Rereading Aeschylus
Something's rotten in the House of Atreus...
Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin, 1984 [1966], 335 pp.
Ken Kesey’s second book Sometimes a Great Notion from 1964 is a great novel. It’s an epic family saga set in the soggy forest-capped hills of the Oregon coast, amidst a union struggle with the loggers, and township at loggerheads with an intransigent petty-bourgeois Stamper family. It’s encyclopedic in structure, and in style makes a homage to the great social novelists of the 1930s.
Unfortunately, I won’t be writing a post on this operatic Oedipal drama any time soon.
I dropped my copy down a hole.
But it’s clear Kesey had tapped into the same idea that had reached James Joyce and Ezra Pound: producing a new piece of literature means throwing strands of classical culture into a “vortex,” as captured in the amazing first part of Hugh Kenner’s Pound Years.
Ulysses was a lab experiment proving that the story of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca already, spontaneously contains the (I believe older) narrative prototype of the Hamlet legend woven into its knot, which also implicates the Oedipal struggle of Sophocles, and the story of messianic return and redemption.
But fast forward from Homer and the Ionian bardic culture of 800 BC to the drama scene of Athens of the fifth century BC. Aeschylus stages a trilogy of plays relating events that take place simultaneously with Odysseus’s wanderings back from the Trojan war. And this, too, is a vortex of the hero’s homecoming — the Nostos — and the revenge-quest of a warrior prince, returning from exile to kill the usurper.
Not consciously, I did end up reading the same translation by Robert Fagles in the Penguin Classics edition as I had before, but I can’t say I regret it. The verse reads very well to me (not like the clunking, dull-thudding iambic pentameter of Wilson’s new translations — I don’t dispute them as translations, they just ain’t poetry). Fagles’s elegant blank iambics make this an “Elizabethan” take on the tragedy of Orestes that reinforces the homecoming-revenge, Odyssey-Hamlet connection.
I’m normally a bad reader of play texts: it’s hard to stage a play in one’s mind for some reason, and I end up just focusing on the words on the page (and the poetry of classic drama is often more than enough) without considering space, movement, scenery.
But not this time, happily. The apocalyptic dread comes through from the opening lines by the watchman (just like in Hamlet!). And then there are the visions of the clairvoyant Cassandra, who like a medium immediately perceives, through amazingly graphic visions, why Agamemnon’s house is haunted:
No…the house that hates god, / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen / torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood —
…See, my witness — / I trust to them, to the babies / wailing, skewered on the sword, / their flesh charred, the father gorging on their parts —
…Young, young in darkness like a dream, / like children really, yes,…
….their hands, they fill their hands / with their own flesh, they are serving it like food, / holding out their entrails…now it’s clear, / I can see the armfuls of compassion, see the father / reach to taste and —
Atreus, Agamemnon’s dad and Orestes’s grandfather, caught his wife cheating on him with his brother Thyestes. In revenge, Atreus did the reasonable thing of killing Thyestes’ children, grinding and cooking them into meatloaf, and serving them to his brother with hamburger helper. In the lore, even this nightmare of vengeance and cannibalism is part of a cursed chain going back to the warring children of Zeus.
In any event, the doom-laden language runs up to the grisly assassination of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra — and he had just gotten back from the Trojan wars. And Agamemnon was the “emperor” over all the Greek fiefdoms, of which Odysseus was one, which made him “commander-in-chief” of all Greek armed forces, which is how he launched the campaign on behalf of his brother Menelaus in the first place. It’s quite a decapitation, socially speaking.
But that’s not Clytemnestra’s motivation: Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia for better sailing weather, and even in the mythological world this is a bit much. But she tricked her husband, axed him in a silver tub, and here she gloats in alliterative staccato lines to the horrified court and audience:
I brooded on this trial, this ancient blood feud / year by year. At last my hour came. / Here I stand and here I struck / and here my work is done.
The middle play, The Libation Bearers, is just like the middle movie in a Hollywood trilogy: there’s a lot of back and forth, and much darkness.
Orestes, costumed like an ordinary wanderer, shares the knowledge of Apollo of the ghastly condition of the unavenged dead. Consider this amazing hellish imagery:
He revealed so much about us, / told how the dead take root beneath the soil, they grow with hate and plague the lives of men. / He told of the leprous boils that ride the flesh, / their wild teeth gnawing the mother tissue, aye, / and a white scurf spreads like cancer over these, / and worse, he told how assualts of Furies spring / to life on the father’s blood…
Between Orestes, his older sister Elektra, and the Chorus is a well-wrought rhetorical dance, all around the question of whether or not to take revenge on Clytemnestra, who has let the house of Atreus — which is like the “county seat” of the mini-kingdom of Argos — go to seed in the intervening years.
The Chorus rightly considers that this act will activate the Furies.
CHORUS: It is the law: when the blood of slaughter / wets the ground it wants more blood. / Slaughter cries for the Fury / of those long dead to bring destruction / on destruction churning in its wake!
These are goddesses of vengeance, the personification of historic blood feuds. And they come from an older world than the ilk of Apollo and Athena; the latter are creeped out at best by the Furies.
Notice how the lines of Chorus tie the Furies in with blood and the ground: this is a truly a matriarchal world where blood ties and ancestry count for almost everything. The “bad blood” leads to bad earth, bad weather, bad harvest: the curse of the Furies seems to express itself in natural disasters.
Sure enough, the Furies hunt down Orestes to Apollo’s temple. The final act of this trilogy culminates in the conversion of the “Erinyes” to The Eumenides or the Kindly Ones.
The fun of this play is that it unfolds like a legal drama (the first of its kind?), with Athena as a judge trying the case of Clytemnestra’s Ghost v. Orestes, respectively counseled by The Furies and Apollo. Being a landmark court case, a revolutionary re-interpretation of law, custom, and indeed civilization comes to be a stake here.
The case is pretty easy to follow, until it isn’t. At first, the Furies assert that they are carrying out their canon to punish crimes against mothers.
— “Matricides: we drive them from their houses.”
But Orestes felt equally obligated to avenge a patricide that was also a mariticide.
— “She killed her husband — killed my father too.”
That’s like two blood-based offenses, so why do the Furies only target Orestes? This is where it gets tricky: because the “legal theory” for the Furies trades on the sanguinity question:
— “The blood of the man she killed was not her own. … Disclaim your mother’s blood? She gave you life.”
The distinction then is that Orestes killed the woman whose blood runs through his own veins, who had once been nurtured in the fluids of her womb.
This is where Apollo comes in with a spurious argument:
Here is the truth, I tell you — see how right I am. / The woman you call the mother of the child / is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, / the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. / The man is the source of life — the one who mounts. / She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps / the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.
Basically, Oreste’s team counters the blood argument by claiming the genetic essence is not in the mother’s womb but the sperm of the father. Life is in the seed, not the blood.
And the Furies have a nuclear option to lay waste to Athena’s brand new city if the verdict doesn’t go their way. But with Jury deadlocked, Athena breaks the tie for Orestes. This also the dethroning of the right of mothers for the right of patriarchal ownership.
This “legal argument” is extremely creaky of course, but what’s interesting is how it may reflect Aeschylus’s and his society’s relationship with the Homeric myths. Even by Aristotle and Plato’s time, this stuff was seen as extremely old and weird.
The playwright in his early classical culture seems to be working through his own doubts about this ancient saga from the bronze age. What’s up with all the cannibalism? And how exactly do the pantheon of gods work? Characters also keep mentioning a single creator-type of “god” as if monotheism is already consolidating itself.
This is a strange and dark play, even though it has a happy ending with the Furies re-converting into goddesses of the hearth and healthy harvests. Why haven’t they remade this story and set it in outer space?
They did: it’s called Dune.