[In the following essay, Colakis compares the use of the House of Atreus myth in Rabe's The Orphan and Joyce Carol Oates's novel Angel of Light.]

Even in the last two decades, when Greek myths are no longer a part of general knowledge, they have not lost their appeal to certain of our dramatists and novelists. When contemporary authors place timeless situations and characters in settings that reflect modern consciousness, we cease to think of myths as the lore of a bygone culture, and we feel anew their hold on our imaginations. This is particularly true of the House of Atreus myth; within the twentieth century alone it has appealed to otherwise diverse authors—von Hofmannsthal, Eliot, O'Neill, Sartre, and Giraudoux, among others.

The myth has retained its appeal because it addresses both personal concerns (the dynamics of a family) and larger questions (the possibility of achieving justice). However much they differ in other respects, both David Rabe and Joyce Carol Oates found the House of Atreus myth suited to their concerns. Both writers in earlier works had examined the potential for violence and despair within the contemporary American family—Rabe in Sticks and Bones and Oates in (among other works) Wonderland, The Assassins, and Do with Me What You Will. Yet the families in all these works reflect larger political, social, and moral realities—and in this respect, the Houses of Atreus that they create in The Orphan and in Angel of Light differ from many of those created earlier in this century. In such Freud-influenced works as Mourning Becomes Electra, psychological exploration of the characters all but overshadows their public roles. But by the early 1970s, such an approach would have seemed narcissistic and decadent.

Thus although The Orphan's principal characters retain their Greek names, it is impossible not to see Vietnam in the references to the Trojan War. Rabe saw the play as a mythological counterpart to his better-known and more naturalistic Vietnam dramas, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers. He also drew a parallel between Orestes' matricide and the murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” (a questionable assertion, to be discussed in detail later). In Oates's novel also, the characters' actions have consequences far beyond the personal realm. Maurice Halleck, the novel's Agamemnon figure, is Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice—a prominent Washington official. Although her work is more concerned than Rabe's with exploring the self—what has been termed “the phantasmagoria of American personality”¹—it does not ignore social issues.

Although they adapted the principals' social position to modern times, both authors retained the plot outline of the Greek myth—an eminent man is murdered by his wife and her lover, who are in turn killed by the son of the family at the urging of the daughter. (There are subplots, which I will omit from this discussion for clarity's sake.) How have the leading figures in the story been re-interpreted?

Both Rabe and Oates accord Agamemnon more sympathetic treatment than he received from Homer or Aeschylus. We, it seems, are more inclined than the Greeks to be kindly disposed (at least in works of fiction) towards ineffectual authority figures caught up in situations beyond them. Rabe's Agamemnon admits to loving his power, but he also recognizes his weakness and foolishness. In a drunken outburst, he says:

Aga … num … num! Aga … num … num? Shit. I … have a name, that when I get drunk, I can't say it. I didn't ask to have such a name and be I. Did anyone ever hear Aganum … nun … drunk or sober, request that he be me? But I am. I'm gonna let my daughter die. I get drunk. I fall down. I pour wine in my ear. I pour it in my hair. I piss on rocks, and still she is going to die. Soldiers run up to me and say this has occurred, or that. I don't give a fuck. … Oh, my God, I will make myself hard and let the world destroy itself against me. … As a child, my brother and I would play games of our father and uncle. … I wanted to be Atreus, but Menelaus managed always to be our father and I was foolish Thyestes, forever foolish and vomiting.²

Oates's Agamemnon character, Maurice Halleck, is even more gentle and less commanding. He is earnest, idealistic, and deeply troubled, out of place among the smooth and corrupt politicians Oates depicts.

Oates's Clytemnestra character, Isabel de Benevente Halleck, is far less substantial than Aeschylus' virago. Beautiful and sensual, she is motivated purely by desire for “Aegisthus,” here called Nick Martens. Rabe presents a fuller picture—in fact, he has two Clytemnestras (though neither is a strikingly original creation). “Clytemnestra 1” is the reluctantly dutiful wife and devoted mother resembling Clytemnestra in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. “Clytemnestra 2,” ten years older, is the steely killer of Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

Feminists may be disappointed to learn that neither author assigned a dominant role to the Electra figure. Only one of the siblings can predominate in a House of Atreus story, and both Rabe and Oates chose to focus on Orestes. Yet both created a strong and memorable Electra figure. As Barnet Kellman has written of Rabe's Electra in contrast to Orestes, “Orestes is young. He is not a leader of that generation, as perhaps in David's imagination Electra might have been.”³ In The Orphan, she becomes a visible reminder of the evils of the older generation. We hear her call out to Orestes from a prison cell, and later Pylades reports to Orestes that her tongue and hands have been cut off—a frequent punishment for those who defy tyrants. Oates's Electra—Kirsten Halleck—is a vivid update of the heroine-in-rags neurotic of Euripides' Electra. An intelligent but severely disturbed student at a prestigious girls' prep school, she starves herself, broods continually, alternately talks constantly and falls mute, refuses to bathe or change her clothes for weeks on end, isolates herself, and worries everybody. Suspecting that her father's fatal automobile accident was really murder, she goads her brother Owen into taking revenge. She makes such an impact that the reader is disappointed when Owen gains the upper hand and she largely fades out of the picture.

Our two authors have a similar conception of their Orestes character. He begins as a model young man of his generation—an innocent in The Orphan, a preppie in Angel of Light. How does he evolve into a murderer? Rabe sees Orestes' receptivity to Apollo (called “The Figure” in the play) as parallel to young Americans' reception of Charles Manson as a countercultural hero. This parricidal side of youth becomes somewhat more palatable in view of Orestes' callowness. (We see him born onstage, emerging from the same tub where Agamemnon was murdered.) Oates, on the other hand, does not trouble to make the pre-matricidal Owen particularly likeable. He is popular at college—in contrast to his outcast sister—but shallow. His concealed flabbiness, in contrast to her emaciation, parallels his moral softness beside her uncompromising intensity. (He loses his excess weight as he prepares himself to kill.) But he is initially so hollow that the reader may well wonder whether he has the capacity for moral outrage to become a killer.

Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Rabe creates no sympathy for Aegisthus, whom he sees as a petty bureaucratic tyrant. Aegisthus' death, in fact, is as close to farce as the play comes. Messengers rush up to him in quick succession to warn him that Orestes is coming closer and closer; he no sooner copes with one message and assures himself that he is in control than another comes. Finally, when Orestes is in the room with him, he ludicrously tries to forestall the inevitable by saying, “You can have that side of the room over there and I'll take this side over here” (88). Oates departs from this one-dimensional tradition. Nick Martens's relationship to Maurice is complicated by the fact that he had once saved Maurice's life in a boating accident. His fate is unexpected also. He survives Kirsten's attempt on his life and retires to an obscure island off the coast of Maine. There he lives in penitence, writing to Kirsten, who does not answer him. Among his sentiments: “After I died … I became suddenly generous—but I have very little to give away. And no one who wants it.”⁴ He is still haunted by Kirsten, “a frenzied angel of wrath, lunging and slashing at him with that incredible knife (432).” In this peculiar turn of events, he—not Owen—is pursued by a Fury and purified through suffering.

Rabe's play is the more problematic—not to say unsatisfying—of the two works because its allusions to contemporary life do not always “work” within the framework of the myth. It is doubtful, for example, whether Clytemnestra and Sharon Tate have much in common other than the status of murder victims. Yet Rabe retains aspects of the myth for which other adapters found no equivalent—such as the sacrifice of Iphigenia. (In Angel of Light, Isabel Halleck has a stillborn first baby and draws closer to Nick Martens as a result, but the event does not occasion an agonizing moral conflict between husband and wife.) In The Orphan, Iphigenia's death occupies much of the first act. This event seems anachronistic if we expect to find parallels with Vietnam, but it turns out to have contemporary relevance. Rabe saw the arguments of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon over the killing of Iphigenia as emblematic of the misuse of language during the 60s—in the calling of Asians “Gooks,” in the taunting of armed guardsmen by rioting students, in the mutual accusations of North Koreans and Americans during the Pueblo incident. Misuse of language is a constant theme in Rabe's plays;⁵ Kellman describes how it came to be central in the first act of The Orphan:

David was outraged and viscerally upset by much of what he saw in New Haven that year [1970]. He found himself in a uniquely lone position amid the broil of the times. A veteran of the war, he had little sympathy for its apologists, but, at the same time, he was appalled at how little the war protestors understood of the reality of what they were protesting.

He found himself isolated: no one wanted to hear what he had actually seen, when it threatened to conflict with the account of things they had comfortably adopted.⁶

This distortion of reality with words reaches a climax in the simultaneous killing of Iphigenia and Agamemnon (45):

AGAMEMNON:
I sacrifice! I sacrifice! I do not slaughter!
(He is fleeing.)
CLYTEMNESTRA 1:
I SACRIFICE!
As The Figure plunges his knife into (Iphigenia)
CLYTEMNESTRA 2:
I SACRIFICE!
(And Clytemnestra 2 plunges her knife into the tub and Iphigenia screams).

Referring to murder as “sacrifice” converts it into a religious act and distances the doer from the horror of it. In the second act—Orestes' revenge—Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are turned into acceptable victims by The Figure's denial of their humanity. They are called “abomination,” “a fungal place,” “pig,” and “pigette.”

Oates's Owen and Kirsten also convince themselves that they are performing a great act, and they too use religious language:

[Owen] says, as if reading a written document: Our acts are to confirm justice. To restore balance. Equilibrium. They will not be acts of personal vengeance—we've gone beyond that. Do you understand? Do you agree?

Yes, says Kirsten, closing her eyes.

Sacrifices are necessary, says Owen … but they will not be “personal” sacrifices.

Yes, says Kirsten. …

We are taking upon ourselves the sorrow of the judges, he says in a whisper. The sorrow of the executioners.

(314-315)

Both Owen and Orestes form these distorted perceptions through the indoctrination of a charismatic individual—The Figure in The Orphan, Ulrich “Uli” May (a name suggestive of Apollo?) in Angel of Light. It is worth examining what remains of Aeschylus' Apollo. The latter was indifferent to the role of women in childbearing; The Figure shows positive revulsion. He says, “A seed is planted in a swamp—is that to the credit of the swamp and gore of a woman's belly that goes on wet and futile until a man enters seed to give it purpose? Are we never separate? The tree grown tall need pay no homage to the swamp, but merely rise toward the lightened sky from which it fell, in which its loving father lives. Only women love this dank cruel place (71)!” He threatens that if Orestes does not kill Clytemnestra, “I will make your flesh rot upon you like the ruin of age come in a single day. It is my curse. I am your friend, but it is my curse” (72). In other words, he embodies all of the more unpleasant characteristics of Aeschylus' god with no terrifying Furies to oppose him. The Furies are now The Family, “white skull-like God-heads” who appear to Orestes after he has ingested a hallucinogenic mushroom given to him by The Figure. “Apollo sent us, God of reason and the pit, called Apollyon,” one of them tells Orestes (80).

The Apollo character in Angel of Light, Uli, is the leader of an international terrorist group known as the Doves. (This is a violence as inseparable from the 80s as Vietnam and Manson had been from the 60s and early 70s.) Uli indoctrinates a drugged Owen as The Figure had indoctrinated Orestes. He too denies the humanity of the prospective victim. He says. “Your mother isn't so much depraved and vicious and selfish as she is utterly worthless—litter—a piece of trash. I mean actual litter on the face of the earth” (242).

Not surprisingly, Oates depicts a world without God; only Maurice appears to have any religious life at all, and Oates portrays his resorting to prayer as part of his alcoholic disintegration. Secular organizations—such as the Doves—adopt the language of religion. We have seen Owen and Kirsten speak of “sacrificing” and taking on sorrows; Owen and Uli speak of their “conversions” when they become terrorists. This is all that remains of Aeschylus' theology in the 1980s.⁷

Without belief in a divine justice, the characters of both Oates and Rabe create their own laws. In The Orphan, The Girl—a follower of The Figure—says, “I knew society was not worthy of my respect, I made up my own, only my justice was just, unlike the regular one” (13). Her words could have been spoken by almost any character in either of our works. Uli also denies that justice can exist within society in its present state. He says:

And I hope I won't upset you, Owen, by suggesting … that your father, as an official in the U.S. Government, as the Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice—absurd title!—was contaminated by his association—he was doomed—I mean morally and spiritually—though I'm willing to believe he was the best of the lot … there's no possibility for justice within the context of the existing society. The enemy is everywhere: the enemy is this nation, and particularly this ludicrous city. Imperialist, capitalist, racist … simply doomed.

(246)

There is a similar flattening out of moral distinctions at the end of The Orphan. Orestes proclaims, “And it is my verdict that vile, cunning Agamemnon, noble and cruel, butchered his most sweet and foul Iphigenia, and good Clytemnestra, out of heat and hate, passion and reason, pity and self-deceiving self-revelation, murdered good Agamemnon, and I am innocent” (95). The Figure confirms, “You have killed your mother and it means nothing and you have seen the nothing that it means” (94). The Orphan ends with Orestes hoisted to heaven on a gold bar, exulting in his power but also completely isolated from both gods and people.⁸

It is appropriate that each work ends with an isolated individual—Orestes suspended on his bar, Nick Martens in exile. When society ceases to believe in the power of collective institutions (such as Aeschylus had long ago celebrated) to benefit humanity, the individual is the only source of hope. Only in the forbidding, solitary figures of Orestes and Nick can we seek any sense of victory or redemption of the evils our authors compelled us to witness.

Notes

1. G. F. Waller, Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates (Baton Rouge: La State U Pr, 1979).

2. David Rabe, The Orphan (New York: French, 1973), 32-33.

3. B. Kellman, “David Rabe's The Orphan: A Peripatetic Work in Progress,” TheatreQ 7 (Spring 1977): 88.

4. Joyce Carol Oates, Angel of Light (New York: Dutton, 1981). 432.

5. This is examined in further detail in C. Werner, “Primal Screams and Nonsense Rhymes: David Rabe's Revolt,” Educ Theatre J 30 (1978): 517-529. Werner analyzes the (mis)use of language in Rabe's other Vietnam plays, but does not discuss The Orphan.

6. Kellman (above, note 3) 73.

7. The use of religious language and themes by terrorists is examined in the essays of part 1 in The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications (New York: Pergamon, 1982).

8. Of this ending, J. S. Hertzbach writes, “Tainted by violence, Orestes is left literally suspended between the uncaring gods of heaven and the waiting Furies on earth, abandoned and ultimately deluded.” (“The Plays of David Rabe: A World of Streamers,” in Essays on Contemporary American Drama, ed. H. Bock and A. Wertheim [Munich: Max Hueber, 1981], 180). It is not readily apparent that Furies are indeed waiting for Orestes, but he is definitely deluded. He says to Apollo, “I look at you and you seem many shells of skin behind which you recede from me to a center I have never seen … a hideous lunatic eye.” The Figure replies, “Sometimes you seem exactly that way to me, Orestes” (The Orphan, 94). Both Apollo and Orestes are correct; they are both remote and hideous.