The Tragedy of Man and Salvation Through Art: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Reflections on Human Condition in Oriental Tales

Written between 1936 and 1938, then continuously reworked in the following decades, Oriental Tales appeared for the first time by Édition Gallimard in 1938 and reappeared in 1963 in a revised version. This work covers most of the ancient cultures: Greek fables, Balkan ballads, Hindu or Chinese apologues, and Japanese medieval novels. This collection of tales has a so eccentric, exotic, distant, and archaic color that the author Marguerite Yourcenar did not hesitate to name it “Oriental”. The temporal and geographical remoteness of the stories reveals no less the depth of Yourcenar’s critical considerations on the human condition in general or in concrete terms. Man, entangled in the labyrinth of the world, is doomed to tragedy. Art, such as the writing that is in the making, presents a salutary way out.