Free The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies by Aeschylus Page A

and the violated robes of ceremony, between Agamemnon’s bloodlust and the majestic vengeance that it looses. The Furies also bind Cassandra to her death while they release her prophecy of Orestes, rising from the painful implications she has seen.
    Her vision is enacted by the queen. Clytaemnestra murders Agamemnon, and as she unfurls the robes around his body - ‘he had no way to flee or fight his destiny - /our never-ending, all-embracing net’ - the running weave of her words extends the nets into the murderous heirloom of the house, the curse itself. As the elders mourn the king they meditate: This queen with her net, is she not a spider, the ‘black widow’ with her fatal web? - the spirit of the Spider Mountain raining havoc down on Argos. Yet she is a Fury that can spin as well as kill. As her trial unfolds, she and the chorus expand the curse into an inescapable moral network of complicity, so large that it includes us all, so incriminating that it cries for justice, so dominated by the Furies they alone can give that justice power. The two forces will be bound together in Orestes, and when he is acquitted all the reticulations of evil decisions and evil destinies will be resolved at last by Athena’s master hand.
    But we begin in the darkness-before-dawn. In our nightmares the terror often comes most strongly when it emerges slowly from the background, or worse still, when a harmless, familiar object slowly grows more sinister, the commonplace becoming the macabre. That is the atmosphere of Agamemnon, and nothing makes it bristle more than the metaphor that comes to life, then passes into metaphor and into life again, one/stage exceeded by the next in terror. ‘Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings.’ But the forward thrust of Agamemnon brings us back to the beginnings, the first gods, the elements bursting from the night to bring the first barbaric dawn. The terror of Agamemnon transcends the terror of most tragedy, the terror that is ‘unspectacular and always human’, or even that we may wake to find the roof come down upon our heads. It is all that and more It is what Eliot calls ‘the backward half-look/Over the shoulder towards the primitive terror’. It is chaos.
    But, as in the chaos of mythology, there is a potential here that would be harnessed. Clearly the great weight of the play is destructive. It coils inwards towards the killing of the king, then outwards towards its most disastrous meanings. Yet it also turns the murder into justifiable homicide, as if the vengeance of the Furies might, on a later day, radiate towards the justice of the gods. An Iliad converges into an even bloodier Odyssey. Clearly the pain comes first - pathei mathos - but the pain will reverberate with meaning. For all the retaliation in the play, there are relations that may balance ‘great good blessings mixed with doom’. There is the charis biaios of the gods, their violent kindness that breaks us into pieces but may leave us open, sentient and prepared. There are the ageing voices of the chorus rising into ringing social conscience. Behind all there is the poet, like Cassandra, venturing into the very dark and danger of Clytaemnestra to evoke her deep maternal power. There is the original paradox of Fury, the memory that must avenge her children, and the matrix of her children who avenge themselves on her - Fury, the muse of vengeance that will generate the future.
    There is Orestes. There is a dialectic just begun to work. We are simply at the first, negative extreme. ‘Where there is a reconciliation,’ as Stephen Dedalus says, ‘there must first have beer a sundering.’ Dionysus is dismembered, as prologue to the ace of his rebirth. Here is an antigenesis with all the elements intact, waiting to be built into a world. That is the challenge of Agamemnon, and Aeschylus suggests it should be met with the tragic spirit of Cassandra and the queen who know that ‘all things fall and are built again,