Weighty Tomes - the Tragedy of Electra
For the past few months my go-to bedtime reading was the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. As part of my decades-long quest to slay the demons from my misspent youth, ploughing through this weighty tome has been on my to-do list for quite some time, and I’m pleased to say that I’m finally through with it, and have moved on to books that are much lighter (Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, at the moment). However it was an moderately-good cure for insomnia, and even good exercise - the book was so heavy that my wrist muscles seem stronger just from holding it all every night for months on end.
But as much as I did not enjoy the book, I did learn a lot from it. And one of the things that I am learnt is just how important the literature of ancient Greece (be it poetry, prose, or drama) is to the entire canon of Western literature. Basically, everything we write today is built off of the writing of the Greeks, or more accurately the misinterpretation of the writing of the Greeks, by basically everyone who ever read ancient Greek.
It’s helped explain, I think, why I found this production of Electra so relatable. At first I thought it was just due to a quality translation, but perhaps it is due to the connection between the literature of Euripides and the literature in my high school and university English classes. There is a connection, not in structure (Greek tragedy doesn’t follow modern story structure) but in the feeling, the tone, the style. Electra feels like a real woman to me; her pain, her sadness, her righteous indignation, even her bloodlust. I know her. I know thousands of protagonists like her, flawed-but-indomitable.
So much of this play is visual - you’ll have to come and see it in person to truly get a sense of who Electra is, and why her story matters so much. But I think it’s comforting to know we all have a pretty good place from which to start when it comes to unpacking this most profound of tragic stories.
Comments