Electra by Sophocles - Nothing less than this / can cut the knot of evils / inside me

Peace follows Peace and we find a gap in the plays from approximately 420 to 417 BCE, where otherwise we have close to one surviving play per year from 431 to 404 or so.  Probably coincidence, but given that the next Euripides play saved by the anthologists is an explicitly anti-war play – peace did not last long – I wonder.  Maybe the anthologists were also interested in how Euripides knocked up against Thucydides.

I put the loosely dated Electra of Sophocles in the gap, so it is today’s play.  Maybe it is a little later, or a little earlier.  It’s The Libation Bearers of Aeschylus revisited, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes, but with a large shift of emphasis to Electra, the suffering, vengeful daughter.  It is another perfect Sophocles play, balanced in pace and mood, troubling yet moving, built of rhetorical figures and imagery that move it in a single coherent direction.  None of that Euripidean raggedness.  Aristotle will approve.

Electra is as purely psychological of a play as any we have read so far. “Why are you so in love / with things unbearable?” (56, tr. Anne Carson), as the chorus asks Electra.  Our heroine does almost nothing but exist, and compare her existence to those of others around her.  The limited action of the play, like the detailed chariot race, with a spectacular crash, belongs to other characters.  Is the space given to the chariot race an aspect of the alienness or the universality of ancient Greek culture?

I think I will just shake some of Electra’s, and Anne Carson’s, great lines from my notes:

Never

will I leave off lamenting,

never.  No.  (54)

I ask this one thing:

let me go mad in my own way.  (55)

Kill him at once.

Throw his corpse out

for scavengers to get.

Nothing less than this

can cut the knot of evils

inside me.  (110)

That last one is a good example of what I mean by “purely psychological.”  Is there even a hint that the killing of Clytemnestra and even, at this moment in the play, Aegisthus, is about justice or the will of the gods?  Or about healing Electra’s wounds, perhaps only by creating new ones?

Anne Carson’s translation was a pleasure to read.  Her mix of strange and familiar registers is a strength.  The arguments between, for example, Electra and her mother would not sound too out of place in a contemporary drama, say by a weirdo like Sam Shepherd.  Here is some strange Carson:

Already the sun is hot upon us.

Birds are shaking, the world is awake.

Black stars and night have died away.  (51)

An odd way to say it is morning.  David Grene has:

                                                  Already the sunlight,

brightening, stirs dawning bird song into clearness,

and the black, kindly night of stars is gone.  (127, U of C edition)

So whatever Carson is doing is somewhere in the Greek.  She just shades everything a little weirder.

For an illustration, I chose a 6th century (BCE) relief of the murder of Clytemnestra, owned by the Getty, in which only Electra’s feet are still visible, on the left.  But she’s there.

Our next play will be a shocking contrast to Electra.  It is the Heracles of Euripides, c. 416, maybe; it is utterly anti-Aristotelian, as if written, decades before Poetics, as a rebuttal, not a Euripidean mess but an example of a competing aesthetic.  It also contains some things that are almost too painful to read.  Poor Heracles.  Poor everybody.

life is probably nothing other than happiness - Jean Anouilh and Anne Carson adapt Greek plays, and Jean Giraudoux adapts something else

The French went nuts, in the 1930s and even more so in the 1940s, for adaptations of ancient Greek plays.  I don’t know why.  I have guesses.  The one I read most recently is Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944).  The play’s major theme of “duty to the state” versus “duty to something else” (the gods in Sophocles, perhaps the self in Anouilh) sounds like the perfect way to get in trouble with Nazi censors, but no, they seemed all right with the debate. 

A third of the play, one long scene, is nothing but the debate between Creon and Antigone.  Each debater is convinced, by the end, that they are less right than they thought.  Creon is, to a large degree, arguing to Antigone that she should live, that she should let him protect her from his own law:

You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old: life is probably nothing other than happiness. (tr. Barbara Bray)

Meanwhile Antigone argues, in contemporary French fashion, that life is nothing other than absurdity and Creon should execute her as soon as possible.  Psychologically, it often seems like she buries her brother not out of duty but as a form of “suicide by cop.”

Greek plays in general, and this one in particular, are ideal for stripped down sets, avant-garde musical accompaniment, and anachronisms.  The big surprise to me was the large, goofy part of the guard, pure comic relief, perfect for, say Lou Costello or Stan Laurel.

***

Anne Carson has a new adaptation of (riff on) a Greek play, the Herakles or Euripides (c. 416 BCE) turned into the H of H Playbook of Carson (c. 2021 CE).  Like her Antigonick (2012), but I think not her Antigone (2015), it is a mix of poetry and art book, jokes and tragedy, aggravation and brilliance.

I thought the piece starts to snap together when H of H takes the stage, his labors complete, his existentialist doubts just beginning.  Was that really such a good way to spend a life?  I mean, killing a lion, what’s the point of that?  He finds reading Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) helpful for understanding his own psychology:

Our business was to crush the counterrevolution.  And Victor Serge sums it up: occupational psychosis.

This dang book has no page numbers.  Here it is:

Maybe another photo, too.  It is an art book:

H of H:

I should have left you in The Chair of Forgetfulness.

Th[eseus]:

Maybe you did, Daddio, maybe you did.

H of H:

One correction.  I don’t call them gods.  If god exists, god is a perfect thing, not some hooligan from bad daytime TV.

***

Anouilh was deeply influenced – in fact inspired to become a playwright – by Jean Giraudoux, and I have trouble telling them apart.  Giraudoux’s “Greek plays” are mostly from the 1930s, while Anouilh’s are form the 1940s, so there’s a difference.  Their styles and interests are similar.  It is strange to think that plays by both writers were once commonly staged in English.

I read a non-Greek Giraudoux adaptation recently, Ondine (1938), where the lovely 1811 fairy tale novella of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué is turned into what else but absurdist French proto-existentialism.  Can a man survive the love a pure water spirit?  No, for he is human.

Parts – the tragic ending – are still lovely, parts ridiculous.  Parts both:

HANS: I’m being called too, Undine; called by something pale and cold.  Take back your ring, and be my true widow under the water. (almost at the end, tr. Roger Gellert)

Giraudoux stuffs in plenty of magic and trickery and surrealist goofing.  Unlike stripped-down wartime Anouilh, he had a budget.

***

I have been thinking about organizing some kind of readalong for next year, and one idea that seems almost good is to read through the extant Greek plays, all of them, at a pace of one a week.  They are all short, and there are only 45* survivors.  They are foundations of Western literature in multiple ways, and mostly a great pleasure in their own right.  Anyone interested? 

* I first wrote "44," miscounting Euripides, but now I think I will do a 46 week event, reading Menander's complete Dyskolos and also his completed The Girl from Samos.

Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel - On Anne Carson's Antigonick

A little bit about Anne Carson’s new adaptation of Sophocles, Antigonick.  The book as such is a pleasing physical object, although I do not claim to understand, or to have put much thought, into relating Bianca Stone’s illustrations to the text.  Please see here and also here at the New Directions blog to see what Antigonick looks like.  Now I will ignore the art book aspect and just poke at the text.

Antigonick is not exactly a translation of Antigone.  Here is how it begins – I will also ignore Carson’s handwriting, capital letters, punctuation, and spacing on the page (I especially regret the loss of the spacing):

[Enter Antigone and Ismeme]

Antigone:  We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us

Ismene:  Who said that

Antigone:  Hegel

Ismene:  Sounds more like Beckett

Antigone:  He was paraphrasing Hegel

Ismene:  I don’t think so

Antigone's reply is a compact version of lines actually written by Sophocles (I am consulting the Robert Fagles and Elizabeth Wyckoff translations).  This opening is sufficient information for most readers who happen upon Wuthering Expectations.  It does sound more like Beckett, and Ismene’s last line is hilarious.  Hegel recurs, too.

I wonder what readers who do not know the Sophocles play are doing with Carson’s book.  Carson’s version is quite short, for one thing, compressed to essentials, exposition not necessarily being one of them.   By compressed, I mean that where Wyckoff uses six lines and Fagles five for the lines of the Chorus that end the play, Carson has “Last word wisdom better get some even too late.”

Fagles actually keeps “wisdom” as the last word of his translation (“at long last \ those blows will teach us wisdom”), while Carson comments on the last word (her actual last word is “measuring”).   Antigonick is not just a re-telling of Antigone, but it is about the Sophocles play.  Meta, to lapse into Greek, as when the Chorus asks Antigone if she “Remember[s] how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back.”

My favorite moment of Antigonick, a sort of climax of the commentary theme, is Carson’s expansion of the role of Antigone’s mother Eurydike, who in Sophocles only has a few undistinguished lines asking a messenger to summarize the offstage action.  Perhaps the centuries have eroded a longer part.  Carson finds something to do with her:

[Enter Eurydike]

Eurydike:   This is Eurydike’s monologue it’s her only speech in the play.  You may not know who she is that’s ok.  Like poor Mrs. Ramsay who died in a bracket of To the Lighthouse she’s the wife of the man whose moods tensify the world of this story the world sundered by her I say sundered by her that girl with the undead strapped to her back…

We did everything we could for her, the mother laments – a bicycle, a therapist – but it was not enough.  Eurydike is in the denial stage of grief, though, and Carson eases the modern mother back into the Sophocles play:

Eurydike :  When the messenger comes I set him straight I tell him nobody’s missing we’re all here we’re all fine.  Why do messengers always exaggerate Exit Eurydike bleeding from all orifices

[Eurydike does not exit]

The messenger, although his report on the new round of deaths is, in both Sophocles and Carson, unusually grisly, is not exaggerating this time.

Messenger:  O my Queen I did not see death marry them at last oh so shyly.  But I did I did see it.  Exit Eurydike

Chorus:  Exit Eurydike

Eurydike:  Exit Eurydike

[Exit Eurydike]

Sophocles’s solution to a minor structural problem is transformed by Carson into a surprising and sublime moment of grief.