Goodkin KillingOrdersIphigenia 1989

Killing Order(s): Iphigenia and the Detection of Tragic Intertextuality
Author(s): Richard E. Goodkin

Source: Yale French Studies , 1989, No. 76, Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality
(1989), pp. 81-107
Published by: Yale University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930163
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RICHARD E. GOODKIN
Killing Order s): Iphigenia and the

Detection of Tragic Intertextuality
1. THE DETECTION OF INTERTEXTUALITY
One of the recurring motifs in the current awakening of critical in-

terest in detective fiction has been the parallels between the detective
novel and tragedy. Shoshana Felman calls Sophocles' Oedipus Tyran-
nus "the classical analytic detective story," and points out that a
number of critics have approached the Oedipus from the perspective of
the detective story. ' Equally important for our purposes here are those
critics who, while recognizing the similarities between tragedy and
detective fiction, oppose the two. Dennis Porter contrasts "mythic
crime" such as is found in Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or Racine with
the sort of "profane crime encountered on country highways and city
streets"2 that characterizes detective stories, and David I. Grossvogel
points out that the "mystery" in tragedy is essentially unresolvable:
[At the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus], when the truth so doggedly sought
is finally understood in the fullness of its perfect circularity, there remain
just as many oracles to decipher as before. Oedipus learns to displace
limits in order to learn about the permanency of limits.
The detective story does not propose to be "real": it proposes only, and
as a game, that the mystery is located on this side of the unknown. It
replaces the awesomeness of limits by a false beard-a mask that is only
superficially menacing and can be removed in due time. It redefines mys-
1. Shoshana Felman, "De Sophocle a Japrisot (via Freud), ou Pourquoi le Policier?"

Littdrature 49 (February 1983): 24.
2. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 12.
YFS 76, Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality, ed. Richard E. Goodkin, ? 1989
by Yale University.
81

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82 Yale French Studies
tery by counterstating it; by assuming that mystery can be overcome, it

allows the reader to play at being a god with no resonance....3
Here is, it would appear, the limiting factor in any mutual consid-
eration of tragedy and detective fiction: while tragedy tells us that
even the "solutions" of its enigmas retain an inextricable element of
mystery, the premise of detective fiction is that we-or at least some-
one, presumably the detective-can get to the bottom of things, can
solve the mystery and come up with simple answers to the questions it
poses. Thus at the end of Agatha Christie's Mysterious Affair at Styles,
as Grossvogel puts it:
The lovers are reunited, the upper-middle-class ritual is once again re-
sumed. Law, order, and property are secure, and, in a universe that is
forever threatening to escape from our rational grasp, a single little man
with a maniacal penchant for neatness leaves us all the gift of a tidy world,
a closed book in which all questions have been answered.4
Marjorie Nicolson sums up this "neatness" of the end of the mystery

story: "detective stories are experienced as reassuring because they
project the image of a cosmos subject to the operations of familiar
laws. "5
Thus, as we begin an intertextual reading which will link detective
fiction and tragedy, we find ourselves dealing with two genres which
might be opposed to each other as the simple (detective story) is op-
posed to the complex (tragedy), or as order is opposed to disorder. In
fact this movement toward simplification and toward a reaffirmation
of order in detective fiction appears to provide an implicit model for
the theory of intertextuality itself; critics such as Michael Riffaterre
make that branch of literary criticism into a sort of detectivelike pur-
suit in which the text offers clues to the reader:
The task of interpretation is . . . not to avoid . . . errors, since they are a

part of or stage in the reading process; they are a moment in the reader's
perception of the work of art. He must pass through this stage before
finally arriving at a complete decoding, the one fit to be stabilized. Yet the
reader may not notice he has hit the jackpot-or rather, he may notice it
without necessarily realizing it is the jackpot.6
3. David I. Grossvogel, Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 40.
4. Mystery and Its Fictions, 52.
5. "The Professor and the Detective" in TheArt of the Mystery Story (1929), quoted
in Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, 223.
6. Michael Riffaterre, "Interpretation and Undecidability," New Literary History
12: 2 (Winter 1981): 228.

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RICHARD E. GOODKIN 83
What Riffaterre calls "agrammaticalities" are essentially clues, in-

congruities which, like the best and subtlest clues in a good detective
novel, almost pass unnoticed, but which, once we have seen them for
what they are, point the way to a reinterpretation, so that the anomaly
that originally drew our attention is resolved.7 Looking for the inter-
text thus becomes a kind of search for the solution to the mystery in a
crime novel: when Riffaterre uncovers the intertext of an untitled
poem of Rimbaud, for example, he cries: "And there it is: we have
fingered the culprit."8
If we recall the opposition between detective fiction and tragedy as
one between the simple and the complex, Riffaterre would seem to be
making of intertextuality a process of simplification or resolution, a
solving of the mystery of the text which leads to a reaffirmation of its
"decidability."9 What I would like to propose here is a definition of
intertextuality not simply as a process of detection, but also as a pro-
cess which is profoundly consonant with tragedy; not only as a sim-
plification or even a clarification, but also as a complication; in short, a
process which begins as a transformation of apparent disorder into
underlying order, but ultimately becomes a recognition of the nature
(and limitations) of any order, a realization that is fundamentally
tragic.
In this article I will be examining the intertextual links between
Racine's Iphigenie and a recent detective novel, Sara Paretsky's Killing
Orders ( 1985), which ends with the revelation that the middle name of
the novel's main character, a female private investigator, is Iphige-
nia.10 This identification, which grounds our intertextual reading,
raises a number of complex issues, as we shall see, but perhaps the
most immediate of these is a question worthy of a private eye: which
Iphigenia? Does the novel's use of the Iphigenia myth necessarily al-
low us to consider it in relation to Racine's version of the myth?
Paretsky's private-eye spends much of the novel living on Racine Ave-
nue in Chicago, first in a rooming house "on Racine and Montrose"
(178) to which she moves after her apartment is destroyed by fire, and
then in "a co-op on Racine near Lincoln" (274) which she buys. But in
fact Sara Paretsky informs me that she has never read Racine's
Iphigenie:" if our aim is to explore the relations between Killing
7. See, for example, "L'intertexte inconnu," Litterature 41 (February 1981): 5.

8. "Interpretation and Undecidability," 232.
9. "Interpretation and Undecidability," 238.
10. Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 277. All sub-
sequent references will be to this edition and will be bracketed in the body of the text.
11. In a private communiction of 3 March 1988.

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Orders and Iphigenie, that fact alone forces us to frame this intertex-
tuality in terms more complicated than a straightforward detection.
This absence of a direct link between the two texts actually covers
over a complex series of indirect ones. Paretsky tells me that she is
familiar with several other versions of the Iphigenia myth, those of
Euripides and Gluck,'2 and Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis is- itself an
extremely important model for Racine's play. I will be establishing the
intertextual relation between Iphigenie and Killing Orders not simply
on the basis of a shared source, but rather on the basis of a shared
reading: my premise here is that both Racine's Iphigenie and Killing
Orders are (among other things) readings of Euripides' play, and that
we, in turn, can learn something about all three works in question-
and about the workings of intertextuality-by reading the two read-
ings together. It will be as hard for us to "move" from Killing Orders to
Racine as it is for Paretsky's heroine to move to Racine Avenue (she
does so only after her home is destroyed), and we will "get to Racine"
only by the establishment of a triple relation: first between Killing
Orders and Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, then between Iphigenia in
Aulis and Racine's Iphigenie, and finally (and indirectly), between
Iphigenie and Killing Orders.
2. ORDERS TO KILL: IPHIGENIA INAULIS
Let us start by sketching out a number of issues raised by Euripides'

Iphigenia in Aulis which will be essential to our analysis of Killing
Orders. Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis is a play about order, or rather
about two orders: a familial order and a heroic order which is meant to
protect or insure it. The origin of the Trojan expedition, undoubtedly
the single greatest source of heroism in all of ancient Greek literature,
is in fact a kind of rudimentary insurance policy: the expedition stems
from the Achaian oath by the terms of which each of Helen's suitors
promises to support whatever husband is selected for her by protecting
his household against any would-be interloper once the couple is mar-
12. Paretsky tells me that her heroine is named after the protagonist of Gluck's
Iphigenia operas (Iphigenie en Aulide, the libretto for which is largely based on Racine's
Iphigenie, and Iphigenie en Tauride), but that she is also familiar with Euripides'
Iphigenia in Aulis (private communication of 3 March 1988). In an earlier novel of
Paretsky's, we are told that her heroine's mother named her for an operatic character ("her
love of opera had led her to burden me with an insane name, " Indemnity Only [New York,
Dial Press, 19821, 48).

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ried (Iphigenia in Aulis, 55-59).13 When Helen is abducted by Paris,

Menelaos cashes in his insurance policy by asking his brother
Agamemnon to gather the Achaians at Aulis with the idea of setting
sail for Troy and bringing Helen back to her home and family.
If the Achaians were allowed to leave Aulis without further ado,
they would thus be doing so under the unchallenged illusion that the
heroic order simply supported the familial order. When the goddess
Artemis demands the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia if
the Greeks are to get their wind for Troy, she is trying to tell them
(even if they don't necessarily understand her) about the nature of that
illusion. She is telling them that even if this heroic order-this gather-
ing of heroes which at the beginning of the Iliad becomes a pure order-
ing, a veritable taxonomy (the catalogues of Iliad 2)-starts out as a
means of protection for the family order, it will ultimately attack that
order, as is abundantly clear in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the numer-
ous plays dealing with the aftermath of the war (e.g., Euripides'
Andromache, Hecuba, and Trojan Women; Aeschylus's Oresteia
trilogy; Sophocles' Electra). The oracle demanding the sacrifice of
Iphigenia is thus a lesson which states that in order to initiate the
heroic order (raise the winds for Troy), the leader of the Achaian forces
must be willing to attack the familial order; that heroism does not
ultimately provide a support for the familial order, but rather is a
reaction against it. The sacrifice of Iphigenia, the precondition of the
war, is nothing but a preenactment of the fundamental undermining of
the family order which will come to be synonymous with the Trojan
War. The goal of the drama is to make Agamemnon accept the need for
the sacrifice, to transform the loving father, however unhappy he
might be about killing his eldest daughter, into a pedocide.
It is therefore absolutely essential that by the end of Euripides'
drama both Agamemnon and Iphigenia accept the need for the sacri-
fice. If Artemis substitutes a deer for Iphigenia at the end of the trag-
edy, thus saving the human sacrificial victim (1581-1601), this does
not mean that the sacrifice is not necessary, but rather that it has in
some sense already taken place once Iphigenia's and Agamemnon's
acceptance of the oracle has broken the continuity between the gener-
ations by destroying the trusting relation of father and daughter. The
sacrifice can be "called off" because accepting its terms means estab-
lishing the adversative relationship linking the familial order and the
13. All line references to Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis are to the text established by
Frangois Jouan in Euripide (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1983), vol. 7.

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heroic order. Thus it would not be an exaggeration to give to Euripides'

Iphigenia in Aulis the subtitle Killing Orders, for the play is based not
only on an order to kill (Iphigenia), but also on one order "killing"
another, the heroic order ultimately establishing its hegemony over
the familial order.'4
3. IPHIGENIA IN CHICAGO: KILLING ORDERS
As we now turn to the detective novel Killing Orders, let us first give a
rather detailed synopsis of the novel's complex events. Chicago
private eye V. I. Warshawski is called in to investigate some stock-
certificate forgeries discovered in a Dominican priory safe when V. I. 's
great-aunt Rosa, who works for the priory, is fired from her job, under
suspicion of complicity in the forgeries. The reason V. I. agrees to help
her Aunt Rosa in spite of the old lady's mysterious hatred of her is that
V. I.'s mother, Gabriella, whom the old lady particularly despised, on
her deathbed made V. I. promise to help her great-aunt if she were ever
in need. However Rosa soon calls her off the investigation, the origi-
nals of the forged stock certificates are mysteriously returned to the
priory, and V. I. begins receiving threatening phone calls warning her
not to look into the matter further. Nonetheless she pursues the inves-
tigation and uncovers an attempt by a secret lay organization of the
Catholic Church called Corpus Christi to take over an insurance com-
pany called Ajax. The mastermind behind this takeover bid is Xavier
O'Faolin, a crooked Church functionary in charge of the Vatican's
financial affairs, who is attempting to gain control of Ajax in order to
"launder" (i.e., put into circulation) millions of dollars from a huge
bank embezzlement operation; the forged stock certificates were com-
missioned by one of the Dominican friars attempting to raise money
for the takeover by secretly selling some of the priory's stock holdings
and replacing the original certificates with forgeries. This forgery
scheme also involves the Mafia, which provided the forgeries and is
therefore also interested in squelching V. I.'s investigation: the tele-
phone threats on V. I. are carried through when a Mafia-hired assailant
attempting to throw acid in her eyes is deflected and instead burns her
14. This in itself may seem a simplified reading of the Iphigenia in Aulis; certainly
other plays of Euripides suggest more openly that in tragedy the heroic order never fully
establishes a clear and unquestionable priority over the familial order, but it does seem
to me that the Iphigenia in Aulis is one of the plays of Euripides that least openly
challenges the heroic order.

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neck and back, and her apartment is subsequently set on fire and
gutted.
The most serious crime in the novel, however, is not a financial
crime, but one committed to cover up the traces of the Ajax takeover
bid, and it is here that we start to approach the novel's relations to
Iphigenia in Aulis. When V. I. asks her friend Agnes Paciorek, a stock-
broker, to look into the Ajax takeover, Agnes is killed, and V. I.'s
investigation of her murder slowly comes to focus on Agnes's own
mother, Catherine Paciorek, a multimillionaire member of Corpus
Christi and a close friend of O'Faolin. This death, which, as we shall
see, comes to take on the value of a sacrifice, becomes the focus of the
novel; and although V. I. never proves conclusively that Catherine
Paciorek had her daughter put to death to keep her own involvement in
the takeover a secret, she does discover evidence linking Catherine
Paciorek to the takeover when she breaks into a stock-broker's office
and xeroxes records of stock transactions. V. I. also disguises herself as
a Dominican friar in order to break into O'Faolin's room at the priory
and steal a letter implicating O'Faolin in the "laundering" of the em-
bezzled money. Armed only with these pieces of evidence, along with
a few notes scribbled by Agnes on the day of her death, she convinces
Catherine Paciorek's husband of his wife's guilt. O'Faolin is killed
when a bomb is anonymously planted in his car, presumably to pre-
vent him from implicating the Mafia in the F. B. I. investigation into
the forgery.
So concludes the public aspect of the investigation, but the end of
the novel places a greater importance on the personal and private
ramifications of the inquiry. Catherine Paciorek, consumed with fear
and anger at being discovered and with guilt over her role in her
daughter's death, has a stroke which leaves her incapacitated. V. I.
receives an anonymous gift of $25,000 (presumably from the Mafia
don, as compensation for her burnt apartment) which allows her to buy
the co-op on Racine Avenue. Aunt Rosa reveals that the reason for her
hatred is that many years earlier, before V. I.'s birth, Rosa's husband
fell in love with V. I. 's mother, Gabriella, and when Rosa threw her out
of her house, he committed suicide. Finally, V. I. reveals that her
middle name is Iphigenia.
V. I.'s climactic revelation notwithstanding, the points of contact
between Killing Orders and the Iphigenia in Aulis may not be immedi-
ately apparent. Indeed, the differences in genre, setting, and tone
which separate the two works may make our premise seem somewhat

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preposterous. To begin with, we may well wonder why a drama about

trying to raise the winds would be set in Chicago, for from the very first
page of Paretsky's novel the Midwestern metropolis lives up to its
nickname of the Windy City: "The January wind scattered dead leaves
around my feet" (1); "A strong wind was blowing across the lake" (31);
"I slowly finished my cappuccino and went back out into a minor
blizzard" (48); "Now I could hear the sullen roar of Lake Michigan in
front of me. The regular, angry slapping of wave against cliff made me
shiver violently" (231). Our detection thus begins with the question:
how are Killing Orders and the Iphigenia in Aulis (secretly) alike? How
does the tragedy secretly order the detective novel?
In fact, once V. I. establishes her link to Iphigenia, a number of
motifs in the novel, like accumulating clues in a case to be solved, fall
into place. At the end of the novel V. I. establishes herself as an
Iphigenia figure not only because of her name, but also because of a
persistent dream she has that her mother is about to place her on the
sacrificial fires (277), and in the course of the novel, starting with the
very first scene, V. I. repeatedly, almost obsessively mentions her
hatred of smoke, as if in fear and anticipation of this sacrifice:
He took a pipe from the desk top next to him and began the pipe
smoker's interminable ritual with it. With luck I'd be gone before he
actually lit it. All smoke makes me ill.... [5]
This first mention of smoke establishes its links to ritual, in this case
the harmless ritual of the pipe but by association the ritual of sacrifice.
Indeed the attack on V. I.'s life takes the form of arson, as her apart-
ment is set on fire (148-50).
As the last sentence of the novel points out, Iphigenia is associated
in mythology with the goddess Artemis (277)-who demands
Iphigenia's sacrifice and whose priestess Iphigenia later becomes in
some versions of the myth-and V. I. 's association with Iphigenia as a
protegee of Artemis is supported by two motifs in the novel: running,
the principal activity of the huntress Artemis, and woods and forests,
her preferred habitat. V. I. not only jogs religiously, but she mentions it
every time she does. Trees and woods are everywhere in the novel:
whether in the city or in the distant suburbs, street names (Chestnut
Street, 148, Oak Street, 173, Arbor Drive, 104), town names (Lake
Forest, where the Pacioreks live), even names of corporations (Wood-
Sage, the dummy corporation established by Corpus Christi to take
over the Ajax insurance company) seem to echo Artemis's domain.
And V. I.'s final confrontation with Mrs. Paciorek, which takes place

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on Arbor Drive in Lake Forest, requires V. I. to go through the woods at

the back of the Paciorek's house in order to break in secretly (230-32).
But if V. I. is an Iphigenia figure, what is the nature of her heroism
and her sacrifice? At the center of Killing Orders is in fact a double
sacrifice, the successful sacrifice of Agnes Paciorek and the attempted
sacrifice of V. I., both at the hands of a patriarchal orderl5 whose main
goal is to reproduce itself in an unchanged form from generation to
generation. In Paretsky's novel, even more explicitly than in Eu-
ripides' play, the heroic "order" attacks the familial order; in fact,
V. I.'s heroism is a kind of disorder; from the perspective of a conform
ist social order, her heroism, or difference, is itself a crime. It is for this
reason that the starting point for all of the criminal activity in the
novel, and the ultimate source of Agnes Paciorek's sacrifice, is the
take-over bid for an insurance company named Ajax, a name which
Paretsky tells me was meant to suggest an association with "the hero
of the Trojan wars."'6 Insurance'7 is the central illusion of Killing
Orders, as V. I. herself points out in her fury at a would-be suitor:
Anger was tightening my vocal cords. "No one protects me, Roger. I
don't live in that kind of universe.... Just because the people I deal with
play with fire instead of money doesn't mean I need or want protection. If I
did, how do you think I'd have survived all these years?"
I was clenching and unclenching my fists, trying to keep rage under
control. Protection. The middle-class dream. My father protecting
Gabriella in a Milwaukee Avenue bar. My mother giving him loyalty and
channeling her fierce creative passions into a South Chicago tenement in
gratitude. [177]
Insurance is not what saves one from sacrifice; it is what requires

sacrifice, for rather than simply preserving order, it becomes a meta-
phor for a system which forces one to stay in order.
The model of familial order in the novel and one of the moving
forces behind the Ajax takeover is Catherine Paciorek, who more than
15. Insofar as Killing Orders depicts an oppressive patriarchal system which is re-
jected or at least resisted by its heroine, I consider it to be a feminist novel, but part of the
novel's strength lies in the complexity of its attitude toward women. In fact the novel
also presents a number of unsympathetic female characters who fully accept the system,
key among whom are Aunt Rosa and Catherine Paciorek; V. I. explicitly comments on
Aunt Rosa's position as willing victim: "served Rosa right for all her antifeminist at-
tacks to be the victim of wage discrimination herself" (132). Thus it is not, I think,
contradictory to say that Agnes is sacrificed by her mother but to a patriarchal order.
16. In a private communication of 3 March 1988.
17. Sara Paretsky actually works for an insurance company.

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anyone else in the novel is the perpetrator of sacrifice. A morally

repressive figure, Catherine Paciorek is a wealthy, archconservative
Catholic who will do anything to protect her reputation, and if she
sacrifices her daughter, it is not only for looking into an insurance
fraud in which the mother is implicated, but also for the daughter's
nonconformism, which Mrs. Paciorek feels to be a fundamental attack
on the familial order. Agnes Paciorek, whose name suggests a sacri-
ficial victim (agnus paschalis, Pascal lamb, or perhaps agni [Dei] pas-
sio, suffering of the lamb of God, that is, the passion of Jesus Christ),
defines herself by opposition to her mother. As Mrs. Paciorek puts it:
"It was enough for Agnes to know I believed in something for her to
believe the opposite. Abortion. The war in Vietnam. The Church. I
thought I had seen my family name degraded in every possible way. I
didn't realize how much I could have forgiven until she announced in
public that she was a homosexual." [136]
The keynote of being in the familial order is reproduction, not only

having children of one's own, but becoming a carbon copy (or rather, as
we shall see, a xerox) of one's parents. The model of familial order in
the younger generation is Agnes's sister: "At thirty she already looked
like Mrs. Paciorek, including an imposing bosom under her expensive
black suit" (111). This familial uniformity is paralleled in the novel by
the Dominican order of friars, all of whom look alike, as V. I. tells us
when she is introduced to them:
These were all "brothers," not "fathers." Since they tended to look
alike in their fresh white robes I promptly forgot their names. [19]
To look alike is to belong to the order, to be in order, to be identifiable

as a copy of an inherited model and therefore to be utterly unheroic, to
have no name. The essence of the order embodied by Catherine
Paciorek is to be reproducible.
If the goal of the order is to perpetuate and reproduce itself, V. I. in a
number of ways avoids "reproduction." When in the course of her
investigation she breaks into a brokerage office, discovers files indicat-
ing that Catherine Paciorek has bought a considerable number of
shares of Ajax stock, and xeroxes the files, she is surprised by a night
watchman and forced to hide inside of the xerox machine:
As the watchman fumbled with his keys, I hit the off button and looked
around desperately for a hiding place. The machine had a paper cupboard
built in underneath. My five-feet-eight frame fit badly, but I squeezed in
and pulled the door as nearly shut as I could. [124]

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V. I.'s difficulty in fitting inside the xerox machine becomes a meta-

phor for her refusal merely to copy the role which the order has set out
for her, an order embodied by the substitute father figure Bobby Mallo-
ry, a policeman who was her father's best friend and who "thinks Tony
Warshawski's daughter should be making a better world by producing
happy healthy babies, not by catching desperadoes" (83-84); "he
didn't want me in the detective business, he wanted me in Bridgeport
or Melrose Park with six children and, presumably, a husband" (21 1).
When V. I.'s frame does not comfortably fit into the copying machine,
she becomes one of the heroes hiding inside the Trojan horse rather
than someone being protected by those heroes; the only way she finds
to escape being caught by the police or the watchman is by disguising
herself in a subservient role: she dresses herself in one of "the regula-
tion smocks of the cleaning women" (125) and when confronted by
two policemen as she is leaving the building she has just broken into,
she bluffs her way past them by using her mother's maiden name (126)
and her mother's language (Italian) as well as the disguise of a "regula-
tion" female profession, thereby triply returning to a female "order."
Indeed, when V. I., by masquerading as a cleaning woman, mo-
mentarily leaves the heroic order, her action is a crystallization of the
conflict between the heroic order and the familial order, a conflict
which we also find in the motif of dirt and cleansing, related to tragic
catharsis, a purification. Being in order essentially means being clean,
conforming to one's models and thus being free of any "foreign"
bodies, so that it is being out of order-that is, in the heroic order-
which requires catharsis or cleansing: Ajax, the name of the insurance
company, is also the name of a popular household cleanser, and this
rather banal domestic association adds the cleanliness of soap to the
safety of insurance in drowning out the heroic resonance in the name
"Ajax."18
Thus Killing Orders is quite the opposite of the Iphigenia in Aulis
in that the sacrifice in the detective novel is not called for by the heroic
order but rather by the familial order; Agnes's and V. I.'s sacrifice, the
proof if not the source of their heroism-as-difference, is carried out in
the name of the familial order.19 The take-over of the Ajax insurance
18. The financial plot which sets off the action of the novel is a plan to "launder"
dirty money, that is, to remove its identifiability and thus get it back into circulation as
an indistinguishable part of the economic order: to this extent it is no surprise that the
money is supposed to be laundered by the takeover of "Ajax."
19. Paretsky's Indemnity Only, the first novel in which V. I. appears, also features an
infanticide (albeit an unintentional one).

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company comes to be synonymous with the familial order's attempt to

appropriate-that is, to undermine-all possibility of heroism; Ajax,
rather than a figure belonging to the heroic order, becomes the sign of
the familial order's constant attempts to "fix" ("cleanse," that is,
make similar and anonymous, or "ensure," that is, render harmless)
the heroic order.
The main reason that takeover bid ultimately leads to the (at-
tempted) sacrifice of V. I. is that in a number of ways she refuses to fit
into the order of which the insurance company becomes the emblem.
V. I., whose barely controllable fury is apparent in the passage just
cited, replaces Achilles, thus playing both Iphigenia and Achilles in
her own version of the Aulis drama. V. I.'s friend Lotty describes her in
terms closely recalling Achilles:
"You're a Jill-the-Giant-Killer," [Lotty] said, her black eyes worried.

"You're always taking on things that are too big for you, and maybe one
day you will take on one big thing too many. But that is your way. If you
weren't living so, you would have a long unhappy life. Your choice is for
the satisfied life, and we will hope it, too, is a long one." [104]
V. I.'s choice is essentially Achilles' choice, between a long and un-

satisfying life and a short but glorious one (Iliad, 9: 410-16; Racine,
Iphigenie, 220-26). This is an Iphigenia who is herself in the heroic
order.
Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of the relation be-
tween Killing Orders and the Iphigenia in Aulis is that the "sacri-
ficers" in the detective novel are not men, but women: the two male
figures who clash over Iphigenia's sacrifice, Agamemnon and Achilles,
that is, Iphigenia's father and future husband, are conspicuously ab-
sent in the detective novel and are replaced by female figures: V. I.
herself replaces Achilles, Agnes Paciorek is "sacrificed" by her moth-
er, not by her father, and in the novel's final scene, when V. I. reveals
her middle name, she tells her friend Lotty, herself a substitute
mother-figure, of her dream of being sacrificed by her own mother:
"Do you know what my middle name is, Lotty? " I burst out. "Do you
know the myth of Iphigenia? How Agamemnon sacrificed her to get a fair
wind to sail for Troy? Since that terrible day at the priory, I can't stop
dreaming about it. Only in my dreams it's Gabriella. She keeps laying me
on the pyre and setting the torch to it and weeping for me. Oh, Lotty! Why
didn't she tell me? Why did she make me give her that terrible promise?
Why did she do it?" [277]

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V. I.'s dream makes a surprising substitution: the Agamemnon figure

in the novel would appear to be Gabriella, so that V. I. is "sacrificed" by
her mother just as Agnes Paciorek is sacrificed by hers.20
Moreover V. I.'s final traumatic confrontation of her mother's ac-
tions underscores the ambiguity and complexity of Gabriella's
"crime," for V. I. here identifies three distinct elements to Gabriella's
attack on the familial order: "Why did she do it? " "Why didn't she tell
me?" "Why did she make me give her that terrible promise [to take
care of Aunt Rosa after Gabriella's death]? "; in other words: 1) Why did
she commit the crime [of falling in love with her aunt's husband]?; 2)
Why did she hide the crime?; and (most importantly) 3) Why did she
pass the crime on to the next generation? For it is, as we have seen,
only because of V. I.'s promise to Gabriella that she becomes involved
in the Ajax investigation, and because of that involvement that Agnes
dies, a fact which doesn't escape V. I.'s notice (146). By the novel's
chain of events it is Gabriella's promise, meant to preserve or rather to
repair a familial order which she herself attacked, which leads to a
sacrifice carried out in the next generation in the name of the familial
order (Mrs. Paciorek's sacrifice of Agnes).
4. IPHIGENIA IN THEBES, OEDIPUS AT AULIS
This is the point at which the Iphigenia story becomes Oedipal: V. I.,
reacting against what she perceives as her mother's conformity and
subservience to the familial order, discovers that she herself has spent
her entire life doing nothing more than repeating her mother's original
rebellion against the family order: Gabriella's loyalty to her husband is
a compensation for his saving her from the streets when her Aunt Rosa
kicked her out for her involvement with her aunt's husband. The
promise exacted from V. I. by her dying mother then takes on the value
of an oracle which openly says one thing ("protect the familial
order. . .") but harbors a hidden meaning (". . . because your natural
tendency will be to attack it"). For the true sense of V. I.'s "oracle"-
like Oedipus's-is that the familial order is itself based on suppressing
disorder, on suppressing Gabriella's, or V. I.'s, or anyone else's revolt.
20. Apart from the sexist policeman Bobby Mallory, there are actually surprisingly
few clearly unsympathetic male characters in the novel. Even Don Pasquale, the Mafia
figure who is the head of yet another patriarchal order, is rather likable (as Paretsky
explains it, the fact that he is named for Donizetti's Don Pasquale gives the reader a hint
that he is not going to be a "malevolent" figure; private communication of 3 March
1988).

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Oedipus thinks he is preserving familial order by leaving Corinth for

Thebes, but later discovers that he has fulfilled the oracle of patricide
and incest by fleeing it: in the history of tragic irony, this unwitting
fulfillment has become a paradigm. But what we as readers of
Iphigenia's story can add to the understanding of the Oedipal oracle is
that the oracle itself is more about the inevitability of disorder within
the family "order" than about simply preserving that order: to say that
Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother is to say that disorder
is in the order of things, that it is not an exception but part of the
rules.2'
If Agnes Paciorek is V. I.'s double in undermining the patriarchal
order-indeed Catherine Paciorek blames V. I. for all of Agnes's non-
conformist behavior (79, 136-37)-the question then becomes: is
V. I.'s investigation finally a gesture of order (stemming from a prom-
ise to protect her Aunt Rosa) or of disorder (her refusal to be a mere
copy of the order)?
In order to begin to answer this question, let us look at the single
most important episode linking the novel to the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
The episode describes an attack on V. I. in which her assailant tries to
blind her by throwing acid into her eyes. Because she deflects the
attack, the acid spills onto her neck, leaving an angry wound:
I pulled back and started to kick when I sensed his arm coming up toward
my face. I ducked and fell over in a rolling ball, felt liquid on the back of my
neck underneath the muffler.... [T]he back of my neck began burning as
though I'd been stung by fifty wasps.... The collar of the crepe de chine
jacket had dissolved. I twisted around to look at my back in the mirror. A
thin ring of red showed where the skin had been partially eaten through. A
long fat finger of red went down my spine. Acid burn. [101]
The attempt to blind V. I. would seem to put Killing Orders into the
tradition of Oedipal detective fiction, with the investigator trying to
find out more than she is allowed to see. But the attack on V. I.'s eyes,
the site of her identity as an investigator ("my eyesight, my live-
lihood," 141; cf. the term "private eye," which V. I. uses to describe
herself, 146), fails, or rather is deflected into a different kind of attack:
21. For the inextricable relations between order and resistance, see the work of
Michel Foucault, particularly his discussion of the nature of power, e.g., "there are no
relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective
because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised;
resistance to power . . exists all the more by being in the same place as power."
Power!Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton, England: Harvester, 1980), 142. See also
The History of Sexuality 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Pantheon, 1978), 94-96.

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the acid burns not her eyes but her neck, th

(cf. Iphigenia's words in the Iphigenia in Aulis: "For I will cou-
rageously offer my neck in silence," 1560).22 What started out as an
Oedipal blinding scene turns into a figure of Iphigenia-like sacrifice;
indeed, this incident invites us to look further into the relation be-
tween the myths of Oedipus and Iphigenia.
Beyond certain differences in chronology, both stories deal with the
relations between order and disorder. Oedipus discovers that what
appeared to be in order-his entire story since the return to Thebes and
the saving of the city, his establishment of family and lineage-is
based on a disorder, on a cataclysmic double attack on the familial and
civic order (patricide, incest). In Iphigenia at Aulis, conversely, the
Achaians are made to confront the fact that the heroic order is based on
an attack against the familial order. Whether the realization of disor-
der comes before or after the order, both dramas are about the shocking
revelation of the true nature of an apparent order, that is, the disorder
that underlies it.
The fundamental difference between the two plays is the final rela-
tion of the hero or heroine to the (dis)order which is the subject of the
drama. While Oedipus's revelation leads to a blinding, a figure for the
impossibility of assimilating the knowledge of the true nature of the
familial and civic order and of one's own position within it, at the end of
the Iphigenia in Aulis-which is a prospectively rather than a retro-
spectively oriented tragedy-a protective illusion of heroism still re-
mains intact in spite of the play's attack on the family: the saving myth
of the Iphigenia is that the heroic order, even if it demands the sacrifice
of the familial order, is worth the sacrifice, and will eventually make up
for its initial attack on the familial order by ultimately protecting that
order. Iphigenia herself becomes a heroine in order to sacrifice herself;
her acceptance, indeed her exaltation of the sacrifice provides an artic-
ulation between the familial order and the heroic order, and her stance at
least implicitly tells us that the heroic order is worth upholding, what-
ever the cost.
But Killing Orders suggests that the stories of Oedipus and
Iphigenia are not ultimately as clearly distinguishable as they seem,
and it is precisely this confusion that will allow us to move to Racine's
version of the myth. Perhaps the central characteristic of Oedipal de-
tective fiction is that in one form or another the investigator's identity
22. In Racine's Iphigdnie, as we shall see, the sacrifice, which requires that the
victim's neck be cut, is undermined, since Eriphile plunges the sword into her breast.

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ultimately comes to be confused with the criminal's,23 so that the

story being investigated slowly begins to overlap with the investiga-
tor's own story. This is certainly the case in Killing Orders, in which
V. I.'s most important discovery has to do with her own mother's
betrayal of her family. V. I.'s investigation into Agnes Paciorek's
death-that is, Agnes's sacrifice at the hands of her own mother-
finally becomes confused with V. I.'s discovery about her own moth-
er's "sacrifice" of her. Agnes and V. I. are doubles in the novel, double
heroines and double sacrificial victims. V. I., in investigating a mater-
nal sacrifice, is, like Oedipus, unknowingly investigating her own
story.
V. I. is thus both an Iphigenia figure (sacrificial victim) and an
Oedipus figure (investigator who turns out to be investigating her own
story), a figure who establishes the priority of one order over another
(sacrifice of Iphigenia) and one who discovers that no apparent order
can ever erase a fundamental, hidden disorder (Oedipus). It is this very
ambiguity of the nature of order and its delicate relation to disorder
which in fact distinguishes Racine's play from Euripides', as we shall
presently see, and if, as we stated earlier, we can move from Killing
Orders to Racine's Iphigenie only indirectly, through the intermediary
of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, Killing Orders does provide us with a
point of transition to Racine no less remarkable for being, apparently,
coincidental.24 For the dry cleaner to which V. I. takes her smoke-filled
clothing after her apartment is burned down is located on Racine
Avenue:
"And if you're taking those to a dry cleaner, there's a good one around the
comer on Racine."
The woman at the cleaners informed me triumphantly that it would
cost me extra to get the smoke out. She made a great show of inspecting
each garment, clucking her teeth over it, and writing it down on a slip with
the laboriousness of a traffic cop writing a ticket. At last, impatient, I
grabbed up the clothes and left.
A second cleaner, sharing a dingy storefront with a tailor several blocks
23. This confusion goes against a number of "rules" of what has come to be called
the classical detective novel-what Todorov calls the "roman a 6nigme." "Typologie du
roman policier," Poetique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 57. For example, if in the
classical detective novel there are two stories and not one, "the story of the crime and
the story of the investigation" (Todorov, 57), in the Oedipal detective story it is not
possible to distinguish fully between the investigation and the crime; the investigation
itself is part of the crime.
24. Sara Paretsky informs me that she was not making a conscious allusion to Racine
here (private communication of 3 March 1988).

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down, was more obliging. The woman at the counter accepted the smoky
clothes without comment and wrote up the ticket quickly. [2031
The cleaner "on Racine" emphatically points out the price of getting
the smoke out, that is, the price of the attempted sacrifice of V. I(phi-
genia). The other cleaner, which is also where V. I. has her Dominican
uniform made, is not on Racine Avenue but on Montrose Avenue (206,
207-08), and here the smoke can be removed at no extra cost (203).
Indeed, Racine's entire play, and particularly in its relation to Eu-
ripides', asks this very question: At what price can the smoke of the
sacrifice be "removed"? What is the price of the death of Eriphile,
Iphigenie's double? What is the cost of tragic catharsis, or "cleansing"?
Can the smoke of the sacrificial fires ever be removed once and for all?
5. "LA SEULE IPHIGENIE"?
Racine's addition of the character of Eriphile, the "other" Iphigenie,

most obviously distinguishes his play from other versions of the myth,
especially from the Euripides drama upon which it is largely based, and
gives Racine's play, more than any other tragic treatment of the myth,
the appearance and structure of a detective story. Racine's play begins
with an oracle saying that the winds for Troy cannot be had without
the sacrifice of Iphigenie; it ends with the discovery that Achille's
mysterious captive from Lesbos, Eriphile, who is finally revealed to be
the secret daughter of Helen and Theseus and Iphigenie's first cousin,
is actually, unbeknownst to herself, also named Iphigenie. The horror
of sacrificing the "virtuous" Iphigenie, as Racine himself calls his
heroine in his preface to the play,25 is avoided when Eriphile/Iphigenie
is duly sacrificed in place of her more fortunate cousin. The organizing
question of Racine's play is therefore "which Iphigenie?", its action
apparently nothing more than a successful detection. But in fact what
Racine suggests by his creation of a second Iphigenie is that the most
serious challenge to the familial order comes not from an actual sacri-
fice of Iphigenia-since in his play Eriphile is there to "save the
day"26-but rather from the heroine's ambiguous attitude toward the
25. "Preface d'Iphigenie," in Jean Racine, Theatre complet, ed. J. Morel and A. Viala
(Paris: Gamier Freres, 1980), 510. All quotations of Iphigenie will be taken from this
edition, and line numbers will be bracketed in the body of the text. All translations from
French are mine.
26. In Euripides' play, as we have seen, Iphigenia is not actually sacrificed, but the
substitution of the animal victim doesn't raise all of the complex issues that Racine's
doubled Iphigenia does.

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sacrifice and toward those who try either to impose it on her or to save
her from it. Racine's play will bring the "detective" element of our
intertextual reading to an end, for discovering "which" Iphigenie does
not mean understanding the tragedy; let us examine why this is so.
The center of Racine's play is the relation linking Iphigenie and
Eriphile, or the two "Iphigenies": Eriphile is Iphigenie's double pre-
cisely because the two figures are the two components of a single
personality attempting to form itself. Iphigenie herself wonders aloud
whether she and Eriphile can ever be separated:
Vous ne pouviez sans moi demeurer a Mycene;

Me verra-t-on sans vous partir avec la reine?
You couldn't stay in Mycenae without me;

Will I leave here with the queen, without you?
[665-66]
Je vois ce que jamais je n'ai voulu penser:
Achille ... Vous bruflez que je ne sois partie.
I see now what I never wanted to believe:

Achille .. . You're longing for me to leave.
[672-731
These admonitions of Iphigenie to Eriphile have the impact of an

internal dialogue: Iphigenie, who has been described as one of Racine's
most Cornelian characters, the epitome of virtue and duty, is here
speaking to the part of herself-Eriphile-in which nonvirtuous de-
sire is lodged, so that the question of whether she will be able to leave
Aulis without Eriphile becomes the question of whether she can extri-
cate from within herself the desire which is in conflict with her virtue,
the hidden disorder which might compromise the familial order.
More specifically, Iphigenie and Eriphile form two parts of the
same character, one in order, one out of order, in their relations to the
play's two male protagonists, its centers of power: Agamemnon and
Achille. This is already true in the cousins' first shared appearance
onstage, their meeting with Agamemnon:
Vous n'avez devant vous qu'une jeune princesse

A qui j'avais pour moi vante votre tendresse.
Cent fois lui promettant mes soins, votre bonte,
J'ai fait gloire a ses yeux de ma felicite.
Que va-t-elle penser de votre indifference?
Ai-je flatt6 ses voeux d'une fausse esperance?

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You see before you just a (or just one) youn

To whom I boasted of your tenderness for me.
Promising her my care and your kindness a hundred times,
I gloried in my good fortune in front of her.
What is she going to think of your indifference?
Have I assuaged her demands with false hope?
[561-66]
"Vous n'avez devant vous qu'une jeune princesse": this means not
only "Eriphile is no one to feel inhibited in front of," but also, "There
is only one princess here, not two." Iphigenie's assurances to Eriphile
of Agamemnon's devotion are the language of duty speaking to desire:
Eriphile, who revels in her status as unloved, rejected daughter ("Je
requs et je vois le jour que je respire,/ Sans que pere ni mere ait daigne
me sourire" [I was given life and see the light of day,/ Without a father
or a mother ever condescending to smile at me], 425-26), is also
Iphigenie's hidden desiring function, which by the very nature of de-
sire is never satisfied, so that this "Iphigenie" can never be sufficiently
reassured of her father's love. If Iphigenie may allow herself to think
only of Agamemnon's utter devotion to her ("Quel bonheur de me voir
la fille d'un tel pere!" [What happiness to see myself the daughter of
such a father!], 546; "J'ai cru n'avoir au ciel que des graces a rendre" [I
thought I had only thanks to give to heaven], 550), when she assures
Eriphile of Agamemnon's fatherly affection she is doing nothing more
than soothing her own secret fears. This is the dutiful Iphigenie trying
to close the gap between herself and the desiring Iphigenie; it is the
conscience trying to make desire accept the very limitations which are
inimical to desire, trying to put desire in order.
This link of similarity and opposition between Iphigenie and
Eriphile most strongly characterizes their relationship to the shared
object of their desire, Achille. Although the masochistic nature of
Eriphile's desire has been commented upon, the complex nature of
Iphigenie's love for Achille has not been sufficiently emphasized. At
the outset, there is no conflict between virtue and desire for Iphigenie:
desire is, in fact, compatible with familial order, as Achille is approved
of by both Iphigenie's father ("[Cet amant]/ Qu'un pere de si loin
m'ordonne de chercher" [This lover/ That my father orders me to seek
out from so far away], 600), and her mother (Clytemnestre: "Je vous l'ai
dans Argos presente de ma main" [I introduced him to you in Argos
with my own hand], 640). But whereas Iphigenie at no time fully op-
poses or revolts against her father's plans for her own sacrifice, that

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exemplary bit of obedience draws our attention away from her refusal
to reject Achille. Iphigenie herself draws the parallel between the two
"sacrifices," of her life and of her love for Achille:
Vous voyez de quel oeil, et comme indifferente,

J'ai requ de ma mort la nouvelle sanglante.
Je n'en ai point pali. Que n'avez-vous pu voir
A quel exces tantot allait mon desespoir,
Quand, presque en arrivant, un recit peu fidele
M'a de votre inconstance annonce la nouvelle!
You can see with what an indifferent eye

I took in the bloody news of my death.
I didn't even turn pale. If only you could have seen
To what excesses my despair went just now,
When, just after I arrived, an unfaithful account
Told me the news of your inconstancy!
[1033-381
In this light the confrontation between Iphigenie and Eriphile (II, v)

takes on the impact of a meeting of Iphigenie with herself, of her
conscience with her desire. It is absolutely essential to remember that
when this scene takes place, Iphigenie has just been instructed by
Clytemnestre to forget Achille (645-46); this is the moment when
Iphigenie's desire becomes split from the familial order, when her love
for Achille falls out of order. If Iphigenie does not make the slightest
response to her mother's orders, this is because her indirect reply will
take the form of a cry of astonishment, anguish and resistance directed
purportedly at Eriphile, but more fundamentally toward the part of
herself that is Eriphile: "Oui, vous l'aimez, perfide!" [Yes, you love
him, perfidious one!] (678). This is a discovery not only that Eriphile
has been in love with Achille from the very beginning, but also that
Iphigenie herself, now turned "perfidious" because her love is no long-
er in line with her filial duty, is still in love with Achille in spite of the
dictates of the familial order.
Thus the most important sacrifice in Racine's drama is not the
threatened sacrifice of Iphigenie's life, but the demanded sacrifice of
her love for Achille once that love is outside the familial order and
potentially disruptive of it. This is the sacrifice which she rejects:
Achille trop ardent l'a peut-etre offense,

Mais le roi, qui le hait, veut que je le haisse;
II ordonne a mon coeur cet affreux sacrifice....

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Dieux plus doux, vous n'avez demande que ma vie!

Mourons, obeissons.
Achille, too fiery, has perhaps offended him,

But the king, who hates him, wants me to hate him;
He is ordering this frightful sacrifice of my heart....
Gentler gods, you asked only for my life!
Let us die, let us obey.
[1504-111
The ordered sacrifice ("II ordonne a mon coeur cet affreux sacrifice")
that Iphigenie refuses to make is a sacrifice of her own disorder, of her
desire for Achille, and when she says "obeissons," her gesture of obe-
dience (offering up her life) is designed-and undoubtedly succeeds in
its intention-to cover up a more serious act of revolt against
Agamemnon's authority than a refusal of the sacrifice of her life would
be, that of not sacrificing her love for Achille. Continuing to love
Achille against the demands of virtue means creating an internal divi-
sion, a split embodied by Eriphile, the "desiring" Iphigenie.
Iphigenie's heroic illusion is that Eriphile, the nonvirtuous lover, is
not a part of her, is not "another Iphigenie. " Iphigenie nowhere openly
admits either to herself or to anyone else that her love for Achille is in
any danger of undermining her status as the most virtuous of
daughters. It is Eriphile alone who bears the brunt of her reproaches,
Eriphile who is labelled as perfidious, and this is so precisely because it
is Eriphile's role to oppose rather than conform to anything that is
presented to her. Iphigenie, "virtuous" to the end, would literally
sooner die than recognize that she is out of order, indeed, that there is
an adversative relation at the heart of the familial order itself.27
When at the end of Racine's play the "true" identity of Iphigenie as
sacrificial victim is revealed, when Eriphile plunges the knife into her
breast rather than wait to have her throat cut as the terms of the
sacrifice demand, what we are being told is that the sacrifice is a
failure, that the "other Iphigenie" has not been properly killed-that
is, has not been correctly or truly sacrificed-because what she repre-
sents can no more be extricated once and for all than it can ever be
27. My discussion owes a great deal to Ren6 Girard's theory of sacrifice and its
central role in the establishment and maintenance of social order. See in particular
Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1977). For a very interesting Girardian reading of Racine's Iphigenie, see Gerard
Defaux, "Violence et passion dans l'Iphigenie de Racine," PFSCL 11, no. 21 (1984): 685-
715.

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assimilated into an order. Perhaps Iphigenie herself understands this,

as we are told that "La seule Iphigenie/ Dans ce commun bonheur
pleure son ennemie" [Iphigenie alone/ In the midst of this general
rejoicing weeps for her enemy] (1785-86). Why is Iphigenie crying? For
whom is she crying? Are these tears of virtuous condescension toward
the unfortunate victim, or tears of secret identification with her? Is "la
seule Iphigenie" to be translated as "Iphigenie alone," thus emphasiz-
ing her nobility of spirit-no one else has the generosity to mourn for
an evil soul like Eriphile-or as "the only Iphigenie [left]," which
would remind us that the two Iphigenies are not as separate as we are
led to believe?
If the oracle which opens the play and demands the sacrifice of
"une fille du sang d'Helene" [a daughter of Helen's blood] named
Iphigenie (57-62) is finally taken to apply to Eriphile, the oracle which
Eriphile receives might equally be taken to apply to Iphigenie:
J'ignore qui je suis, et pour comble d'horreur

Un oracle effrayant m'attache a mon erreur,
Et quand je veux chercher le sang qui m'a fait naitre,
Me dit que sans p6rir je ne me puis connaitre.
I don't know who I am, and the height of horror

Is that a frightful oracle attaches me to my error,
And when I wish to search for the bloodline that gave me birth,
Tells me that I can't know myself without dying. [427-301
Iphigenie, too-like Killing Orders-combines the myths of Iphigenia

and Oedipus in the relation that the play develops between Iphigenie
and Eriphile. To know oneself for what one is, which for Iphigenie
means knowing the Eriphile within her, means dying as oneself, that is,
losing what one thought was one's identity in the cataclysm of a tragic
recognition. Oedipus's tragic recognition consists of his discovery that
he is himself the criminal he was pursuing, that he is everything which
he based his previous identity on rejecting,28 and this is precisely the
sort of recognition hovering beneath the weeping eyelids of Racine's
Iphigenie.
Eriphile must be sacrificed before the heroes can leave for Troy, and
they leave happy ("Dans ce commun bonheur") in the thought that the
sacrifice has restored order. They leave Aulis not defiantly, in rebellion
28. As Aristotle points out, this is a case in which recognition and reversal coincide
(Poetics, 1 1). Moreover Oedipus is also told that he will die when he learns his identity
(Oedipus Tyrannus, 438).

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against the apparent cruelty of the oracular demands, but harmo-

niously: Eriphile's sacrifice leaves even Achilles and Agamemnon, the
protagonists of the miniature civil war that opens and organizes the
Iliad, in seeming agreement ("[Achille et Agamemnon] tous deux d'in-
telligence, / Sont prets a confirmer leur auguste alliance" [Achille and
Agamemnon] [both in agreement, / Are ready to confirm their august
alliance], 1789-90). But Racine's play tells us that this "auguste al-
liance, " this agreement, is not the source of tragic heroism. The goal of
the familial order is reproduction, the replication of order from genera-
tion to generation; tragic heroism is precisely what escapes this order-
ing. Eriphile represents the unassimilable element in any order; her
protest-indeed, her embodiment of protest-is the very essence of
the tragic heroine's (or hero's) desire to be more than merely the prod-
uct of the system that produced her, the node of resistance that might
be called the refusal of the particular ever to be fully classifiable by the
general, the perpetual renewal of the sui generis in the face of any
attempt at systematization or ordering. Tragic heroism, seen in this
light, is not simply disorder, nor even an absence of order, but rather a
protest against the inadequacy of order; it is not a positive system, but
rather an implicit criticism of a system, an indication that there is
always something that won't fit into any system, whatever it may be.
To this extent, Eriphile is a double not only of Iphigenie, but also of
Achille (the names are rhymed at 153-54,345-46, and 593-94), for the
essence of Achillean heroism is protest, the ultimate rejection of even
a heroic ordering like the Achaian hierarchy (Agamemnon's political
priority over Achilles, the greatest of warriors). Achilles' wrath, like
Eriphile-Iphigenie's, is the kernel of negation and affirmation-nega-
tion of what comes to be felt to be an inadequate order, affirmation of
the part of the individual which escapes that order-that is the essence
of heroism. Its paradoxical nature, and more specifically its paradox-
ical relation to order, can perhaps be best summed up if we consider it
to be an affirmation of the individual's need to refuse.
What, then, is the relation between recognition and sacrifice, the
domains of Oedipus and Iphigenia, that the end of Iphigenie leaves us
with? It might be said that while Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis is a
tragedy of sacrifice, the end of Racine's tragedy is based on the opposi-
tion between a tragedy of sacrifice and a tragedy of recognition. The
end of Euripides' tragedy of sacrifice brings a return to order; the will-
ingness to sacrifice Iphigenia establishes the priority of one order over
another and thus purports to root out the souce of disorder. Iphigenie,
too, is a tragedy of sacrifice for Clytemnestre, Agamemnon, Achille,

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and all of the Greek warriors: Clytemnestre even closes the play with a
statement demonstrating her rather shocking illusion that the drama's
conflicts have been resolved by Achille ("Par quel prix, quel encens, 6
ciel, puis-je jamais/ Recompenser Achille, et payer tes bienfaits!" [By
what prize, what offering, o heavens, can I ever/ Reward Achille, and
pay back your benefits!], 1791-92); in her mind Iphigenie's insurance
policy is still (or already) in Achille's name.
For Iphigenie alone, and perhaps for the spectator as well, this is a
tragedy of recognition. What Iphigenie seems to understand in her
tears is the failed nature of the sacrifice, the impossibility of situating
Eriphile outside of herself, the return of the Oedipal in her story. Thus
to ask "which Iphigenie?" is not to have understood Racine's tragedy;
it is to want to make the tragedy into a detective story, a story in
which, finally, order is restored, rather than one which explores the
nature of order and reveals its relation to the disorder which it can
never fully do away with.
6. OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, RACINE IN TAURUS
The recognition that takes place at the end of Iphigenie is thus not
simple: Iphigenie seems to recognize the complex nature of the sacri-
fice of Eriphile; at the same time as she understands its inevitability,
she understands its artificiality and its limitations, that is, its non-
definitive nature. The end of Iphigenie tells us that sacrifice is neces-
sary for the maintenance of an order, but that it must always be re-
newed, and it is the necessity of this renewal which can be understood
only by tragic recognition. Achille and the Greeks must truly believe
that (only) the "right" Iphigenie has been sacrificed to affirm their
alliance, but the tragedy of recognition tells us that nothing, not even
sacrifice, ever solves the problem of disorder once and for all.
V. I.'s recognition at the end of Killing Orders makes it, too, into a
tragedy.29 V. I. recognizes that the social order is a killing, repressive
force, a tyranny which bases its authority on combatting a disorder
which it can neither tolerate nor do without; that it requires little
more than knowing how to transform its victims-like V. I.'s moth-
er-into its guardians, criminals in the next series of sacrifices; and
that social norms themselves are based on-indeed, have need of-her
protest. She recognizes that the victim of the (killing) familial order,
29. As Paretsky herself puts it, deciding to give V. I. the middle name Iphigenia
"altered how I thought of the character and made it possible to see her in the tragic light
of [Killing Orders]" (private communication of 3 March 1988).

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Agnes Paciorek, is also (in the eyes of that order) a criminal simply
being punished, that given the relation of antinomy between the famil-
ial order and the heroic order the concepts of criminal and victim are
not completely discrete.
The common point in the recognitions which end these two works
is that in both cases order is not a simplification, but rather a binariza-
tion, a division into two seemingly opposing components one of which
constantly attempts to exclude the other, but which are in fact in a
state of symbiosis, each struggling to affirm and express its rights, each
needing to repress the other in order to define itself. Although finding
the criminal in works which question the adequacy of order itself may
require a good deal of detective work, "identifying" the criminal is not
simply an act of detection, but rather, ultimately, an act of recognition,
of recognizing that the criminal's identity is itself not simple.
Thus, Iphigenie and Killing Orders offer remarkably similar read-
ings of Euripides: both works are about the impossibility of ever killing
disorder completely and of doing away with sacrifice. More compel-
lingly than the question: "which Iphigenia?", Iphigenie and Killing
Orders pose the question: "how many Iphigenias?" Now that we have
finally brought Iphigenie and Killing Orders together, let us conclude
by looking to the Oedipus Tyrannus one last time to examine the true
nature of "la seule Iphigenie" who is left at the end of Racine's tragedy
and the solitary Iphigenia figure who is identified at the end of Par-
etsky's detective novel.
The question "how many criminals?" is actually the very question
which has organized much recent criticism about the Oedipus Tyran-
nus; it is the single issue which most compromises that play's status as
a simple detective story: how many people attacked Laius at the
crossroads? If the eyewitness's response to this question, "many,"
holds firm, then Oedipus is cleared of blame in his father's death, for he
was alone when he defended himself against the old man at the
crossroads, but as has been noted by a number of critics,30 the Oedipus
Tyrannus never comes back to this crucial question, and Oedipus
finally comes to assume his guilt in the matter. What in a detective
story would be the key to the outcome of the investigation is sum-
marily dropped.
This apparent side-stepping of the question of the number of crimi-
30. See, for example, William Chase Greene, "The Murderers of Laius," TAPA 60
(1929): 75-86; Karl Harshbarger, "Who Killed Lalus?", Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4
(Summer 1965): 120-31; Sandor Goodhart, "Oedipus and Lalus' Many Murderers,"
Diacritics 8 (Spring 1978): 55-71.

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nals-a question absolutely crucial to the investigation-is visible in

an entirely different light if we understand that the answer to it is
"many" because we are all destined to be guilty of attacking the famil-
ial order, that such an attack, as the oracle tells us, is in the very nature
of the order itself; this will be Freud's conclusion about the Oedipus
myth and one of the points of departure for his theory of development.
Even if Oedipus was alone at the triple crossroads, his action, the
unwitting and unwilling but inevitable violence against the familial
order, was done in the name of everyone, indeed, was foreseen (and
used) by the order itself in the form of the oracle given to Oedipus at
Delphi.
The question in Iphigenie and Killing Orders of "how many
Iphigenias?" is even more complex than that posed by the Oedipus
Tyrannus ("how many criminals?"), because it means, at the same
time "how many criminals?" and "how many victims?"; that is, it
suggests that the criminal is not fully distinguishable from the victim.
The fact that Oedipus's question also means both those things is not
clear until the Oedipus at Colonus, in which Oedipus lodges a protest
against the divine and human orders that have been his downfall, and
the myth of Iphigenia, too, is bipartite: Oedipus's story at Colonus
corresponds to Iphigenia's escape to Tauris (this is the story told in
Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris). There she is first made to carry out a
human sacrificial rite for Artemis-the escaped victim of sacrifice
thus turning into its agent-and then, when she is asked to sacrifice
her own brother, Orestes, revolts against the sacrificial rite itself and
escapes. Indeed, Racine himself began work on an outline for an
Iphigenie en Tauride.31
But Racine never allows Iphigenie to make it to Tauris, for he never
brought the project of the Iphigenie en Tauride to fruition, and this
abortive project allows us to establish one final ordering of the three
texts we have studied. Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, as we have seen,
makes of Iphigenia's sacrifice a stepping-stone, albeit a sharp and pain-
ful one, to the heroic order. Killing Orders offers a fairly open protest
against the sacrifice of Agnes Paciorek and V. I. But Racine's Iphigenie
is based on (covertly) recognizing the nature of the sacrifice of
Eriphile/Iphigenie and yet not being able to do without it, not even
being able to mount an unequivocal protest against it: the function of
protest in Racine's play is projected onto the character of the sup-
31. For the outline of the first act of Iphigenie en Tauride, see Jean Racine, Oeuvres
completes, ed. Raymond Picard (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Plkiade, 1950), 1,
948-51.

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posedly evil Eriphile. Might Racine's failure to complete his Iphigenie

en Tauride not be an indication that he could envision, but not ulti-
mately execute a drama which would openly revolt against sacrifice-
as Iphigenia in Tauris does-and thereby put an end to the need for it?
If we began with the rather strange premise of linking Racine's play
with another text by the nonreading of the Racine drama (Paretsky's
unfamiliarity with Racine's Iphigenie), let us conclude with the non-
writing of another Racine text, the Iphigenie en Tauride. Although
Killing Orders stands in a series of complex relations with several
visions of the Iphigenia myth, as we have seen, in fact V. I. is named not
for the Racine character, nor even for Euripides' heroine, but rather for
the operatic Iphigenia both of whose stories-in Aulis and in Tauris-
are set to music by Gluck; perhaps it is because the events in Tauris
constitute Iphigenia's revolt against sacrifice that Paretsky seems to
associate her heroine's naming with the Tauris story.32 When Racine
ultimately places Iphigenie in Aulis, he is (perhaps unconsciously)
saying that however happy the end of his drama might seem-and
there are those who consider that Iphigenie is a tragedy which "ends
well"33-however much that ending might lull us into believing that
Iphigenie is ultimately structured like a detective story which re-
affirms order in the end, in tragedy there is no final and conclusive
escape from-or taming of-disorder. By the same token, by closing-
or rather not closing-this detection of a tragic intertextuality with a
text that couldn't be written, I would like to suggest, once again, that
not only the orderly laws of detection but also the disorderly lessons of
tragedy underlie the process of intertextuality.34
32. In one of Paretsky's earlier novels, Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride is mentioned

explicitly as being the only opera V. I.'s mother sang in professionally before having to
flee the Fascists in Italy. Deadlock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), 122. Paretsky
tells me this is why Gabriella names V. I. Iphigenia.
33. "Iphigenie est une trag6die qui finit bien" (Raymond Picard in Jean Racine,
Oeuvres completes, 1, 1143).
34. I would like to express my thanks to Elizabeth MacArthur for her very helpful
comments. Thanks also to Charles Gillespie for several useful suggestions.

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Killing Order(s): Iphigenia and the Detection of Tragic Intertextuality

Author(s): Richard E. Goodkin

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930163

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Killing Order s): Iphigenia and the

1. THE DETECTION OF INTERTEXTUALITY

One of the recurring motifs in the current awakening of critical in-

1. Shoshana Felman, "De Sophocle a Japrisot (via Freud), ou Pourquoi le Policier?"

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tery by counterstating it; by assuming that mystery can be overcome, it

Marjorie Nicolson sums up this "neatness" of the end of the mystery

The task of interpretation is . . . not to avoid . . . errors, since they are a

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What Riffaterre calls "agrammaticalities" are essentially clues, in-

7. See, for example, "L'intertexte inconnu," Litterature 41 (February 1981): 5.

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2. ORDERS TO KILL: IPHIGENIA INAULIS

Let us start by sketching out a number of issues raised by Euripides'

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ried (Iphigenia in Aulis, 55-59).13 When Helen is abducted by Paris,

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heroic order. Thus it would not be an exaggeration to give to Euripides'

3. IPHIGENIA IN CHICAGO: KILLING ORDERS

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preposterous. To begin with, we may well wonder why a drama about

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on Arbor Drive in Lake Forest, requires V. I. to go through the woods at

Insurance is not what saves one from sacrifice; it is what requires

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anyone else in the novel is the perpetrator of sacrifice. A morally

The keynote of being in the familial order is reproduction, not only

To look alike is to belong to the order, to be in order, to be identifiable

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V. I.'s difficulty in fitting inside the xerox machine becomes a meta-

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company comes to be synonymous with the familial order's attempt to

"You're a Jill-the-Giant-Killer," [Lotty] said, her black eyes worried.

V. I.'s choice is essentially Achilles' choice, between a long and un-

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V. I.'s dream makes a surprising substitution: the Agamemnon figure

4. IPHIGENIA IN THEBES, OEDIPUS AT AULIS

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Oedipus thinks he is preserving familial order by leaving Corinth for

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the acid burns not her eyes but her neck, th

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ultimately comes to be confused with the criminal's,23 so that the

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5. "LA SEULE IPHIGENIE"?

Racine's addition of the character of Eriphile, the "other" Iphigenie,

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Vous ne pouviez sans moi demeurer a Mycene;

You couldn't stay in Mycenae without me;

I see now what I never wanted to believe:

These admonitions of Iphigenie to Eriphile have the impact of an

Vous n'avez devant vous qu'une jeune princesse

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You see before you just a (or just one) youn

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Vous voyez de quel oeil, et comme indifferente,

You can see with what an indifferent eye

In this light the confrontation between Iphigenie and Eriphile (II, v)