Final Destination

I was really surprised by the up-tempo ending and emotional change of direction of this week's book, Aeschylus' ancient Greek trilogy, The Oresteia.  The play thickens into a rhythmic song of violence and vengeance, and spirals into an exultation of "prosperity and peace" (The Eumenides, line 545). Or I guess I could reverse it and say that it spirals into an exultation of violence and vengeance, and thickens into a rhythmic song of "prosperity and peace."

Strange. Because I didn't see this shift in feeling and outlook as even a remote possibility in the first two plays. Tragic plays usually rule out positive destinations for any of the characters. But the ingenuity of Aeschylus--and Athena--somehow manages to avert the bleak ending and end the conflict, and I'm still trying to understand how they both accomplish this, when other minds throughout literature--and history--have failed.

Towards the end of the play, The Furies, a pack of otherworldly hags, who feel defeated and displaced by God-and-human negotiations and skewed concepts of justice, ask Athena what she has in store for them.

"Where is the home you say is mine to hold?"(901), the leader of the Furies asks.

Athena's answer is brief, but generous, gentle yet forceful. "Where all the pain and anguish end. Accept it. " (901-2).

Earlier in the play, Athena asks the Furies a similar question about the destination of Oreste's troubled "flight" from Argos where he murdered his mother: "Where does it all end?" (434). The Furies' answer is less than comforting. "Where there is no joy, the word is never used." (435)

I thought that these words surely spelled out doom for Orestes-- particularly since all of the lives of the play's characters, Cassandra, Agamemnon, and Clytaemnestra, were doomed, full of betrayals, terrors, and turmoil.  And yet, the characters who play out the drama's last conflict in The Euminides-- The Furies, Orestes, Athena, and the citizens of her city, all manage to avoid disaster and end the cycle of outrage and anger.

While I found it sometimes too strange and ancient a work to enjoy, the chorus of the Furies gave it a mysteriously ghoulish quality.

I can't remember the exact quote but I think D.H Lawrence once said that there are only two forces in the world: 'life' and 'anti-life.' Though death and destructiveness dominate the world of The Oresteia, life is the ultimate victor, the resilient survivor. And that made it worth the read.