• “I want a bath!”: On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice
• Michel Büch (bio)

Sarah Ruhl’s early play Eurydice (2003) is a liquefied version of the well-known myth. Set in an underwaterworld, her adaptation overflows with affect and undulates our understanding of sexuality, family bonds, and agency. Two recurring points dominate the substantial scholarly and journalistic debate around the play: the argument that it grants agency to a traditionally objectified figure (Eurydice), and the interpretation of its themes through the Jungian lens of the Electra complex. While both readings have merit and are not inherently contradictory, they tend to complicate and offset one another. Moreover, both risk reducing the play to fixed frames of reference, overlooking its broader artistic and thematic dimensions. In this essay, I step away from these conventional approaches to focus on the role of water as metaphor, material, and mindset within the drama. I consider the play’s text alongside its 2024 staging by the [End Page 406] University Players, a student ensemble at the University of Hamburg. I take my cue from Joanne Stroud’s foreword to Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, which encourages readers to “read images centrifugally [like] the ripples from a center point, constantly expanding our way of seeing.”¹ I allow myself to sink into the motives and visual elements that provoke perceptive experiences, rather than focusing on how the play or a character develops or what a specific image means. I hope this method allows a more organic engagement with the play and its production—one that resists the reductive tendencies of rigid methodologies. This approach is inspired by the pragmatic Deweyan shift from recognition to perception and enables us to look at what the play does rather than what the critic knows. By embracing this flexibility and vulnerability, I aim to contribute not only to the study of Eurydice but to the broader critique of its axiomatic ground, questioning the universalism that underlies both the play and the discourse it has inspired.

Though a modernized version with additional characters and elements (the Father, the stones as a chorus), Ruhl’s aqueous play does maintain the central plot points of the traditional tale: the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice’s accidental death (in some tellings a consequence of fleeing from her rapist, which is evoked in Ruhl’s play), Orpheus’s lamentations and katabasis into the underworld (where he charms Hades and Persephone with his music), and the subsequent bargain that Orpheus and Eurydice can return to the world of the living on the condition that he does not turn to look at her until they arrive (a condition he ultimately fails to meet). Ruhl’s play simultaneously pays tribute to and subverts the myth, recognizing the way the storyline as is performs in the Western literary context, except that Eurydice actively causes Orpheus to turn around by calling out his name in Ruhl’s version. Like the ancient re-tellers of the myth, Ruhl makes use of the “authoritative status of myth discourse” and mobilizes the “narrative logic of the tale . . . to articulate the distinctions that are important” to her.² Eurydice’s intentional responsibility for the failed bargain is a key moment of Ruhl’s play “as an adaption,” to use Hutcheon’s phrase.³ It crystallizes the “feminist twist”⁴ of the play in focusing on Eurydice, traditionally merely a cipher for a quest, an ambiguously erotic and funerary male desire “for one who is absent,” for the unknowable, ungraspable animator of musings both [End Page 407] artistic and philosophic.⁵ In Blanchot’s words, she is “the furthest that art can reach. Under a name that hides her and a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend.”⁶ In Ruhl’s version, Eurydice is no such vanishing point. The play focuses on “her choices and actions”⁷ and she becomes a “more vocal player in the myth.”⁸ And yet I am not sure that the play “ultimately [puts] Eurydice’s fate firmly back in her own hands,” as a review...

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  “I want a bath！”：萨拉·鲁尔（Sarah Ruhl）的《欧律狄刻》（Eurydice）中普遍主义液化的深度和极限
•  Michel Büch （生物）

Sarah Ruhl 的早期戏剧 Eurydice （2003） 是著名神话的液化版本。她的改编以水下世界为背景，充满了情感，并起伏着我们对性、家庭纽带和能动性的理解。围绕该剧的大量学术和新闻辩论中，有两个反复出现的要点占据主导地位：它赋予传统上客观化的人物（欧律狄刻）代理权的论点，以及通过荣格式的伊莱克特拉情结镜头对其主题的解释。虽然这两种解读都有其优点并且本质上并不矛盾，但它们往往会使彼此复杂化并相互抵消。此外，两者都有可能将戏剧简化为固定的参考框架，忽视了其更广泛的艺术和主题维度。在这篇文章中，我摆脱了这些传统的方法，专注于水在戏剧中作为隐喻、材料和心态的作用。我认为该剧的文本以及汉堡大学学生剧团 [End Page 406] University Players 于 2024 年上演的剧本。我从乔安妮·斯特劳德 （Joanne Stroud） 为巴舍拉德 （Bachelard） 的《水与梦》（Water and Dreams） 撰写的前言中汲取灵感，该序言鼓励读者“离心阅读图像，就像从中心点出发的涟漪一样，不断扩大我们的观看方式。¹ 我允许自己沉浸在引发感知体验的动机和视觉元素中，而不是关注戏剧或角色如何发展或特定图像的含义。我希望这种方法可以更有机地参与到戏剧及其制作中——一种抵制僵化方法的简化倾向的方法。 这种方法的灵感来自杜威从认知到感知的务实转变，使我们能够看到戏剧的作用，而不是批评家知道什么。通过拥抱这种灵活性和脆弱性，我的目标不仅是为研究欧律狄刻做出贡献，而且是为了更广泛地批判其公理基础，质疑该剧及其所激发的话语所依据的普遍主义。

虽然是一个带有额外角色和元素（父亲、作为合唱团的石头）的现代化版本，鲁尔的水性戏剧确实保持了传统故事的中心情节点：俄耳甫斯和欧律狄刻的婚礼，欧律狄刻的意外死亡（在某些叙述中是逃离强奸犯的结果，这在鲁尔的戏剧中被唤起），俄耳甫斯的哀叹和进入冥界的 katabasis（在那里他用他的音乐迷住了哈迪斯和珀耳塞福涅）， 以及随后的讨价还价，即俄耳甫斯和欧律狄刻可以返回生者世界，条件是他要在他们到达之前不要转头看她（他最终未能满足这个条件）。鲁尔的戏剧既致敬又颠覆了神话，认识到了故事情节在西方文学语境中的表现方式，除了欧律狄刻在鲁尔的版本中呼喊他的名字，积极地使俄耳甫斯转过身来。就像古代神话的重述者一样，鲁尔利用“神话话语的权威地位”，并动员了“故事的叙事逻辑......阐明对她来说很重要的区别”。² 欧律狄刻故意为失败的交易负责，用哈钦的话来说，是鲁尔戏剧“作为改编”的一个关键时刻。³ 它具体化了该剧的“女权主义转折”⁴，专注于欧律狄刻，传统上只是一个追求的密码，一种暧昧的色情和丧葬的男望，“对一个缺席的人”，对于不可知、不可把握的沉思 [完第 407 页] 艺术和哲学的激励者。⁵ 用布兰肖的话来说，她是“艺术所能触及的最远的地方。 在一个隐藏她的名字和覆盖她的面纱下，她是艺术和欲望、死亡和黑夜似乎趋向的极其模糊的点。⁶ 在鲁尔的版本中，欧律狄刻不是这样的消失点。该剧侧重于“她的选择和行动”⁷，她成为“神话中更直言不讳的玩家”。^“8 然而，我不确定这出剧是否”最终将欧律狄刻的命运牢牢地掌握在她自己手中“，作为一种评论......