--Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses
Soldiers wait on the coast. Drums no longer beat, their
vigor lost to stillness. The air refuses to breathe life into the warrior’s
sails. No plea will abate its silence. No sacrifice will appease its
indifference. The wind obeys its god. Not like men. Men slay hosts without
abandon. Futures fall to swords of desire. Death hangs across the bows of ships
that will not return from Troy’s shores. And still, men—lusting after blood
born of war—strike down the beasts of Artemis. Her fury matches the brightness
of her brother’s light. She stays the air of glory, accepting no recompense for
her slain treasure. And the Greeks wait. Enticed by promised victory, a
thousand faces look on at dreams unable to launch.
In a vengeance forged by Hephaestus’ flames, Artemis extends
an offer to man’s general, Agamemnon: the winds will blow and the boats will
sail, but only at the price of royal blood. For Agamemnon’s eternal glory to live,
his daughter Iphigenia must die. Honor. Glory. Gold. Women. Immortality. Prizes
for a daughter’s heart. Agamemnon’s nation calls upon him to lead the way. If
he denies them and saves her life, others will overpower him, offering them both to
Artemis. War claims its victims. It will always start at home. A daughter’s
tears will not beat back ambition. Agamemnon’s knife sinks into Iphigenia’s
chest, but it severs the ties of families—Priam’s and his own. Iphigenia’s
blood stains the altar’s stone. The winds blow. Troy falls. Agamemnon gets
everything he ever wanted. What is a daughter’s life to a father’s immortality?
Recently, I have struggled to think of a tragedy greater than
that of Agamemnon at Aulis. Let’s leave aside all of the violence that happened
as a result of Agamemnon’s blood lust: this not only includes the death of most
of Prium’s family in Troy and the rape of most of the city’s women but also the
subsequent murders of Agamemnon, his concubine Cassandra, and his murderers—his
wife Clytemnestra and her lover (his cousin) Aegisthus. Not to mention the death
of Agamemnon’s murderers came at the hand of his children, Orestes and Electra.
The story starts with a father killing his daughter and wraps around to
children killing their mother. But for right now, let’s leave all of that
violence aside. And also, let’s leave aside Helen as the impetus for this great
war. Let’s simply focus on Agamemnon in Aulis. That’s all the tragedy we need.
A great man gathered armies to lay waste to an impenetrable city.
But he gathered no patience to satiate his zealotry, his ambition, and his desire
for blood. A lust for glory seized his senses, his hubris, his daughter, and
his future. Agamemnon had a choice: the nation of Greece or Iphigenia; military
prowess and victory or Iphigenia; the honor and praise of men or Iphigenia;
success on the battlefield of the great world before him or Iphigenia. His precious
daughter—first-born to his house and into his heart—she never stood a chance.
As his child, she offered him a future through the blood she would spill bearing him grandchildren; but he couldn’t wait. He poured her blood upon his
name, sanctifying his immediate desires.
When Euripides told the story, he humanized Agamemnon.
Agamemnon was not a callous warlord. He was not a monster. He lived as
something far more terrifying: a loving
father. Iphigenia gave him joy; her presence evoked smiles and hope. When he
learned of Artemis’ demands, he wept; he cried in pain, racked by the goddess’s
cruelty. But a wrathful and greedy army sat outside his tent. The gathered
forces of Greece’s kingdoms see Troy’s gold and women. Agamemnon knew that refusing
Artemis was not a simple choice; he and Iphigenia could both die to satisfy the
lust, rancor, and ambition which Agamemnon ignited in others when he convinced
them to combine against Troy. For Euripides, Agamemnon had to choose between
his role as a general and his life as a father.
The tragedy rests in his choice. The horror is the myth that
he had no choice. Agamemnon brought his daughter to the place of sacrifice. He
put her in a place of danger. It seems that he had no choice—that they’d both
die if he defied the forces of war—but he chose to live. He sacrifices his
fatherhood for his name to be the one carrying the troops to Troy. Fear might have been present and
it’s important to understand the man, but ultimately fear is a red herring. Agamemnon
loved his daughter, but love was not enough to swallow personal ambition. It is
easier to stomach a soulless tyrant: Hitler, Stalin, Mao—illogical as it might
sound, they make sense to us. Or rather, we can make a sense of them. But Agamemnon,
a loving father who places his beloved daughter on a tainted altar . . . that’s
more troubling. Agamemnon in Aulis: it’s not just tragic, it’s
incomprehensible. It is sin.
Most of how I think about Agamemnon is based on Neil LaBute’s
retelling of the ancient tale in his play Iphigenia
in Orem. This one act monologue features a man recounting, confessing, and
rationalizing the murder of his daughter. The man reveals that a coworker deceived
him as part of a practical joke; the coworker convinced the man that he was going
to lose his job. The man didn’t lose his job, but the false threat combined
with the terror of real debt. The man could not afford his standard of living and his
daughter’s medical bills without his job. The audience slowly learns that the
man suffocated his baby girl in his bed. Forced to choose between material
possessions and fatherhood, LaBute’s Orem-ite sacrificed his daughter. Given
LaBute’s time at BYU and in the “ProvOrem” area, it is a terrifying but a wonderfully scathing commentary on Utah and Mormon culture, specifically a perceived glorification of
capitalistic materialism. When contextualized within an understanding of Mormonism’s
sincere exaltation of the family unit and familial relationships, Iphigenia in Orem’s criticism bears
greater weight—particularly its critique of Mormon culture’s tendency to worship
of wealth.
I think LaBute lacks Euripides’ subtlety—there is no
question that we are to despise the man who suffocates his daughter—however, he
takes the greater challenge of bringing the power of the myth and the
protagonist into our immediate presence. Agamemnon exists as a man above and beyond our daily life; the man in Iphigenia in Orem
is our brother, our neighbor, and each of us. We despise him because he exists
as a manifestation of our worst selves. Very few of us will suffocate our baby
daughters to afford the debt of a new car, a new townhouse, and a new plasma TV. I
doubt many of us will plunge knives into our children so we can have wind to
sail into battle. I don’t even have kids. And yet, I cannot get Agamemnon and
Iphigenia out of my mind. For the past few months, their story has cycled over
and over again in my heart. I have tried to understand why this violent myth
has grabbed me so much, why it has haunted me.
About a year ago—perhaps a little more than that now—I sat patiently
in my apartment’s living room with two of my roommates as two more young men about
our age administered to us spiritually. They were our hometeachers. For anyone
unfamiliar with the hometeaching program in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, there is neither a paid nor a trained clergy in the church. All positions of
ecclesiastical authority are held by members of the laity. There’s a nice
democratic and communal ideal to the organization but it does necessitate a distribution
of spiritual duties since there is no individual or collective tasked with
caring for any particular congregation as their sole job. Hometeaching is one
manifestation of how the institution maintains an ecclesiastical laity while
spreading out work. Generally, pairs of men are assigned different individuals
and families they are responsible for visiting and helping. Ideally, once a
month the pair will visit and impart a spiritual lesson designed to uplift
those committed to their stewardship. This was one such meeting. A meeting I
cannot look back on without laughing.
Bless my hometeachers’ hearts, they really wanted to
encourage the three of us in our individual and variant lives. With a prepared
lesson in hand, they executed their plan to share scriptures, their
testimonies, and heartfelt convictions about God caring about the many and important
things occupying our time and attention. But there was a dynamic in the room
that did not make the lesson exactly work in my favor. See, it was a couple of
weeks before one of my two roommates was getting married. So throughout the
visit he talked about the excitement and stresses involved with the life-altering event that is a wedding. My other roommate took time from
packing to visit with the hometeachers. He was moving out of our apartment to
begin an internship with a US Senator from Nebraska. This was after he had
returned from his internship in Belgium with an organization associated with
the European Union.
And then there was me. At that point of my life, every
waking hour was spent either on my masters thesis or the theater history class
I was teaching. Friends did not see me. For the better part of six weeks, I
left the apartment every day around 8 AM and usually returned at about 11 PM or
midnight. The Subway franchise on
campus and I grew very close that term. I did not feel like I had the time to
sit and listen to my hometeachers talk about faith or happiness or Jesus. But
they wanted to come over and they set up an appointment. I figured that if I did not
feel like I had the time, then I needed the break; I needed to listen to their short message and it would do
me good. If you can't make time for Jesus, well . . . that's not a good sign.
Oh, and how I listened. During the lesson, one dear hometeacher
attempted to relate how what he was saying about Christ and the gospel related
to each of us. I heard him say that God cares about what’s going on in our
lives and what challenges we’re facing, “whether that applies to challenges
that come up with getting or being married, or moving to a new place and having
new responsibilities, or work. I did not quite notice how I had been framed
into this litany until the young man repeated the application again as he ended
the lesson with a prayer and a blessing upon each of us. He asked that God
would help my first roommate with the new and exciting adventures that come
with marriage. He asked that God would help my second roommate with the new and
exciting adventures that come with being in a new place with exciting
opportunities. And then he called down the Heavens to bless me: he asked that God
would bless Allan . . . and his work.
It was in that moment, in the enunciation of the prayer and
propitiation that I glimpsed the pattern. I recalled how he had made sense of
our lives earlier in the lesson. I saw how people around me were embarking on
new adventures in marriage and great internship opportunities. And then, I was
the guy blessed . . . in work. I choked back a chuckle as he continued on. We all
shook hands and they left. I ventured back to my room and proceeded to laugh. I
realized that I AM that guy. I am that guy who has nothing else to bless in his
life but his work. I am that guy that people see as a person successful at
their work, but that there’s not really anything else you can pray about for
them. Almost every time I tell people about this, they laugh. Rightfully
so. There is something incredibly
pathetic about becoming so terribly cliché. And there’s something so ironic
about seeing your life reflected in such a belittling mirror while someone is
praying for your capacity to find success. There’s something inexplicably
crushing about such little words: please bless Allan and his . . . work.
It’s as though we’re all searching for something else in
that gap, in between those little ellipses. “Is there anything else to bless this guy
in?” No. Okay. Odd thing about it is that I am. That is, I am incredibly blessed in my work. I wrote a kick-ass
thesis about Hell Houses. I am a damn good teacher of theater history—very
edu-taining and I know both history and theater backwards and forwards. Every time I
taught, I had excellent TAs. I even got to co-teach the class that changed the
course of my life with the teacher who changed my life. Not only did I go to
London to study theater for six weeks, but I received funding to pay for the
program and because I was the TA got paid while I was practically on vacation.
I co-created an amazing production of Romeo
and Juliet with some of my favorite people in this world and with one of my
best friends in this life.
I was accepted into a great PhD program. I am studying
theater history and performance studies right outside of Washington D.C., where
I don’t have to pay tuition and I get a stipend for being a teaching assistant.
My first year I was on a fellowship so I was effectively paid to study there—I didn’t
have to work at all. I completed two degrees at BYU without any student debt. I
have never taken out a loan. I have an amazing credit rating because my funding
at BYU allowed me to purchase all sorts of plane tickets on my credit card so I
could go to conferences and Hell Houses around the country. I hold leadership
positions in a number of graduate student groups, both in my department and in
national organizations. For the next four years, I will be in a position to
either continue as a teaching assistant or be a teacher of my own class again.
And I have this time to conduct research into whatever topic I want to advance.
I am indeed blessed in my work.
And yet, I look at my labors and I can’t help but wonder
what Iphigenias I’ve sacrificed these years. To stay out of debt, to retain my
scholarship, I had to maintain a 3.92 GPA. There was no room for error. I stayed home studying and working, passing on road trips and adventures of college life. In a
matter of years, I have grown greatly in intellect and confidence. And I say
that I don’t think I would give that up for anything in the world. But there
are moments that I am concerned by just how true that statement might be.
In a matter of weeks, perhaps the best friend I have ever had in this life is
about to marry a wonderful woman. We have other friends (particularly the
organizers of this blog) who—individually and as a couple—I hold in similar
esteem. By virtue of their existence rather than any manner of proud or
self-aggrandizing declarations, these friends boast the type of relationships I
deeply envy and wish to have in my life. In passing thoughts, I wonder if I
lack their blessings because I keep returning to Aulis. I stand ready to drain
the blood of possibility into the life of my name. Recurring and frequent as the
thoughts might be, though, they tend not to endure interrogation. Quite
frankly, I do not believe that I have ever passed on a relationship that might
have been because I overworked myself. I like to think more positively that
while my life has not known the joy of love and family I have always wanted, I
have known strength in myself and the success that, for now, is serving as mysubstitute for love.
Perhaps I see Iphigenia as my faith. I might wonder if I
walk the cliché path of forsaking testimony and spiritual might for victory in
academia. But the circles of academia I engage with, while critical of faith
and religion, are not necessarily hostile. I have trouble with hearing how there
is great animosity harbored by institutions of liberal education and religion,
not because there are not instances of that (I’m not naïve), but because I
instead see how much such educational institutions have sought to address their
errors and faults. My faith is not what it once was, but I see it as matured by
learning. At times I doubt that I would have remained a member of my faith tradition were it not for my education that allowed me complicate or challenge my own frustrations or faulty premises regarding the church. I think I could
consider my faith and my career as apt to this metaphor, but because the winds
gave life to a reincarnation of my faith, it’s hard to draw the parallel
completely. So I suppose that I am not entirely convinced that there is any
easily identifiable Iphigenias on my altars right now. And yet . . . I cannot
shake how much Agamemnon haunts me. He is a companion at this time, occupying
my thoughts and calling my life into relief.
Where is my Aulis? Who is my Iphigenia? What is the wind in my
sails? What Troy do I seek?
