Source: Haruhi Suzumiya No Yuutsu IV
Sleep: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Good morning 😊 Sleep has been better! I recently went through Salvador Espriu’s Otra Fedra, Si Gustáis (lit. “Another Phaedra, if you like”) and it was my favorite version so far. I’m gonna write my thoughts about it here.
The text encloses the bulk of Phaedra in a thin meta-fictional narrative: the Phaedra we read is written in-universe by a sickly, cold, offscreen author as a gift to “The Great Actress”, who becomes Phaedra, and this framing provides us with a chorus taken from the audience. The individuals in the chorus are named and are the sort of stereotypical theater-goers from 1978– a rich old lady with nothing to do, an annoying academic, etc. Even though we get very few glimpses to the world outside of the play, what we do get is rich and perhaps more emotionally evocative than the actual play. The vibe I’m getting is a bit like Vous N’avez Rien Vu, 2012, Resnais.
Since Phaedra’s passion is perhaps too much to believe in our world, the Great Actresses’ yearning to approach that passion tinges every speech with a different kind of sadness. The Great Actress, like Phaedra, is no longer young, and this particular Phaedra seems the most afraid of aging, of becoming like Oenone, who has accepted her age with grace and dignity, of letting go of the youth that Hippolytus represents. In this version Hippolytus himself is superfluous: he’s not much more than a painful image of Theseus as a young man.
Historically, Phaedra has kind of occupied the place of a horror story. Phaedra, a woman cursed by either Aphrodite, her mother’s lineage or by society, has a monstruous desire that is opposed to the social order wherein she resides. She suffers silently for a while, gives in and tries to fulfill it, fails, dies and in the process usually wrecks havoc to Theseus’ house. The horror is in the process by which her desire blossoms into death. Seneca in particular is transfixed by it. The point is that the horror is generally seeded in her desire: it threatens the patriarch’s house were it to be enacted. However, this threat never comes to fruition— I’ve never read a Phaedra that lets her fuck Hippolytus— and the social order is restored through her death. We do know that there was an earlier version of Phaedra that was too much for the prudish Greek public, Hippolytos Kalyptomenos, and it is suspected that perhaps she managed to get laid in that one. What I would give to read it!
Otra Fedra reorients the horror so that we may experience it the way Phaedra does. Her yearning is somewhat opaque to herself, but we see the position she is in:
- She is worried that her children, the legitimate heir, might be slain by Hippolytus in a power grab, and her attempts to preemptively kill him are fruitless.
- Theseus is often absent, unfaithful and inflexible, and yet she loves him despite himself and the horrid acts he’s committed. His son is described as looking identical to his father thirty years back.
- She is aging and his youth is resplendent, inescapable. Does it not make sense to find comfort in this image from the past?
The horror in this play lies in her inability to threaten the social order. She has been driven mad but her desire, monstrous or not, is of no real concern to the social order or Theseus’ power. Her sacrilege is disregarded off-hand and Phaedra’s agony is reduced to a whimper. The play ends in bathos as Phaedra’s death, traditionally the source of her power, is denied to her. She will continue as a silently suffering wife, the true Bad Ending to the myth. One gets the sense that “The Great Actress” too, has been snubbed by the author, Salom, as she had not read the script until the day of the performance.
This one was really good! Not many adaptations try to weave in Phaedra’s past into the story, but the genre shift to psychological horror justifies their inclusions as these traumas inform and eventually produce the Phaedra we see in this story.
The original text was written in Catalan and we do get explicit invocations of foreignness, xenophobia and linguistic alienation, which are perfect for Phaedra, herself a transplant from conquered Minos to Athens. The author has a few other plays that interest me: An Antigone, one about Ariadne (sister to Phaedra and Theseus’ previous lover), and… a first Phaedra simply titled “Fedra”. Knowing this makes the “Another” in the title more meaningful… I might try to get these, but finding this one was kind of a nightmare in the first place, hopefully I can track them down. Miss having institutional library access.
Anyway, if you got all the way down here thanks for reading.
