Nobody liked to fiddle with Greek myths more than the Greeks did. Take, for example, one of the best-known tales from the vast web of stories that circulated about the Trojan War: Agamemnon, the victorious Greek general, comes home to his kingdom after ten years only to be murdered by his queen, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus—a crime later avenged by the dead king’s children. In Homer’s Odyssey, composed around 750 B.C., the main villain is Aegisthus, a cad who seduces the weak-willed Clytemnestra and then ambushes the recently returned king and his retainers at a feast, slaughtering them in a grotesque parody of a real battle, the bodies lying among the scattered crockery. (Aegisthus may have had his reasons: according to some, his two brothers were murdered by Agamemnon’s father and served up to their own father at a feast, baked in a pie.)
Three centuries later, Clytemnestra took center stage—literally. In the first part of the Oresteia (458 B.C.), a trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus, the queen fulsomely welcomes her husband home from Troy; then she lures him into a bathtub and hacks him and his Trojan concubine to death. Unlike Homer, Aeschylus gave Clytemnestra a powerful motivation for her treachery. At the beginning of the play, the chorus recalls how, at the outset of the Trojan War, Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia, in order to propitiate an angry god and win fair winds for his fleet to sail to Troy.
The Oresteia established a more or less canonical version of the events that rippled outward from these retributive homicides. In the second play of the trilogy, the couple’s two surviving children, Orestes and Electra, are reunited as adults after a long separation and then scheme to murder their mother and her lover. (In a scene that came to embarrass later dramatists, Electra is persuaded that her brother has returned after she discovers a footprint and a lock of hair at their father’s tomb—which, she concludes, must belong to her long-lost brother because the footprint is the same size as hers and the hair is similar.) The third play features Western literature’s first courtroom drama: Orestes, pursued by the vengeful Furies for the murder of Clytemnestra, is put on trial for matricide but is eventually acquitted—in part because his defense lawyer, who happens to be the god Apollo, argues that matricide isn’t such a big deal since, after all, the man is the only “true parent,” and the woman merely “nurses the seed.” No wonder scholarly studies of this work have such titles as “The Dynamics of Misogyny.”
Over the next half-century, playwrights teased out the implications of the story’s irresistibly schematic pairings and oppositions: between justice and vengeance, male and female, parents and children, free will and fate, the claims of family feeling and the exigencies of state policy. Sophocles wrote an “Electra” whose heroine is a counterpart to his Antigone—a fierce virgin who defies convention in her obsessive quest to avenge family wrongs. As time passed, a note of irreverence crept in: in Euripides’ “Electra,” Aeschylus’ grim moralizing and Sophocles’ agonized psychologizing have been edged aside by an almost postmodern willingness to poke fun at literary models. In this version, Electra refuses to believe that the lock of hair discovered at her father’s tomb belongs to Orestes since, as she exasperatedly points out, siblings don’t necessarily have identical hair. In the same playwright’s “Orestes,” produced in 408 B.C., shortly before he died, the siblings, awaiting execution after their trial for matricide, hatch a plan that, for sheer ad-hoc nuttiness, would give the villains in “Fargo” a run for their money. Enraged by their dilemma, they plot to murder Helen of Troy (Clytemnestra’s sister), hold her innocent daughter hostage (they nab her after she goes to offer a lock of hair at a tomb), and torch the royal palace. “Set the parapets ablaze!” Orestes cries at the play’s climax, and it’s hard not to feel that that’s pretty much what the play is doing to the mythic tradition.
Many scholars have seen in these fantastical riffs on the ancient tale a sign that the genre of tragedy had exhausted itself. The Princeton classicist Froma I. Zeitlin suggests that, by the time Euripides wrote “Orestes,” he had diverged so extravagantly from myth (“the relatively closed and predetermined form”) that he ended up straying into a genre that hadn’t been invented yet: what we call fiction (“the mode of new possibilities marked by a receptivity to experimentation and change”).
And yet, although authors working in a number of genres have revisited the plots and characters of Greek tragedy—from Ovid’s playful verse epic Metamorphoses, in the first century A.D., to “Mourning Becomes Electra,” Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 updating of the Oresteia narrative to the Civil War era—the genre has tended to resist novelistic adaptation. Epic, by contrast, has proved a rich source of temptation for novelists: recent attempts include works as diverse as David Malouf’s “Ransom,” which finds space in a climactic scene from the Iliad to explore themes of mortality, forgiveness, and, indeed, novelistic originality (in it, the Trojan king, Priam, wonders whether he can break out of his usual role and think of something new to do); Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” a feminist retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’ queen and her twelve maids; and Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles,” a breathless reimagining of the relationship between the Iliad’s Achilles and his companion, Patroclus.
But whereas the weave of epic is loose, leaving spaces for expansion and adaptation, the tragedies—many of which, we should remember, were themselves adaptations of episodes from epic—are highly compressed, almost hermetic. The contemporary mainstream novel, which is realistic in technique and concerned, more often than not, with the lives and psychologies of ordinary people, doesn’t seem an ideal vessel for tragedy, with its stiffly operatic formal conventions, its grandiose royal protagonists, and its plots inflected by the supernatural. And, as “House of Names” (Scribner), a new novel by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, suggests, the Oresteia narrative in particular—precisely because it has already been endlessly reimagined, reworked, expanded, and adapted—poses special problems for even the most inventive and subtle writers.
Like his ancient predecessors, Tóibín wants both to enhance and to interrogate a much told tale. A nice touch is that, in “House of Names,” Clytemnestra and Electra each get to tell their own stories: chapters devoted to their first-person narratives of the familiar events alternate with sections about Orestes’ adventures. The Orestes story is related in the third person, a device that deprives the eponymous hero of Aeschylus’ trilogy of his own voice—the author’s sly riposte, perhaps, to the fact that in so many Greek myths women’s concerns, like their bodies, are subordinated to those of men.
Still, at the beginning of the novel, events hew so closely to the Greek originals that you may wonder why the author has bothered to retell this old tale at all. The first section consists of Clytemnestra’s bitter account of the events leading up to Iphigenia’s sacrifice, lingering on how Agamemnon tricked her into bringing their daughter to the port of Aulis, where the Greek fleet had gathered, on the pretext that she was to be married to Achilles. This version of the story is lifted more or less intact from one of Euripides’ final plays, “Iphigenia in Aulis.”
But before long a number of additions, omissions, and tweaks to the Greek versions make it clear that Tóibín is just as comfortable playing around with the traditional narrative as Euripides was. In “Iphigenia at Aulis,” Clytemnestra begs Agamemnon to stop the sacrifice, an act that, she knows, will turn her into a murderess. But what, you always wondered, went on between the husband and wife just after the horrific ritual was performed? Tóibín ingeniously fills in the gap. His Clytemnestra doesn’t witness her daughter’s sacrifice, because Agamemnon has his wife thrown into a hole in the ground for a few days, just to let her know who’s in charge—and to prevent her from using her dark female magic to foil his plans. When she emerges, she’s feral, starving, covered in her own waste. In the Oresteia, after Clytemnestra has slaughtered her husband and his concubine, she exults over the bodies in a speech notorious for its unhinged grisliness (among other things, she compares the blood in which she’s drenched to a nourishing rain). Tóibín vividly enhances our sense of what unhinged her.
Tóibín has also mastered Euripides’ tart literary allusiveness. Like the Greek playwright, he includes a rather sour recognition scene in his story:
You imagine that, when Euripides’ audience first saw “Electra” and got to the part where the heroine irritably observes that siblings don’t have identical hair, people chuckled—they recognized the (perhaps fond) jab at the archaic credulity of Aeschylus’ recognition scene. But in his riff on the scene Tóibín out-Euripideses Euripides. Here the youth who’s come home after a long absence and has to prove his identity to his sister isn’t Orestes but a made-up character called Leander, Orestes’ best friend and sometime lover. (The two men, we learn, met as children, when they were imprisoned on Aegisthus’ orders, soon after Agamemnon’s murder, in a kind of Mycenaean reform school. This episode, as well as the boys’ subsequent adventures after they escape, is an invention that satisfyingly fills in another awkward gap—what Orestes was up to between the sacrifice of his sister and his reappearance as a young adult bent on vengeance.) Tóibín’s simultaneous allusion to and sidestepping of the older myths, his lithe entwining of mimicry and innovation, give his novel a very Euripidean feel.
But Tóibín is interested in more than mere literary gamesmanship. In an article for the Guardian earlier this year, he described why he finds the old myth still relevant. The sectarian violence in Ireland during his youth, he wrote, seemed to him a perfect parallel to the retributive horrors described by Aeschylus in the Oresteia: “For any student of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, no event was isolated. Each murder or set of murders seemed to have been inspired by a previous one, each atrocity appeared to be in retaliation for something that had occurred the week before.” Another thing that he wanted to explore, he went on, was a paradox all too familiar from Ireland’s and, indeed, the world’s troubles: how otherwise ordinary people become agents of atrocity. He cited Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syria’s President, as an example, and something of her, perhaps, finds its way into Tóibín’s portrayal of Clytemnestra. Here she is both a mother fretting about her children—she’s much more sympathetic to Orestes and Electra than her character is in the Greek plays—and a queen who doesn’t ask too many questions when it turns out that Aegisthus is keeping the rebellious nobles in line by holding their young sons and grandsons hostage.
But, however ambitious its themes and refined its literary allusiveness, “House of Names” never quite comes to life. Part of the problem is, predictably, technical. The diction, as so often in modern attempts to render ancient voices, wobbles between being strenuously high (“the place where my memory lives is a shadowy, ambiguous place, comforted by soft, eroding edges”) and, sometimes, jarringly banal (“Once he learned that I was preparing to murder my husband, Aegisthus became serious”). And while Tóibín has evidently immersed himself in the tragic texts, there’s something fuzzy and unpersuasive about the ambience in which his legendary characters operate—as if he’d pored over Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” but never thought to pick up “Everyday Life in Ancient Greece.” With its cold baths and inscrutable “points” system, the juvie where young Orestes and Leander are incarcerated feels suspiciously like a Catholic reform school; and you don’t need to be a classicist to feel that something’s off when Tóibín’s Bronze Age warriors tap on “windows,” wear “shirts,” and tipple “drinks” from “glasses” as if they were extras in “Mad Men.”
We are very far here from the firm grasp of atmosphere and setting and regional habits of mind that gives such immediacy and verisimilitude to Tóibín’s novels of modern Ireland—and, for that matter, to novels where his project, as with “House of Names,” is to bring legends to life. A longtime intimacy with Catholicism, its theology and history, makes itself felt on every page of “The Testament of Mary” (2012), his wittily revisionist novel about the Virgin in old age looking back on her life. (Tóibín’s Mary is a bemused Jewish mother who doesn’t understand why her son runs around with a bunch of losers, spouting incomprehensible nonsense. “I disliked weddings,” she grumbles, recalling the trip to Cana.) “The Master” (2004), a subtle evocation of the inner life of a literary legend—Henry James—is a remarkable fusion of meticulous research and sympathetic imagination. The Greeks were just as complex and distinctive as James was, and as the Irish are, but those qualities don’t make themselves felt in the new book.
One culturally distinctive element that Tóibín, like many modernizers of Greek myth, jettisons altogether is religion. It’s not hard to see why: if you can blame your matricide on Apollo (who, in Aeschylus, commands Orestes to kill Clytemnestra), there’s not much room for the kind of inner psychological texture that the novel is so good at rendering. In “House of Names,” the Olympian gods are absent from the action, and the resulting atmosphere of atheism can give the book a crisp, modern edge. (“If the gods really cared,” Tóibín’s derisive Clytemnestra mutters, “they would take pity and quickly change the wind over the sea.”) But the danger of stripping away considerations of fate and divine justice and human agency is that you can lose the very things that make Greek tragedy’s grapplings with the legendary past so urgent; without them, all you’ve got is dysfunctional family dramas. If you’ve always wondered why Electra sided so fiercely with her father and loathed her mother (who, after all, committed her crime to avenge the girl’s murdered sister), it’s unlikely that you’ll find a satisfying explanation here. “Maybe I should have stayed up through the night taking her into my confidence,” Clytemnestra muses—a sentiment that smacks more of “All My Children” than of “Medea.”
And so “House of Names” falls between two horses. On the one hand, the author wants to use myth, with its strong archetypal patterns (“vengeance begets vengeance”), to illustrate his political point; on the other, he wants to demythologize myth, cutting its heroic characters down to modern size, giving them recognizable psychologies and more or less normal motivations. But you can’t have your ambrosia and eat it, too. When your tale begins with a human sacrifice, it’s probably safe to say that you’ve left “normal” and “recognizable” far behind. The Greeks themselves understood this: even in the most tawdrily revisionist adaptations—such as Euripides’ “Orestes,” the play in which Aeschylus’ high-minded Orestes and anguished Electra have become no more than a pair of young thugs—the gods and their plots and plans loom large.
The vexing problem of how to balance allegory and realism is one that Tóibín seems to be uncomfortably aware of. At one point during their adolescent escapades, Orestes and Leander and another boy escape from prison and spend several years hiding out in a remote steading—the House of Names—with a spooky old woman and her dogs. The name of this house is meant to be ironic. Over the years, the old woman tells the boys lots of stories: about girls who are ravished by figures who seem to be animals, about mothers who try to murder their children, about men who go to war over a woman’s beauty. These, of course, are the bones of many Greek myths—the primal narratives that Tóibín is so attracted to. The irony is that the old woman is vague about the names of characters and other particulars. She keeps forgetting them, as do the young men to whom she tries to teach all this lore: “He recounted what she had said, trying to remember the exact words, stopping in the same way she did when he came to some of the details.”
You suspect that Tóibín is making a point about the power and adaptability of myth itself: how we continue to see ourselves in it even as we blur or alter the details. But details matter. In the end, the House of Names, at once allusive and blank, seems all too apt a symbol for the novel that shares its mysterious name. ♦
