The Tragedy of Orestes

It is a mistake to give a myth one interpretation and claim it to be the only interpretation. It is impossible to fully interpret mythical stories – they go beyond falsity and conventional truth and express things that can’t be otherwise expressed. So to explain them is to cheapen them. There is a difference between a myth and a mere story – and explanations of naturalism do not satisfy me, and do not explain most myths in any case. With that preamble out of the way, we move on to one possible interpretation of the Oresteia – keep what I’ve said in mind as we continue.

One way to look at the Oresteia is as an expression of the futility of escaping repetition, and of escaping one’s essential nature.

One lesson we can take from Orestes is that any variety of events is filtered through a prism of experience given to us in our formative years – created far before our birth – and our lives constitute a navigation of this prism. For the moment, it suffices to say that…

I am of the belief that people are more alike than they believe. The only difference is in the artform – the outward expression, which is necessarily coloured by experience and context.

My first point is that people are repetitions, and repetitious. Orestes demonstrates this:

Roberto Calasso writes of Orestes, in Cadmus and Harmony, page 190: “His greatest torment was this: no matter where he went, all his affairs were family affairs…Hermione was his cousin twice over. But then he realised that his reason for seeking her out made matters even worse: it paralysed him. Hermione had been betrothed to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son…Orestes took the murdered man’s place next to Hermione. He was perfectly aware that he was not, as he did so, himself, Orestes; he was Agamemnon once again depriving Achilles of his beloved Briseis. Orestes never was Orestes, except in the brief periods when the Erinyes goaded him into insanity…” and so on. He provides further proof with Erigone, the daughter of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

And Kazantzakis, famously, in the Saviours of God: “It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart. Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breathing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions. Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart. In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.”

Javier Marias’ A Heart So White is about the essential impossibility of change, and how aspects of our lives are filtered through our experience, made comprehensible by being analogised – made into repetitions, made into the same thing. Jonathan Coe writes in the introduction to the Vintage Classics edition of A Heart So White: “One of the things Marias is trying to tell the reader is that no matter how much we experience, no matter how shocking or intense our experiences are, we remain locked within the same patterns of thought and reflection. One usually closes a Marias novel with the sense that human experience is immutable, and that people themselves rarely change.”

Our life’s goal is to escape being like Orestes, but Orestes himself hounds us in the form of our selves, or inescapable lives, just as the Furies hounded him.

Orestes, the society of one – everywhere he went, his family followed. Context changed but the fundamental experience remained.

A point from Luke Smith: a society designed to be understood by one human brain – a society modelled on one mind – is not complex enough to function in service of multiple people, because they are too different for one mind to account for them all. All functioning societies and customs are built over time, filtered by the experience of thousands of people, and participation in that society requires a modulation of the self to function within the structure…etc.

This is why we struggle to avoid being like Orestes.

To a point, the only religion that can take over a place is one that is suited to that place. Even successful invasions, as in early Christianity and the Jesuits, account for and imitate custom. I’m sure that some of you have seen repetitive posts about how Christmas is the solstice celebration and a pagan holiday, and for some reason the smirking atheist never quite manages to justify why this means we should never celebrate the 25th of December. But it speaks to human nature that Christianity spread in this manner.

People’s minds cannot be changed in less than a generation – although a generation is all it takes. It would seem there is a soul to a place which is only gradually modified through exposure and that soul is the people’s property. Christianity was able to spread through Greece and Rome because Christians were:

a. generally lower-class and the pool of possible converts appreciated the notion of eternal equality, plus it functioned more like a union in the early days in major Greek cities (this point is explicated in the First Urban Christians, by Wayne Meeks) and…

b. because on a theoretical level it appropriated Platonic and neo-Platonic texts and made them prophetic precursors to its own vision. The Hebrew Mashiach became the Greek logos – the logic of the world – applied to a human. And because of this graduation, this fitting into a pre-existing social strata, Christianity took root in Southern and Eastern Europe.

But when this type of change is forced, the resulting resistance is violent, or will eventually become so, as in Scandinavia with its Protestants and in Japan with its Jesuits. Customs cannot be modified on a whim – people are trapped in their own minds – shaped by the prisms – expressed dramatically, destinies – given to us before our births. Everyone is Orestes, surrounded by the familiar to the point of exhaustion.

III

This brings me to some points about writing.

The difference that remains between writing and other forms of artistic expression is the attitude toward tools.

You can buy a beginner’s violin, or a mobile phone with a high-quality camera, and so people like to say the barrier to creating (non-vocal) music and film is lower than it has ever been. True. But no other form of art in its entirety, except rudimentary music (singing and drumming) comes close to the ease with which literature is produced, because even if you would like to, you cannot produce literature in any more advanced a manner than with a machine with a keyboard. (At least not now. Letters are reproduced exactly, perfectly every time; we can manipulate spacing, style, font, any characteristic we like, with the most elementary of tools.) And each keyboard produces the same letters on the computer irrespective of its physical makeup. Writing is perhaps the most free art after singing and drumming (the former of which requires only the ability to use the vocal cords, and the latter the limbs). This means that all writers from Stephen King to Thomas Pynchon to myself are in some sense on the same footing. Writing is hounded by the familiar, even when it is different writing, because its experience is the human experience and not yet changed since the beginning of what we call history.

Ordinary practitioners of any other art are content with 90% maximal performance of their tools. Hard-liners spend exorbitant amounts on extra pieces of equipment, amplifiers, paints or boards or acrylics or stages and so on to reach the extra 10% performance possible from their tools, without any actual difference in the quality or style of what they are doing. Perhaps you’ve heard of audiophiles – while they’re not actually making anything, they’re a fantastic example of this phenomenon, because they’ll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for placebos to “improve” their sound systems. But so far as I know, there is really nothing you can do, as a writer, to improve your performance with any gimmicks or gadgets – it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on the computer because the 300$ laptop has a keyboard which works just as well as the 2000$ hardware. There is no functional difference in the document produced – the only arguments are superficial and based on the provision of comfort. If you sing a song, and digitally record it, it’s possible to run the file through a program, add effects – echo and reverb and reversals and modulations. No substantive clean-up can be given to writing save the arrangement of the letters (In projects like House of Leaves, this might end up being a complex arrangement in itself, which does affect the work – but this style of arrangement of text is still regarded a novelty, still seen as somehow separate from the work itself, the pure prose.

At most you have the choice between typing and writing by hand. I’ve found the latter requires fewer minor edits later, but more major edits, because it takes longer to make in the first instance, and when I change my mind about the direction of the work a whole chunk of relatively-well-considered work is gone. But the fundamental craft is the same between typing and writing.

This is also the chief reason books are produced alone. Processes gravitate toward their easiest expression, as a person gravitates toward his natural behaviour and a society toward customs that most suit its constituents – and it is easier to get one person to sit and write a piece of prose than it is to get two people to do it. It is easier to pull a person’s most personal reflections from them when they are alone rather than when they are distracted; it is easier to choose the correct words to express a point when undistracted. And singular production of course changes the essence of the book from the bottom up and makes it what it is – few popular movies are singular expressions of artistic intent. The degree of communal effort required to create a work is inversely proportional to the amount of individual expression which can be found in it without taking it apart. This is a somewhat obvious statement but needs to be clarified, because otherwise individual pieces are lost in the mess of the whole. It is not that you can’t appreciate a certain actor’s performance or a costume designer’s work or a composer of a soundtrack, but their visions are necessarily modified by the needs of other collaborative agents. This is also not to say that a writer is unaffected by circumstance, but the effect of that on the pure art of the actor or matte painter is much more obvious because they do not take influences from outside and then work in a vacuum as a writer does.

The resulting navigation of mutual need is neither positive or negative, merely a characteristic of collaborative work. A carefully designed costume can be hidden by poor lighting on a film set; a soundtrack can be drowned out; or the reverse can happen; each of the elements can combine to create a product that can’t be said to have come from any one person involved (“greater than the sum of its parts”). The point is not that each element is worsened or bettered but that there is necessarily a difference from its mental expression, and an ‘ur-art’ – the art of the composition of disjointed elements, carried out by a director, to create the whole. All this is to say that collaborative audio-visual art presents a greater distance from the mind than that between the brain and the conventional novel.

When we think about art in this way, in terms of ‘removal or abstraction from the brain’ it may implicitly suggest that ‘purer’ or ‘greater’ art is that which is closest to the vision of the brain. And yet the entire point is to represent the human condition to a hypothetical other – the closer it is to the individual mind the harder it is to communicate, because the details are so specific that any given mental vision is necessarily stuck within the mind.

I’d like to divert a moment to more fully consider the question of translation through analogy, to which I have given voice previously.

Nobody has ever even managed to read a book as intended, unless the intent was for it to be read in the way anyone could possibly read it. Unless a concept was initially made up of only words, it will lose something in the translation from a mental impression to a written statement. Put dramatically, Orestes cannot change, cannot leave his own maddened mind. For this reason, I don’t consider reading a work in translation to be that much inferior, or lesser somehow, than reading the original except in fringe cases. The work is bastardised by the time it’s written down by the action of its being written – any further layers are irrelevant compared to the immense change from that first mental idea.

If a concept is expressed in words, it can never be more in depth or complex than words can. But if it has its origin in something else, the words can point to that and suggest a method to receive that mental impression. But if something is born from words in the first place and has no other meaning, it is essentially just a game. Words for words’ sake. Vladimir Nabokov wants to know my location, but I insist on the validity of meaning beyond words for their own sake. For brevity’s sake I will call this pure literature – and it may be pure, but that purity gives it an onanistic quality that repels me – since it fundamentally loses its ability to communicate anything interesting. Consider this: meaning in PL is secondary, meaning is encapsulated in the sound and impressions of the words used and it stops there. This means that there cannot be a pure literature, there cannot be a poetry of pure sound, because at that point you are making noise – you are composing music. Not writing.

Earlier I stated there existed a confusion between the mental impression of an idea expressed in writing and its expression. Audio-visual arts do not suffer this confusion – they always give exactly what was intended, even if that is not what is received – because the film is put together outside the brain. By joining with society, it escapes Orestes – loses its incestuous quality, becomes a public project – becomes society itself (a thing people congregate around). Everyone involved creates a physical contribution (sound waves, costumes etc) and their necessarily flawed conception of the full work in their minds becomes irrelevant, because as in society they must modulate their own behaviour to fit in.

The product doesn’t leave any aspect of its actual self to be interpreted (as in the true underlying meaning of words) – only its meaning. There is no question of confusing an impenetrable mental dimension.

Art may be viewed as the product of a mind, an expression of meaning, or as an expression of technique. Neither of these approaches really have anything to do with format or equipment – but the second approach is more easily manifested when multiple people are involved because what we call the world is made of nothing more than multiple people.

Technique is the original meaning of art, techne – this word comes from a time when the sole purpose of art was to reflect the world accurately – not materially accurately, but accurately in any possible sense. Point being, the meaning of art has changed. As such it only follows that the technique-based approach to art, as opposed to the ‘auteur’ approach, lends itself to collaborative projects with a higher number of variable components – movies and plays and orchestral music as opposed to paintings and literature etc. There are, as ever, exceptions.

In regards to movies and games, it is tempting to make an argument about the pervasive bogeyman of the boardroom, making financial decisions at the expense of artistic integrity; it is equally easy to remember the fact that anyone with a cheap camera, anyone with a working computer, anyone with a working voice, anyone with a cheap computer tablet, can make art which rivals the work those boardrooms create in both volume and quality.

It seems both of these models are able to exist in tandem, and that naturally leads to the question of when and where they are best applied.

It’s a mostly intuitive question because of course a novel is generally a solitary project and a film requires a huge team to make. Then you have bordering cases like novels with multiple authors and auteur films to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

VII

I should like to close off with some points about criticism.

Critical theory in regards to various movements posits that no one is capable of doing what our ancestors did and that every great man is a cog or an abstraction for a group of people. There is no Socrates. There is no Aristotle. There is no Shakespeare. Etc. Most will be familiar with the Star Wars version of this idea, wherein nothing good about Star Wars is the result of the work of George Lucas. In Herodotus’ account of Marathon the soldiers were positioned 1.6km apart before the battle even started and the Greeks ran at least half that distance in full armour and still won. Modern historians can’t comprehend the idea of people being able to do that because they’re all professional academics who can’t do a five minute km. Thucydides: any society that separates its thinkers and warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

There is no great conspiratorial collusion – or at least there is no evidence of one – it is merely the trend of the day, Critical Theory, that everything be demoralised and deconstructed and exposed for a sham made by boasting ancestors. Sources can lie. But there must logically be an end point to Critical Theory in regards to history at which we throw away the entire lot of it and claim it all to be false and begin again. See: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant.

Criticism of the past had no formula, was a lot more digressive and discursive, and like all older writing seems excessively prone to long-winded distractions to those who aren’t used to that style. But the reason the intelligentsia is filled with people who lack an understanding of the basic concepts that hold up our civilisation nowadays (it is the same reason criticism has lost this hyper-loquacious quality) is that intellectual activity has been made easy by the application of critical theory – and a structured approach to criticism which allows anyone to exploit the formula and emerge with a piece of writing they can call criticism ostensibly in the vein of the old type. However, most of the literature they talk about – it would be wrong to say it wasn’t written with criticism in mind, but more accurate to say that it wasn’t written in expectation of the kind of criticism that ignores the work’s purpose and attacks it based on values the author would never reasonably be expected to have according to their context.

VIII

The better the art, the easier it is to separate it from the artist. Good art escapes Orestes – it is universal. It does not matter if it is made by a large group or one genius.

Seen from one perspective, the work transcends its maker and becomes a universal comment – a society/a film crew can do this with relatively little effort, because so little of it manifests the obviously personal (you don’t have to work as hard on the creative level if you’re a costume designer rather than a writer who has to design an entire project and every aspect of it alone – and in a medium that doesn’t necessarily show anything unless they think of it explicitly).

Seen from the other side, everyone gets attached to revered art and wants a piece ‘for themselves’ – not always in the pecuniary sense but in the sense that they want to feel their interpretation is the most valid. See: again, Star Wars. Speaking of Star Wars, you might say making art is like launching a rocket – if it doesn’t get out of the atmosphere, everyone knows you made it and you take responsibility, and its failings are yours (Rian Johnson) – but when it gets to Mars it’s a human achievement (George Lucas). Its successes belong to everyone.

It’s a scary thing to see a man put his life online and to note that he lives in a room covered wall-to-wall with Star Wars toys. Many people criticise the inevitable overreach of this very general statement and argue that there is no difference between a bust of Beethoven and a Boba Fett helmet. The Avengers is America’s Iliad. Iron Man et al are the new Odysseus, Achilles…

The problem is that examples of ancient or pre-modern culture and modern pop culture are equated when this is a hilariously reductive way to understand both things.

I might as well talk about this now. Perhaps you’ve read the article by some Australian academic arguing that the Iliad and the Avengers are the same. Here is my rebuttal, taking into account everything we’ve gone over:

The Iliad is an intergenerational work of multiple bard-poets, it was composed in multiple dialects, there was no central authority concerning its contents save a general consensus as to the course of history (until Homer).
It is a society, an external work, mediated by society and reflecting it exactly. It is a fundamental text that defined the rules of the civilisation that proceeded from it. Avengers is a creation by a collection of people who wish to define the values of the civilisation which they live alongside, and wish to make money from the people below them. There is no slow development of custom in it – its plot is decided in a boardroom and it is directed from far away. The Avengers is created by the society that it exemplifies. As such, it is Oresteian – inherently incestuous – despite being created by a multitude.
The Iliad demonstrates every kind of social virtue in different places, and every kind of love; its glorification of the heroes is always momentary, always tempered by their selfishness, and by the complete lack of glorification of death; and the Trojans are treated equally sympathetically to the Greeks to the point that hundreds of studies have tried to tell if Homer was Trojan himself; the Avengers is a cut and dry good v evil film about a bunch of pretty people saving the normies from alien bugs – they are always virtuous.

Perhaps this is the true tragedy of Orestes:

As I find myself becoming more like my family, and falling into an Oresteian trap – though thankfully less violent – never escaping my self and my filters which are my self – it becomes clear to me that no book or piece of art will necessarily change me again in as fundamental a way as I have already been changed.