Our ethical culture is rightly tolerant and compassionate. Our ethos is responsive to exceptions, excuses and justifications. As a result, we have become clever at concocting imagined grounds for exoneration. Some people seem to believe somewhere out there lies a good excuse that can redeem them. We run from blame, even when the choices we have made are clearly wrong. That bad habit is threatening to turn America into a culture of cheaters. We must shake the habit of overreliance on exceptions, excuses and justifications.
Ethical behaviour is not simply a matter of ‘fessing up’ after you get caught. […] It is certainly admirable to take the blame after getting caught, but it is even better not to cave in to the rationalizations that lead to unethical conduct in the first place.1
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This diagnosis is by no means confined to America, and the extract and the attitudes which it both charts and challenges provide the framework for the discussions in this book. One symptom of the condition diagnosed is a move to re-interpret dramatic stories from classical mythology in such a way as to explore, on behalf of the protagonists, excuses which they might not previously have thought of. Such defensive re-appraisals of shameful characters abound: even such apparent monsters as the child-slayer Medea or the husband-killer Clytemnestra are portrayed in ways that seek to understand, explain or even exonerate their crimes. If Macbeth – or Othello – has not yet been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it seems only a matter of time – Jason certainly has. The biblical King Saul was given tragic dignity through his transformation by Gide into something approaching a gay icon, tortured by repressed feelings into a state of diminished responsibility. These and other test cases will be examined in the ensuing chapters as we explore the ways in which excuses are used within tragic drama to open debates about guilt and exoneration which are often central to the works’ moral impact.
This is a work of literary criticism rather than moral philosophy, but it draws on ethics (both old and new) as well as performance theory and reception theory to try to bring out how the study of classical tragedy – ancient, early modern French and twentieth-century adaptations – can inform debates on moral issues that continue to challenge society, however old they may appear. Central to the study is French seventeenth-century tragedy, the plays on ancient classical themes by Racine, Corneille and their contemporaries, for no better reason than that that is where my professional expertise lies. I have sought to explore their distinctiveness by comparing them to the ancient models and to modern adaptations, and I have not resisted the temptation to bring in comparative comments from other cultures, in particular Shakespeare, where they have seemed relevant to the argument or its illustration. What I bring to the discussion is over thirty-five years of interaction with undergraduate and postgraduate students on these matters at the University of Bristol. It is conventional at this point to thank them for what they have taught me, and I am grateful to each generation of them for the stimulation they provided. The commonest experience relevant to this study is this: seminars exploring responsibility and extenuation in a particular tragedy would usually take the form of some variant on the hardy standby of the mock trial, and I would generally allocate roles to individual students or small buzz groups by lot. The students did not always know in advance what other students (who would become their opponents in debate) were being asked to do. The surprising thing is how often a student who vocally wished they had not been given the task allocated them turned out a week later to be a most passionate advocate of that cause, indeed a committed convert to it! If anything can justify this book it is that: the plays I am studying, centuries after they were written, raise questions about moral choices, responsibilities and extenuations that continue to stimulate live debate in ever-changing new social environments.
I do acknowledge a greater debt still to those postgraduate doctoral students whom I have had the privilege to supervise in related fields. Véronique Desnain and Ramona Dana Lungu sparred with me patiently over many years on the plays and interpretations which form the substance of the book. In the context of a postgraduate supervision session, it really is impossible to determine which idea or expression originated in which mind, so I hope that if they think they instigated a train of thought that has ended up in these pages, they will accept this blanket acknowledgement. Neither I nor this book would be the same without my contacts with them, and Véro’s existing and Dana’s forthcoming publications deserve to remain on university reading lists.
I would like finally to record my gratitude to the editorial colleagues at Brill for their perceptiveness, patience and meticulous attention to detail: Christa Stevens, Paul Pelckmans and Carina van den Hoven.
Earlier versions of chapters 5 and 6 were previously published as follows:
‘The Provoked Wife: The Defence of Clytemnestra in Twentieth-century French Drama’, Essays in French Literature, 44, 2007, pp. 85–108 (ISSN 0071-139X)
‘ “Pour être donc humain j’éprouve sa colère!” Saul, King of Israel, as Tragic Hero in French Drama’, Modern Language Review, 108, 2013, pp. 438-458 (ISSN 0026-7937)
We are grateful to the Essays and to MHRA for permission to republish them here.
There being a readily available translation into English blank verse of the plays dealt with in most detail, I spared myself the daunting task of providing my own. All translations from Racine are therefore taken from the relevant Penguin Classics translations by John Cairncross:
Racine, Andromache, Britannicus, Berenice (London: Penguin Books, 1967)
Racine, Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athalia (London: Penguin Books, 1963)
On the rare occasions when I have suggested alternative renderings of individual words, this is not to imply that Professor Cairncross could have done better within the constraints of his commission to provide accurate but performable texts. I have sometimes merely pointed out small nuances or resonances, most often associated with the use of tenses or modal verbs, that his version could not quite convey. All other translations from French texts are my own.
A.L. Allen, The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st-century Moral Landscape (New York: Hyperion, Miramax Books, 2004), p. 258.