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The Greek tragedies by the “big three” are so formal and often over-the-top to my modern-day ear that I enjoy poking a bit of irreverent fun at them. I was looking forward to doing the same with Euripides’ Orestes but it is such an interesting play that I have to take it seriously. Mostly. I read a fantastic translation by Anne Carson. My respect for her work continues to grow the more I read it. She really is top-notch and better than Robert Fagles in my opinion.

I imagine Orestes was probably the third play in the traditional three-play cycle and we just don’t have the others. But since the introduction doesn’t mention this, perhaps Euripides placed it differently in his play cycle. Oh, wait, Euripides has an Elektra too. So much for reading in order. Anyway, the story that comes before this play is the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra when he returns from Troy. Orestes who has been fostered out, returns and kills his mother. Now, in this play he suffers the consequences: the Furies.

But Euripides does something so totally unexpected and I would love to have seen how the audience reacted when it was performed at the Dionysian Festival in 408 B.C. Whereas others like Aeschylus, portrayed the Furies as actual women flying through the air relentlessly chasing Orestes and tormenting him, Euripides turns them into a psychological metaphor for guilt. Not that they weren’t before, but the Furies in this play are all in Orestes’ head, they have no physical manifestation. Apparently Euripides introduced into Greek theatre

a concern for the solitary inward self, for consciousness as a private content that might or might not match up with the outside appearance of a person, that might or might not make sense to an observer. He lived at a time when philosophers as well as artists were becoming intrigued by this difference between outside and inside, appearance and reality, and were advancing various theories about what truth is and where truth lies.

In Euripides’ story of Orestes, his sister Elektra and his best friend Pylades helped him kill Clytemnestra at the command of the god Apollo. Nonetheless, Orestes is still being tormented with the guilt of murdering his mother even though he did the right thing according to Apollo and according to custom that the son must avenge the murder of his father. But it gets complicated when the murderer is your mother and there is a law against matricide.

This then being a psychological situation with Orestes looking inward we get conversation like this:

MENELAOS: What’s wrong with you? What sickness wastes you away?

ORESTES: Conscience. I know what I have done.

MENELAOS: How do you mean?

ORESTES: Grief is killing me.

MENELAOS: She is a dread goddess. But curable.

ORESTES: And fits of madness. Mother madness. Mother blood.

It has only been six days since his mother’s burial. Though surprised by his grief and guilt, he is still expecting Apollo to come through for him and absolve him of his crime and madness.

The town has been holding the guilt-stricken Orestes and his co-conspirators captive trying to figure out what to do with them. Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother arrives with his wife Helen and their daughter Hermione on the eve of the town taking a vote on whether or not Orestes and friends will be stoned to death. Orestes pleads with Menelaus to intercede for them but he pretty much claims he can’t do anything but that he will try anyway. Elektra, Orestes and Pylades start making a plan directed at the hateful Helen (“the weapon of mass destruction” she is called in the play by Pylades) who they see as being the one at fault for the mess they are in since she is the one who started the war and thus the whole chain of terrible events leading up to this moment in time.

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By Helen Constantine

Travelling on Line 3 out to the Pont de Levallois in the North West of the Paris metro you pass through a station called Louise Michel. It is named after a feisty, brave woman, sometimes known as the Red Virgin, born in the revolutionary year of 1830, the July Revolution, less bloody than the one with which she herself was to be associated, the uprising of the Commune at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

Louise Michel, as she tells us in her Mémoires (1979), was the child of a maidservant in the château de Vroncourt in the Haute-Marne, and –probably – the lord of the manor, or his son. All her life her relationship with her mother was very close. She lived in the château, enjoying a liberal, enlightened upbringing by her grandparents until driven out by her stepmother in 1850, when she was forced to earn her own living. Louise became a teacher and set up her own school, using fairly unconventional methods, and in 1856 she moved to Paris to continue her teaching career, during which time she became increasingly politicized and feminist, as well as violently anti-clerical.

The Prussian army marched on Paris in 1870, Napoleon’s forces were crushed at the Battle of Sedan, and Napoleon himself taken prisoner. The continued threat from the Prussians who were besieging the city, the Thiers government who were compliant to Bismarck’s demands, and the appalling conditions endured by the people that winter – Côtelettes de chien aux petits pois and salamis de rats for example were on a contemporary Latin Quarter menu – led to the uprising by the National Guard and the workers, among them, Louise Michel, and ended in la semaine sanglante (the bloody week), the wholesale slaughter by Thiers’ troops of their fellow-citizens. The fighting finished in the cemetery of Père Lachaise against the wall, now called the ‘Mur des Fédérés’, where 147 Communards were lined up and shot.

Louise managed to escape from the soldiers with her life, but was imprisoned for almost two years and, along with others, deported to New Caledonia, to Noumea on the ship Virginie. Her years of exile, as well as her trial when she returned, and her struggles on behalf of women, are well-documented in her Mémoires. But ‘documented’ is perhaps the wrong word. These memoirs are not only remarkable for their recounting of the facts but also for the way they are written. Her own poems are interspersed throughout and her descriptions shine with that attention to detail which is typical of the poet, whether it is the portrait of the old woman crossing the Hôtel de Ville square during the siege to fetch oil and spilling it because her hands were trembling so much, or her evocation of the shreds of burned paper floating across to Montmartre ‘like butterflies’ from the burning of Paris.

Louise’s Mémoires were too long for me to include in my anthology of Paris Metro Tales but it is somehow comforting to know that her name lives on in this little metro station on Line 3.

Helen Constantine taught languages in schools until 2000, when she became a full-time translator. Her books include the companion volumes Paris Tales and French Tales, and she was consultant editor for Berlin Tales. She is married to the writer David Constantine and with him edits the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest book is 0 Comments on Revolution in the Metro as of 3/16/2011 2:33:00 AM