Ruxandra Cesereanu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

RuxCes@yahoo.com

 

 

Orestes and Oedipus: Differences, Similarities, Contaminations

 

 

Abstract: Greek tragedy launched many heroes (and anti-heroes), two of which are particularly remarkable through their strenuous and perilous glory: Oedipus and Orestes. Although at first sight the two masculine characters are each other’s obverse facet, the twentieth century managed (albeit rarely) to contaminate and relate them partially, at least insofar as Eugene O’Neill’s From Mourning becomes Electra and the lesser known Orestes & Oedipus by French author Olivier Apert are concerned.

Keywords: Greek Tragedy; Oedipus; Orestes; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; Eugene O’Neill; Olivier Apert; Myth, Parricide; Matricide.

 

 

Greek tragedy launched many heroes (and anti-heroes), two of which are particularly remarkable through their strenuous and perilous glory: Oedipus and Orestes. Although at first sight the two masculine characters are each other’s obverse facet, the twentieth century managed (albeit rarely) to contaminate and relate them partially, at least insofar as Eugene O’Neill’s From Mourning becomes Electra[1] and the lesser known Orestes & Oedipus by French author Olivier Apert are concerned. Before, however, the modern reworking (and contamination) of the two characters and myths in O’Neill’s and Apert’s works, let us what Orestes’ and Oedipus’ mythical trajectory was in the Greek tragedy, as written by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (both Aeschylus and Euripides wrote, in their turn, an Oedipus, but those tragedies have been lost).

 

Oedipus the parricide

 

Oedipus is arguably the most provocative hero in Greek tragedy: his tendentious hubris demonstratively makes him both an absolute sinner and an exceptional redeemer (after his self-punishment and his lengthy nekya), which explains why he dies such a glorious, ritualistic death at Colonus. At least this is the portrait Sophocles makes him in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. The question of destiny is, primarily, what defines him; let us, therefore, see how the hero positions himself towards fate in the beginning. Tiresias, Oedipus’ camouflaged master, refuses initially to tell the truth about the Theban king’s capital sins, relying on the fact that destiny has a way of revealing itself, in the sense that it has its own destructive energy. When he does learn the truth about himself and is terrified by his own condition, Oedipus starts wondering whether it is the gods who actually weave the mortals’ fate or whether it is the working of some demons! The moralising chorus explains to him, however, that destiny is only fatal to the vainglorious: But if there be who walketh haughtily,/ In action or in speech,/ Whom righteousness herself has ceased to awe,/ Who counts the temples of the Gods profane,/ An evil fate be his,/ Fit meed for all his boastfulness of heart.[2] Unaware of the reason why Jocasta obstructs his revelation of identity, Oedipus avows his being the son of Chance, out of a fatal belief in hazard, more exactly in the hazard of good fate and even in the impossibility of getting crushed by it. Nonetheless, when he is later on revealed to be a parricide and an incestuous man, he deems himself to be particularly abhorred and forsaken by the gods; in the making of his destiny he also programmatically identifies the human evil committed by his own parents, Laius and Jocasta, who are guilty of having tried to suppress him and have acted as catalysts in channelling his destiny onto its malefic trajectory. At the end of Oedipus Rex, in order to get the human beings inured to fate’s illogical logic or logical illogic, the chorus draws attention to the fact that destiny is structured by a dialectics between ascent and descent, between good fortune and ill fortune, setting Oedipus as an example.

To some extent, however, Oedipus’ hubris is justified and has meaning. When he shows up in front of the Thebans, Oedipus speaks of himself as the most honoured one in Thebes. Zeus’ priest calls him a redeemer, but also cautiously warns him that Oedipus is not like the gods, since he is merely the first amongst men, meaning the king (and a priest, for that matter), conjuring him afterwards to become the city’s saviour for the second time. Oedipus perceives this request as a further enigma to be deciphered; consequently, since he already knows himself to have been a saviour when he unravelled the Sphinx’s enigma, the hero has unlimited faith in himself, and promises to solve the mystery, cursing Laius’s murderer and simultaneously cursing himself, unwittingly. Another component of his hubris relates to Tiresias, an Apollinic priest and a taboo character in the play – the gods’ messenger. Oedipus abusively accuses Tiresias of murder, then discredits him as a soothsayer, charging him with being a wizard, a plotter of foul schemes, a vagrant mountebank,[3] mocking his sacred blindness and considering himself to be the true prophet instead of Tiresias, given that the latter had been unable to solve the Sphinx’s enigma (which in effect was solved by someone who was not a divine tongue). Not only does Oedipus sense, but he actually knows that he is a chosen one (which he truly is); however, he will dearly pay for the arrogance of his knowledge. The chorus teaches him an entire theory about vainglory, reproving him: But pride begets the mood of tyrant power;/ Pride filled with many thoughts, yet filled in vain,/ Untimely, ill-advised.[4] Oedipus has something else besides his hubris: a contagious fascination with the enigma of Laius’s murder, which he unravels like a detective. The moment he understands he is the great sinner, he overcomes his own destiny, no longer awaiting for the gods to punish him, but punishing himself, as if he were his own god. His violent rage is a typical reaction with Sophocles’ characters who are in hubris (see also Ajax, Creon or Heracles). Oedipus is first enraged when he causes Laius’ death; then he is enraged by Tiresias, by Creon and, eventually, by himself; this rage measures up to his hubris, since everything must serve as an example in the trajectory of this famous character. Not only as a parricide, but also as an incestuous man, Oedipus is guilty of being simultaneously born and begetting, a son, a husband, a brother and a father, all within the same blood. His blindness also has meaning as visual hara-kiri, for he is prevented from gazing (in the inferno) at his parents and at his children who are actually his own brothers and sisters in the diurnal reality. Another reason why he blinds himself is so that he can no longer look at the insignia of the gods (icons, altars, statues), which his gaze might defile. Since it is the gaze that is guilty, it must be punished in an exemplary manner.

Another essential observation: the god who will later on mark Orestes’ destiny also marks Oedipus’ destiny, but in reverse. In Oedipus’ case, Apollo is a persecutor defending the paternal principle: the son’s atonement for his sin must be exemplary. In Orestes’ case, Apollo is the patron and protector of the hero, who must seek vengeance for the murder of his father, Agamemnon. It is not by chance that Oedipus and Laius meet violently and that parricide occurs when the former is coming form Delfi, while the latter is heading there. Moreover, when Oedipus is asked who impelled him to blind himself, he names Apollo; not having anything to reproach the god for and accepting the latter’s sentence, he becomes, in fact, an Apollinic priest.

At a prophetic level, Oedipus Rex is not really an oracular tragedy, which is why we should overview a few details. The hero’s destiny is abusively included in an oracular matrix, since it is a prophecy-generated destiny (albeit camouflaged beneath the oracle are the divine entities). One might say that in Oedipus Rex the oracles correspond to a sort of factotum, given that everything depends upon and is circumscribed by them. Not knowing how to stave off the plagues afflicting Thebes, Oedipus sends Creon to Delfi to inquire the oracle. In his youth, he himself had been there to find out his fate. Tiresias plays, however, an overwhelming part in this tragedy, insofar as oracular performance is concerned: considered to be a godly soothsayer and Apollo’s mouth, he is revered initially like a king by Oedipus himself, who deems that, among others, Tiresias is an expert in ornitomancy. At first, Tiresias is exalted by Oedipus; the Theban king portrays him as the one whose mind embraceth all,/ Told or untold, the things of heaven or earth,[5] and as a great sacerdote. After, however, Tiresias reveals to him, the truth of parricide and incest, Oedipus denies to Tiresias, in a fit of rage, any charisma and gift of prophecy, charging him with being deaf, blind, mad, a mountebank, a plotter of schemes, a wizard, uninitiated by the gods, wrapt in one continual night[6] (and not in light, like the glorious Oedipus), since he was capable of neither solving the Sphinx’s enigma, nor reading the flight of birds. It is therefore exactly in order to prove his gift of prophecy that Tiresias will expose and predict Oedipus’ entire destiny, albeit in a ciphered manner. It is in fact a dialogue between the master and the apprentice, although the latter is as yet unaware of this. Like Tiresias, Oedipus is also blind, but his blindness is of a different kind: he is a king immersed in the darkness of knowledge, despite his access to daylight. Throughout the entire tragedy Oedipus Rex, and particularly towards its end, the king becomes, unbeknown to himself, the prophet’s apprentice (which is attested by the gesture of visual hara-kiri). As Tiresias makes clear, the revelation of truth will occasion Oedipus to experience simultaneous death and birth: the king will symbolically die and wander through the inferno so that Oedipus the prophet may be born. Since Oedipus keeps failing to understand, Tiresias dares him ironically to decode his prophecies.

When the messenger from Corinth announces Oedipus that Polybus (his presumed father) is dead, the hero mocks the role of oracles, considering that in his case neither Pythia’s sayings, nor Tiresias’ prophecy has worked. Little does he know, little does he suspect that he will become Tiresias’ apprentice, that he will become like him. On the other hand, when he finds out the truth about himself and crosses the threshold of knowledge, Oedipus exclaims: O light, may I ne’er look on thee again![7] Foreseeing his self-blinding, he is already on the way to becoming Tiresias’ apprentice. From the outset, Oedipus’ blinding is nekya and extreme initiation; by crossing the inferno (in slow motion), he becomes a prophet. After the revelation of the truth and after his blinding himself, Oedipus first asks Creon to murder him, then to allow him to retire on Mt. Cithaeron, where he had been exposed as an infant and left to die by his parents, and from where he had been saved so he could fulfill his destiny. Mt. Cithaeron is a mountain-tomb where Oedipus wants to expose himself blind in order to be able to descend into the inferno; his exposure is also meant to foster his rebirth in another dimension, that of a blind soothsayer. At the end of Oedipus Rex, he is already capable of prophesying, although he may as yet be unaware of it; this attests that the gift of divination has already been imparted to him and that his initiation has succeeded, albeit through extreme suffering.

Oedipus Rex is a tragedy that foregrounds the Oedipus complex, as Sigmund Freud defines and interprets it. It becomes apparent the moment Oedipus states that he will find Laius’ murder, as if the former king of Thebes had been his father. Burdened with the prophecy of the Delfi oracle, Oedipus confesses to his mother (who is also his wife, Jocasta) that it is not the parricide prophesied to him that abhors him, but incest, the mother’s “bed.” Jocasta’s (and Sophocles’) answer sounds like a contemporary professional psychoanalyst’s advice, since the queen reassures Oedipus that incest is a common place in any man’s unconscious: But thou, fear not that marriage with thy mother:/ Such things men oft have dreams of; but who cares/ The least about them lives the happiest.[8] Jocasta is also the first to sense that she has committed incest with Oedipus; hence, she tries to prevent her husband and son from finding out the truth. When she fails to do that, she resorts to suicide. The suggestion is that the queen would have tolerated incest, had she been capable of assuming it: as proof to that stands her adamant insistence that Oedipus should not find out who he is (i.e. that he is also her son). At the end of the play, Oedipus ceases to be a man, a son and a husband, given his self-blinding and his becoming a prophet; instead, he is exclusively a father, dominated by paternal affection towards his daughters/sisters, Antigone and Ismene. Through blindness and symbolical castration, he has renounced his status as a man and a husband, remaining just a father (true, though, one who is blatantly averse to his own sons).

 

Orestes the matricide

 

In Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia (comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides), Orestes structurally accepts that his destiny has been bent by the god Apollo; the latter has threatened him with diseases, curses and the Erinyes in case he does not commit matricide. The same god determines Orestes to honour Agamemnon not only as a father, but also as a forefather and a hero. Matricide is, therefore, part of Orestes’ destiny, since it pertains to divine “weaving.” Clytemnestra’s defence rests on the same pre-programmed destiny: she clamours that she is not the one to blame for Agamemnon’s murder, but destiny. Orestes ironically responds to her through a mirror strategy: It is you who will be killing yourself, not I.[9] His point is that whoever is guilty of hubris is murdered by his own guilt, which turns against him. Having his mother’s sin as a warning, Orestes hastily embarks upon all the purifying rituals after committing matricide: he goes to Apollo’s temple in Delfi, and then to Athens, where he may stand trial and expiate for his sin. What happens in his case is that he becomes aware of and assumes the responsibility for murder not in a frantic manner, but in the spirit of the talion (which is paternally laid down); his carrying out the rituals of purification and his self-exposure entail the dissolution and sublimation of his hubris. At Orestes’ trial, Apollo appears as the main witness for the defence of his protégé. According to the Apollinic argument, the sons always belong spiritually and morally to the father; hence, murdering a father is always more horrendous than murdering a mother. Paradoxically or not, Apollo gives the example of goddess Athena, who was gestated in her father, Zeus’ head. Goddess Athena (who considers herself to be a virile deity) is essential within the economy of Aeschylus’ tragedy: she is, symbolically and psychoanalytically, a “good mother,” who stands in stark contrast with Clytemnestra, the “bad mother,” and whose decisive vote goes in favour of Orestes’ innocence.

In Aeschylus’ vision, Orestes must respect the rituals of worship, as well as the funeral and purification customs, in order to be saved: on his return home, he offers two tufts of hair in homage to the river (considered to be a deity) and to his father’s grave. In the former case, this is a formal gesture of piety, while in the latter, the hair establishes a connection between the dead father and the living son, suggesting a form of communion, a sort of genuine umbilical cord between them. To avoid being a matricide and in order to truly appear as a redeemer, Orestes must also make a special pledge: next to Electra, he kicks Agamemnon’s grave, treading on it as if he were trying to make the dead man listen to him and promising him rich alms and animal sacrifices. Knowing himself to be impure after the matricide, Orestes wears an olive branch, assumes the posture of a praying man, and at Delfi he coils around the omphalos (the sacred stone marking the centre of the earth) bearing the olive branch tied with white ribbon in his hand. In Apollo’s temple, Orestes sacrifices a boar with whose blood he smears himself; afterwards he washes himself in the river (this is a ritual that is specific to those who require purification after murdering their parents). Blood smearing has the role of restaging the murder, which means that water ablution is expected to produce instantaneous and epiphanic cleansing. At the trial, Orestes confesses to Athena that he has been sprinkled with a lamb’s blood by a cleansing man who has accepted to purify him. The matricide through which Orestes has closed up the cycle of violence is described by the chorus in The Libation Bearers as redeeming: expiate the blood of those deeds/ long ago with fresh justice; I wish/ the old murder breeds no more in the house![10] It is also relevant that Orestes wreaks his revenge through a hoax, since he shows up in his native city as the herald of his own (Orestes’) death, in order to fool Clytemnestra’s and Aegisthus’ suspicions. When he does murder Aegisthus, one of the servants signals the paradox of vengeance through trickery: The dead are killing the living, I tell you.[11] In order to seal the closure of this cycle of violence, Orestes flings upon the corpses of the two culprits the same cloak in which Agamemnon’s body was wrapped.

The relationship between Orestes and Electra is also rather intriguing in Aeschylean vision. Electra is erotically barren (she is de-sexualised), deprived of libido, since up to Orestes’ arrival, she is, symbolically speaking, her father’s widow. After Orestes’ return, she reveals her being aroused by the adultery between a virile Clytemnestra and an effeminate Aegisthus; moreover, she declares her impassioned love to Orestes, proclaiming him thus a father, a mother, a brother and a sister. Although he does not explicitly occupy an erotic space, Orestes is a surrogate figure for everything. He also perceives the adulterous couple (Clytemnestra-Aegisthus) as a pair of women: the male is obviously emasculated (he is kept by the queen) since Orestes can be the sole legitimate male entitled to his father’s inheritance. Before being murdered, Clytemnestra uncovers her breast in front of her son (who hesitates for a moment); her gesture, however, is not incestuous, but emotionally provocative in the maternal sense. The trap does not work, alas.

Sophocles’ Orestes (from the tragedy Electra) is more nuanced than Aeschylus’ character: the former does not see destiny as robotised, but as dependent on opportunity, on chance: Chance will overthrow/ The great, and raise the lowly; nothing’s firm.[12] Thus, Orestes’ framed death has meaning within his own destiny: by recounting, in disguise, his heroic death at the athletic games from Delfi (a sacred, Apollinic place), Orestes actually prepares his – just as heroic – symbolical resurrection as the avenger of regicide, and as a pawn in and director of matricide. In order for his destiny to be grand, the ruse of his heroic death, announced as such in front of the regicidal couple, is crucial. His resurrection is construed for this exact purpose: it is only a “resurrected” hero that might grant exemplary punishment to the supreme crime: I waited long, but when the voice of God Spoke, then I made no more delay,[13] as Orestes explains to Electra. The de facto heir of the house of Atreus dies a symbolical death so that he may be reborn as the punitive and legitimate heir of his father; in other words, he dies as his mother’s son so that he may remain his father’s son exclusively: And so, I trust, may I, through this pretence,/ Look down triumphant like the sun in heaven/ Upon my enemies.[14] Electra’s symbolical widowhood is even more emphatic in Sophocles’ play than in Aeschylus’: such widowhood is related not only to the father figure, but also to the brother; hence Electra’s overpowering grief. When Orestes shows up, Electra exchanges her overpowering grief into overpowering hate, given her frustration related to spinsterhood, her lack of individual maternity and her pariah condition: the transfer will be conducted through Orestes. The patron deity of paternal revenge is, of course, Apollo: he advises his protégé to murder the regicides through trickery but with his own hands; in other words, the vengeance must be direct, in accordance with the talion principle of blood for blood. It is because he knows he must respectfully follow the customs that Orestes will bring pious homage to his father’s grave, making all the necessary sacrifices. He goes to Delfi to find out whether he should revenge his murdered father or not. Unlike in Aeschylus’ tragedy, where Orestes appeared symbolically in Clytemnestra’s nightmare as a snake, in Sophocles’ play, he appears as a redeemer and a regenerator of the house of Atreus (the queen dreams of Agamemnon’s sceptre springing leaves and casting a shadow upon the city of Mycenae – a prophetic and germinative dream, foretelling Orestes’ return and triumph).

The relationship between Electra and Orestes is quite nuanced in Sophocles’ play too: believing Orestes to be dead and planning her revenge on her own, Electra wants to unite herself with her brother in death, so that they may have the same fate and that she may act like Orestes’ twin mirror. She does manage to recognise her brother thanks to a ring Orestes had given her to serve as a seal before he fled from Mycenae. This is actually a ring marking the ethical engagement between brother and sister, although, one should insist, only with a view to wreaking their vengeance, in which each of them will act as the other’s perfect mirror. Electra is a more involved director in staging their revenge than Orestes: she rushes Orestes to murder Aegisthus, who is taken exactly to the spot where Agamemnon was killed. Aegisthus becomes, therefore, a human sacrifice on the grave of the king he once slew.

Euripides’ Orestes (from the tragedies Electra and Orestes) acts initially according to a robotised destiny; it is only later that he acts through choice, which ensures the eventual success of both the character and his fate. Although praised by Electra for having slain Aegisthus, Orestes (who is rather Aeschylean at this stage) cautions her that the gods are the main sources of destiny, followed to a lesser degree by humans and by free arbiter: Think first of the gods, Electra, as the ones who have caused this good fortune; then you may praise me too who served both them and Fortune.[15] Before committing matricide, Orestes hesitates; then he acts, since he feels stimulated by the will of the gods: If this is heaven’s will, so be it.[16] Orestes’ hesitation also rests on a minimum of filial piety (the genetic argument): She is our mother, he tells his sister, whereupon Electra urges him not to fall into manlessness. The end of Electra is altogether conformist, given the Dioscuri’s mechanically performing the gesture of tracing and announcing how the main characters’ destiny is about to unfold. In the play Orestes, remnants of Aeschylean penance also survive: God guides mortal man to his end;/ And his end is as God appoints;/ For the power that guides is great.[17]

Orestes is a revolutionary and innovative tragedy insofar as Euripides provides a psychological profile of the main character, who is afflicted by the sin of matricide he has committed: the legal heir of the house of Atreus has fits of madness and is depressive, berserk; he is eaten alive by hallucinations, nightmares, and delirium; he betrays signs of epilepsy (frothing at the mouth, bristling hair). Orestes seems to be down with rabies, Electra notices: his gaze astray, he is convulsive and insane. He is sick of his own guilt, of his own impurity. Euripides projects Orestes like a psychopath, his (and Electra’s) violence verging on the pathological. His imbalance reaches paroxysm when he promises to set fire to the royal palace. After the matricide, Orestes experience fits of madness, inspired by the Erinyes while he is amongst the dead and has to symbolically cross the inferno so that he may be born again. Menelaus sees him as a ghost and a revenant, sick with raving lunacy. In his moments of lucidity, Orestes becomes perfectly aware, like a genuine psychoanalyst, of his guilt and the causes of his delirium.

What is the disease that ravages you?, Menelaus asks him. Conscience. I recognize the horror of what I did,[18] is Orestes’ answer; Clearly the gods/ Hate you, and with these raving lunacies and terrors/ Punish you for your mother’s death.[19] What Euripides intends to problematise through Orestes’ hyperbolic delirium is the character’s acute hubris, which places the hero in a risky position compared to his portrayal by Aeschylus or by Sophocles. In Orestes’ delirium, even Electra comes to be mistaken for one of the Erinyes, while the hero himself engages in nightmarish dancing with the bitch-headed goddesses, avengers of kinship murders.

In Euripides’ tragedies (in Electra, anyway), the god Apollo also undergoes a few changes: he is contested and critiqued, and Orestes even wonders whether the god might be a bad spirit who has incited and compelled him to murder his own mother. The tutelary god is accused of having forced him to commit justice veiled in darkness; even the Dioscuri reproach Apollo for having given Orestes the foolish command of matricide. Electra partially defends the god’s position, since she invokes Apollo’s oracular character and, especially, his divinity. In Orestes, the protagonist sees his patron deity as an ungrateful god who treats his worshipper like a slave: What are the gods? We don’t know – but we are their slaves.[20] Orestes asks those who have charged him with matricide to consider Apollo as an impious god and to punish the latter, since he, as a human being, has been but a mere instrument in his hands. That is why, at the end of the play, the god will have to take upon himself all the accusations in order to reconcile matters; nevertheless, this is an artificial denouement, given the god’s admission that Orestes has been but a human pawn, as well as his favourite protégé. It is only in the face of this recognition that Orestes also avows Apollo as a true god.

In Euripides’ two tragedies, questions related to rituals and ceremonies are also given much prominence. At Agamemnon’s grave, Orestes, who has returned home in great secret, makes an offering of hair and sprinkles the pyre with blood, by virtue of the faith that the souls of the dead feed on blood. Electra, Orestes and the Old Pedagogue honour the royal grave with wine and myrtle branches, they sit on their knees and hit the ground with their hands, as if to seal a pledge with the dead man. The most important ritual, however, is that related to the sacrifice, as it is pictured in Electra. To honour the nymphs, Aegisthus prepares to sacrifice a bull, and this ritual is described in much detail. Orestes offers to take part in this sacrifice, with a specific purpose in mind: Aegisthus’ sacrifice of the bull will take place simultaneously with Orestes’ sacrifice of Aegisthus (a human “bull”). The murder of the regicide is perceived as a holy sacrifice and, moreover, as a form of cosmic communion: see Electra’s gesture of placing a winner’s crown on Orestes’ head. Through this gesture, she actually proclaims her brother to be the new king-priest who has brought sacrifices to the great dead man (Agamemnon). The murder of Clytemnestra, which also has as a pretext a bull’s sacrifice, relies on the same ritualistic logic. Consequently, the siblings appear all the more blatantly as religious sacrificers: they are dipped and smeared in their victims’ blood. After the matricide, they offer the blood libation to the Earth and to Zeus, attempting to purify themselves. In Orestes, however, the protagonist is portrayed as insufficiently cleansed: he tries, for instance, to touch Menelaus’ knees, but his supplicant gesture is rejected, since he isn’t holding an olive branch that might indicate his desire for purification. Orestes should have bathed his hands in the blood of a piglet (as custom demands), but none of the city’s inhabitants has been willing to take him in their homes for performing that ritual. What Menelaus reproaches him for is failing to carry out the cleansing rituals, considering that in Orestes’ case, given that he has committed matricide, his purification should have been intense, rather than second-rate.

The relationship between the siblings is, naturally, even more complicated in Euripides’ plays. In Electra, Orestes appreciates the fact that his sister has remained chaste and untarnished by the marriage with a commoner imposed on her. An insidious eroticism is verbally manifested between brother and sister: O my long-lost one, I hold you, the one I never thought to see!, says Electra. And I hold you, at last!, says Orestes.[21] Although their relationship will never be consumed incestuously, a permanent erotic undertone can be sensed at the verbal level. In Orestes, the relationship between the siblings maintains this erotic hint: when they are sentenced to death, they perceive themselves to be one, and their communion is rather special. Body to body – thus, let us be close in love./ Say ‘brother’ sister! These dear words can take the place/ Of children, marriage – to console our misery,[22] Orestes says. Electra desires to be buried in the same place as her brother, who admits that I share your wish.[23] At another point, he admires not only his sister’s mind, but also her body: Oh, what a manly spirit and resolve shines out/ From your weak woman’s body![24] This is ultimately only a case of symbolical and virtual incest, since Electra will become, as fate has preordained for the house of Atreus, the bride of Pylades, the siblings’ loyal friend.

 

The contamination of the two myths in the twentieth century

 

The two myths and the two characters underwent emblematical contaminations in the twentieth century. I shall not dwell here on all the modern and postmodern reworkings of Oedipus or Orestes; instead, I shall analyse only two of the theatre plays that rely on a contamination and hybridisation of the famous characters and their guilts: Eugene O’Neill’s From Mourning Becomes Electra and Olivier Apert’s Orestes & Oedipus.

In O’Neill’s play, the theme of the Oresteia is Americanised and Yankeefied, but the entire ensemble of symbols and the entire structure from the Greek tragedy are maintained (including the idea of a trilogy). Revelation revolves around the character of Orin Mannon (as Orestes), who gradually becomes Oedipalised, ending up by committing suicide. Ever since his appearance, Orin is more like Oedipus than like Orestes, even though he is urged to be Orestes and act like an avenger for his father’s death (Ezra Mannon, who was assassinated by the complicitous Christine Mannon, his wife, and Adam Brant). His Oedipal complex is multilayered: the tutelary mother figure (Christine Mannon) is the one he craves, but after her death (by suicide – for any Jocasta must end up in suicide), his sister (Lavinia Mannon) is craved after just as incestuously. Adam Brant (Aegisthus) also oscillates, partially, between the same two women, even though he decisively opts for Christine Mannon. As for Lavinia Mannon, she acts as she does because she also suffers from an Electra complex, craving her father incestuously, manifesting jealousy towards her mother, manipulating her brother so as to have him kill Aegisthus (Adam Brant) and fomenting the suicide of Clytemnestra-Jocasta (Christine Mannon). Although Lavinia Mannon is virtually predisposed to incest with the father figure and with her cousin (Adam Brant, but only because she sees in the latter a younger father, an unripe Ezra Mannon), she is obviously averse to incest with her brother (hence, from this vantage point, she is no “classical” Electra). In fact, O’Neill’s construction is much more complicated: the author projects the theme of the Oresteia upon the psychoanalytical background of the Oedipal complex; his revelatory demonstration is that there are only one man and only one woman in the entire Mannon family (dominated by a common subconscious that controls their lives and modifies their destinies), who are perpetually replicated in other men and other women. Furthermore, the relationship between this prototypal man and this prototypal woman is, by necessity, incestuous. Just like his father before him, Ezra Mannon once craved after Marie Brantome, a governess who is Adam Brant’s mother. Although completely unrelated to Marie Brantome, Christine Mannon belongs, psychologically, to the same feminine family; hence, it comes as no surprise that she is craved after by her legitimate husband (Ezra), by her lover (Adam) and by her son (Orin). Lavinia Mannon could be craved after by Adam Brant (Aegisthus) and is desired by Orin (after the death of their mother, Christine). O’Neill arrives at this construction since he is interested in the tendentious opposition between Puritanism and the return of repressed instincts. What is at stake, however, is inflating the Oedipal conflict and forking it within one and the same family to the point of explosion. One of the key scenes is that in which Adam Brant (Aegisthus) identifies himself with Ezra Mannon (when gazing at the latter’s portrait), sensing that they belong to the same masculine psychological family; similarly, when he murders Adam Brant, Orin Mannon has a clear intuition of the fact that he has executed him as if he had assassinated his own father. Just like men replicate one another, women do too: Lavinia Mannon imitates her mother, Christine Mannon, perfectly; the only thing that she refuses after the latter’s death is incest with her brother Orin. In this sense, after all the Oedipuses and all the Jocastas perish in the typhoon of the alluvial subconscious and of the branching Oedipal complex in From Mourning Becomes Electra, Lavinia Mannon returns to her preordained role of Electra, and remains the sole (self-mortified) survivor of the house of Mannon.

In the case of Olivier Apert’s play, Orestes and Oedipus are demonstratively and explicitly made to meet in a city that is, alternatively Mycenae and Thebes. The two mythical heroes are foreigners here, yet they are both placed initially under the sign of the father. The definition given to the father differs, however, for each of them: the father is the one we revere, Agamemnon says; the father is the one we murder, Laius says. From Apert’s perspective, Orestes and Oedipus diverge not only insofar as their paternal figures are concerned, but also as regards the two women who mark their destinies: Electra (the she-wolf), in the case of the former, and the female Sphinx, in the case of the latter. Another symbol permeating Apert’s text and joining the two myths is the scarf: Jocasta kills herself with a scarf, while Clytemnestra is murdered with one (the suicidal mother and the assassinated mother share a particular logic of death). The maternal figures are, predictably, incestuous: Jocasta calls Oedipus my son and my king, claiming that the sinful nuptials should not be judged on moral grounds. Incest is symbolically present in the relationship between Orestes and Clytemnestra, at the very moment of the mother being slain; symbolical incest is also at work between the two siblings, Electra and Orestes.

The conclusion of Apert’s text is that the meeting between Orestes and Oedipus was occasioned by their fatal destiny: they part ways in the end because they have a common identity, as wanderers who are haunted by the Erinyes. The two myths are each other’s negative. When Apert draws the line, he explicitly reveals a bifurcated scheme: Orestes revenges his father, murdering his mother; Oedipus murders his father, marrying his mother. Clytemnestra and Jocasta are also opposed: the former is a regicide, the latter is a victim. The game of chess is in actual fact a game of domino.

Why are the two myths contaminated in the twentieth century, if their mutual contagion is an exception and does not prove the rule? At the structural level of Greek tragedy, Oedipus and Orestes experience the dialectics of ascent-descent-ascent; they correspond to archetypal cases in tragedy, insofar as there is an exquisite demonstration and application of questions like hubris, destiny, the relation with the strong family figures (the father, the mother, the sister, where necessary) on these heroes. The differences between them do not vanish but become subdued to their common trajectory (Oedipus will turn into a prophet and die as a redeemer acknowledged by the gods; Orestes will come to be his father’s legitimate heir). Both commit violent crimes, but their violence is cathartic, since both are kings and priests.

 

 

Bibliography

C. Fred Alford, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992

Olivier Apert, Oreste & Oedip, Cluj: Biblioteca Apostrof – Editions Mihaly, 2000

Eschil, Orestia, Bucharest: Univers, 1979

Euripide, Teatru, Bucharest: Univers, 1996, 1998

René Girard, Violenţa şi sacrul, Bucharest: Nemira, 1995

Eugene O’Neill, Din jale se întrupează Electra în Teatru (II), Bucharest: EPLU, 1968

Guy Rachet, Tragedia greacă, Bucharest: Univers, 1980

Sofocle, Teatru, Bucharest: EPL, 1965

Annick de Souzenelle, Oedip interior, Timişoara: Amarcord, 1999

Tragicii greci (An Anthology), Bucharest: ESPLA, 1958

 

 

Notes