Just This Once, Everybody Lives: Racine’s Iphigénie and Storytelling as Salvation

I grew up on Greek mythology in the way that some people grow up on Grimm’s fairy tales. To this day, I am sometimes surprised when I make an offhand reference to Achilles, the Argonauts, or the Trojan War, only to be met with blank stares. Upon such occasions, I have to remind myself that most people did not read D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths before bed at the age of seven.

For those unfamiliar with ancient mythology, the stories can appear fluid and changeable especially because there are often many versions of a particular narrative. From an outside perspective, the fact that Achilles kills Hector or that Athena curses Arachne is not true in the way that a historical fact is true. Everyone knows that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and if you were to change the year to 1367, you would quickly be corrected. We do not usually treat the facts of ancient mythology with such respect.

Some may argue that we treat history differently from mythology because history really happened, but this is not quite accurate. As an example, let us consider one of the most sacred works of American mythology: the story of Spider-Man.

Many of us could recite the mythological origin story of Spider-Man by heart. A teenage boy named Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider which gives him superhuman powers such as the ability to climb walls and shoot webs out of his hands. His Uncle Ben is shot and dies in Peter’s arms, but not before warning him that with great power comes great responsibility. He is in love with a young woman named Mary Jane Watson (or sometimes Gwen Stacy). In fact, the plot beats of the Spider-Man myth are so familiar to us that the immensely successful Spider-Verse film series plays on the audience’s knowledge with a meta commentary on these fixed “canon events.”

It is deeply entrenched in the art of human storytelling that our mythology always takes on a life force and permanence that resembles history. In fact, the facts of Spider-Man’s story are just as true as the facts of history, if not in the same way. If you don’t believe me, imagine trying to convince someone that Peter Parker is a 60-year-old man who flies and wears a cape. It just isn’t true, just like it isn’t true that Columbus set sail from Spain in the year 1367.

For me, the narratives of Greco-Roman mythology are just as permanently fixed as the stories of American mythology, if only from sheer repetition—and so when I first read Jean Racine’s Iphigénie for a seminar class in college, I was under no delusions about what I was getting into.

The Myth of Iphigenia

The tragic story of Iphigenia is foundational to the Trojan War myth, and it goes something like this. After Paris convinces Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, to run away with him to Troy, Helen’s husband Menelaus calls in the help of many Greek kings, including his brother Agamemnon. But Agamemnon cannot set sail for Troy because the winds are unfavorable. He sends messengers to an oracle who tells him that the goddess Diana will only send favorable weather once Agamemnon sacrifices his young daughter, an innocent girl named Iphigenia. Iphigenia weeps and begs for her life before finally accepting her fate as the price that Agamemnon must pay in order to wage war against Troy.

It is important to understand that the sacrifice of Iphigenia is a staple of classical mythology. Aeschylus references her death in the Agamemnon, and Lucretius much later in De Rerum Natura. Ovid writes about Iphigenia in Metamorphoses. Euripides wrote a tragedy about her, Iphigenia at Aulis, in which he suggested that the gods had ultimately spared Iphigenia, but this version intentionally cut against the classic narrative and scholars doubt the ending’s authenticity and believe it was not part of the original. No matter how many times one tells the Iphigenia myth there is one fact that must be faced, which is that Iphigenia is sacrificed in the end.

So there I was, reading Racine’s famous retelling of the Iphigenia myth, and I knew exactly what was coming. The play hits all the necessary plot points: Agamemnon summons Iphigenia, not telling her or his wife of his intention to sacrifice her to the goddess Diana. When Iphigenia arrives at Aulis, she is uneasy about Agamemnon’s strange behavior, which she confides to her servant, Eriphile. At this point, however, Racine’s plot begins to deviate from the traditional narrative. Eriphile begins to make trouble behind the scenes, working toward what seems the inevitable ending: Iphigenia’s death. That is, after all, just how the story goes.

But it isn’t how Racine’s version of the story goes. At the last moment, the high priest reveals that Eriphile also bears the name “Iphigenia,” and that it is her death that the gods require. Eriphile kills herself on the altar, and Iphigenia lives.

It is difficult to express my surprise and unexpected joy when I read this ending. For me, the death of Iphigenia was a fixed fact—just like the fixed fact that the sky is blue, or that Columbus sailed in 1492, or that Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin. In countless retellings by countless storytellers, from the time of the ancient Greeks to our contemporary world, Iphigenia had been sacrificed over and over again, but here—in this one version, this one time—Iphigenia gets to live.

But there is a strange paradox in the unexpected joy of Racine’s surprise twist: that the delight of saving Iphigenia is only possible if in every other version, Iphigenia dies. To see this more clearly, imagine that the myth of Iphigenia had been a comedy from the beginning. We might still feel joy when Racine’s Iphigenia is saved at the end, but the joy would be formulaic—an old, worn-out happiness that we had already experienced every time we had heard the story before. Iphigenia is marked for death, and yet Racine sees fit to save her. There is a unique joy in the salvation of the damned.

In looking for examples of this particular kind of trope subversion, we need not limit our focus to seventeenth century French playwrights. Just as Iphigenia’s death is a fixed fact of the Greco-Roman mythological canon, the tragedy of death is a fixed fact of the BBC series Doctor Who. Throughout the Doctor’s adventures, he is eternally tortured by the fact that no matter how hard he tries, he can never save everyone. As one character remarks at one point, “Everybody knows that everybody dies, but nobody knows it like the Doctor.”

In one memorable storyline, the Doctor fights a losing battle to save a whole city of humans from being transformed into walking, gas mask-wearing zombies. Only after countless victims succumb to the virus and all hope seems lost does the Doctor discover a way to reverse its effects. Overjoyed, he releases the cure, crying out, “Everybody lives! Just this once…everybody lives!” In fact, this turn of events is so unusual that this episode is known colloquially among Doctor Who fans simply as “the one where everybody lives.”

As an audience, we are delighted by this moment in the same way that we are delighted by the moment in Racine’s Iphigénie when we realize that just this once, Iphigenia will not be sacrificed. Just this once, everybody lives. This moment in the show is so memorable only because it is atypical. We rejoice more over the salvation of these characters because we expect them to die—because like Iphigenia, so many characters in Doctor Who are doomed from the start. The existence of the tragedy makes the comedy possible.

But this practice of reinventing tragedy to create a comedy begs a question. If Iphigenia’s death is a fixed fact—if the “real story” is a tragedy, and nothing can change that fact—then isn’t it naïve to reconstruct the narrative into a comedy? In other words, if the tragedy is the truth, then isn’t the one version with a happy ending just wishful thinking?

To Know How It Ends, and to Sing it Again

Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, is an example of a modern story written from this far less optimistic perspective. Yet another staple of the Greco-Roman mythological canon, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a tragedy just like the myth of Iphigenia, but Mitchell does not shy away from this fact. In the opening number, Mitchell’s narrator sings:

See, someone’s got to tell the tale
Whether or not it turns out well
Maybe it will turn out this time…
It’s a sad tale, it’s a tragedy…
[But] we’re gonna sing it anyway.

From the beginning, Mitchell dangles the hope of a happy ending before us. We the audience are tantalized by it. Mesmerized by the beauty of the music, we even find ourselves hoping that it is true—that this one time, on this one stage, maybe it really will turn out.

But the ending comes, and our hopes are dashed. In the finale, the narrator speaks directly to the audience, making Mitchell’s final case: that “to know how it ends, and still begin to sing it again” is an expression of fortitude. This is the torment, Mitchell says, that each storyteller must carry with them: the torment of telling the truth, knowing that the truth is ultimately tragic. We sing it again, but at least the song is beautiful, and perhaps that is the best we can hope for.

We find a different perspective on this same philosophy in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot. Early on in the play, the two protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, argue about the two thieves who hung next to Christ on the cross. Vladimir recalls that “one is supposed to have been saved and the other damned.” Estragon is uninterested, but Vladimir pushes on, asking, “How is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved?… One out of four. Of the other three, two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.”

Estragon, growing impatient, doesn’t see the point. “They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.”

“But all four were there,” says Vladimir. “And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?”

“Who believes him?” Estragon asks, and Vladimir replies, “Everybody. It’s the only version they know.”

The nihilistic underpinnings of this absurd conversation are clear. People want to believe the happy version of the story—the version where the thief is saved—and they are willing to ignore the evidence in order to get there. If only one evangelist says the thief was saved, and the other three are silent, then why should we believe that the thief really was saved? Why should that be the only version anyone knows? If Beckett is to be believed, it’s because in all our childish earnestness, we look for the best of all possible worlds to believe in, even though it isn’t real.

George Banks Will Be Saved

At least, that’s what Beckett thinks. But Christian cosmological thought would beg to differ.

When we look to some of the oldest stories ever told—the stories of the Judeo-Christian biblical canon—we find an existential hope woven into the narratives we pass down from generation to generation. Cain kills Abel, but God preserves Cain’s life. A flood destroys the world, but God saves Noah’s family. The Israelites are slaves, but God parts the sea and leads them to freedom. Christ suffers and dies, but he rises again.

The Christian mythology—and by mythology, I simply mean a set of stories that express a given way of thinking about the world—makes an extraordinary claim: that the great comedy of reality is comprised of a series of tragedies that are both awful and necessary to produce the happiest ending of all. We experience the wildest joy on Easter morning when we fast through Lent.

We see something like this phenomenon in movies that feature some kind of time-loop, such as Groundhog Day. As the protagonist lives the same bad day over and over again, he undergoes a series of small tragedies which transform him. Over time, those tragedies create a happy ending whose joy is only possible because of every other bad day leading up to this point. Almost every single day is tragic, but the catch is that the last day, the good day—that is the real one.

The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks provides a more specific example. The movie tells the (somewhat) true story of how Walt Disney convinced P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, to sign over the movie rights to Disney. In the film, Travers, a stoic old woman, resists the efforts of Disney to make her story into a whimsical musical. Over time, Disney discovers that Travers’ hesitation stems from her desire to preserve the memory of her father, Travers Robert Goff, upon whom Travers based the character of Mr. Banks. Even though her own father was a dismissive alcoholic, Travers has written a story in which Mr. Banks—her father’s fictional counterpart—learns his lesson and becomes a better father.

In the movie’s climax, Walt Disney meets with Travers to make his final argument:

In every movie house, all over the world, in the eyes and the hearts of my kids, and other kids and their mothers and fathers for generations to come, George Banks will be honored. George Banks will be redeemed. George Banks and all he stands for will be saved—maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.

Travers relents and signs over the movie rights. Disney makes the film Mary Poppins, and true to his word, Mr. Banks is saved “maybe not in life, but in imagination.” Somehow, Disney’s lighthearted film about a magical nanny has real salvific power. The paradox is that nothing can change the man Travers Goff really was, and yet the existence of this one happy version of his story—the comedy shaped out of his tragedy—has the real power to heal P.L. Travers’ broken heart. It’s strange to say, but maybe Mary Poppins is the true story after all.

In the end, of course, it is impossible to disprove the argument of those who maintain that tragedy is the truest form of fiction. It is, of course, possible that happy endings really are just escapism. It is possible that the world is careening toward destruction and comedy is just one way to soften the impact.

But when we consider the wisdom of our ancestors who told the story of Noah and the flood, Moses and the Exodus, and Christ’s passion and resurrection, we find that such a way of thinking is strangely human. Certainly there are those who really do think that the world is an absurdist tragedy—Samuel Beckett, for starters—but there is something unnatural about their philosophy, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Even Beckett himself can’t argue with the fact that when we hear the story about the thief on the cross being saved, we believe it—and although Beckett might argue that we believe it in spite of the evidence, perhaps we believe it instead because we know in our hearts that it is true.

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