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standing the present: "In the century of Orestes and Elektra that's rising, Oedipus will be a comedy."13 |
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The Elektra by Sophokles can be better understood if read against modern times and in particular against the opera by Strauss and Hofmannsthal; this Medusa is best apprehended in the reflection afforded us by the later version. Critical theory shows that the Nachleben of a work in its own way creates a new work which is not only a unique work of art for its own time, but allows a critical reevaluation of the ancient work. This complicated history of revival and recreation is traced, for instance, in the first chapter of George Steiner's Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought, besides being the prominent theme of my Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible and Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage.14 |
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Teilhard de Chardin said, "The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed." The Heisenberg principle also shows how the observer can alter the observed in the act of observing. This applies to later interpretations of the classics. There is no longer a Sophoklean Elektra per se, but rather a complex configuration that is a cultural lightning rod for the time, country and creator that choose to recreate it. |
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I shall try to sort out some of the strands and show how Sophokles and Strauss/Hofmannsthal set up a dialectic between past and present that helps mutual definition. In both Elektra manifests a heroism and concern for the genos (clan) which sets up a rich resonance for understanding our own times. |
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I think Sophokles' Elektra is a valid heroine in her own right, dominated only by her own passionate choices. She kills in the service of freedom and in Strauss's version freely dances to death at the climax of her career. In this opera she, like Achilles, prefers a short life with glory to a long life of no consequence. She escapes the agony of life, following her Sophoklean precedent: "I see the dead do not suffer" (El. 1170). Sophokles in his Oidipous at Kolonos also has his chorus comment on the inadvisability of an overlong life, quoting a maxim frequently used to illustrate Greek pessimism: |
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Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.15 |
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13 Müller (1984) 29. |
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14 See Steiner (1984) and McDonald (1983 and 1991). |
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15 Translation in Yeats (1940) 223. |
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