The Progeny of Atreus

THE PROGENY OF ATREUS THE ABSURDITY OF IWMAN LIFE, this appalling experience of freedom incarnate, is the very source, perhaps the only genuine source of tragedy on stage at all times and in all cultures. The gratuitousness of our existence has always been realized as being in opposition to what every one of us feels to be true: the fundamental freedom of and our. total responsibility for our actions. This eternal conflict is at the core of all great tragic plays in our Western culture. Cloaked in the vagueness of the term "fatality," it continues to inspire our contemporary dramatic authors. Modem dramas will depict and analyze Fate and propose remedies for it, since the old prescriptions, no matter how well they may have "worked" in their times, nO longer cure our ills. To dramatize this conflict, writers of tragedies have used various plots, settings, and themes, some of which proved to be ideally suited for the problem and have therefore been adapted for the stage over and over again. One of these well-known themes will be discussed here because of its remarkable persistence. It is a theme born in the nebulae of pre-Homeric Greece, one that is still a challenge to a Sartre and an O'Neill: the curse upon the house of Atreus as manifested in the parricides of Electra and Orestes. When he attempted to face his ontological problem for the first time, man fell back upon transcendental causes: he tried to find the explanation of his being outside and beyond himself. Thus in the primitive framework of the Atreus story, the actions of the human beings are immediately subjected to the will of the gods or the MoiraL The oracle orders; man but obeys. Such is the plot of Sophoeles' Electra. The fate of the heroes is fully predicted in the oracles, and allusions to this fact abound throughout the play.l The denouement is one of perfect moral and dramatic balance: the chorus absolves the murderers and there are no Erinyes to pursue them. Orestes and Electra did not hesitate to commit parricide. That they did not control their own actions is obvious to them as well as to the spectator. .One might wonder where to find the elements of tragedy in this play, for the strength of man which should be shown as opposed to, fighting against and defeated by superior forces is entirely absent from the stage. Actually, in Sophocles' time or in ours, the mere showing 1. E.g. Electra: "For now I have seen thy face, beyond all thought and hopeI" Orestes: "Thou sawest i~ when the gods moved me to come." Sophocles, Electra, transI. R. C. Jebb, in The Complete ureek Drama, ed. W. J. Oates and E. O'Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938), I, 540. 75 76 MODERN DRAMA May of one of these hostile forces suffices to create dramatic tension and tragic atmosphere, proof that the spectator himself experiences the ambiguousness of human existence, an ambiguousness which he then transfers to the characters presented on the stage. This type of implication might well tempt us to define the Electra of Sophocles as an implicit tragedy. In The Libation Bearers of Aeschylus, the parricidal hands begin to falter. The crime is followed by a frenzy of remorse and the final scene shows panicky flight and close pursuit by the Erinyes. The words of Orestes show how both crime and punishment are preordained : The big strength of Apollo's oracle will not forsake me. For he charged me to win through this hazard, with divination of much, and speech articulate, the winters of disaster under the warm heart were I to fail against my father's murderers;· . . . . . . . . . . . . He said that else I must myself pay penalty with my own life, and suffer much sad punishment; • II • • • • • • .. II II II II • II • II· . . . . . . . . . . .. . . He spoke of other ways again by which the avengers might attack, brought to fulfilment from my father's blood.2 There is no overt indication in this play that man's freedom which is in the grasp of the Moirai, can or should free itself from their hold. With Euripides the psychological motivation...