Giraudoux’s Other Muse

Jean Giradoux wrote eleven full-length plays. Of these he labelled only one, Judith in 1931, a tragedy. One might well have expected Electre (1937), Pour Lucrèce, written not long before he died in January, 1944, and even perhaps Sodome et Gomorrhe (1943), his most pessimistic play, to have borne the label of the genre, for these three also are serious, and each ends, one might well feel, tragically. But I think there is a reason which can be got at for his singling out of Judith. Since this reason would seem to lie in a somewhat special and characteristic notion on the part of Giraudoux as to the nature of tragedy, it might be worth while to try to dig it out. A clearer picture of what Giraudoux is driving at in his theatre in general is likely to result from the exercise. Since Broadway has seen only the Marivaux—and not the Racine—side of Giraudoux thus far, this would seem to be a good idea.

That Giraudoux is a serious playwright, as well as a fantastical one, has been known for a long time to those familiar with his works in the original. That he has been accused of being an escapist is true, and it is also true that he has had his moments of escapism. As Claude-Edmonde Magny has pointed out, however, in her excellent Précieux Giraudoux, preciosity is a perilous enterprise. It risks blinding its audience with a surface brilliance which may hide what is going on beneath, and Giraudoux’s frequent seriousness has at times been missed, despite his own statements about the function of his theatre. For these statements, like his plays, have been poetically conceived and put, and in the ‘thirties and ‘forties it was often hard to believe in a poet’s seriousness, particularly if the poet was charming and witty and obviously in love, if not with life, at least with certain aspects of it. I would merely submit the following, which appeared in a volume entitled Visitations in 1947 but which dates from 1942, and then go on to a consideration of Giraudoux’s three nearly tragic plays and his one “tragedy.”