Klytaimnestra, Who Stayed at Home [Paperback]

Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home is a work of passionate intelligence and consummate learning. It is also a work of challenging, even radical, originality, both intellectually and formally, Hence it does not readily lend itself to traditional and familiar aesthetic criteria. One helpful way of approaching it, however, is to place it in the context of heroic poetry....What makes it heroic is not simply its traditional heroic material but also its literary strategies: like other writers who have operated either wholly or partially in the heroic tradition, Bogen has the aspiration to present a great work on a great subject and, in so doing, to overgo her predecessors in that subject. Bogen is the poet as agonistes, that is, a wrestler with both the form and meaning of her intellectual and imaginative inheritance. Paradox-ically, in this she is really at one with the greatest tradition of Western literature, for the heroic poet and poem have traditionally existed in an ambivalent relationship to their past. The greatest heroic works have manifested an awe before the past; but they have also desired to overgo, to reinterpret and reshape, the past. This is the way of Virgil, of Dante, of Tasso, of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Joyce; and it is the way, too, of Bogen and Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home. Indeed, much of what makes this work, like its predecessors, so emotionally and intellectually compelling is its author's own struggle with the past. As this work reflects the intense self-consciousness that one associates especially with modernist reshapings of works of the Greek past, especially tragedy, it observes the unities, as Aristotle had said a tragedy should; it is structured in three unequal sections;...and the unfolding of the action parallels Oedipus the King as Aristotle described it. As we read the work, however, we rapidly discover that...tragedy is only one of the classical forms informing and being reformed by the work....What this work presents us with, then, is a complex composite of all major forms of Greek literature...contained within a form that is the chief modern, post-classical invention, the novel. And yet, while the work is a novel, in an important sense it is...also...genus mixtus, a mixed kind or genre. The result is...a new form. Hence, to evaluate the work strictly and solely in terms of novelistic criteria is to fail to meet the refreshing intellectual and formal demands this work and form makes of us. Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home ultimately progresses from a critique of inherited literary forms, the novel included, to a mixed modality that transcends the old forms it has explored and redefined. As I suggested earlier, most works participating in the heroic tradition (itself, I should add, the ultimate precursor of Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home's ostensible form, the novel) are a critique of the tradition. Thus Virgil reworks both the form of the heroic poem and also its substance, rethinking the whole Homeric notion of what a hero truly is and what a heroic poem should be. So does Milton,... So, too Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home. Looming large in the work is a critique of the classical inheritance, both its forms and its contents. The limits of inherited literary forms are chiefly seen in parody--of heroic narrative techniques or Aristotelian criteria of tragic narrative structure, for instance. Along with this, there is pervasive stylistic parody; the style harps on certain words and particular colors, as a result parodying the formulaic quality of Homeric language. This...has a very serious end, for Bogen is using the limits of classical forms to suggest the limits of the ideas they embodied: while many of us have forgotten the ancient forms, we are still holding on to the ancient ideas. Bogen asks us to re-examine the sources of our thinking on a number of issues. For example, like Milton and Virgil before her, she asks: what does it really mean to be called a hero?...Hence she turns to Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey..., and presents him as a thorough-going scoundrel. Each Homeric detail regarding him is considered with a woman's eye and rejected;... Out of brutes and scoundrels Homer has made heroes; the material of the epic is a lie, a cheat, sung by the poet-liar to drunken egoists. It is a male fiction created by and for the male; the masculine imagination is literally the imagination of the masculine. Throughout Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home, the critique of classical culture is made through the off-kilter, even mad, sexual relationships between man and woman, the most searching of which is that of Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos. Bogen attempts to deconstruct the inherited masculine version of Klytaimnestra.... It is thus fitting, in the work's own terms, that their narrative should conclude with their taking hands in perfect accord....The conclusion of Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home is thus the culmination of its rethinking of inherited forms and ideas, as it is in Paradise Lost, which ends with the same image. The heroic poem, after all, will ordinarily conclude with male violence in a male-oriented world and/or with the return to or recovery of a city that is a particular culture's symbol. Tragic endings are somewhat similar;...Bogen's refusal to adopt this ending points to her work's refusal,...to embrace the underlying masculine assumptions behind the genres she's working with. For although the two characters face a grim destiny, their holding on to their love is probably the most notable example of true heroism in the entire work. It is saying "no" and "yes" to all the things "no" and "yes" need to be said to. The anger that has motivated this book's demystification of its own generic and thematic inheritance is thus ultimately an anger designed not merely to destroy something as to preserve what is truly strongest and best in us.