unspoken, and must remain sealed, so thickly cemented over with obfuscating layers of guilt and haunting. As Caruth reminds us:
The accident, that is, as it emerges in Freud and is passed on through other trauma narratives, does not simply represent the violence of a collision but also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility. What returns to haunt the victim, these
128 “She is part of the Atrides clan […] she is the aunt of Orestes and Hermione, who are german cousins.
According to tradition, Orestes and Pylades had been conjointly raised at the court in Strophios, their familial ties redoubled with a link of friendship.”
stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known (6).
For Andromaque, this “missed encounter” with death, touched and yet not touched by it,
literalizes the temporal delay/ unexpectedness of trauma. The death of her (false) son has already happened, which she is processing and understanding belatedly (or even not at all), but the death of the real son is still imminent, yet-to come. In the doubling of the false son and the real son, Andromaque is made to experience the “too soon” and “too late” simultaneously. Her own life, her own incomprehensible and unbearable survival, is based solely upon Astyanax’s living-on, a survival for which she is ultimately guilty and responsible.