PREFACEThe garden to be pruned
Two clues appear in the preface. The first is the verb émonder, to prune: the work as a garden to be cut back, a surprising idea beside Les Jardins d'Électre. The second is the pairing of Electra with 1968, as a figure of protest and of revolt against family and social structures: not only mythological vengeance, but a radical refusal of the existing order. Electra is not passive. Even when she suffers she has a vertical strength; she does not try to please or to adapt, and she prefers disaster to falsehood. The other characters accept compromise, forget, and build a normality on top of what remains unresolved; she refuses to anaesthetise herself and constantly feels what is missing and what has been betrayed. She is obsessed with bringing everything to light, even at the cost of destroying the world around her: how much does it cost to really see things, and how much of life depends on illusions? In Freud's terms she is closer to melancholia than to mourning: in mourning the world is rebuilt after the loss, in melancholia part of the loss stays incorporated in the subject. But her lucidity is not merely pathological, because those who see too clearly are often taken for mad. The garden adds what the myth almost lacks: growth, care, slow time. It does not erase pain; it transforms it in an organic way.
