After the election

 People who are disappointed by elections ought to be careful about what they say — not out of fear of tyrants but out of concern for spreading despair.

Citizens who wallow in despair are not good defenders of their own rights or of the rights of vulnerable people.

If you’re tempted to don sack cloth and ashes, don’t.

Some people are circulating W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” It was written when the lights went out in Europe. The poet might have been afraid, but he took heart in the sparks generated by folks he called “the Just.” Here’s the ending:

 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

I hope the Just will keep exchanging messages and will let their dissenting lights shine. I hope they will not lose heart.

• Source: W.H. Auden, Selected Poems; New York: Vintage Books, 1979. “September 1, 1939” is on pp. 86-9. You can find a copy here:

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939

Euripides: ‘Orestes’

 Like Electra, Orestes is a melodrama, not a tragedy, based on character drawing, not plot. That’s the verdict of Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies.

His point is that the play has no tragic conception, no tragic point. It was made not to impart a high moral lesson but to be a rollicking good show. The chief character, Orestes, is mad, pursued by the Furies who are enraged that he’s killed his mother. He and his sister Electra are waiting to hear their fate from the Argive Assembly: death or banishment.

The play begins in hopelessness and goes downhill from there.

From hopelessness, Orestes descends into folly. He identifies possible allies and picks quarrels with them. He goes before the Assembly and provokes them, converting those who had argued for banishment into death-penalty advocates.

From folly, Orestes descends into “criminal recklessness,” as Kitto puts it. One plot leads to another. The fates of Orestes, his friend Pylades and Electra are intertwined, and they are all thinking badly. Since Menelaus failed to come to their aid, they decide to make him suffer by killing his wife, Helen. Better yet, they decide to take Menelaus’ little daughter Hermione hostage. Better yet, if all must die, why not burn down the ancestral home? Why go out in a metaphorical blaze of glory when you can have the real thing?

It’s a descent into nightmare.

Orestes blames everyone but himself for his predicament. The succession runs from the god Apollo to his uncle Menelaus and then on to his grandfather Tyndareus and his mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes’ reasoning is so ironic, his lines appall you while making you laugh.

There are wonders in the play.

With no tragic conception to emphasize, the chorus no longer has a role and is nuisance. Euripides makes it a nuisance — a chorus of women, who are threatening to awaken Orestes with their singing and must be hushed by Electra.

And there’s the breathless speech of the terrified Phrygian slave, reporting on the attempt to kill Helen, given in the broken Greek of a barbarian. Here’s a sample:

 

Into palace

a pride of lions, Greekers, twins;

One of general Agamemnon, son;

other Pylades, man of plots, evil, bad;

loyal, yes, and bold, bold,

skills for war, and killer-snake.

God darn him dead

for plotty sneaks,

I hope.

 

It’s marvelous. I could imagine a genre of poetry in that style.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Orestes is on pp. 366-71. Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 105-208. The quotation is on p. 191.

Rooting for reason

 Greek tragedy is filled with wonderful lines that might or might not have a bearing on the theme of the play. Some are just surprising asides. In Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, Achilles tried to reassure Clytemnestra that everything would be all right. 

Achilles

Reason can wrestle

and overthrow terror.

 

Clytemnestra

My hopes are cold on that.

 

I’m rooting for reason today. I think Donald Trump will go down in history as the person who urged an attack on the American Capitol, trying to stay in power after losing an election. He never did — and will never do — anything more significant than that.

If you haven’t voted, now’s the time.

• Source: Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by Charles R. Walker, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 209-307. The quotation is on p. 240.

Euripides: ‘Electra’

 Sophocles’ Electra was tragic. As Professor H.D.F. Kitto put it, “she is typical of one aspect of the human tragedy, in that circumstances combine with one element in her character to ruin what is conspicuously admirable in the rest of it.”

She’s just like one of us. But that one flaw, combined with unusual circumstances, brought her down.

Euripides’ Electra is no such person. She’s terrifying — “fantastic in her hatred,” as Kitto says. She’s not one of us. She’s so different we’re fascinated.

Kitto says the dramatic conception has changed.

Sophocles took the myth about how Orestes and his sister Electra decided to kill their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. The siblings thought it was justice for their father, Agamemnon, murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

Sophocles emphasized the moral weight of the decision. His play is a tragedy.

Euripides was not interested in moral or social lessons. He was interested in the most effective theatrical production. In Kitto’s terms, we’ve gone from tragedy to tragi-comedy and now melodrama. This is art for art’s sake. There’s no “higher” or “deeper” message.

In Iphigeneia at Tauris and Ion, Euripides held our interest with suspenseful plots. In Electra, he holds it with his characters.

Everyone who attended this play knew the plot. They were fascinated — perhaps horrified — by the characters.

In Sophocles’ telling, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are awful people who don’t deserve much pity. In Euripides, they do. Clytemnestra isn’t sure she’s done the right thing in killing her husband. Aegisthus is the kind of guy who invites strangers and foreigners to a feast.

But Electra mercilessly uses her mother’s humanity against her. Electra, who was married off to an impoverished farmer to keep her from bearing noble sons who might seek revenge, pretends to have had a child and invites her mother to come offer sacrifices for it. She lures grandmother into a trap.

Orestes has a limited role in the plot. He just needs to kill people. Euripides might have portrayed him in many ways — as a fearless avenger, perhaps. Instead, Euripides’ Orestes is indecisive and fearful: a backstabber.

The violence is graphic and gratuitous. It’s not elevating. It’s riveting.

If I had to summarize the play in a line, I’d let Electra speak it:

 

If the first death was just, the second too is just.

 

But we know that the first death is rarely just, and what follows almost never makes things better.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Electra is on pp. 348-60. The quotations are on pp. 352. Electra, translated by Emily Townsend Vermeule, is in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-66. The quotation is on p. 52.

The world’s greatest footnote

 When I can remember to do it, I keep an eye out for what might be the world’s greatest footnote. At the top of my list is this specimen from Professor H.D.F. Kitto: 

Why should we not begin to assume, for a change, that Euripides and Sophocles, being very great and sincere artists, though entirely different by temperament, were, as artists, sympathetically interested in and appreciative of each other’s words and methods? There is no evidence for such a view, but neither, I think, is there real evidence for the impression one is given that they were self-conscious, self-righteous, and censorious rivals. A good theme for an imaginary conversation: the two poets in a group of Athenian notables, from Pericles downwards; the others try desperately to start a philosophic or moral discussion between the two poets, but the poets will talk of nothing but dramatic technique — how to use the chorus, and whether a resolved is more effective than an unresolved dochmiac.

 

That’s a an important thought, and I can’t believe the professor put it in a footnote. Though Kitto published this piece the year before I was born, I also suffered under “the impression one is given” when I went to college.

I wish some writer or fiction or drama would run with that imaginary conversation.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 351.

How Americans see foreigners

 I grew up in Texas, which was hardly a place of love and harmony among different kinds of people. But a lot of immigrants are in this country because the Texas border has always been leaky, if not porous.

Workers from Mexico and Central America came to Texas because the businesspeople who were members of the chamber of commerce and all the civil clubs hired them. These bastions of the community might cluck their tongues over “illegal” immigrants, but they relied on them.

That’s the reality I grew up with. I’m baffled by the frenzied hatred of immigrants that’s on display at Trump’s rallies.

I don’t understand it. But it made me think of Hoffer’s line: 

 

The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling superiority over all foreigners. ... It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

 

• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 100. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §73.

Outrage

 One of the great scenes of outrage in Greek drama features the old Spartan Tyndareus, who was unfortunate in daughters. (He was the father of Helen of Troy and of Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband.)

In Euripides’ account, Tyndareus thought his daughters were despicable, but he was outraged that his grandson Orestes had murdered his mother, Clytemnestra, for killing his dad.

When grandfather and grandson met, the once-loving Tyndareus was outraged. When it was suggested that old age and anger had clouded his understanding, he replied:

 

Understanding, you say?

            What in the name of god

does understanding have to do with him?

Is there some moral question here in dispute

between us?

 

As Trump descends toward the finish line, I can find no moral question to dispute with him. My understanding reached its limits, and so  I’ve been thinking about outrage.

I feel outrage. I am outraged. But Euripides does outrage better than I can.

• Source: Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 105-208. The quotation is on p. 141.