So, I have a habit of hoarding PC Giant Episodes for long drives, road trips, that kind of thing. I really love getting into a long story when I've got no other distractions and no interruptions. Now for some reason or other, this episode has languished at the bottom of my queue for over a year now. I usually prioritize older episodes but somehow this one just got skipped or something.
Anyway, as a result, I just heard this episode for the first time a couple weeks ago, and wow. I couldn't get it out of my head, and listened to it again, in all its Giant Episode glory. My husband heard it too, and *he* couldn't get it out of his head either. It's gone straight to the top of my internal Best Stories I've Ever Heard, Ever list.
So I was surprised to see so little discussion on its story thread. Therefore, I'm necrothreading this sucker to give this story the wordy analysis it deserves.
What really made this story stand out to me was how its very structure reflects the theme, and how careful and consistent Rachel Swirsky is in its construction throughout. For example, early on, Iphigenia loses the word for "flower", and for the rest of the story she never uses this word (it's most apparent in the way she marvels over the nice-smelling decorations woven into her hair for her wedding--they're flowers, but having forgotten about flowers, she takes a childlike delight in them as if seeing them for the first time)
In fact, her disintegrating memory creates a telescoping effect through the whole thing. As she loses more memories, she dwells more and more obsessively on the ones remaining to her, and they by extension become symbols of what is happening to her in the present, as she is being led to her death. By the end of the story, all the walls between past and present have been broken down and flow together, so that you get a collage effect of all the symbols and motifs that have been gradually popping up throughout. It's just brilliant.
And that gradual paring away of her memory down to just a few iconic images is what allows Iphigenia to finally see what's so morally screwed up about the whole situation. The scenes involving Helen showcase this perfectly. At first she's a proud, cold, bitchy woman who selfishly starts a war, and the MC sees her this way because her view of Helen is clouded by all the surrounding history and commentary from her family. Only at the end does she see through it and understand how all the women are pawns who are trapped by their own superlative beauty into the fate laid out for them.
It highlighted something interesting to me about war stories like the Iliad--how brutal things can happen in a sentence or two (like the sacrifice of an innocent women) while great amounts of time are spent dwelling on the feats of warrior men. The important things get lost or obscured in the noise created by the men the "camera" is following around, if you will. So the deletion of her memories paradoxically allows her to see things more clearly than anyone else caught in the system.
This is especially true of Iphigenia's mother Clytemnestra, who is married to the man who murdered her son and her previous husband, and who wants to just bury this fact. It makes perfect sense from the point of view of survival, but it's just fucked up when you step back and realize that this is the morality that lies just beneath the surface of the otherwise decorous royal household. In some ways, this story captures and indicts our own culture of violence that allows violent men and rapists to destroy the lives of others and yet get on with being well-respected members of the community without having to answer for their crimes. I love that moment when Iphigenia loses her ability to self-censor and just lets EVERYONE have it, because ALL of them, excuses aside, could have stopped the whole machine from crushing her against her will: her father, her mother, the soldiers, the household members, Achilles, her uncle, the priests. Only Helen even made an effort to prepare Iphigenia for the truth of the world she lived in.
Anyway, I could go on, but I'll stop there. Great story from start to finish, and GREAT reading. It's going to stay with me for a long time.