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[hauntmethen]

#i always think about what Anne Carson said#that Cassandra is saying 'my Apollo' and 'my destroyer' with the same words (via @amourduloup)

Rober Fagles mentions something similar in his introduction:

[rape m]

Cassandra breaks her silence with a scream that turns the house of Atreus into an echoing torture-chamber - a scream for Apollo, the god of enlightenment and prophecy, that makes his very name Destruction. And through his seer there flows - in language that could be clear only to ‘those who know’ - a pageant of disaster. The collective, curse-ridden past of the house is streaming into Thyestes’ murdered children, streaming into the murder of Agamemnon, streaming into the murder of Cassandra, into Argos are streaming all the murders done at Troy. At the core of her vision stands the king’s death, and each event that rushes towards it rises in stylistic violence, from the floating wreckage of the house, ‘kinsmen/torturing kinsmen, severed heads’, to a tableau vivant surfacing into the light like ghosts from a cavern half seen, half moving, ‘babies/wailing ... their flesh charred, the father gorging on their parts’, then to the murder of Agamemnon breaking out of the swirling mists of prophecy, breaking off in horror - Cassandra’s outcries stabbing into the darkness like the wounds that pierce the king. Apollo’s vision is a crescendo of shattering impressions. For all its seeming order of events, each stands out in isolation, unrelated in human terms, unmotivated, unbearable. Through the eyes of Apollo, history is a chronic nightmare, and Cassandra is at the mercy of the god, forced to endure his piling impositions. Her vision breaks apart. She is wrenched from Agamemnon’s death to prophesy her own. And although she subsides into an elegy, her suffering only grows. First Apollo exploits her as his medium, then he destroys her, ‘treads [her] down’ - his service is a rape.

Of course, the curse of prophecy is a consequence of her refusal to consent to his embrace and a re-violation of her bodily autonomy. Cassandra's words are not entirely her own (contrasted by Clytemnestra whose language is sharply directed at others). Her experience is that of being given language, a voice to violence & whilst not being believed.

(cross-posted from Tumblr - excuse the possibly rough wording, it was meant as a reply to a friend)