‘Greece as Inscape’ in Daphne du Maurier's The Flight of the Falcon

Abstract

In The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Doody explains that among the Greek rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic, ekphrasis had acquired the specialised sense of ‘exploring and explaining (supposed) graphic works’ (1998). This paper will explain how Daphne du Maurier's The Flight of the Falcon (1965) could be said to be a modern variant of this ancient device. In du Maurier's novel, Armino Donati becomes haunted by two Renaissance paintings. These have been fixed in his imagination from childhood by the force of personality of his elder brother Aldo. The Flight of the Falcon thus becomes, in effect, an extended ekphrasis on two works of art–the ‘Raising of Lazarus’ and the ‘Temptation of Christ’. This essay will explore the novel as a whole through the overt (Christian) themes provided by these paintings, but will also draw on the hidden subtext of Greek archetypal images (in particular Apollo, Dionysus and Hermes) that the novel seems to imply. It will become apparent that I am viewing these imagined paintings (and the novel itself) as palimpsests, whereby a heterodox, pagan message has been obscured by a dual layer of heterodox and orthodox Christian ideas. My analysis will utilise ideas from Plato's The Republic concerning the parable of the cave, Luce Irigaray's criticism of ‘Plato's Hystera’ in Speculum of the Other Woman and the thoughts of Nietzsche on Greek mythology as expounded in The Birth of Tragedy. By way of conclusion, I will raise some of the metatextual ideas hinted at by the subtext, which can be gleaned if we view the (supposed) artworks as substitutes for du Maurier's own literary output.

Keywords:

• Apollo
• Christianity
• Dionysus
• Hermes
• paganism
• palimpsest

Notes

¹‘The message-bearing experience of the image … recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as daimones and angels (message-bearers)’ (Hillman 1983: 14).

²Aeon and Aion are the Latin and Greek words for the same idea. The word can mean both an intermediate emanation of the deity, and also a phase (time period) of the deity.

³As it is not immediately obvious to which Greek myth du Maurier is referring, I will give a possible explanation later in this essay.

⁴See Marinetti, 2004.

⁵Svengali is the main character of George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894). Svengali has the power to exert a daimonic hold over people.

⁶Compare this with, ‘Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division’ (Luke 12.51).

⁷Some inspiration for this section comes from Horner and Zlosnik's chapter ‘Murdering (M)others’ (1998: 159–73).

⁸‘Plato's Hystera’, published in Speculum of the Other Woman.

⁹In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980).