Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry

Corneille enters the tragic universe through the door of myth. By choosing to stage, as his first tragedy, Medea's infanticide, Corneille both affirms a belief in (literary) genealogy, of his own place in progression (Euripides, Seneca, Corneille), and plunges back into a universe that pre-exists history. C. Lévi-Strauss has taught us that one of the essential attributes of myth is its ‘eternal’ quality, a quality which negates ‘time’ and ignores ‘progress’:

Situated at an eternal moment of conflict before the imposition of the Law, before the radical separation of the universe into the domains of nature and culture, and co-terminous with the scission of the sexes, myth traces the shifting parameters of these undefined borders. At its most extreme the mythic universe defies all order and seeks refuge in the illogical mode of the magical and the sacred. It is a world whose outlines come into focus in brief flashes of narration only to be engulfed, once again, in the vast expanses of the unrepresentable.