SOURCE: Stone, Harriet. “Marking Time: Memorializing History in Athalie.” L'Esprit Créateur 38, no. 2 (summer 1998): 95-104.

[In the following essay, Stone examines the use and treatment of memory in Athalie.]

Athalie marks the limit of Racine's theatrical career. The play commemorates the historic end point of his dramatic efforts, the moment of rupture that catapults him into posterity as the distinguished author of a corpus now closed, a corpus forever identified by precisely twelve works. In Athalie, moreover, all of Racine's earlier plays continue to echo. Like Astyanax, Joas survives thanks to the efforts of those who revere what has come before. The son's inheritance of the father's place reflects society's respect for the law of succession as it ties son to father, present to past, the tensions of the here and now to a glorious heritage embraced by divine providence. Society conserves these children through its fidelity to an order of things so indelibly etched in time and tradition as to survive the enmity of families and nations. Joined together in this way, generations of Racine's characters transcend the specificities of Greek myth, Roman history, Orientalism, and the Bible that identify his individual plays.¹

As represented on Racine's stage, however, the cycle of memory dulls but does not silence the curse of Athalie, Phèdre, Agrippine—the mother's curse that, in restricting the son, has sustained a history of revolt. Agrippine's efforts to govern Néron and Phèdre's condemnation of Hippolyte before Thésée announce a pattern of violence that culminates in Athalie's execration of her progeny. Acting to silence her curse, the Jews murder Athalie. Their swords serve as the agents of memory, which protects the child Eliacin by restoring his true identity as Joas. Yet, along with the name that returns Joas to his origin, along with the many acts of worship that define the Jews as keepers of memory, Racine commemorates the oppressed throughout history who would deny memory's hold on them, those for whom the meaning of an event is a measure of its ability to disrupt the flow of time.

Traces of Athalie survive in Joas's murder of Zacharie, the history that the drama prepares but does not perform. “Joas … après trente ans d'un règne fort pieux, s'abandonna aux mauvais conseils des flatteurs, et se souilla du meurtre de Zacharie, fils et successeur de ce grand-prêtre [Joad],” Racine recalls, an event so critical as to announce “la destruction du temple et la ruine de Jérusalem” (“Préface”). Racine's final tragedy mediates the Jews' triumph and their subsequent decline, the father's reassuring call from the past and the mother's demands in and for the present.

The play functions as what Pierre Nora terms a lieu de mémoire. What echoes there is not merely how the Jews, in putting Athalie to death, save memory from a history of annihilation but rather how the memory content—what they remember—becomes the locus for exploring the act of remembering as an arbitrary exercise of history, a critical exercise that is the power to forge a knowledge of the past. Nora insists on the something more than history in his designation of the lieu de mémoire:

Considérer un monument comme un lieu de mémoire n'est nullement se contenter de faire son histoire. Lieu de mémoire, donc: toute unité significative, d'ordre matériel ou idéel, dont la volonté des hommes ou le travail du temps a fait un élément symbolique du patrimoine mémoriel d'une quelconque communauté.²

Lieux de mémoire thus are those things and ideas that allow us to reconnect the histoire vécue with “l'opération intellectuelle qui la rend intelligible.”³ The focus on such lieux is necessary, Nora argues, because contemporary history has produced the discomforting rupture of event and meaning:

Habiterions-nous encore notre mémoire, nous n'aurions pas besoin d'y consacrer des lieux. Il n'y aurait pas de lieux, parce qu'il n'y aurait pas de mémoire emportée par l'histoire. Chaque geste, jusqu'au plus quotidien, serait vécu comme la répétition religieuse de ce qui s'est fait depuis toujours, dans une identification charnelle de l'acte et du sens. Dès qu'il y a trace, distance, médiation, on n'est plus dans la mémoire vraie, mais dans l'histoire.

(“Entre mémoire et histoire,” xix)

And he adds for emphasis:

Pensons aux Juifs, confinés dans la fidélité quotidienne au rituel de la tradition. Leur constitution en “peuple de la mémoire” excluait un souci d'histoire, jusqu'à ce que son ouverture au monde lui impose le besoin d'historiens.

(xix)⁴

This reference to the Jews and the “besoin d'historiens” returns us to Athalie. Nora associates the Jews with a ritualistic integrity, with a history that had, until modernity forced their entry into a Christian world, assured the continuity of a culture whose traditions bore witness to its past and to the Jews' identity as a people. How, Nora asks, can one select an appropriate lieu de mémoire for this religion: “Et que choisir du judaïsme, dont le vrai lieu de mémoire n'est autre que la mémoire même?”⁵

Athalie provides an obvious first answer to this prolegomenon: the temple of Jerusalem. Constructed by Solomon upon God's command, the temple is the Jews' most sacred space. The place where Jews go to worship and where they feel God's presence, the temple anchors the Jewish religion and constitutes the Jews as a people. By virtue of what it includes and what it excludes—the child Joas whom it conceals inside, and the idolater Athalie whom it keeps outside until the Jews stage her murder⁶—the temple in Racine's play is the lieu de mémoire linking the Jews in the present to their past.

Yet there is more to the story, the details of which are important enough to be rehearsed in the preface and again in the text proper.⁷ Jéhu killed all the descendants of the King of Israel, Achab, Athalie's father. In response to these massacres Athalie murdered all of her grandchildren. Athalie married Joram, from Judah. The territories of both Israel and Judah originally formed part of the kingdom of Solomon. But, while in the north Israel quickly recognized other gods, in the south Judah, which contained only two tribes to Israel's ten, remained faithful to God and was the more stable region. Athalie is pivotal in Racine's tragedy because she worships Baal. Her idols are an affront to monotheism and a challenge to the Jews' authority. As enacted on stage, her history threatens Joas and the various fathers he serves: Joad, Solomon, David, God. Athalie thus imperils memory as represented by the Jews. Like Joas, however, Athalie can trace her ancestry back through the twelve tribes of Israel before the schism.⁸

Nora's analysis is nowhere more pertinent to a reading of Athalie than when he observes that memory is akin to the literary art of mise en scène:

la mémoire en effet est un cadre plus qu'un contenu, un enjeu toujours disponible, un ensemble de stratégies, un être-là qui vaut moins par ce qu'il est que par ce que l'on en fait. C'est dire qu'on touche ici à la dimension littéraire des lieux de mémoire, dont l'intérêt repose en définitive sur l'art de la mise en scène et l'engagement personnel de l'historien.

(“Présentation,” viii, my emphasis)

For Nora the concept of the mise en scène refers not to stage decorations simply but to the entire staging of history as it reflects the symbolic order governing society, the complex network of relations that constitute a group or nation's cultural heritage. The mise en scène operates as a frame for the text, “un cadre plus qu'un contenu … un ensemble de stratégies” that determines meaning.⁹ In Athalie the notion of mise en scène correspondingly refers not only to the temple. Racine offers a mise en scène that is at once more specific and more encompassing than Nora would have it, for the dramatist's mise en scène in Athalie develops through a mise en abîme.

Athalie's famous dream in Act 2 is pivotal to this aspect of the play's design. Divided into two sections, the dream accentuates two deaths: that of Athalie's mother and her own. The dream extends the past into the present, transforming the history of Jézabel's murder into memory through the act of remembrance, representation. More than an act of recalling the past, however, this memory as played out first in her dream and again in her recollection of this dream on-stage is an accurate indicator of the future, namely, her murder by the Jews:

Mais de ce souvenir mon âme possédée
A deux fois en dormant revu la même idée;
Deux fois mes tristes yeux se sont vu retracer
Ce même enfant toujours tout prêt à me percer.

(2.5.519-22)

In its insistence on mirroring and re-presentation, on the recurring specter of the “enfant fatal” (2.5.545) that unites past, present, and future in a unique vision, the mise en abîme reveals Racine's art and its relation to history more clearly than does the concept of mise en scène. Repeating or reproducing a unique form, the mise en abîme establishes the simplest kind of patterning. Patterns provide a map to experience; they constitute a system through which things are identified and meanings established. In Athalie the pattern is not, however, as simple as it first appears. Athalie does meet the fate that her dream portends. But Athalie's history, as it traces her efforts to assuage her fears following her dream and her eventual extermination by the Jews, is also the performance that mirrors the Jews' own heritage of intolerance and violence. Indeed, as the pervasive theme of opposition to Baal worship in Deuteronomic literature and the prophets attests, idol-worship held an irresistible appeal for many Jews throughout their long history prior to Athalie.¹⁰ The Jews' assassination of Athalie thus restores society more as the result of Racine's framing of history than of history proper. Racine chooses to end the drama with Joas's accession to the throne rather than with his murder of Zacharie. Yet, by calling our attention to this fact in his preface and most poignantly in Athalie's last speech, Racine's mise en scène continues to place the Jews' own history en abîme. Athalie damns Joas by reminding him that if he inherits from David, he inherits from her as well. She condemns him to remember that, although they are now living separate histories, a unique memory carries these histories:

Voici ce qu'en mourant lui souhaite sa mère.
[…]
Qu'indocile à ton joug, fatigué de ta loi,
Fidèle au sang d'Achab, qu'il a reçu de moi,
Conforme à son aïeul, à son père semblable,
On verra de David l'héritier détestable
Abolir tes honneurs, profaner ton autel,
Et venger Athalie, Achab et Jézabel.

(5.6.1783-90)

Consistent with Nora's notion that a nation derives its identity from the past, Racine in his most overt mise en scène situates the Jews on the side of memory and positions Athalie outside this tradition in a history of rupture. Nevertheless, he is careful in the end to bring her into the temple. Athalie enters the Jews' lieu de mémoire, the holy place where the act of performing sacred rites is a return to origin. Racine brings Athalie into the temple the better to kill her, of course. But the effect of her penetrating these sacred walls is to relocate memory, to situate it beyond the Jews' rituals, beyond their fidelity to God. Despite her profanation, her virulence, indeed, despite the multiple acts of infanticide that she commits prior to Act 1, Athalie is no more a marker of Racine's mise en scène than when she calls attention to herself as Joas's mother. She is in fact his mother's mother, the blood tie that links him to her and to her parents Achab and Jézabel. Though he does not erase Athalie's evil through references to her lineage and her family's history of victimization, Racine does encourage us to place her heinous acts within a broader frame. Joas's innocence, moreover, is implicated by Athalie's past to the degree that she and the Jews share blood and that they similarly secure their influence by spilling it. When the Jews kill Athalie to protect Joas, they imitate her parricide. If Athalie is a political expedient, an Other created through historic contingency, the history of her murder by the Jews serves finally to point beyond their memory to the “mémoire vraie, sociale et intouchée” that cannot forget either Athalie or how the Jews fashion memory to exclude her. The “how” becomes the context through which we evaluate memory once it has patterned history.¹¹ Indeed, Racine's exploration of the relation of history and memory adds an interesting twist to Nora's analysis of the problem, for in Athalie history itself becomes a lieu de mémoire.

In his discussion of memory Nora points to the need to preserve the integrity of the past. He calls attention to the essential disjuncture of history and the consequent need to conserve memory as a means of retaining the authenticity of experience: “La mémoire est un phénomène toujours actuel, un lien vécu au présent éternel; l'histoire, une représentation du passé” (“Entre mémoire,” xix). Nora designates history as representation, that is, as an always-mediated experience that doubles and therefore removes the event from the constant flow of memory. History interrupts and distorts the continuous vision that memory affords. Distinguishing between the original occurrence and the subsequent assimilation of this event as representation—representation understood not as (false) copy so much as a grid or application (science) through which the event acquires value relative to other events¹²—Nora champions the lieux that evidence the permanence (durée) of the experience that remains unmediated in memory: “La mémoire s'enracine dans le concret, dans l'espace, le geste, l'image et l'objet. L'histoire ne s'attache qu'aux continuités temporelles, aux évolutions et aux rapports des choses. La mémoire est un absolu et l'histoire ne connaît que le relatif” (“Entre mémoire,” xix).

While memory endures in Athalie in the form of the child king who summons forth into the present the authority of his forbears, the Jews' engagement with Athalie leads not to an affirmation of memory alone—to memory as it preserves the Jews as the people of faith and devotion to the past—but to history as the lieu, or realm, in which memory is actively preserved. “Active” in this context means as a consequence of the Jews' efforts, whether conscious or merely implied, to restore their tradition at the expense of a broader historical perspective that would situate Athalie, too, on the side of the “always there” of memory. The Jews' murder of Athalie reveals how their faith in themselves as the people chosen by God enables them to resist her violence and to reject her as the destructive agent of their own sacred past, a past that is memory precisely because it “allows no other”—no god, no history external to that of His word as the Jews identify themselves through it. If, by definition, theirs is a memory that resists the mediation of history, the tragic irony that resonates throughout Racine's text nevertheless is that this memory is preserved as the result of the Jews' historic choice to ignore, if not to forget, the past that identifies them with Athalie.

In Athalie history does not burden memory with the charge of representing simply, for representation is implicit in the narrative form that history assumes in the drama, where characters enumerate—recite as dialogue—the chronology of events preceding the play as so many acts of reciprocal violence. Rather the problem becomes one of representing selectively, of endorsing either Athalie's version or that of the Jews. The problem, in a word, is how the dramatist, like the historian, chooses a particular context for evaluating the past. Even as it elucidates what Nora terms the “evolution” between events, that is, the shift from one world view (idolatry) to another (monotheism), the history that Racine's characters recount and the history that they enact in killing Athalie repeatedly alternate between Israel and Judah, one form of violence and another. As the audience perceives it, therefore, history is already necessarily memory, part of a more encompassing knowledge. History is the lieu in which memory is constructed, since the play's articulation of meaning derives from the parallel structure through which Racine connects Athalie and the Jews.

The point of the comparison is not to see that Athalie and the Jews are the same, to deny categorically either her evil or their good. Rather the play unfolds in such a way as to make us aware that memory does not, as Nora would have it, flow uninterrupted from the past but instead requires as a condition of its survival the arbitrary framing of the past in the present. As patterned through persistent mises en abîme, moreover, Athalie's history reinforces some comparisons that the perfectly crafted drama, consistent with the classical aesthetic, like the perfectly constructed memory, consistent with classical ideology, must suppress. Memory thus is not every “lien vécu au passé” but “un lien.” There is the rub.

In his emphasis on restoring memory Nora positions himself to compensate for what scholars like de Certeau note is the historians' tendency to impose the ideology of the present on the past.¹³ Racine presents us with a unique opportunity to interrogate these positions, precisely because he celebrates the power of memory at the same time that he marks this memory as a fiction, a cultural artifact. Racine's decision to end the play with Zacharie still alive empowers the Jews because, consistent with Nora's defense of memory, this act preserves Joas in his moment of glory as the leader of a people rescued from the ravages of history. But even when it points past Joas to David, Solomon, and God—to the integrity of memory—the play's concluding reference to the orphan's father reveals the mise en scène to open up at the very moment of closure:

Par cette fin terrible, et due à ses forfaits,
Apprenez, roi des Juifs, et n'oubliez jamais
Que les rois dans le ciel ont un juge sévère,
L'innocence un vengeur, et l'orphelin un père.

(5.8.1813-16)

Referring to the adopted child at the same time that it elides all reference to the child's mother, Joad's speech does not seal in memory as he intends. Rather it creates a vacuum in the text, a history that memory cannot explain except in terms of a motherless child who, in this final moment, never attains the identity of son (he is but un orphelin), not even to his acknowledged father (père).

Even if motivated solely by fear and not by some residual maternal instinct to protect her offspring, and even if part of a grand seduction to win over an innocent boy, Athalie's exchange with Joas is not entirely unconvincing.¹⁴ The love she expresses for her own mother and her claim that she was forced to avenge her family's deaths out of political necessity serve to authenticate her. Like any hero, she elected duty over love by sacrificing even her grandsons. She further chronicles how, since the violence, she has been the region's pacifying force:

Le ciel même a pris soin de me justifier.
Sur d'éclatants succès ma puissance établie
A fait jusqu'aux deux mers respecter Athalie.
Par moi Jérusalem goûte un calme profond.
Le Jourdain ne voit plus l'Arabe vagabond
Ni l'altier Philistin, par d'éternels ravages,
Comme au temps de vos rois, désoler ses rivages;
Le Syrien me traite et de reine et de sœur.
Enfin de ma maison le perfide oppresseur,
Qui devait jusqu'à moi pousser sa barbarie,
Jéhu, le fier Jéhu, tremble dans Samarie; […]
Il me laisse en ces lieux souveraine maîtresse.
Je jouissais en paix du fruit de ma sagesse.

(2.5.470-84)

Thus “l'orphelin” has “un père” only if one ignores a significant portion of history. History shows clearly that the child has a mother, and that this mother is Athalie.

There is nothing inherently evil or ineffective in a culture's selective memory, its privileging of certain responses over others. Memory is a construct, and the fact that it endures may suffice to prove that it works well. But to the degree that the play depends on a clear opposition of the Jews' same to Athalie's different, their one God to her many gods, the attention paid to their common past and to the equally ominous future does much to recontextualize the Jews' memory. Whereas Nora sees memory as a beneficent force with which to counter the negative effects of a present cut off from the past, Racine invites us to examine the conditions under which the Jews' memory comes to signify.¹⁵ In all of his explicit artistry Racine defends the cause of memory as the Jews' enduring tradition. Yet he is also careful to deny the completeness of their memory through Athalie's final malediction of Joas. Her curse extends our glance beyond the moment of their devotion, revealing the memory they celebrate in the temple to be a knowledge fashioned but not final; an act of faith, certainly, but a faith preserved through an active suppression of a fuller knowledge. What the Jews' memory would suppress, namely the violence that threatens it, is recaptured in the successive lieux named in her curse, in the histories that she accurately predicts will repeat the destructive patterns of the past. Projecting into the future, she haunts them with a vision of the past. Trading an eye for an eye, hers for theirs, she meets their gaze as they bring her down, fixing the limits of the memory that they have, for the moment, freed from her contagion.

The point of this analysis is not to deny Athalie's evil or to erase the many differences that distinguish her from the Jews but rather to emphasize how memory, as represented by the Jews, is less authentic than arbitrary, a past chiseled out of history to meet the Jews' own ideological demands. The tragedy evoked in and by the temple is that of the inescapable complicity of all who enter the sacred realm of memory unprepared to find there the remains of history, the power of a history so monumental that even the steady flow of memory cannot smooth away the sharpness of its lines. Instead, memory itself is set in motion by lieux de mémoire that cause us to examine our relation to the past as this investigation includes our construction of memory itself.

Notes

1. For additional parallels, see Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963); Charles Mauron, L'Inconscient dans la vie de l'œuvre de Jean Racine (Paris: Corti, 1969); Eléonore M. Zimmermann, “Au delà d'Athalie,” French Forum 5.1 (January 1980): 14-21.

2. Pierre Nora, “Comment écrire l'histoire de la France?” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 3, Les France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 20.

3. Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 1, La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xviii.

4. One might object that the Jews are by no means the only group able to be defined in this manner.

5. Nora, “Présentation,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, xi.

6. Consistent with Biblical accounts, although Athalie is initially locked inside the temple, she is killed outside it “que la sainteté n'en soit pas profanée” (5.6.1792).

7. Joad recalls this history as a sign of God's power (1.1.104-28); Athalie cites it as proof of her victimization (2.7.709-30).

8. Moreover, like Louis XIV, who chooses to reign as the Sun King, Athalie recognizes in the idols she worships the captivating power of the image, a parallel that further disturbs the play's neat opposition of good and evil.

9. For a more extensive treatment of the framing process, see Harriet Stone, The Classical Model: Literature and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996).

10. See The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford UP, 1993), 70.

11. For an excellent discussion of the tension between history and religion, see Erica Harth, “The Tragic Moment in Athalie,” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 382-95.

12. We are reminded here of Descartes's own system of classification.

13. Michel de Certeau, L'Ecriture de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 10, observes that historiography “sépare d'abord son présent d'un passé. Mais elle répète partout le geste de diviser. Ainsi sa chronologie se compose de ‘périodes’ … entre lesles se trace chaque fois la décision d'être autre ou de n'être plus ce qui a été jusque-là.”

14. Although colored by fear and uttered as an act of deception, Athalie's efforts to persuade Joas to live with her may in the end have proved less threatening to the Jews than they are to her: she may, as she promises, have kept Joas alive. However, her pledge that he might continue to pray to his God appears disingenuous, set as it is against the child's naive innocence (2.7.680-82).

15. Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), 32, argues that the historian's investigation of the past inevitably leads him to investigate his own position.