Books: Return of the Furies

THE WAY TO COLONOS (156 pp.)—Kay Clcellls—Grove ($1.95).

Who but a Greek has a better right to raid Greek tragedy? Kay Cicellis (Ten Seconds from Now), a Greek who writes the kind of English most English writers might envy (she learned the language as a child), rifles not so much the stories as the emotional climate of Sophocles. Her stories have modern settings, and the characters have none of the outer dignity and exalted station that were theirs on the ancient Greek stage. But the author proves brilliantly that heart and character can still forge chains as shackling as those of 23 centuries ago.

The title story is linked to the original. Oedipus at Colonos, mostly through the image of an old. maimed man living in the care of his daughter. A disabling illness has put the father in a wheelchair—embittered, suspicious, and nursing a hatred for his schoolteacher wife, who contemptuously doles out his spending money. Daughter Antigone lives in a tight, self-woven net of deceit. She has retained the original name and relentless sense of justice of her counterpart in Sophocles’ Antigone, but not her virtue, purity or innocence. She takes on a married man as a lover, but for both of them the fun of the game lies in deceiving their families. When the mother dies in an accident. her husband is sure that the blame lies with him. Antigone, without compassion. is drawn to her father for the first time in her life through a common sense of guilt, devotes herself to him coldly and deliberately in what is clearly going to be a life of poverty and possible tragedy.

Come Back, Orestes. Young Orestes, in The Return, is not the man his Sophoclean namesake was. Unlike Clytemnestra. his mother has not killed her husband; she has merely taken up with a fake faith healer while her soldier-husband is missing in war. Her house has become a near-brothel and a hangout for all sorts of scurvy types. To Eugenia, the latter-day Electra, hating her mother’s vulgarity and unfaithfulness, life is agony. Their violent quarrels have become a way of life, to be ended, Eugenia believes, only when Brother Orestes comes back from the university to set things right. When he does show up, he is seen to be a cool, antiseptic young man who is more than a bit of a prig and utterly lacking his sister’s sense of duty and fatality. He too hates what is happening in his father’s house; but killing his mother, as his sister suggests, is the last, thing he intends.

When it comes to making a choice between her mother and brother, Eugenia chooses the mother. Rather a despised parent on whom she can exercise her hatred than a brother who. by her passionate standards, is not a man. “I followed a kind of hunch, an instinctive, obsessive feeling,” says Author Cicellis, ”that Orestes was reluctant to exercise vengeance, not really interested, and that Electra was much closer to her mother than she thought.”

Hercules Replaced. The third story. The Exile, follows the plot outline of the original. Philoctetes, while discarding the names and reshaping the characters and the symbols—a guerrilla war substitutes for the Trojan War. the secret papers of a dead chief replace the bow of Hercules. The central conflict is played out by a young guerrilla fighter who is sent to a distant island to try to persuade an exiled leader to escape and return to the wars.

To the 19-year-old. the older man is a hero, a near-mythical character pressed from the rarest mold. But in the ultimate test, he turns out to be only human, and quite ready to bow to a tough opportunist. To the boy. the blow of disillusionment is shattering—and the impact on the reader is just as powerful.

All of these modern near-tragedies could easily have been stretched into novels and good ones. Author Cicellis has chosen to contract her drama to excellent effect. What saves her from the existentialist, fatalist-futile school is largeness of heart and a glowing style. If her people are the losers of the world, they are dressed in a human dignity of her making. They may be involved in sordid little incidents, but they are also touched by tragedy, as when the modern Antigone reflects on her father: ”The guilty mess would be burnt clean, cleared of pity. She would spare him nothing. She would lead him to her own complete despair, to the place of rest which was at the same time the place where the Furies live.”