A Satyr Play
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Description
Aeschylus’s Oresteia has fascinated legal theorists. And if there is one quirk of Jerry Bruner’s that makes him who he is, it is Jerry’s capacity to find fascination in everything. Unsurprisingly, The Oresteia has long captured Jerry’s imagination. In many of the meetings that preceded every class we taught together, he and I mused about what meaning we might make of the Aeschylean trilogy. We started from Kenneth Burke’s twin observations—one trite, one incisive—that “the great Greek tragedies were devices for treating of civic tensions . . . and for contributing to social amity by ritual devices for resolving such tensions,” and that when the social “network of expectancies and fulfilments . . . [is] summed up dramatically . . . [and] converted into the fullness of tragedy, . . . an almost terrifying thoroughness of human honesty is demanded of us, as audience.” Thoroughness drove us beyond the traditional view that The Oresteia celebrates the victory of the Rule of Law, rationally administered by courts of justice, over an eldritch regime of ever-recycling blood vengeance. But we balked at the opposing view that this supposedly civilizing victory was hypocritical and hollow: —that “Aeschylus por trays a cosmic and political order which is neither moral nor just, but rather tyrannical, in the sense that its ultimate foundations are force and fear.” Mondays and Wednesdays we saw the arc of the trilogy as ascending from the compelling savagery of the first play, Agamemnon, to the triumph of the Rule of Law in the third play, The Eumenides. Tuesdays and Thursdays we saw the arc as descending from Agamemnon’s raw, unflinching struggle of creatures trapped in the contradictions of the human condition into the The Eumenides’s conscience-drugging “dramatized legalism” and “ingenious hagglings.” Fridays we usually disagreed. The opportunity to try again to persuade my dearest friend and colleague of my [latest] reading of the mystery is irresistible. So, Jerry, here is that lost satyr play with which the Oresteia ends . . .
Source Publication
Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities
Source Editors/Authors
Giuseppina Marsico
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Amsterdam, Anthony G., "A Satyr Play" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 1119.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1119
