Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini

Remembering What the Closed Eye Sees: Some Notes on Dacia Maraini's Postmodem Oresteia

Ga~rielle Cody Remembering What the Closed,Eye Sees Some Notes on Dacia Maraini's Postmodem Oresteia The prototypes of drama are hunting, fertility, and initiation rituals .... Rites are staged by older men for the benefit of adolescent boys who frequently are pressed into the leading roles .... Often, the culminating ceremony is circumcision or subincision or some other painful and irremediable body mark. ... The father-king-god is overcome/replaced by the son-hero-savior who attains mastery over the family-state-cosmos.... It is the imagination of the adolescent boy that is at the core of theater. It is the celebration of his achieving the status of manhood that is the subject of theater. Richard Schechner Environmental Theater Through the centuries, woman has looked at the world through a window. Her point of view is from the inside to the outside.... The layers of history belong to our internal house, our soul. I, here, today, feel the experience of our female ancestors: being enclosed, participating in oppression , masochism, and seduction, along with other women.... Madness is not adjusting to the world. . . . My play Clytemnestra is the story of female madness, of rejection, incongruence, non-relationship with the male world. Dacia Maraini diacritics 215 Gabrielle Cody The Dreaming and the Undreaming Whether one believes, as Simone de Beauvoir did, that the Oresteia is the mythical rendering of the patriarchal takeover, Aeschylus's trilogy remains a fascinating and disturbing document of what the Greeks were grappling with philosophically during the period of the so-called "birth of tragedy" in the fifth century B.C. The gender agon of the play is rooted in the dangerous and painful passage from one culturally sanctioned symbolic order to another. Aeschylus dramatizes two conflicting life principles, the ancient, but still psychically potent matriarchal worldview governed by physis, the irrational, anarchic, andretributive cycle oflife and death, blood lust; and the emerging patriarchal concept of nomos, associated with "civilized," historic culture, and judicial law. The Oresteia, literally "Orestes' story," explores the Aeschy- . lean notion of pathei mathos, "wisdom through suffering," as the foundation for a new democratic state. Orestes is the body on whom the experiment of the play is enacted, the adolescent male through whom wisdom will·emerge at great physical and psychic cost, and whose integration into the society of the Fathers will signal.the possibility for the larger culture's evolution . Refracted through a contemporary lens, the play polarizes ancient kinship ties imbedded in the culture's unconscious, and the homosociality of Athenian civic consciousness. Presented in a trilogy, Aeschylus's journey is one from darkness to light, recounted myth to actual time, totemic biology to patriarchal science. In the first two plays of the trilogy, prophesies and dreams associated with sacred female kinship are substantive and haunting, convulsive events that would have still been palpably frightening to an audience at a time when theories of the unconscious did not yet exist. By the·last play, however, the messy, uncontainable subjectivity of dreams has been replaced by the dangerous objectivity of state-controlled ideology. The mythical Orestes, like the rest of his family, predates Homer. He is a figure borrowed from ancient Greek legend, the classic Greek mother slayer, pursued by the Furies for violation of matriarchal law (Walker 742). The antiquity of the Furies-ancient goddesses of the night, who condemn Orestes for the indefensible crime of matricide-is confirmed by the 216 Remembering What the Closed Eye Sees fact that they are summoned against the killers of the female line only. They too are mythical figures from the time· when all genealogies were reckoned through women (Walker 327). They take the shape of bloodhounds, horrible beasts whom the Aeschylean Orestes, at the beginning ofhis quest, deeply fears. But the mythical stature of Aeschylus's female figures is compromised from the start. Clytemnestra, whose name means "divine wooing" or "sacred marriage," was iIi ancient myth, the last matriarchal queen of Mycenae. She acted in the traditional right of queensto choose her consort, and have each new lover slay the old one (Walker 172). Yet the moral crisis of Aeschylus's play is precipitated by Clytemnestra's sexual infidelity during Agamemnon's long absence in Troy, an expedition he ostensibly undertook to return Helen to her rightful husband. In pre-Homeric myth, Helen, also known as Helle or Selene, was worshiped as an orgiastic deity in Sparta (Walker 382). In Homer, she...