Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

7. Elektra: The "Low" Style

7 Elektra: The "Low" Style This first part of this chapter will concentrate upon the problems of genre raised by Elektra's personality and her sham marriage. The second will concern aspects of the play that fit better in the mainstream of its tradition, the relation between Elektra and Orestes and the vengeance plot that they jointly perpetrate. These divisions correspond roughly to two segments that can be marked off by the notorious scene of recognition, a point at which the tension between this Elektra and its tradition reaches a climax. The initial delay of the recognition scene permits a sustained focus on the country setting and its dominant figures, first the farmer husband of Elektra and next the old tutor, now a mountain herdsman. After the recognition, the vengeance plot proceeds relatively directly to its ends, with the focus shifting to confrontations between the siblings and their two adversaries. The fact that this analytic scheme requires me to postpone discussion of the first dialogue between Elektra and Orestes indicates that the play itself is in no real sense more bipartite than other dramas of recognition (anagnorisis) and conspiracy (mechanema). The themes of the second half are already present in the first, just as the themes of the first half find their interpretation and development in the events of the second. I. Anti-traditional Aspects I.A. REALISM AND COMIC TONE Elektra makes a uniquely striking use of certain techniques that appear in a more subtle and fugitive way in other plays. The concentration of these qualities apparently derives from this play's relation to previous treatments of 181 182 Part II: Four Plays Oresteia motifs. In this instance the attitude of combativeness that the innovating artist takes in relation to his tradition is exaggerated, so that this conflict tends to be the major determinant of the course of the play, both in the negative and in the positive sense. The result for this play is a homogeneous stylistic quality rare in Euripides' work. G. H. Gellie has pointed out that the matter-of-fact and circumstantial approach to dramatic events, typical of Euripidean style, is more marked than usual in this play.) Careful explanations provide circumstantial grounds for every event, even those that do not seem to require this support: we would readily believe that the day of Hera's festival approaches, without assurances that the message has been brought to this remote area by a milk-drinking, mountain-climbing Mykenaian.2 Gellie has suggested that this punctiliousness reflects changing tastes in a mass audience.3 But this same audience enjoyed work of Sophokles that lacked this trait; and other Euripidean plays presumed not to be very far in date from Elektra are relatively vague about details.4 This circumstantial precision is another part of the Euripidean techniques that diminish audience credulity and absorption in dramatic reality.5 The more circumstantial are the explanations offered by the play, the more the question of reality moves to the fore and the more the dramatic mimesis of reality becomes problematic. The''realism" of Elektra cannot be treated apart from the play's vigorous attack on tragic literary norms. Its untragic or antitragic stance has continued to confuse and irritate its critics up to the present day. This play challenges the basic split between the "laughable" (geloion) and the "serious" (spoudaion), an opposition that has a strong social and I. 1981, see p. 4, on the play's "obsession with realistic evidence," which reaches a peak in the token scene, but is evident in many other places. Against such a view of Elektra, see Vogler (1967,34). 2. Gellie (1981, 3). 3. ••A large popular audience will ... use its everyday experience of the behavior of men and women to check on what the dramatist offers to its credence" (6). G. also adds that Euripides, far from "succumbing to the temptation of popular writing," is in fact "dramatising the problem " and displaying it as a "kind of game." He remarks that the play has "the flavor of the experimental" (7 - 8). These observations seem to me to be on the mark and to catch well the individual quality of this play. 4. E.g.,/phigeneia Among the Taurians. Neither the entrance of the chorus, nor the first exit and reentrance of Iphigeneia, are compellingly motivated. Sophokles' Elektra. referred to hereafter as Elektra (2), displays a similar lack of concern for precise motivation; see U. v. Wilamowitz (1883, 215). 5. Consider, e.g., the...