ELECTRA: Everything dies – the dust is forgotten.
How can we hope to do what has to be done? (Hughes, 109)
Robert Fagles calls it The Libation Bearers; Ted Hughes
prefers Choephori; in either case it’s the play where the bloodthirsty
chorus of female slaves howls for avenging the murder of Agamemnon that we all
enjoyed so much in the previous play.
CHORUS: Let me scream
That holy scream of joy.
Why should I smother it?
If Justice shares my hope,
If God rides the savage storm
That shakes my heart for vengeance –
Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance. (Hughes, 111)
Will we enjoy the murder of Clytemnestra as much?
I would have guessed that this chorus, captives taken by
Agamemnon over the course of the Trojan War, would not be so firmly on his
side, but he is dead and his murderers and their current enslavers, Clytemnestra
and Aegisthus, are alive. The chorus, as
we have often seen in Aeschylus, gets a lot of good lines.
The Libation Bearers is tragedy mixed with fairy tale,
with its cute brother and sister recognition scene, where Electra recognizes
the presence of her brother by the shape of his footprint in the dust –
remember this when we get to Euripides – and a parallel pair of curious
anti-recognition scenes in the second half of the play, when first the Orestes’s
mother and then his nurse fail to recognize him. The nurse’s failure is admittedly a little more
conceptual and thematic, part of the nursing theme that is itself part of the
larger washing theme, corrupting blood countered by cleansing water and
milk. Agamemnon was all blood.
Not that The Libation Bearers does not have plenty of
blood.
CHORUS: But Orestes fought, he reached the summit
of bloodshed here… (Fagles, 219)
This is more or less at the moment when Orestes kills his
mother, egged on by the chorus and his best friend. My understanding of the ethics of the play is
that the killing of Aegisthus, the uncle of Orestes and an usurping tyrant, is
at worst neutral, just power politics, while the killing of his mother is an abomination,
one more in a long line for this family.
The most curious moment to me was just before the lines above, when
Orestes hesitates and doubts:
ORESTES: Pylades, can a man kill his mother?
Can he perform anything more dreadful
Than the murder of his own mother?
What shall I do?
PYLADES: Remember the words of Apollo.
Obey the command of the god of the oracle.
Embrace the enmity of mankind
Rather than be false to the word of heaven. (Hughes, 134-5)
The strange thing is that these are the only lines of
Pylades, who has otherwise been silently shadowing Orestes through the play. If I think like a fantasy writer, then this
creature is clearly some kind of double, Apollo, or an agent of Apollo (or of someone
else?} who has taken the form of, or possessed, the friend of Orestes. Just a few pages later, we see that “Pylades”
is essentially lying: it is the Furies, not men, who begin to torment Orestes.
They are climbing out of the earth,
Out of their burrows in old blood.
Eyes like weeping ulcers,
Mouths like fetid wounds.
Their whips whistle and crack. (Hughes, 144)
In an earlier speech (Hughes, 106), Orestes says this is what
Apollo told him would happen if he did not avenge his father. Apollo is a liar.
CHORUS: Where will it end? –
where will it sink to sleep and rest,
this murderous hate, this Fury? (226, tr. Fagles)
And curtain, although the Greeks did not have curtains. An
intermission, a week long for us, and then we will get the answers to those
question in The Eumenides, or The Kindly Ones, where we will say
farewell to Aeschylus.
One more curious thing is that we will return to this story
three more times, in Sophocles and Euripides.
So few of the plays survive, but we have four versions of this story.
The painting is Louis Jean Desprez’s “The Tomb of Agamemnon,”
a study for an 18th century Swedish opera, a surprising item owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One more
Aeschylus play with an altar in the center of the stage.
Euripides' spoof and comments on the recognition scene is great.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the ethics of the play, it seems like he's working toward a definition of justice, starting with the Sopranos method instead of a Socratic one. The rules on murder do seem a little fluid.
Yes, a note for the people reading along who have not read many of the plays before - they really do begin to build on each other. Aeschylus is the foundation.
ReplyDeleteThe move toward civilization is such a central part of the myths, the old stories, even if it is not always so explicit in the plays as it is here. The rules that worked in the age of monster-killing don't work anymore.
I like your interpretation of Pylades. It's easy to forget his presence in the textual version of this play - I wonder if his one line was a surprise to the audience at the time.
ReplyDeleteThis play feels like a letdown after Agamemnon, and most of what I find interesting about it is in contrast to the prior work. What Emily Wilson said here about how the Oresteia is largely about the subjugation of women rang true to me. In contrast to the two vivid female characters in Agamemnon, here we have an Electra who doesn't do much (Orestes sends her to "keep a careful eye on all within the house, so that our plans will hold together") and Clytemnestra, who has some good lines but is only a brief presence here. Notably, Iphigenia goes almost unmentioned; Electra says to Orestes that "my love for a pitilessly slaughtered sister turns to you", but I think that's the only direct reference. (Later Orestes says "Our Fury who is never starved for blood shall drink for the third time a cupful of unwatered blood", but it's not clear to me whether the third besides Agamemnon and Aegisthus is Iphigenia.) Most surprisingly, Clytemnestra doesn't even mention Iphigenia when confronted by Orestes, which certainly makes her seem less sympathetic than she does in Agamemnon. The Chorus's allegiance to the slain Agamemnon is, as you point out, somewhat surprising, but what strikes me most about them is their bloodthirstiness. Maybe they too are agents of Apollo? After all, when the nurse questions the message they give her, they say "Do as you were bid. The gods' concerns are what concern only the gods."
I'm also tempted to question Orestes' motivations. He certainly spends a lot of time mourning his father, but he also bemoans the loss of his inheritance in a way that makes him seem motivated by materialism. "The loss of my estates wears hard on me", he says. Later, "Father... I ask the gift of lordship at your hands, to rule your house." Certainly fuel for Wilson's core argument.
The next play may be a letdown, too, or at least it is again totally different than the previous two plays. Something quite new.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea that the chorus has been also been possessed by Apollo. If I put myself in Neil Gaiman mode, one key point is explained. Apollo does not want revenge for the perhaps justified killing of Agamemnon, but for the gratuitous murder of Cassandra, whose terrible fate is of course all his fault, thus his guilt. Outstanding. It's like a detective novel plot. Completely consistent with Emily Wilson's idea.
The chorus continues to be a fascinating character. I don't think they are on Agamemnon's side so much as they are on Electra's. "Behind our veils we weep for her, this girl, her senseless suffering, as grief, concealed and cold, congeals our hearts to ice." To root for Agamemnon's avenger is to root for Electra, and to oppose Clytemnestra, who forces them into a pretense of mourning. Their libations are a sham, until Electra prays for an avenger.
ReplyDeleteThe inheritance question is important, as both of Agamemnon's children have been essentially disinherited. Electra lives in the slaves' quarters with the Trojan women. Orestes is in exile. A murderer sits on the throne. It's almost "Hamlet."
There is certainly an anti-woman argument in the play, though. Orestes calls Aegisthus a woman and says that the heroes who conquered Troy should not be ruled by "two women." I wonder why Orestes never thinks of Iphigenia, and really what reason do we have to think that Orestes wouldn't be a self-serving king like his father, and his father before him? Murder is sort of the Atreus thing, the family business.
All the different ways of mourning the dead in this play are great, the way they're played off each other.
The chorus is anti-anti-Agamemnon.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why Orestes never thinks of Iphigenia - this sort of thing is why Euripides is my favorite of the bunch. He wondered that, too.
One of the things I've noticed in the plays so far is the turn away from Homeric ethics, heroes, etc. Not that Homer didn't sometimes turn away from them, too.
ReplyDeleteHere there is a clear breach of xenia by Orestes and Pylades. Is it excused because it's Orestes' real home and he's not really a visitor? Or for other reasons? Or there's just too much going on and Aeschylus didn't want to add another problem to be resolved?
Eh, I'm probably just looking for an issue that isn't there.
No, I think you're right, and the distance from Homer is only going to grow as Euripides gets to work on the problem. Won't it be fun when we get to Orestes.
ReplyDeleteHimadri's view of this play.
ReplyDelete"It is hard to think of a single play, either in the Athenian tradition or in any other, that presents so grim a view of the human condition."