Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of its aesthetic and political work. An on-stage Medean presence pits two forms of temporality against each other, each performed by a different stage technology. The chapter explores technological innovations in set design and special effects, which offer contrasting experiences of time: rapid transformation versus narrative suspense. The chapter shows how the play changes the rules of dramatic narrative by challenging audience expectations of what will happen. This play offers, contra such conceptual historians as Reinhart Koselleck, an early example of the collision between pre-modern forms of history and more progressivist senses of temporality. This collision is shown to invoke the metaphor of suspension only to replace it with that of suspense, thus effecting a replacement that positions the threat of violence close at hand.