find divinity in themselves. The magnificence of the opening play is muted, less because the king is gone and the work at hand is ugly than because a fresh new spirit is required. The gorgeous arias yield to conversations. There is an intimacy breathing in the shadows, warm, confiding, alive. Something can be done. The Libation Bearers is a play of action.
The plays are as different as their choruses. The old men of Argos reach back to the heroic past; like Homer they invoke the muse and find that she is Fury. Still they strain to praise the gods, they seize on Olympian doctrines to shield them from the truth. But once it crashes through, they learn what they had never known before - how it feels to suffer - and they convert to the Furies in the end. The captive women have known the Furies all along but fail to use their powers to the full. Victims of the wars abroad and the strife in Argos, they yearn to support Orestes and the mission of Apollo. When they reach to the past, they show how the present exceeds all past example. They live to provide momentum here and now; cajoling, goading, bloody-minded, they are the midwives to the action. They cry to the gods for help, too rushed for doctrine. Their style is stripped, their morality is at last simplistic - too vindictive or too optimistic, they leap to the future when justice will prevail, and flee the arena where Orestes struggles on. They are finally extruded from the action. They leave a vacuum which the Furies fill.
The Furies will unify language and action, and Orestes leads the way. Even when his syntax and his conscience go insane, his shattering holds a kind of promise. His language at the outset, like his conscience, strains for commitment - now too sure, now insecure, too pious or despondent, feverish, overwrought. But after his painful recognitions he can articulate the conflicts of maturity itself. He is torn between his maddening insights and his desire for the rights; his cries clash out against his closing prayers. Orestes’ fury and his gods are clashing, but the language of the play predicts their union, especially in that symbol of complicity from Agamemnon, the nets of capture and the ceremonious robes. Here they reticulate in subtle ways. First in the strands of hair Orestes places on the grave, one for death and one for life. As Electra animates the strands, she brings her brother forth; and, as the children recall the lethal net, they lash their father back to life and invigorate themselves. ‘Corks to the net, they rescue the linen meshes/from the depths. This line will never drown!’ Their very existence is a weave of life and death, like Electra’s web that binds the wild beasts in its design, and unites her with her brother in vengefulness and love.
We see the weave most clearly in another symbol, perhaps the living, coiling extension of the nets, that dominates this play. At first the serpent is the queen who kills the warlord in her coils, but she also presses her children to conspire against her, and the serpent in her nightmare lends Orestes will to act. The meaning of his action springs from a new bond between the serpent and the nets. The bloody robes that trammelled the bodies of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, that embody Orestes’ mission and his guilt, stimulate the snaky-headed Furies in his mind. And in a sense he is doubly invested at the end, with the Furies’ swarming cloaks as well as with the trappings of Apollo, a Nessus shirt and a habit of perfection. For Orestes may prefigure a union of the warring moral orders in the Oresteia - he may become the fury of the justice of the gods. As he rushes out, his language and his action work together. All that he envisions leads him on.
In The Libation Bearers vision enlivens action, for better and for worse. The brother and the sister embrace, yet they only foreshadow the embrace between the mother and the son. The characteristic act of Agamemnon is a trampling; here it is an embrace
The plays are as different as their choruses. The old men of Argos reach back to the heroic past; like Homer they invoke the muse and find that she is Fury. Still they strain to praise the gods, they seize on Olympian doctrines to shield them from the truth. But once it crashes through, they learn what they had never known before - how it feels to suffer - and they convert to the Furies in the end. The captive women have known the Furies all along but fail to use their powers to the full. Victims of the wars abroad and the strife in Argos, they yearn to support Orestes and the mission of Apollo. When they reach to the past, they show how the present exceeds all past example. They live to provide momentum here and now; cajoling, goading, bloody-minded, they are the midwives to the action. They cry to the gods for help, too rushed for doctrine. Their style is stripped, their morality is at last simplistic - too vindictive or too optimistic, they leap to the future when justice will prevail, and flee the arena where Orestes struggles on. They are finally extruded from the action. They leave a vacuum which the Furies fill.
The Furies will unify language and action, and Orestes leads the way. Even when his syntax and his conscience go insane, his shattering holds a kind of promise. His language at the outset, like his conscience, strains for commitment - now too sure, now insecure, too pious or despondent, feverish, overwrought. But after his painful recognitions he can articulate the conflicts of maturity itself. He is torn between his maddening insights and his desire for the rights; his cries clash out against his closing prayers. Orestes’ fury and his gods are clashing, but the language of the play predicts their union, especially in that symbol of complicity from Agamemnon, the nets of capture and the ceremonious robes. Here they reticulate in subtle ways. First in the strands of hair Orestes places on the grave, one for death and one for life. As Electra animates the strands, she brings her brother forth; and, as the children recall the lethal net, they lash their father back to life and invigorate themselves. ‘Corks to the net, they rescue the linen meshes/from the depths. This line will never drown!’ Their very existence is a weave of life and death, like Electra’s web that binds the wild beasts in its design, and unites her with her brother in vengefulness and love.
We see the weave most clearly in another symbol, perhaps the living, coiling extension of the nets, that dominates this play. At first the serpent is the queen who kills the warlord in her coils, but she also presses her children to conspire against her, and the serpent in her nightmare lends Orestes will to act. The meaning of his action springs from a new bond between the serpent and the nets. The bloody robes that trammelled the bodies of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, that embody Orestes’ mission and his guilt, stimulate the snaky-headed Furies in his mind. And in a sense he is doubly invested at the end, with the Furies’ swarming cloaks as well as with the trappings of Apollo, a Nessus shirt and a habit of perfection. For Orestes may prefigure a union of the warring moral orders in the Oresteia - he may become the fury of the justice of the gods. As he rushes out, his language and his action work together. All that he envisions leads him on.
In The Libation Bearers vision enlivens action, for better and for worse. The brother and the sister embrace, yet they only foreshadow the embrace between the mother and the son. The characteristic act of Agamemnon is a trampling; here it is an embrace
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