James E Hartley

Frankenstein Meets Faust

“My Dear Managers,
Are we at war then? If you still want peace, here is my ultimatum….
If you do not meet these conditions, tonight you will present Faust in a cursed house.
A word to the wise is sufficient.
O.G.”

Who is the O.G.? (No, not Ice-T.) It’s the mysterious Opera Ghost in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. You have undoubtedly run across this tale at some point. With over a dozen movie versions and one of the most successful Broadway spectacles of all time, it is safe to say this story has become part of the culture.

Reading the book is a bit jarring. At one level, the story is roughly the same as the Broadway or movie versions. Opera House in Paris is haunted by a guy named Eric, who has a disfigured face, hides in the cellars, moves about through endless secret passages, trains Christine to be a great singer by coaching her through the walls of her dressing room; Christine falls in love with Raoul; Eric doesn’t like that, kidnaps her, and takes her to his lair from which she is rescued. Stated baldly, the story is a penny dreadful tale meant to be sold in a cheap paperback edition. Sure enough Gaston Leroux specialized in that sort of tale in the early 20^th century;he wrote a lot of mystery tales, but Phantom is the only one which still sees the light of day.

Since the plot is exactly what you expect, why is it jarring to read the novel? To start: there is nothing romantic or dashing about the Phantom. He is a very creepy guy, stalking a young woman before hauling her off to his even creepier underground lair complete with a torture chamber. The torture chamber itself becomes the focus of an interminable section toward the end of the book. (Suffice it to say that the torture chamber is absurd.) The Phantom has absolutely no redeeming features; he is truly a mean and nasty piece of work. A comic book villain.

On the other side of Christine is the rather uninspiring Raoul. It is hard to find anything that Christine sees in the guy. So, you are left with Christine trapped between a creepy stalker and a thoroughly dull love interest. Then add in the mysterious Persian, who is so incomprehensible as a character, he gets left out of the musical. The chief purpose of the Persian, who knows Eric’s backstory, seems to be to allow the narrator to pretend this is a true story; without the Persian, the narrator would have no way to know Eric’s origin story. Despite being a cartoon villain, Eric’s origin story is unworthy of its own tale.

The Phantom of the Opera is really nothing more than a zillion other schlocky mystery/suspense novels. Truly nothing here that rises above a decent way to spend an evening when you want some formulaic entertainment. So, how did it become so famous?

After reading it, I wrote one of my former students who is obsessed with Broadway musicals in general and Phantom in particular. She cleared up my confusion.

First, she noted that in the various incarnations of the story, the director gets to make a choice about the nature of Eric. He isn’t always a cruel cartoon villain. He can also be a victim or a mysterious romantic figure. As Eric takes on assorted personas, the story subtly shifts; the more romantic Eric is, the less creepy he becomes and the more Christine can fall in love with him. Similarly, if you play up his victimhood, then you can arouse sympathy for him. Morph Eric and you can turn this into a story with a bit more depth than exists in the novel.

Second, my former student pointed out that The Phantom is an incarnation of an even earlier morphable literary figure: Frankenstein’s monster. Here we have a person who is rejected by the world and resorts to a life of violence. Do the sufferings of the monster or the phantom justify the later violence? Do we pity the monster or the phantom? Are either of them really capable of love?

The Phantom of the Opera is thus the equivalent of a myth, and that is what explains its staying power. The importance of myth to this story is related to another curious feature of the book. The novel, published in 1910, assumes the reader is acquainted the opera in general and Faust in particular. There are a lot of references to Faust, and Leroux spends no time at all explaining them to the reader. Once I realized this, I was stunned. Imagine a word in which a book with no real literary pretensions assumes the Reader is acquainted with the details of an opera (trivia question: who wrote the famous Faust opera?) and the story on which the opera was based (second trivia question: who wrote Faust?). Once upon a time, the readers of the equivalent of the thriller of the moment could be assumed to know such things. Now? Obviously not. Yet, understanding the nature of Christine requires knowing that she is singing the part of Marguerite in Faust at the insistence of the Phantom. That is rather chilling, but totally lost if the reader knows nothing about Faust and Marguerite. (Answers: Gounod and Goethe.)

If you are so inclined, you can now give The Phantom of the Opera literary street cred by saying it is Frankenstein meets Faust. That is actually not a bad description, but it does make you think the novel has more depth than it actually has.

Thomas Paine’s Twitter Account

Tom Paine would have loved the Internet. He would have been a master of the vicious comment on other people’s Tweets. His Facebook rants would have circulated widely. He was born too soon.

Then again, because he was born in an age where you had to write essays longer than a blog post, he is still worth reading. Consider Common Sense.

First, a digression: When I was 9 and 10 years old (4^th and 5^th grade), I was fascinated by the Revolutionary War. I loved reading about it. I have a vivid memory of finding a book with the complete list of battles in the Revolutionary War, and thinking that such information was unbelievably invaluable, the sort of thing that simply needed to be preserved for easy reference, I sat down and copied the whole list onto several sheets of paper (it’s a long list when you have the oversized handwriting of a 9 year old). (Note for youngsters: this was in the pre-internet era, so Google was not yet your friend.) I also, for reasons I cannot explain, was particularly excited when copying over said list to discover that there were two battles of Saratoga, the second one duly named “The Second Battle of Saratoga.” (I suppose being unbelievably excited about finding this list was a pretty good indication of the type of career toward which I was heading—though interestingly enough, never once in my life—and I mean never—did someone say to me, “You should be a college professor.”) I also have a vivid memory of excitedly discovering in the library a whole book devoted to Spies in the Revolutionary War. This Revolutionary War thing you may have heard about was a Big Deal.

In the course of my reading about this War, I kept seeing references to a book by Thomas Paine entitled Common Sense. It seems at this most exciting time of history, when people were saying really exciting things like “Give me liberty or give me death!” and “I regret I have but one life to give for my country!” that this book by Paine was electrifying. In an era of exciting rhetoric, this seemed to be the most exciting book of all. So, I decided that since reading about the Revolutionary War was about the most exciting type of reading there was, then reading the most exciting book from this most exciting time period would be the sort of thing that would send Young Jimmy Hartley into Paroxysms of Joy.

So, on my next voyage to the Public Library, I boldly marched up to the Front Desk, looked keenly into the eye of the librarian, an elderly woman (well, she seemed elderly to me, so that means she must have been somewhere between 40 and 100), and said in my most reverent, excited, and undoubtedly slightly hesitant (after all, I was about to talk to The Librarian) voice, “Do you have a copy of Common Sense by Thomas Paine?”

The Librarian….scowled. “Yes,” she said in a vaguely disapproving voice. “It would be in the Adult section,” she added. And right then I knew the “Adult” section was not the place Young Jimmy Hartley belonged. The Adult section was obviously the place for books which young people like me really shouldn’t be reading. The Librarian then told me to follow her and we went to the Adult section. She found the book and gave it to me with that look that said, “Kid, you are never going to read this book.” I checked it out, took it home. It sat on my dresser for a bit. I finally got up the courage to open it to the first page, looked at that page, but knowing I probably shouldn’t be reading this book, I never quite managed to convince myself to start it. Two weeks later the book went back to the library. Unread.

(I never again entered the adult section of that library. Never. We moved when I was 14, and (fear not) I have been to the adult sections of other libraries. I also checked out adult paperbacks from that library because, you see, the paperbacks were in a rack that was near the checkout desk, so I didn’t actually have to enter the Adult section.)

For three and a half decades, I had this nagging feeling that I should read Common Sense. But, I have never read it. Was I really old enough yet? Am I sure it would be a book I would like? Maybe it was really boring. Maybe that librarian was right that the book just wasn’t for me. I finally read it—35 years after I first checked it out.

The first thing to note is that it is highly unlikely that 200 years from now any kid is going to have the same experience wondering what was contained in the musings of the Great Twitter Warriors of today. Maybe we should bring back the pamphlet!

The second thing to note is that Common Sense, which I recently reread, is actually quite good. By the end I was ready to throw off the despotism of the English Crown. It did all seem like so much common sense.

It begins with an interesting distinction between “society” and “government,” a distinction about which many people still seem unaware. If there is a problem, is it the job of society or government to find a solution? The dividing line these days is between those who think there is a difference between those two possible answers and those who are confused about the question.

It also has a curious passage in which Paine seems to suggest that democracy, and not despotism, was the original form of government. At one level all these prehistoric ruminations are just prehistoric science fiction, but it is hard to believe that governments arose when a bunch of people just started chatting about how to improve their lives. I find it much easier to imagine the strongest guy subjected others. Paine also offers an early version of the argument that democracies do not go to war with one another.

But the real charm of Common Sense is theinvective—those who oppose Paine’s preferred scheme of government “would have joined Lucifer in his revolt.” Or this: “Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am inclined to believe, that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation, may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.”

I was talking about this book with a couple of former students, and one of them pointed to this bit: “But if you have [suffered at the hands of the British], and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.” Now that, sadly, could be the mantra of the modern world for offenses far less than the actual murder of a loved one. Like I said, Paine would have loved living in the modern age. Then again, it is no longer clear his invective would stand out.

Feeling Enthusiastic?

If someone were to tell you that you are a very enthusiastic person, how insulted would you be? Not at all? That is curious.

“For Inspiration is a real feeling of the Divine Presence, and Enthusiasm a False one.”

That is from “A Letter concerning ENTHUSIASM” by Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. It was the first essay in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, a book, it is fair to say, of which very few people even know its existence, let alone have read it. Yet, the book, first published in 1711, was according to the editor of the Liberty Fund volume (Douglas Den Uyl), “the most reprinted book in English in that century.”

The essay is a bit jarring. Enthusiasm, that perfectly innocuous sentiment conjuring up the image of a sprightly lad or lass telling you about the Obsession of the Moment, does not come off very well in Shaftesbury’s account. Indeed, we really ought to be on guard against this Enthusiasm thing.

You are now naturally thinking Shaftesbury is one of those dour types who thinks we all ought to spend our days in morose reflection. You are wrong to think that. “I am sure the only way to save Mens Sense, or preserve Wit at all in the World, is to give Liberty to Wit.” Or consider this: “Gravity is of the very Essence of Imposture.” The plot thickens.

Fortunately the lexicographical equivalent of Holmes is at hand to solve the mystery of how Shaftesbury is simultaneously the Critic of Enthusiasm and the Enthusiastic Critic. The Oxford English Dictionary to the rescue. Enthusiasm does not mean what you think it means. There is an older meaning:

Enthusiasm, n. depreciative. False or pretended divine inspiration, or an instance of this; a belief in or emphasis on private divine revelation as opposed to revelation through scripture. From the 18th cent. also in wider sense: excessive religious emotion or fervour; mystical, fanatical, or radical religious delusion. Now historical.

Amazing, no? And, to think that Samuel Johnson in whose own dictionary defined a Lexicographer as “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Let us pause and praise lexicographers for a moment. (Insert Pause.)

The most intriguing thing about that definition labeled “now historical” is that it might be time to bring it back.

To whom does the term apply? Shaftesbury’s essay is clearly addressing the Religious Enthusiasts of his day:

Nothing can persuade us of Sullenness or Sourness in such a Being [God], beside the actual fore-feeling of somewhat of this kind within our-selves: and if we are afraid of bringing good Humour into Religion, or thinking with Freedom and Pleasantness on such a Subject as God; ’tis because we conceive the Subject so like our-selves, and can hardly have a Notion of Majesty and Greatness, without Stateliness and Moroseness accompanying it.

In Shaftesbury’s age. enthusiasts were those who looked within themselves to understand God, and since they found no Good Humor within themselves, they saw none in God.

The use of the word “enthusiasm” in this sense is obviously obsolete. Does that mean the phenomenon has disappeared? Hardly. Indeed, we live in a time of great enthusiasm. Takes the sense in which the term was used in Shaftesbury’s time: “excessive religious emotion or fervour; mystical, fanatical, or radical religious delusion.” Replace “religious” with “political” in that definition. Now open up your favorite (or least favorite) news source and play the game: How many Enthusiasts can you spot?

Of course the enthusiasts of the day are instantly very annoyed about this comparison and will quickly explain that the Politics of the Day are a Serious matter, that we should not think with Freedom or Pleasantness on such a subject as Contemporary Politics, that Stateliness and Moroseness are indeed the only way to approach a subject with the Majesty and Greatness of Politics.

We should not be surprised at this. As Shaftesbury notes;

There is a Melancholy which accompanys all Enthusiasm. Be it Love or Religion (for there are Enthusiasms in both) nothing can put a stop to the growing mischief of either, till the Melancholy be remov’d, and the Mind at liberty to hear what can be said against the Ridiculousness of an Extreme in either way.

We live in an Age of Enthusiasm. That is not a compliment to our times. The cure is wit and raillery. People need to laugh more. And not that harsh pseudo-laughter which is just a cover for serious complaints. Laugh at oneself. Laugh at the extremes in one’s own beliefs. When you hear tell of things which insult you or your beliefs, how should you respond?

Shou’d we not, in good truth, be ridiculous to take offence at this? And shou’d we not pass for extravagantly morose and ill-humour’d, if instead of treating the matter in Raillery, we shou’d think in of revenging our-selves on the offending Partys, who, out of their rustick Ignorance, ill Judgment, or Incredulity, had detracted from our Renown?

It’s time to resurrect this historical sense of the word “enthusiasm.” It is sadly, a remarkably apt description of our time.

Reading Gravestones in Spoon River

Imagine you are dead and have the chance to explain yourself to the living. You can have up to roughly two dozen lines of free verse to say it. This will be your epitaph, the final word on your life.

What would you say?

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of a couple hundred such epitaphs. Crafted by Edgar Lee Masters in the early 20^th Century, it captures the life of a small town in the Midwest by allowing the dead to speak one last time. It’s a fictional town; well mostly—the book was long banned from use in the public schools in Masters’ hometown, because the locals all had copies in which they penciled in the real names of the fictional characters.

The copy I own is the 100^th Anniversary Edition, with a back cover proclaiming “The freshness of this masterpiece undiminished, Spoon River Anthology remains a landmark of American literature.” Publisher’s hyperbole? Depends on how you measure such things. Individual poems are a staple in high school literature anthologies, so there is that. But, is it worth reading straight through 250 pages of fictional epitaphs?

A century ago, the book was all the rage. The idea of telling the story of a town through a long series of monologues is rather clever. Each entry tells a story. You now know that person. Ah, but turn the page and there is another story which contradicts the story you just read. It turns out husbands and wives or parents and children have very different ways of seeing the same thing. If nothing else, this book is a rather good way to force you to realize that the story you just imagined telling about your own life might, much to your shock, come out different than how you are mentioned in the stories of others.

Part of the sensation of this book when it was first published is irrecoverable. Take A. D. Blood:

If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
Why do you let the milliner’s daughter Dora,
And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier
Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?

Are you shocked? Now back up a hundred years and imagine the shock of a book that has a couple engaging in an illicit union on a grave. And the whole image is just tossed out there in the last line of a seven line poem. Living in the 21^st century, you weren’t shocked. But, readers at the time of publication were…which presumably did not put a damper on sales.

A hundred years later, Blood’s epitaph illustrates the limitations of the book as a whole. That particular poem is noticeable; you read it, hit that last line, and you can’t help but notice. But, not every story can end with a killer line. Not every story can reveal that a previously told story may not have been entirely true. Most stories are stand-alone, the voice of an individual unlike the other individuals in the book. After reading a hundred such stories, are you eager to see the 101^st? After 150, still going strong?

I mentioned this feature of the book to a friend of mine, who laughed at me and asked for which book of poetry this is not true. Which poet can I read poem after poem straight through for 30 or 60 minutes? Obviously, none. Then it dawned on me: this really is a book of poetry. I read the whole thing trying to force it into the genre of epic poem, telling a story. But, this isn’t The Odyssey or Paradise Lost. It is North of Boston or Lyrical Ballads. Sure some of the poems connect, but it really is just a series of poems.

As a book of poetry, is it good. Yes. Is it Great? Ah, that will hinge entirely on how often a poem causes your attention level to rise. It is hard to know how often that will happen for you.

An example: the poem which grabbed my attention and won’t let go is the story of Seth Compton:

When I died, the circulating library
Which I built up for Spoon River,
And managed for the good of inquiring minds,
Was sold at auction on the public square,
As if to destroy the last vestige
Of my memory and influence.
For those of you who could not see the virtue
Of knowing Volney’s “Ruins” as well as Butler’s “Analogy”
And “Faust” as well as “Evangeline,”
Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.

As even semi-regular readers of this here space will know, it is not hard to figure out why Seth Compton resonated so deeply with me. He died; mission unaccomplished. I guess if he had succeeded, I would not have a mission. Then again, he wasn’t real. But, if Seth Compton is right, and I obviously think he is, then many people won’t find this particular poem interesting at all.

Should you read this book? It is fun, easy to read, and has enough characters that surely you will find some appealing. I suspect, however, that the real reason to read this book straight through is that you can afterwards have it on your shelf where it will constantly provide something to do in an idle minute when you flip open the book at random and remember some of the denizens of Spoon River on the off chance that the person whose tale you are reading will give you some insight into your trials of the moment.

Drinking Deeply from The Breakfast of Champions

On the cover of a book sitting on my desk right now there is a picture of St Augustine painted by Justus van Gent in the 15^th century. On a book cover on the other side of my desk there is a pentagon, with a smaller pentagon in it, which has an image that I think is two people reading books, but it is hard to tell. A third book has a copy of a Claude Lorrain (17^th century) painting, Imaginary View of Delphi with a Procession. I haven’t read this third book yet. And so on.

Nothing in that first paragraph matters in the least. It’s just a story about my desk right now.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions has lots of stories like that. They also don’t matter. That’s the point.

Let’s start over. Tracing the development of Vonnegut’s thought through his novels is fascinating. Consider the slice included in the Library of America’s Kurt Vonnegut, Novels and Stories 1963-1973. It begins with Cat’s Cradle, which argues that life is pointless and meaningless and just one thing after another. Then comes God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which argues that since life is pointless and meaningless, we might as well love our neighbors. Then Slaughterhouse-Five, a devastating description of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which Vonnegut enters the pit of despair. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page. Since it is Vonnegut, there are some amusing bits. But, the nature of the book is found it its title: The Breakfast of Champions is not Wheaties; it’s a martini.

You think that is a harsh assessment? It’s more generous than Vonnegut’s later self-assessment. He graded his own novels. Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five were A+. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was an A. Breakfast of Champions? C.

You want a plot summary? Good luck. Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author who shows up in Vonnegut’s earlier novels, gets invited to a convention in Midland. Dwayne Hoover owns a car dealership and a bunch of other retail establishments in Midland. In chapter 1, we are told they will meet. Eventually they do. The only reason to pick that out of all the stories in this book as the plot is that it is the one story that is actually mentioned a few times. Turn to a random page, and you’ll almost certainly get a totally unrelated story.

The stories seem to overlap, but that is only because they are all taking place in the same novel and Kilgore and Dwayne are in multiple stories. We get, for example, a lot of summaries of Kilgore Trout’s stories, which is a funny in a way. Vonnegut has a bunch of ideas for stories, but rather than write up the stories, he pretends that Kilgore Trout wrote the stories, and then Vonnegut provides a sketch of the Kilgore Trout story which Vonnegut could have just written. The whole novel is like that; people drop in for a page or two and you get their back story and then they vanish and are never heard from again.

If you are looking for a nice linear novel, just move along. The mess of a plot is enhanced by the frequent insertion of a bunch of crudely drawn pictures. If you are imagining the pictures are an important key to the story, you haven’t been paying attention. Opening the book at random, we get a picture of a Holiday Inn sign and on the next page a picture of a lamb and a few pages later two pictures: one of a blazer a monkey wore in a Trout story and the other a sign in front of a diner that says “Eat.” Two pages later, two pictures of trucks, one of which says “Pyramid” on the side and the other says “Ajax” on the side and then…do you want me to go on listing pictures?

What is this mess of stories all pretending to be a single novel? Vonnegut gives us a hint late in the novel in an authorial interlude:

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: it was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Vonnegut is talking about You, Dear Reader, and Me. We really do think of our lives like we are a part of a story. Stories have plots that cohere and themes that mean something. They also have to end somehow and you really want to think your life has a progression toward that end, don’t you?

But, Vonnegut isn’t done with you yet. He wants to tear apart your ability to imagine you are a character living in a story. He doesn’t even want you to have the dignity of thinking that highly of yourself.

When Kilgore Trout meets Dwayne Hoskins in a hotel cocktail lounge, there is suddenly a third important character in the bar. Vonnegut himself, sitting in a corner. Now Vonnegut doesn’t call himself Vonnegut. He gave himself a penname in the Preface, but when he shows up in the cocktail lounge, he repeatedly lets us know that the characters are doing exactly what the author of the novel decides they should do. This isn’t just breaking the fourth wall, having the author address the audience. It is shattering the fourth wall into a bajillion fragments. To what end?

In the cocktail lounge, when the promised meeting occurs and Kilgore Trout finally does meet Dwayne Hooper (and remember, we have been waiting for this scene since the first chapter of the novel), the entire interaction between them is this: Dwayne, who had been slowly going insane, walks up to Kilgore and asks for the message, then grabs a novel that Kilgore wrote and happens to be holding, asking “Is this it?” A bewildered Kilgore says “Yes.” Dwayne wanders off and reads Kilgore’s novel, which takes remarkably little time because conveniently enough the author of the book had sent Dwayne through a speed reading course.

The novel Dwayne read was a message to the reader that the reader was the only person in the world with free will. Everyone else is a robot. Dwayne goes on a rampage attacking the people he now knows are robots. Ambulances come. And so on.

That undoubtedly does not make you want to read this story. But, here is where Vonnegut is being really meta. Breakfast of Champions is itself a novel in which there is only one character with free will—the author. Everyone else is a robot, doing exactly what the author wants the characters to do. To rub it in, the novel ends with the author talking with Kilgore Trout, revealing himself as Kilgore’s Creator and telling Kilgore that he will henceforth be free. But of course there is no possible way Kilgore Trout can be free. He has no ability to have free will, no matter what the Creator says.

And you, Dear Reader? Remember that story in which you think you were living? Who is the author? You? A Different Creator? Are you the only person with free will in a world of robots? Or are you one of the robots? Or is your story really not a story at all, but just a bunch of people with free will crashing into one another and whatever happens, happens? Vonnegut won’t let you have any of those answers. He won’t let you have an answer at all.

Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.

Related Posts

Vonnegut, Kurt Slapstick “Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom”
Kundera, Milan The Unbearable Lightness of Being “Bearing Life”

Return of the Furies

Now when the sudden blows come down,
let no one sound the call that once brought help,
‘Justice, hear me—Furies throned in power!’
Oh I can hear the father now
Or the mother sob with pain
At the pain’s onset…hopeless now,
The house of Justice falls.

That is the Furies raging at the end of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, the trilogy tracing the fall of the house of Agamemnon and the rise of Athens. (Robert Fagles’ masterful translation.)

In a recent post, I ruminated that one of the problems with contemporary political discussion is that people do not spend enough time reading Aristotle. Now, truth be told, Aristotle requires some patience to read; his works do not have the charm of watching Socrates go to work in a Platonic Dialogue. So, I understand why people are not flocking to read Politics, even though it would be quite beneficial to do so.

But Aeschylus also provides a remarkable reflection on contemporary society. And he wrote plays! Plays with murders and intrigue and Furies hounding the guy who murdered his mother and Greek gods and Goddesses showing up and the first ever jury trial! Coming soon to Netflix! Or HBO! Well, actually, I have not heard of an Oresteia series being made, but it really does have all the elements of compelling TV.

The story can be told as a list of deaths:

1. Tantalus’s son Pelops had two sons, Thyestes and Atreus. Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife in order to get the throne. Atreus, not pleased about this, killed Thyestes’ two sons and then made a meal of the sons and served it to Thyestes. (This, by the way, was an imitation of a bit of family history: Atreus’ grandfather killed Atreus’ father and served the father as a meal to the gods.)

2. Atreus retakes the throne, and has two sons, Agamemnon (who inherits the throne) and Menelaus (who marries the most beautiful woman in the word, Helen of Troy). After Paris runs off with Helen, Agamemnon raises an army to go fight the Trojans. But alas, the wind is unfavorable and the ships can’t get out of port. So, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods. The winds become favorable. But, for some reason, Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, is not happy that her husband sacrificed their daughter. Go figure. All of this is the background to The Oresteia.

3. Agamemnon returns victorious from the Trojan War. His wife meets him at the dock, rolls out the red carpet (literally) and Agamemnon comes home. Unbeknownst to Agamemnon, during his absence, Clytemnestra has taken up with Aegisthus, Thyestes’ son (not one of the sons who was served as dinner, obviously). Agamemnon walks into the palace and is immediately murdered by his wife. Aegisthus gets revenge for his father and, not incidentally, the throne.

4. Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, hears of the murder of his father and is not happy about it. With the help of his sister Electra, he gets into the palace under an assumed identity where he takes advantage of the hospitality of the royal couple by murdering his mother and her new husband.

5. Matricide is not looked upon with favor in ancient times. Enter the Furies, whose role in life is to pursue vile matricides to their deaths. Orestes races to Apollo, who sends him on to Athena. Orestes pleads with Athena for his life. The Furies rage that Orestes must die. Interesting moral problem: is it OK to murder the person who murders your father? Is it OK to murder your mother? And what do you do when your mother murdered your father? (As you might recall, Shakespeare also got some mileage out of this question.) Athena, ever the wise one, decides to settle the matter by a jury trial. Clever, but alas, the jury splits evenly, so Athena has to cast the deciding vote. And after all this death, Orestes is spared.

(Seriously…you would watch a Game of Thrones level production of that story, wouldn’t you? It is just sitting there, in the Public Domain no less, waiting to be done.)

Are you happy Orestes was spared? The Furies are not. Indeed, they are furious.

You, you younger gods!—You have ridden down
the ancient laws, wrenched them from my grasp—
and I, robbed of my birthright, suffering, great with wrath,
I lose my poison over the soil, aieee!—
poison to match my grief comes pouring out my heart,
cursing the land to burn it sterile and now
rising up from its roots a cancer blasting leaf and child,
now for Justice, Justice!—cross the face of the earth
the bloody tide comes hurling, all mankind destroyed.
… Moaning, only moaning? What will I do?

Note the content of the Furies complaint. They want Justice. Remember the crime for which they want Justice is matricide, which I think we all still agree is indeed a vile crime. But, Justice is thwarted by the apparatus of this new-fangled court system thing. A man who murdered his mother is set free. Where is the Justice in that? And so, the Furies pledge to loose their poison onto the soil, cursing the land and burning it sterile. The Furies are taking it to the streets.

Poll Time: Who is right? The Furies or Athena? Second Poll: Once Orestes is set free, are the Furies doing the right thing, even though it means “the bloody tide comes hurling, all mankind is destroyed”?

This is why we read Aeschylus, by the way. Or at least it is why we should read Aeschylus. You don’t actually care what happens to Orestes, but you do care about Justice. Strip the matter of Justice from the passions of the day, and wrestle with it in the passions of another day. It doesn’t take long in thinking about The Oresteia to realize that Justice is an enormously complicated matter. Solving the quandary here is not something that can be done on a bumper sticker or in a 1000 word op-ed or on a Facebook post or with a bullhorn. Figuring out Justice, really thinking it through, takes some time and hard thought.

If you can’t figure out what should happen to Orestes, why are you so confident you know all the answers about the issues of the day? Maybe the violent emotional response of the Furies is the right course of action. Maybe the cool calculation of Athena is the better route. But, before burning down the city or condemning those who do, is it too much to ask that we all first pause and think about this?