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The Terror of the Wound

The first stage death to resonate is Agamemnon's, at the hands of Clytemnestra. Though it transpires in the time during which we watch the events of the Agamemnon unfold, it is, in terms of the House of Atreus, not the first murder but only the most recent: and these are humans, not the gods or semi-gods of the Iliad with which the audience was familiar.

And before us, the spectator, they are fleshed: the Homeric storyteller described events, Aeschylus' tragedy embodied them in the performer. We have to take care to realize that the power of the tragedy lies not in mere death but in the manner of that death, the disposition of the body, the deaths to which these bodies' living behavior, moving and speaking before us, has led. We are aware, or made aware if coming to the story for the first time, of the gross history of murder and cannibalism (Thyestes' children fed to their father, a perverse reversal of eating as healthful sustenance, Thyestes feeding on his own flesh and blood; the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father as if she were an animal rather than his daughter) in the pasts of the personages before our eyes; and always, everywhere, there is desire and sex.

The immediate causes of Clytemnestra's murderous rage are her lust for power, the unending burden of grief at her daughter Iphigenia's death at the hands of her husband, and her jealousy over Cassandra (though she herself has spent years bedding Aegisthus). Clytemnestra can't be blamed, though Aeschylus (a protector of the paternalistic state, rationalizing its institutions rather unconvincingly in the Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy) tries to blame her for overreaching her status as a woman in this Athenian culture (the play is set in Argos, but it is performed in the Greek capital, before Athenians). In a sense Clytemnestra acts with justice: she is redressing a balance.

But how does she go about redressing this balance, what is the nature of the violence she does to her husband? Interestingly, it is an entrapment in binding robes, a trap of the wrappings of the body and the self. Clytemnestra describes it in lines 1569-1587 of the Shapiro/Burian translation:

... I have been brooding for a long time
over this strife bred from an ancient feud,
and now at long last it's come; and here I stand,
here where I cut him down, my aim achieved.
My aim was so exact – I won't deny it –
that he could not outrun death, or fend it off
once I ensnared him in a deadly wealth
of robes, escapeless as a fishing net;
I struck him twice, and while he cried two cries,
his legs gave way. Then soon as he was down,
I struck him yet again, and the third stroke fell
as a votive offering for the Zeus
below the ground, the savior of the dead.
And so he fell, and panted his life away,
and breathing out a last sharp gale of blood
he drenched me in the dark red showering gore,
and I rejoiced in it, rejoiced no less
than all the plants rejoice in Zeus-given
rainfalls at the birthtime of the buds.

The murder is in two most sensual and sensuous motions: ensnarement and release, especially in the imagery of the gore that, in Clytemnestra's description, becomes lifegiving rain upon the plants and flowers of the field (among which she places herself), rather than violent drainage of the red liquor that pulses through the living body, finally vomited through Agamemnon's mouth – a terrible flood of blood on the lips, rather than the expected tender and passionate kiss. Agamemnon has every reason to believe that his bondage in that "deadly wealth of robes" would lead to tender homecoming affections from his consort; instead, she strikes with a violence that she has no reluctance in justifying to the chorus as meet retribution for the violence of the past.

Always, in the Oresteia, there is a question as to whether any of the violence of the past and present was escapable. Iphigenia's sacrifice was the fulfillment of a god's demand, an echo of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, but at the last minute God stayed Abraham's hand. Iphigenia was not as lucky as Isaac; and once the violence at Aulis was accomplished, the Greek fleet could sail on to victory at Troy, as ordained by the gods.

Gods do not appear, however, in the Agamemnon; they aren't personified on-stage, we see only the results of the burden of the past and the intentions of the gods. Unlike Abraham's God, Greece's gods remain silent. In the theater this burden is uniquely fleshed; Clytemnestra fleshes Agamemnon a second time, costuming him, before the knife penetrates, rather than the tender hand caresses, skin. Willing vulnerability is wrenchingly and horrifically betrayed by hatred, rather than recompensed with love. The terror of the image of Agamemnon's death, intensely cried aloud in howls of deepest pain and fear that scream to us from off stage, lies in its intimacy, three violent wounds that emerge from expected pleasure of flesh on flesh. It is human, all-too-human. And it is the first indication of the terror, and the fantasized image of expectant desire cut short and destroyed by the bloodied wound, that penetrates to the core of the theatrical and human experience.

George Hunka
May 2006