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Reframing Tragedy

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_r_00620

1537-9477

Helene P. Foley,

Irish and British Studies

Anne Carson's long-term obsession with Herakles emerges from endless contradictory representations of this unique Greek hero/eventual divinity. The colossal Herakles of the famed labors kills an array of monstrous beasts; wears a lion skin; uses a bow and arrow and club more often than the heroic shield and spear; defeats whole cities or armies by himself; briefly takes over holding the world on his shoulders from the god Atlas; travels the globe from far east to far west; descends to Hades to retrieve the three-headed dog of the Underworld, Cerberus; and makes the world safe for civilization from the margins. This figure is ubiquitous on Greek pots and temples but is remote and not quite accessibly human. Herakles/Hercules was also for Greeks and Romans a stoic hero who accepts a life of continuous toil because Hera, the goddess who hated him from the moment Zeus conceived him with the mortal woman Alkmene, cheated him of his birthright and doomed him to serve his cousin Eurystheus. Even his name, which means “glory of Hera” (hera/kleos), derives from this enmity. Unlike other heroes, Herakles never receives the kingship of Argos or Thebes to which he was entitled. All his wives die. Every time he makes a rare entrance into a city or a civilized context, trouble explodes. A repeated violater of host-guest relations, he is punished for killing his host's son Iphitus by serving an eastern queen Omphale for a year. His appetites are excessive, as well. During one visit he impregnated all fifty daughters of Thespius, who was anxious to have heroic descendants. In comedy, where his appetitive character fits quite well, he attends only to food and wenching.As far as we know, Herakles made only two appearances as a rather unlikely tragic hero. Sophocles’ play Women of Trachis expands on the familiar civilization-busting hero of tradition. In this play, Herakles returns to his exiled family after completing his labors. He brings with him a concubine, Iole, whose city he has destroyed to acquire her, and expects his long-suffering wife Deianeira to accommodate this. Deianeira welcomes Herakles with a poisoned robe smeared with what she thinks is a love potion; she commits suicide over her error. The dying Herakles has a pyre built to complete the burning of his body. Herakles forces his son to marry Iole. An excruciating heroic death, but perhaps more “tragic” for wife and son. The play ends before Herakles’ expected transition to a god in Olympus, now reconciled with Hera and married to her daughter Hebe (“Youth”).Euripides’ later Herakles created a shockingly novel and genuinely tragic hero. His Herakles performed his labors to restore authority and reputation to his mortal father, Amphitryon. He is celebrated by an admiring chorus of aged veterans, faithful to his courageous and royal wife Megara, and a fond father to his three male children. He returns from finishing his last labor, the abduction of the dog Cerberus from Hades, to rescue his family from murder by a Theban usurper, Lykos (“wolf man”). Herakles’ labors now mean nothing to him in comparison to his family: “Who else should I defend if not wife, / sons, father? Farewell my labors! / That was all pointless. / I should have been here. / How is it heroic / to fight hydras and lions for Eurystheus, while my children face death alone? / I shall never be called ‘Herakles the victor’ again.”1 The family begins to perform purifications and celebrations after Lykos is dispatched. Gods (Dionysus of Bacchae excepted) generally appear at the beginning and/or end of Euripides’ plays to set in motion or resolve the action. In this play, Hera sends the messenger goddess Iris and Lyssa (Madness) to madden the hero at the center of the play. In another tragic anomaly, Lyssa surprisingly objects, citing Herakles’ civilizing labors. Herakles then murders his wife and children and collapses into unconsciousness, tended by his mortal father Amphitryon. Upon awakening he determines to commit suicide, from which he is rescued by his Athenian friend Theseus, whom Herakles previously rescued from Hades. Herakles then surprisingly denies his divine story: “I don't believe gods commit adultery. / I don't believe gods throw gods in chains / or tyrannize one another. / Never did believe it, never shall. God must, if God is truly God, / lack nothing. All the rest is miserable poets’ lies.”2 He rejects cowardice, accepts Amphitryon, not Zeus, as his true father, reluctantly takes up his child-killing weapons and departs for Athens leaning on his friend/replacement “son” for support. Euripides’ play inserts the family killing episode into a new place in Herakles’ myth. Usually, he kills his first wife Megara and his children by her at the beginning of his labors, which are sometimes interpreted as punishment for this crime.Euripides made Herakles ripe for radical reimagining. The hero's psychotic break then made him a victim of post-traumatic stress in modern play readings designed for vets by Bryan Doerries's group, Theater of War. Carson's H of H Playbook also revisits and builds on the play, which she had previously translated, as well as her novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red (1998) and its sequel of poems, Red Doc (2013). The cryptic phrase “H of H” perhaps implies a Herakles derived from previous versions of the hero, including her own. For Carson, already famous for her translations of fragmentary early Greek lyrics, including those of Sappho, building a work from fragments comes naturally. In the style of her earlier Antigonick (2012), H of H Playbook interweaves blocks of often partially rhyming texts typed on fragments of paper pasted on the Playbook's otherwise blank and unnumbered pages with a range of images, above all her own suggestive drawings.Yet this atypical “book” coheres above all as another translation of Euripides’ play, and labels itself as such at the start, along with a cast list of characters. It begins like Euripides’ play with father, wife, and children now in “an airstream trailer parked in front of a house formerly belonging to H of H, now to Lykos … suppliants at an altar / being hounded by the totalitarian cracker / who's seized power in Thebes.” The book also ends with a colloquial version of Euripides’ conclusion pasted over what looks like a set of blurry brown and yellow columns (Athens?):Th:So we goH of H:Go.Th:Forward only.H of H:Forward only.A version of the typically clichéd choral ending to Euripides’ plays follows.Ch:We go in grief.We go in tears.We’ve lost a man of greatest merit,truly a devil of a spirit,our greatest, our most legendary friend.An abstract drawing appears after a blank page. Carson is back where she started, with Euripides. Yet in Euripides when Herakles and Amphitryon long for a final embrace, Theseus is afraid this gesture will undermine Herakles’ will to live. His Herakles is at least allowed to promise a return to bury his father. In Carson's cruel and cryptic version, Herakles’ “Let me kiss my old Dad one more time?” is accompanied by an image of a seated, grieving old man on the opposite page and followed by three pages of “Th: No;” Herakles’ “But I must;” and Theseus’ second “No.” The choice for survival, courage, and friendship threatens to be redemptive in both versions. But always, in both versions, not quite.Within this Euripidean frame, the Playbook constantly merges past and present. Between the introduction of the cast, its dilemma, and the return to a close engagement with the final Euripidean scene, moments of revised or updated Euripides appear, such as the touching scene where Herakles returns to his family, or the appearance of a now collective Iris and Madness, followed after a blank page by a creature with frightening red eyes. But Carson's Herakles has an extensive “voice over” of his own (a novel replacement for a Greek tragic chorus). The Labours themselves now look to him much as they might to a modern viewer of the myth, “embarrassing,” if once grand, canonized, and endlessly revised. “So I get done with the Labours, I come home, I look in the mirror and the mirror is uninhabited.” The Labours (appropriately spelled) become for a moment the product of oppressive capitalism. Herakles then tells us that the first Labour with the Nemean lion left him clothed in a smelly skin; routing the Centaurs left him lonely; Atlas was tricked into taking the world back on his head because Herakles threatened to drop it (ha!); getting a girdle from the Amazon queen was an odd excuse for a great Labour. It “did not make the world a better place, it just demoralized the Amazons and gratified a wealthy collector.”Suddenly we shift to the tenth Labour, retrieving the cattle of Geryon, who had three heads and bodies, but in Stesichorus’ lost poem, simply wings. This Geryon is no longer a rejected, philosophically inclined boy-lover of Herakles with little red wings as in Autobiography of Red and its sequel Red Doc, but a tall, worthy opponent in battle. Herakles unjustly kills his elephant, instead of his beloved dog, as in the original myth. A large, bloody, and red square follows the death of the appealing elephant. This killing leads Herakles to wonder if “cleansing the world of threat and anomaly” had become “sarcasm.” More questions about the Labours then emerge. Herakles’ voiceover concludes with “Brief pause. I’m walking backward into my own myth. / I was trying to walk out.” The last phrase is at first crossed out, then reasserted. A reader who has read the books might recognize during the Geryon episode that she has briefly wandered into Carsonland, a world with a different tone altogether. I found this excursus into these previous publications, if not the voiceover's re-examination of the labors, somewhat self-indulgent, even self-congratulatory. (Carson fans might love it.) Euripides gave Herakles a vulnerable human psychology of sorts. Without this diversion, Carson's novelistic self-examination of Herakles’ mythic life, with its full recognition of his out-of-date, strange, and somewhat repetitive heroic acts, remains at the heart of her thoughtful modern reconsideration.Carson also borrows Euripides’ manipulations of the building blocks of tragic form. Megara's own voiceover starts as a messenger speech adapted from Euripides that describes the events leading to her own death, then shifts to girlish reminiscences about meeting Herakles while hitchhiking. Amphitryon comments metatheatrically on the ironies of the plot: “But now doesn't it seem ironic to you, / just as H of H is finally through / with the last of his Labours—the underworld (Cerberus) dare— / his family finds itself on the slippery slope to down there? / Doesn't Zeus care?” Iris and Lyssa become a single deus ex machina, thus erasing Lyssa's novel resistance to her role in the original. The line “Do you think that madness has a psyche” clues the reader in to the revision.The Carson world in this non-book grows out of a mind steeped in the process of translation, often for performance, and from a self-consciousness about contradictory myths and genres, especially the tragic genre. That mind suddenly generates shifts to possible links between Herakles’ strange story and capitalism, existentialism, Chernobyl-like disasters, or totalitarianism. How could a mere book encompass this fragmented experience? Afloat in this mind, the endless representations of Herakles in ancient art are inevitably replaced by images domesticated, personalized, and frighteningly half articulated: maps, sketches, handwritten lines, tortured faces, floods of bloody paint, eraser stains. Herakles’ entrapment in an “Olympian overall” is visualized as Osh Kosh. Theseus surprisingly wants Herakles to start a new life by making lion-skin tee shirts. (I found no obvious hint at Disney's Hercules.) This Playbook recognizes itself as a work always in process and corrected. Without an end (blank pages remain throughout), it is somehow framed and held within its covers by Euripides’ own extraordinary, innovative, and genre-busting original.