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At the Feet of the Gods: Myth, Tragedy,

and Redemption in Alfonso Reyes's
Ifigenia cruel
a
Francisco Barrenechea
a
University of Texas at Austin
Published online: 15 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Francisco Barrenechea (2012) At the Feet of the Gods: Myth, Tragedy,
and Redemption in Alfonso Reyes's Ifigenia cruel , Romance Quarterly, 59:1, 6-18, DOI:
10.1080/08831157.2012.625910

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 Romance Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1, 618, 2012
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ISSN: 0883-1157 print / 1940-3216 online
DOI: 10.1080/08831157.2012.625910

FRANCISCO BARRENECHEA
University of Texas at Austin

At the Feet of the Gods: Myth, Tragedy, and Redemption

in Alfonso Reyess Ifigenia cruel
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Alfonso Reyes describes his Ifigenia cruel (Cruel Iphigenia), an adaptation of Euripides Iphigenia
at Tauris, as a play about an individuals redemption from a cycle of violence: Iphigenia, forced
to go back to her murderous family in Greece, refuses to do so and remains as a priestess in
Tauris, sacrificing human victims to Artemis. This article offers a qualification of Reyess reading
through the following two aspects: his choice of myth and his understanding of Greek tragedy.
The alternative version of the myth, that of the Taurian Iphigenia, allows Reyes to explore the
possibility of redemption. At the core of this version there are two types of violence, human and
sacred; Reyes concentrates on the human aspect of this violence in his reading of the play, but
the sacred poses a problem: to liberate herself from the crimes of her family, Iphigenia chooses
human sacrifice. Reyess understanding of Greek tragedy provides a solution to this apparent
contradiction. Since tragedy, for Reyes, is the manifestation of universal forces that transcend
the individual, Iphigenias redemption through sacred ritual is a pull toward the universal that
projects this violence onto the cosmic forces that engulf her.

Keywords: adaptations of Greek tragedy, redemption, Alfonso Reyes, the tragic, violence

In the fall of 1923, while living in Madrid, Alfonso Reyes put the finishing touches on his Ifigenia
cruel (Cruel Iphigenia). This dramatic poem (as Reyes called it) is, as far as I know, the first
contemporary adaptation of a Greek tragedy written by a Mexican author.1 Despite the violent
upheavals of the Mexican revolution that shook the country from 1913 to 1920, which personally
affected him, and the intense social and political transformations that followed immediately after,
Reyes opted for an adaptation that did not deal directly with any of these concerns. When Reyes
was eventually drawn, in 1932, into a heated debate about the role that literature should play
in the cultural program of the new revolutionary regime, this detached quality, which was also
apparent in other literary and critical works of his, came under attack: he was accused of not
caring about the issues facing the country, of being a spinner of strange routes that do not even
add a guiding principle to what is ours [that is, to what is Mexican] (Sheridan 214), of being, in
brief, completely out of touch with the needs of the country in his literary interests. Reyess first
line of defense was to proudly proclaim to his critics that the only way to be advantageously
national consists in being generously universal, since the part has never been understood without

6
 At the Feet of the Gods 7

the whole (Sheridan 290).2 What Reyes meant by universal, here, is the healthy embrace of
the common patrimony of the [human] spirit (Sheridan 290), that is, other literary traditions
and areas of interest (for example, ancient Greek literature and Golden Age Spain) that would
strengthen and enrich the Mexican soul (Sheridan 291). Still, this impulse toward the universal
in Reyes went much deeper than this clarion call to abandon narrow-minded provincialisms. His
Ifigenia cruel, written almost a decade before this debate, gives another account of the universal,
one that has more in common with a mystical experience than a cultural program, and that is
intimately tied not only to a particular understanding of the genre of ancient tragedy but also to
the creative process of adapting a Greek play.
Reyes based his Ifigenia cruel on Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris (ca. 414412 BC), but
introduced a radical twist into the plot: faced with the prospect of returning to her murderous
family in Greece, Iphigenia chooses not to leave the savage land of the Taurians. By means of this
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willful choice, she liberates herself from the violence that has cursed her family for generations.
Reyes, in his notes and commentary to the play, was very clear about the larger significance of
this innovation: his play is about an individuals redemption from a cycle of violence and rancor, a
reading that scholars have unanimously validated.3 The following pages will offer a qualification
of this reading through the study of two aspects of Ifigenia cruel that I believe complicate this
reading and that have not been attended to sufficiently: Reyess choice of Greek myth and his
understanding of the ancient genre, particularly as they relate to the message of redemption that
the play conveys. First, I will consider the myth of Iphigenia and how the alternative nature of
the version Reyes chose offers the possibility of exploring redemption. Next, I will point out
that at the core of the myth there exist two types of violence, human and sacred, that need to be
distinguished when considering the consequences of Iphigenias fateful decision. Reyes and other
scholars concentrate on the human aspect of this violence in enforcing their positive reading of
Iphigenias final decision, but the sacred aspect of the violence poses a problem for this reading:
to liberate herself from the violence of her family, Iphigenia chooses religious violence. She
stays in Tauris sacrificing human beings to Artemis. How can an individual redeem herself in this
fashion? Reyess understanding of Greek tragedy, I argue, provides an answer. Since tragedy is,
to him, the manifestation of universal forces that transcends the individual, we have to consider
Iphigenias redemption through sacred ritual as a pull toward the universal, which transfers the
violence from the individual to the cosmic forces that engulf her. This same redemptive process,
I will further argue, is also at work in Reyess creative process of adapting the ancient genre.

THE CHOICE OF MYTH

Reyess Ifigenia cruel, as I mentioned above, is modeled on Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris.

In the play by Euripides, the protagonist, about to be sacrificed in Aulis at the hands of her
father Agamemnon, is spirited away to Tauris by the goddess Artemis, where she becomes her
priestess. Iphigenias brother, Orestes, and his loyal friend, Pylades, arrive in Tauris. Orestes has
been instructed by Apollo to steal the statue of the goddess and bring it back to Greece to end
the attacks of the Erinyes, who have hounded him since the murder of his mother Clytemnestra.
Both friends are captured and taken to the priestess to be sacrificed to the goddess. Through
an unexpected turn of events, both siblings eventually recognize each other; they then plot their
escape to Greece in the ship that brought Orestes to Tauris, which lies in wait for him. Iphigenia
manages to deceive Thoas, king of the Taurians, to allow her to leave the temple with her brother
 8 Romance Quarterly

and the statue, but their plan is discovered at the same time that their voyage home is impeded
by heavy surf, thereby putting their lives in danger. Only the intervention of Athena ex machina
manages to pacify Thoas, calm the winds, and secure their return.
Reyes introduces radical innovations to the myth that impinge directly on the recognition
scene. In his adaptation, Iphigenia has completely forgotten her identity and is only aware of her
role as priestess. What is more, Reyes actually has her kill the human victims herself, whereas in
Euripides she only consecrates them before handing them over for others to kill. Orestes arrives
from Greece with the express command of Apollo to find his sister Iphigenia. After recognizing
her, he helps her remember who she is and, in the process, makes her recall the crimes of their
family. Horrified by these crimes, Iphigenia repudiates her family and refuses to return with
her brother to Mycenae, preferring instead to remain in Tauris and continue her savage duty to
the goddess. The escape plot, which accounts for the second half of Euripides play, is entirely
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scrapped, together with the divine intervention at the end. These innovationsIphigenias lack of
memory and recollection, her savage duty as virgin priestess, and her eventual rejection of Orestes
demandsdefine her cruelty (Xirau 751), the characters signature trait in Reyes. Through these
innovations, Reyes made the plot of his Iphigenia entirely, and I would even say radically, his
own.
The particular myth that Reyes chose, that of Iphigenia, brings along with it an essential
element that is crucial for his adaptation: the alternative quality of the myth. For there existed
two versions of the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the time when Euripides wrote his tragedy. In one
version, Iphigenia was killed and did not rise again from the shores of Aulis; in the second,
Artemis substituted at the last minute an animal for the human victim and spirited Iphigenia
away.4 The first version is mentioned in several surviving Greek tragedies, such as Aeschylus
Agamemnon and Euripides Electra and Orestes, in which Iphigenia is taken to be dead and gone;
the second is fully dramatized in Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris, but it is also foreshadowed at
the very end of his Iphigenia in Aulis. The Aulis version can definitely exist without Tauris, but
Tauris is impossible without Aulis: the sacrifice is its invariable precondition. Once we embrace
this alternative version and concede that Iphigenia did not die, we can reconsider the sacrificial
drama at Aulis and the fate of its participants in a new light. Thus, the Taurian alternative of
Iphigenia opens up a space to rethink one version in juxtaposition with the other: Tauris with
Aulis, Aulis with Tauris.5 Both Euripides and Reyes, as we shall see, use this alternative myth
to open up the possibility of redemption for the crimes of the family of Iphigenia, including her
sacrifice at Aulis. In the case of Reyes, the alternative helped him create a new identity for the
protagonist, that of the powerful priestess who cannot remember her past, in contraposition to
her former one, that of the powerless victim who carries the trauma of her previous experience.
This very exploration of possibilities is preconditioned, as noted above, by the unspeakable act
of violence at the core of the Iphigenia myth.
This violence of the myth can be said to have two faces: on the one hand, we have the
sacred violence, the demand of Artemis to sacrifice the maidenthe brutal side of the divinity
that Euripides own Iphigenia has a hard time coming to terms with (IT 38191).6 On the other,
we have the human dimension of the violence: the surviving Greek tragedies that deal with
the sacrifice, for instance, often reflect on what compelled Agamemnon to kill his daughter.
Both aspects of the violence involved in the sacrifice, the human and the sacred, are present in
Euripides and Reyes. In the section that follows, I will concentrate on the human angle of this
violence, particularly in relation to the eventual redemption of Iphigenia, before I tackle its sacred
aspect.
 At the Feet of the Gods 9

HUMAN VIOLENCE

Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris is, in essence, a tragedy about the redemption of the children
of Agamemnon, as scholars frequently point out (see, most recently, Cropp 35 and Kyriakou
913). In this play, the murderer Orestes, who killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his
fathers death, is saved from his wanderings and punishment: Orestes, freed from his mothers
Erinyes, returns to Greece, bringing back with him his long-suffering sister, who played a
central role in achieving his salvation. At the end of the play, the hand of divine providence,
which guided the characters from wretchedness to a state of good fortune, becomes readily
apparent.
Reyes was well aware of the redemptive character of Euripides tragedy (IC 358) and stated
in a clear fashion that the same message should also apply to his adaptation: [Iphigenia] brings
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about, in a certain way, the redemption of her people (IC 316), he writes in his brief notice to the
play. However, both playwrights differ in the way they present the crimes to be redeemed; the bases
they establish for this redemption are radically opposed. In her recent commentary on Euripides
tragedy, Poulheria Kyriakou has made the valuable observation that the playwright correlates
the redemptive goal of his play with the downplaying, through obliqueness and allusion, of the
family crimes (1112). For instance, Orestes, in a remarkable exchange, twice tells Iphigenia not
to ask any questions about his motives for killing Clytemnestra (IT 92428, 940). The trend of
the tragedy is thus toward the silencing of the familys history of violence.
In contrast, Reyes amplifies the violence to a remarkable degree. On the one hand, Orestes
gives a detailed, and I would even say cosmic, account of the family crimes, from Cronuss
castration of Uranus to avenge his mother Gea, down to the crimes of Tantalus and his descendants
(IC 33739). On the other, Reyess Iphigenia narrates in detail how she and Clytemnestra were
cruelly tricked into coming to Aulis with the promise of a wedding to Achilles, how mother and
daughter pathetically pleaded with Agamemnon to avert the killing, and finally the sacrifice itself
(IC 34146). This foregrounding of violence is the result of the innovation that Reyes introduced
into Euripides play: the centrality of remembrance for the plot, as represented by Iphigenias
lack of memory of her former life. To reclaim her identity, Iphigenia has to be reminded of the
crimes of the family and, specifically, that heinous deed in which she played the central role as
victim: the sacrifice at Aulis. In fact, in Reyess account, the first time Iphigenia hears her long-
forgotten name is when Orestes first mentions this very sacrifice (IC 340). Her former identity is
intimately tied to this history of violence, which needs to be recounted for her to remember who
she is.
But Iphigenias recognition of her identity involves not only the remembrance of violence,
but also a violent remembrance. This again stands in stark contrast to Euripides play, in which
the recognition scene between Iphigenia and Orestes unfolds in a concerted manner, through
dramatic irony and suspenseful delays, with no display of force: Iphigenia writes a letter to
Orestes, liberates Pylades, and asks him to take it to her brother. Orestes immediately recognizes
his sister, but Iphigenia does not believe him; once Orestes gives Iphigenia the proofs she asks
for, they celebrate their reunion in a duet. However, the tone of Reyess recognition scene is quite
dark: Orestes arrives in Tauris expressly looking for his sister; Apollo made it known to him how
to recognize her (IC 33233). However, since Iphigenia has lost her memory, Orestes needs to
make her remember who she is so that she can recognize him, as Reyes makes clear (IC 316).
Unlike Euripides recognition scene, the one in Reyes unfolds in a coercive, manipulative, and
repressive manner.
 10 Romance Quarterly

Throughout the scene, the act of remembering repeatedly conjures up images of being hunted
down, conquered, captured, and put in bondage. For instance, when Iphigenia slowly begins to
recall her arrival at Aulis, she suddenly stops herself in horror:

Friends, I flee: this is remembrance!

I flee, because I feel
tied by a hundred crimes to the ground.
I flee from my memory and from my history,
like a mare that tries to come out of its own shadow. (IC 341)

Iphigenia is even physically restrained onstage immediately after she pronounces these words to
force her to listen to Orestes revelation. The latter then exclaims:
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Hold her and let her drink reason

down to the most reluctant part of her bones.
Fill up with memories,
hear it all. (IC 341)

Iphigenia, as an individual, attempts to repulse an identity that brings along with it the threat
of inevitable captivity to the account of violence related by Orestes. Therefore, the latter has to
force her previous identity on his sister. The memories themselves are described as taking over
Iphigenia, obliterating her will with the remembrance of her origins. What is more, the identity
that Iphigenia regains is portrayed as an inescapable bond, not only through her blood, but also
through the oracular command brought by Orestes: the injunction of Apollo for her to return to
Mycenae, marry, and beget children to continue the cursed line of Tantalus (IC 347). In fact,
Orestes refers to this command as a condemnation (IC 348). Thus, the recognition scene does
not simply involve the recuperation of old memories, but the difficult struggle of Iphigenianow
resisting, now giving waywith the violent imposition of a former identity and the duties that
go along with it.
Im your sister, theres no remedy, / and in the torrent of the flesh I feel / the curse of Tantalus
beat (IC 342), exclaims Iphigenia when she finally acknowledges that she has recognized her
brother. Reyess Iphigenia differs from Euripides in this respect as well. She recognizes that the
violence of her family is at the core of her identity, that it is part and parcel of her as a descendant
of Tantalus. She is the one, let us not forget, who sacrifices her human victims with her own
hands, a duty in which she throws herself with an almost sexual abandon. It is, as she coldly tells
the chorus who tries to befriend her at the start of the play, a love better than your love, women
(IC 321). The curse of her blood, therefore, has found a way to surface and reveal itself in her
new identity as well. In brief, Reyes imbues Iphigenia with the criminal instinct of her family
and, by the same token, with the possibility of redemption that, in Euripides, was only reserved
for Orestes.
The redemption in Reyess adaptation comes as a reaction to the violence marshaled in the
language, images, narrative, and enactment of the recognition scene we examined above. Once
again, Euripides provides the contrast. He carefully prepares the redemption of his own tragedy
by developing the nobility, sympathy, and solidarity of the siblings with each other (Kyriakou
10). Iphigenia, for instance, offers to sacrifice herself to allow Orestes to escape, but the latter will
have none of it and tells his sister: I want to be your partner and share your fate both in life and
 At the Feet of the Gods 11

after death. Ill bring you home if I get home from here myself; or else Ill die with you and stay
with you here (IT 100811).7 In Reyes, instead, we find a brutal, resigned submission of sister
to brother. Her words, steeped in despondency and fatalism, offer a remarkable contrast to the
bittersweet duet that marks their mutual recognition in Euripides (IT 82741). The path toward
redemption in Euripides, which is blazed by the solidarity and affection between the siblings,
is blocked by Reyess focus on the violence and coercion perpetrated by Orestesand, through
him, by Apollo and the family curseon Iphigenia, who becomes, once again, a hapless victim.
Consequently, Reyes has no use of the escape plot of the original and its promise of salvation,
since to return to Greece is to return to that same violence that Orestes has brought to Tauris.
In the face of these fatalities comes the celebrated twist that Reyes introduced into the myth:
Iphigenia rejects the condemnation to return home and does so with the following curt remark:
Take in your hands, grasped with your mind, / these hollow shells of words: I dont want to!
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(IC 348). Through this sheer act of free will, the individual rebels and liberates herself from
her own destiny. The impossibility of a return to Greece, which would have been the worst-case
scenario for the characters in Euripides play, becomes, in the hands of Reyes, the only redemptive
solution for Iphigenia. But this solution, as I will argue later on, brings along with it its own set
of difficulties that need to be addressed to make sense of her liberation and redemption. For now,
and to set up the contrast with the negative reading that I will propose later, let me turn to Reyess
own positive interpretation of his work.

AN INTIMATE CONFESSION

As I mentioned at the start of this article, Reyess Ifigenia cruel is inextricably linked with
a personal and deeply traumatic experience: the death of his father, General Bernardo Reyes.
General Reyes, whom Alfonso idolized, ill-advisedly took part and lost his life in an attempted
coup against the government of Francisco Madero in 1913. Alfonsos brother, Rodolfo Reyes
later formed part of the deeply unpopular government of General Victoriano Huerta, the man
who treacherously deposed and murdered Madero a few days after the death of General Reyes.
Alfonso reluctantly accepted a position in the new governments diplomatic corps in France and
left for Paris that fateful year. In 1914, when Huerta was deposed by Venustiano Carranza, who
later became president, the Reyes family fell into disgrace, and Alfonso lost his position. He then
decided to go into self-imposed exile, and spent the rest of that decade living in Madrid, where
he finished his Iphigenia in 1923, ten years after the death of his father. By then, he was already
back in the good graces of the government of Alvaro Obregon, who had reincorporated him into
the countrys diplomatic service.
Most of the scholarship on the play has unanimously agreed on seeing Iphigenias redemption
as the authors reaction to the tragedy of his own familya reading that Reyes himself sought to
inculcate. At first, Reyes demurely hinted at the connection of the play to his personal trauma, by
calling it almost . . . an intimate confession (Anecdotario 320), for instance. Nevertheless, he
became more upfront about the plays symbolic meaning in later years. In this respect, Rogelio
Arenas Monreal, among other scholars, has called attention to the importance of Reyess Oracion
del 9 de febrero (Oration of February 9th, 1930), his prose account of the same traumatic
experience, as important comparative material to understand the confession involved in his
adaptation of Greek tragedy. There, Reyes declared that he preferred to close his eyes before
the prostate image of his father, to preserve of him only the better image, and that he also chose
the path of freedom, relinquishing every impulse of rancor and vengeance, so as not to enslave
 12 Romance Quarterly

himself to low vendettas (Arenas Monreal 273, quoting Reyes, Oracion 29). Reyess Iphigenia,
who also chose the path of freedom, can thus be easily understood as the dramatization of his
fateful decision to put aside hatred and revenge.

SACRED VIOLENCE

For Reyes, Iphigenias liberation and redemption are effective and positive acts. In the words
of the chorus that ends the play,

Oh sea, that drank the evening

until you uncovered its stars:
you did not know, but now you know
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that men free themselves from them! (IC 350)

But there is an unsettling side to Iphigenias decision, and Reyes is well aware of it: Iphigenias
rejection of her former identity leaves her no other option but to fall back on her role as savage
priestess, killing human victims for Artemis with her bare hands (IC 313). This is the second
aspect of the violence behind the Greek myth that I mentioned above: the brutal side of Artemis,
which is reflected in Iphigenias savage duty. Reyes, however, does not elaborate on the reason
why the characters choice of this violent identity should be preferred, or at least be considered
a lesser evil, to the violence of her society and culture. His only observation is that this last
extreme [that is, to fall back on her role of sacrificer], no matter how abominable and harsh it
may seem, [is] the only certain and practical way she can liberate herself (IC 313). Likewise, he
does not clarify how this identity contributes to the redemption of the character.
The majority of scholars have been content to follow Reyess optimism in their interpretations
of the play; consequently, they have left untouched the problematic aspect of Iphigenias decision,
although a few perceptive ones have attempted to address its contradictory qualities.8 In the
paragraphs that follow, I will first briefly point out some of the difficulties before I put forth my
own interpretation of what Iphigenias retreat into sacred violence might signify.
In falling back on her identity as priestess of Artemis, Iphigenia consigns herself to a life
of perpetual virginity, rejecting marriage, childbirth, and the contentment of a womans daily
life inside a household; she also resigns herself to continue her sacrificial duties. These two
characteristicsher virginity and savage ritual dutyare part of the signature cruelty of the
character (Barrenechea 95; Rodrguez Monegal 13; Xirau 751). Reyes dramatically explores
the deeply alienating nature of this identity in the first movement of the play, by contrasting the
cruel Iphigenia with the chorus of Taurian women who lead normal lives and whose repeated
attempts to reach out to the priestess meet with little success. Through this initial contrast, Reyes
sets out in very clear terms what Iphigenia stands to lose in achieving her redemption.
One further difficulty involved in her final decision is that Iphigenia, faced with the prospect
of a life of submission to Orestes and her future husband in Mycenae, rejects it, only to end up
in another form of submission, this time to the goddess Artemis. This may be the reason why
Reyes claims that Iphigenia decides to humbly refashion her life after liberating herself (IC
316). The adverb may seem disingenuous at first, given her savageness and eventual rejection of
the demands of others on her, but it makes sense if one considers her sacred duty to the goddess.
In the first movement of the play, she defines this duty as a forceful imposition of Artemis that
progressively takes control of her body:
 At the Feet of the Gods 13

From your broad eyes of stone

the mandate began to come down,
that articulated the broken hinges in me,
fashioning from the puppet a living menace. (IC 318)

Iphigenia then goes on to describe how the will of the goddess fills her entire chest (IC 318)an
image that recalls Orestes words, quoted earlier, that ordered his reined-in sister to be filled
with her former memories (IC 341). Both Artemis and Orestes, in sum, aim at controlling her
broken figure; both force on her an identity based on submission. As Iphigenia declares in the
last words she speaks to her brother, the price that she pays for her liberation is to be reborn a
slave at the feet of the goddess (IC 348).
How does this priestly identity, which perpetuates the characters alienation and submission,
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liberate her from the duties forced on her by a family cursed by gods and men? And what does it
mean to fall back on a violent ritual to redeem oneself from violence? A few possibilities come to
mind: at the level of plot, one can argue that these very contradictions bring about her liberation
and redemption through a process of transference. Iphigenia, by retreating into her religious
duty, consigns herself to perpetual virginity, thereby stopping the family curse in her womb. By
remaining in this liminal and, indeed, alienated state, she frees society from the pollution she
carriesa pollution that, as she earlier told Orestes, would have occasioned plague, deaths, and
miscarriages by her mere presence in Mycenae (IC 347).
Carlos Montemayor takes this point further in his interpretation of the play. He explains
that the murderous instinct that Iphigenia harbors is channeled into the human sacrifices she
performs; in this way, the curse is sublimated into an action that is religiously sanctioned and
that transcends human vendettas. This is, for Montemayor, the true meaning of her liberty: the
final acceptance of her criminal instinct, and its elevation in her own bloodied hands to a
sacrality (Montemayor 4). I think we can go still deeper here, but in order to account for this
sublimation of crime into sacred violence, I believe that we need to approach the play in terms
of genreor more specifically, in terms of what Reyes understood to be the essence of Greek
tragedy.

THE HUMAN AND THE UNIVERSAL

Reyes spoke at length about his views of Greek tragedy in his Las tres Electras del teatro
ateniense (The Three Electras of the Athenian Theater), written in 1908, and again in the
commentary he appended to his Iphigenia. The latter, according to Reyes, is a summary of his
earlier views, but it does include some interesting refinements, as we shall see. Reyes was of
the opinion that, in Greek tragedy, mans individual sufferings are communicated to the wider
world, a world considered in its natural as well as metaphysical dimension; thus, the fatality of
Oedipus, for instance, causes a terrible plague in Thebes (Reyes, Electras 42). Reyes contrasts
this sensibility to that of the modern theater of his time, in which human beings are portrayed
as being alone with their suffering, completely cut off from the world that surrounds them
(Electras 41). But the purpose of tragedy for Reyes does not lie in the simple expression of a
sympathetic connection between human and world; it lies, above all, in the portrayal of those
cosmic, metaphysical forces that transcend the human. Reyes identifies these with abstractions
such as destiny, divine influence, [and the] compensation of natural forces (or necessity of
 14 Romance Quarterly

equilibrium), which take part in what he enigmatically refers to as the universal tragedy
(Electras 48). These universals manifest themselves, as in an epiphany, through the medium of
Greek tragedy. For Reyes, therefore, the ancient genre is a cosmic dialogue (IC 353) that the
poets ear, attuned to the suffering consciousness of the universe (IC 353), transcribes into
elements that can be understood at a human level, that is, into language, forms of expression
(Electras 44), as well as into dramatic characters, or human types (Electras 48), that reveal those
universals. In this respect, the characters of Greek tragedy are mere shadows or outlines that
give form to those superhuman forces (Electras 4748). To use the striking image Reyes himself
employs to illustrate this point: a tragic character is like a screen that, when held up, suddenly
reveals the images projected by the beams of the magic lantern in the darkness (Electras 48). One
of the main pieces of evidence that Reyes brings up to support this view of the ancient genre is
the latters structural form, which he calls its symmetrical formula (IC 353), that is, its fixed
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(according to Reyes) progression of prologues, parodoi, episodes, stasima, and exodoi that give
tragedy a rhythm, that make it a dance of balanced speeches. This fixed structure suggest . . . a
universe ruled by harmonious, musical laws, much more than an individual drama (Electras 45).
We shall come back to Reyess attention to form in a moment.
Reyess view of Greek tragedy is not without its problems. In this article, I will be concerned
with one particularly significant ambiguity: on the one hand, if a Greek tragedy stands for a
cosmic dialogue of superhuman forces, and the characters are mere outlines through which
those forces manifests themselves, then how can one say that Iphigenia, in Reyess adaptation of
the genre, liberates and redeems herself from her own destiny? On the other hand, if we accept
her individual liberation and redemption, like Reyes and the majority of his critics have done,
then how does this outcome fit with the idea of the genre as primarily a cosmic dialogue? It
is no surprise, then, that a certain ambivalence creeps into Reyess explanations: in Las tres
Electras, he repeatedly affirms that Greek tragedy is more universal than human (44); but in
his commentary, he made sure to qualify this earlier statement by stating that Greek tragedy is
still very much attentive to the human element after all since it submerges man in the frame
of the energies that overflow his being (IC 353). Therefore, it should come as no surprise that
this same uncertainty exists in his Ifigenia cruel: both aspectsuniversal tragedy and individual
liberationcoexist in that tense balance that I described above.
Based on Reyess understanding of the ancient genre, I will argue that Iphigenias retreat
into her sacred duties at the end of the play can, in fact, be read as that pull toward the universal
that, according to Reyes, is the ultimate goal of the medium. In a recent study of the literary
image of General Reyes in the works of his son Alfonso, Arenas Monreal also had recourse
to the ancient genre to explain how Reyes came to terms with his personal trauma: according
to him, Reyes tried to heal the wounds of his spirit by inserting it in the cosmogonic frame
of universal human suffering that Greek tragedy offered him (113). For Arenas Monreal, the
genre is inherently therapeutic and consolatory, and the genre is also helpful to tease out these
symbolic implications of the play. Like Reyes himself, he does not see any major difficulties
with Iphigenias final choice. For my part, I will employ Reyess understanding of the ancient
genre to attempt to make sense of these very difficulties: in brief, Iphigenias final redemption
comes from accepting a ritual structure that carries her beyond her limits as an individual,
transmuting her into the embodiment of a divine force. This process is achieved, as I will now show,
through an aesthetic dimension that is likewise at the core of Reyess conception of the ancient
genre.
 At the Feet of the Gods 15

SCULPTING THE SACRED

Reyes dedicates much attention in the first movement of his play to the statue of Artemis,
which he describes in detail. This religious image may seem incidental at first, but it is an
important plot component of Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris: let us remember that Orestes receives
the express command to bring the statue back with him to Greece. But whereas in Euripides the
statue is portable enough that brother and sister can take it along with them in their escape, in
Reyes the statue is monolithic and colossal. A man can fit between its toes, as Iphigenia notes (IC
325). Consequently, it is also unmovable. Reyess image of the statue impressed Octavio Paz so
much that, when the latter describes the goddess Artemis in his own reading of the play, he calls
her a pillar at the center of the world (284). Behind these words lies Iphigenias exclamation,
Around you dance the stars. / Woe betide the world, if you should falter, Goddess! (IC 325), at
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the end of her extended description of the statue. The image is, in fact, the perfect representation
of the cosmic forces at play in Reyess vision of Greek tragedy.
Throughout Reyess play, Iphigenias identity is inextricably tied to this statue of Artemis:
at her feet she regained consciousness after being spirited away to Tauris (IC 318); and it is
again at her feet that she decides to be planted and reborn a slave, as she tells Orestes
when she rejects him (IC 348). Her sacrificial duty also comes down from the statues broad
eyes of stone (IC 318), as I already pointed out. Both violence and alienation descend from
this image as mandates of the cosmic force that possesses her. The centrality of this image in
Iphigenias reception is confirmed by Pedro Henrquez Urenas testimony of an earlier version
of Reyess play, in which Reyes actually had Orestes steal the statue of Artemis. Iphigenia, who
refuses to join him (IC 358), stays in Tauris sculpting a new idol of the goddess she serves to
substitute for the one snatched away (Henrquez Urena 15960). The character still achieves her
redemption by refusing to return but accompanies her decision with the creation of that image
to which she adheres and submitsan image in which the ritual, the aesthetic, and the universal
converge.
Turning for a moment to the ritual angle, I would like to call attention to the fact that
the aesthetic dimension of Greek tragedy is closely linked in Reyess mind to religious ritual,
which he sees as the origin of the dramatic genre. Behind the fixed symmetry of the formal
structure of the genre, its rhythm, and harmony, Reyes states that one can easily discover the
ritual spirit, the spirit to overcome what is social and immediate in order to represent an object
of religious philosophy, a sort of mass (IC 354). (By philosophy, here, I should note, Reyes
is referring to those abstract, universal forces manifested by Greek tragedy, to which the divine
belongs.) The dramatic characters themselves, those shadows and outlines, are beings that
perform religious rituals, communing in this way with the forces that guide them, contacting
them (Electras 48). In this respect, not only does ritual serve as a bridge between the dramatic
medium and the universal, but it also shares in the aesthetic dimension of both. Ritual itself,
according to Reyes, answers an aesthetic need (Electras 47).
I already mentioned Montemayors interpretation of Iphigenias final decision, how she
sublimates her criminal instincts into a sacrality. I wish to expand on this point further: through
the ritual of human sacrifice, violence is not eradicated but rather controlled and given an ulterior
purpose, that of appeasing the goddess. Ritual, in fact, takes violence out of the human order and
transfers it onto a universal force. By the same token, it makes it aesthetic in that the action is
now performed in conformity with the rhythm of the cosmos; thus, the feet of the statue suck the
red vats of sacrifice, at every moon (IC 325). What is more, Iphigenias extensive description of
 16 Romance Quarterly

the statue proceeds in a way that explicitly equates her cruel identity with that of the goddess, as
if she herself had been carved in her image:

But I am like you made me, goddess,

between the equal lines of your flanks:
like the builders plumb line,
and like you: like a cold flame. (IC 325)

Iphigenias redemption through sacred violence, as symbolized by her veneration of the cult
statue of Artemis, thus aligns her with the aesthetic dimension of the ancient genre.
To conclude this section, let me return to another sculptor of sacred images, Reyes himself,
to gauge how this aesthetic dimension factors into his personal interpretation of his play. When
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Reyes reflected back on his own traumatic experience in an autobiographical account dated
to 1925, he described his fathers death as a natural cataclysm, alien to the will of men and
superior to it (qtd. by Arenas Monreal 106). It is clear from these words that his view of Greek
tragedy had already ingrained itself quite deeply in his own way of thinking about his personal
trauma: the experience is no longer historical, social, or even personal; it is now a larger-than-life,
impersonal phenomenon, like an earthquake or a tsunami, beyond human control. For Reyes,
the only consolation for his misfortune is to match the nature of the event, by retreating into
an activity that transcends the personal, an activity that consists of projecting his suffering
upward onto the artistic sky, as he put it, and unloading it as a dialogue of shadows (IC
354). This activity is, in fact, the act of writing an adaptation of a Greek tragedy. Just as Greek
tragedy represents cosmic forces through its fixed, symmetrical formula of structural elements,
Reyes also resorts to that same formula to manifest the cataclysm that befell him: his play, for
instance, has a prologue, a parodos, a messenger speech, and an agon. Within this fixed structure,
Reyes observed, the ancient poet did his sculpting (IC 353), and the modern poet follows in
his footsteps. As he himself states, in reference to the first version of the play noted above, his
Ifigenia is cruel . . . because of effort that it has cost me. . . . [I]t is carved by axe-strokes and,
more than in wood, in rock. I do not want it to caress, no: I come out covered in scrapes and
scratches from dealing with her (Gutierrez-Vega 98). What Reyes highlights here is the suffering
that the composition of the play cost him, a suffering that eventually proved liberating for him.
Both the playwright and his character are bent on what amounts to a creative act, that of hewing
their liberation as individuals, and both do so by submitting to the superhuman: Iphigenia sculpts
her Artemis, Reyes his Greek tragedy. In doing so, both take refuge in that which transcends
them, the aesthetic and the universal.

CONCLUSION

Reyess choice of the Tauris variant of the myth of Iphigenia, instead of the Aulis one, is
a significant one. Classical scholars of the first half of the twentieth century tended to dismiss
Euripides version as an escape tragedy, a sentimental rescue drama that offered a flight into
fantasy for the war-weary Athenian audience of its day, with no more serious purpose than, as H.
D. F. Kitto says, the serious purpose of creating such elegant drama (qtd. by Wright 8). Reyes,
fortunately, paid no heed to these prejudices: escape, in fact, has a truly serious connotation in
his adaptation. For him, escape implies rebirth, choice, and ultimately redemption: Iphigenia
rejects her legacy, breaks with her destiny, and withdraws into the inner sanctum of a new identity,
 At the Feet of the Gods 17

free from the violence of her people. In this respect, Reyes is working within the alternative
character of the myth he chose to dramatize, that of the Taurian Iphigenia, while introducing his
own radical contrasts and juxtapositions of events and character identities.
In contrast to Euripides, Reyes does not shirk from foregrounding the violence that is at
the core of the myth of Iphigeniaa major factor in the dynamic of his recognition scene and,
ultimately, in the redemption of his tragedy: the violent imposition of an identity grounded in
human violence is what occasions Iphigenias cruel rejection. But along with this positive reading,
backed by Reyes and the majority of scholars, comes the negative side of the characters escape:
her decision to stay in Tauris leads her to fall back on the violence at the heart of her new identity,
as represented by her duty of human sacrifice as well as her submission to the goddess. In escaping
the imposition of human violence, Iphigenia opts for an imposed sacred violence.
Reyess understanding of Greek tragedy can help us make sense of this contradictory aspect
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of Ifigenia cruel and, indeed, deepen our understanding of his personal interpretation of the play.
Greek tragedy, for him, is a medium that represents a cosmic drama of universals (for instance,
destiny and the divine) that overflow [a human] being (IC 353). In the light of this understanding
of the ancient genre, Ifigenia cruel displays an unresolved tension between the individual and
the universal; however, redemption is only achieved at the end by the projection of that violent
component of Iphigenias identity onto the divine, which is manifested aesthetically in the play
through the ritual act of sacrifice and the devotion to the sacred image of Artemis. This pull from
the individual to the universal can also be traced in Reyess process of writing his own Greek
tragedy. The act itself of adapting the ancient genre, with its concern with dramatic structure and
the link of the latter to religious rituals, provides a powerful aesthetic and even savage experience
of an almost mystic nature (IC 354) that allows the writer to lose himself in the universal and
find consolation in the fact that suffering pervades what is, to all effects, a cruel and tragic cosmos.

Notes
I would like to thank Konstantinos Nikoloutsos for his many detailed criticisms and suggestions that have greatly improved
this article, as well as Alicia Reyes and the staff of the Capilla Alfonsina, who welcomed me warmly and facilitated my
work in Reyess archives.
1By adaptations, I refer to those plays that derive their plot, directly or indirectly, from one or more tragedies of
the Greek playwrights. Ifigenia cruel was also the first Mexican adaptation of a Greek tragedy to be staged: the Teatro de
Orientacion, one of the most important avant-garde theater companies active in Mexico, premiered it in 1934.
2All translations are my own, except where indicated.
3The bibliography on Ifigenia cruel is extensive and, sadly, quite uneven. Among the most thought-provoking
contributions are those of Paz; Rodrguez Monegal; Vitier; and Xirau; the fourth chapter of Caicedo Palacioss dissertation
also has some quite valuable insights, as does Montemayors thumbnail introduction to the play.
4Cropp (4346) offers an excellent overview of the evidence for the myth.
5Wright (13357), for instance, has recently argued that Euripides based his tragedy on this alternative version to
invite speculation in his audience about the truth-value of the myth being enacted before their eyes.
6Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris and Reyess Ifigenia cruel will be referred to by their initials IT and IC, respectively.
7I follow Cropps translation here.
8These perceptive scholars are Caicedo Palacios (214, 24756); Montemayor; Paz (28182); Rodrguez Monegal
(1011, 13, 17); and Vitier (30102).

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 18 Romance Quarterly

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