{"id":2393,"date":"2013-04-03T16:17:21","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T16:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2393"},"modified":"2016-01-23T18:22:45","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T17:22:45","slug":"antigonick-bloodaxe-by-anne-carson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2393","title":{"rendered":"Anne Carson, Antigonick<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a37.99 reviewed by Jennifer Thorp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Carson, Classics professor, previous translator of Sappho and Stesichorus into English and prolific advocate of the cross-genre, has in the last few years begun to experiment with incorporating visual art as well as language into her work.\u00a0\u00a0 Nox, <\/i>her Catullus-inspired elegy to her brother, was filled with scrapbooked photographs and sketches, and Antigonick<\/i><\/a>, her interpretation of the Sophocles play, follows that trend, incorporating whimsical yet dangerous drawings by the New York illustrator Bianca Stone.<\/p>\n

Finding a foothold in any Carson work is notoriously and deliberately difficult.\u00a0 Her characteristic mix of references to both ancient and modern texts (Antigonick <\/i>has Hegel, Holderlin, Woolf) and stark, angular sentences resist easy interpretation.\u00a0 Indeed, Carson even seems to have some fun with the idea in Antigonick<\/i>, which is united by the motif of thread and needle \u2013 find the thread going through the work, she seems to say, I dare you.<\/p>\n

The \u2018nick\u2019 of the title is both pun and image: \u2018in the nick of time\u2019, which is precisely what the main antagonist Kreon isn\u2019t, with the nick of an open wound and the idea of thread, binding, feminine, minute, family-oriented.\u00a0 Different elements of these images surface at various points, and in an unskilled hand would become a gimmick to \u2018renew\u2019 an ancient text, but under Carson\u2019s purview they form a complex net of reference, drawing us back to the central concerns of Greek tragedy: binding fate versus \u2018sewing one\u2019s own.\u2019<\/p>\n

Visually the work is off-putting, surreal, an art object: straggling red and black blocks of text, ostentatiously hand-written in all-caps with huge gaps and irregular punctuation.\u00a0 This is a work intended be considered as is, not simply as a guideline to performance.\u00a0\u00a0 The lack of consistency in punctuation is one of Carson\u2019s more consistent traits across her poetics, and in Antigonick <\/i>it plays beautifully into the rhythms of the transmuted Greek, permeating the speech patterns with a sense of stripped-back purity.\u00a0 The dialogue\u2019s stylised rigidity is perhaps Carson\u2019s way of \u2018translating\u2019 the heavy, rich tone of the Sophocles, and it is one of the text\u2019s great successes.<\/p>\n

The tightly lyrical structure of a Greek tragedy is a piece of poetic mastery, as Carson well appreciates; the \u2018thread\u2019 motif also references the Greek Fates, who measure a man\u2019s life on thread and sever it at its conclusion.\u00a0 Fate has a tricky role in Greek drama \u2013 the inevitability of destiny alongside the inherent dramatic engine of choices and their consequences \u2013 and Carson plays this tension to the full. Carson\u2019s Antigone might consider Hegel, Kreon\u2019s wife Euridike might be appallingly self-aware of her own very minor role in the tragic momentum, but the core dual structure of the Sophocles is preserved, with its mechanics exposed to the light.\u00a0 As a contemplation of the form, Antigonick <\/i>is self-knowing to the point of occasional disruption, as when her Chorus makes glib puns (\u2018how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer\/they\u2019re both in the business of searching for a precedent\u2019).\u00a0 However, its self-reflexivity, while an acquired taste, is both intimate and weirdly disturbing when it hits its stride.<\/p>\n

One of Antigonick\u2019s <\/i>more distinct characteristics is the level on which the conflict is played: not merely dramatic but linguistic.\u00a0 Under Carson\u2019s needle, Kreon becomes a tyrant of language as well as geography.\u00a0 He struts across the page collecting authoritative nouns and verbs in lurid red, and clashes with Antigone and Haimon, his loyal but rational son, on the exact meaning of concepts: rule, honour, obedience.\u00a0 Carson lets the essential struggles of the dialogue play out in linguistics and spatial poetry: her Antigone flies wildly around the page, her Kreon lashes.\u00a0 It is a staging as well as a rewriting of the text \u2013 one can almost see the characters on the stage-space, following her blueprint for abstract, blind, wilful movement.<\/p>\n

Her Antigone is equally brutal and suffused with linguistic play.\u00a0 Carson\u2019s first-person voices are typically muted, explosively anguished in a secretive, brittle manner, so her choice of this play in particular, featuring a famously passionate female character, is an interesting change of pace.\u00a0 While Kreon concerns himself with definitions, Antigone is preoccupied with concepts, which renders their arguments over her \u2018transgression\u2019 a particularly elegant bit of drama \u2013 they talk past each other on a completely epistemological level.\u00a0\u00a0 Antigone is, as she notes herself, \u2018a strange new kind of inbetween thing\u2019 \u2013 a speaker whose signifiers are meaningless \u2013 and Carson lets her learn the language too late: \u2018Next word is death\u2019, she says to Kreon, and he obliges, \u2018Death\u2019.<\/p>\n

An occasional criticism of Carson\u2019s works in Greek translation is her penchant for the flatness of modern idiom \u2013 one reviewer called them her \u2018vulgarisms\u2019 – but in Antigonick <\/i>they flourish as moments of dramatic bathos.\u00a0 Flatness of tone is Carson\u2019s trick of the light, her exposure of an expression as problematic or a situation as constricted, and in a dramatic space as with Antigonick<\/i> the result is intensely satisfying.\u00a0 The point is evident in a scene occasionally used to measure new interpretations of Antigone: the scene in which Antigone reproaches Ismene to save her own life.\u00a0 Kreon is notoriously silent in this scene, despite being present onstage, and how playwrights deal with this particular deliberate act of presence can charge the entirety of their interpretation.\u00a0 Carson\u2019s method is to make Ismene descend into miserable, flailing clich\u00e9 \u2013 \u2018we\/all\/think\/you\u2019re\/a\/grand\/girl\u2019.\u00a0 The flatness is distortion brought on by Kreon\u2019s presence, his pressure on her idiom.\u00a0 The impact on stage would doubtless be riveting.<\/p>\n

The illustrations of Stone are, as is common with a Carson text, connected to the text in abstract and obscure ways: a chance word, a vision of a scene.\u00a0 Laid over the text like shrouds at particular intervals, they form their own corresponding but not necessarily companionable story.\u00a0 This is in fact an extension of Carson\u2019s own ideas about translation: over her career she has adopted a policy of \u2018collecting\u2019 interpretations, often laying them alongside one another or worrying at them over the length of an entire text.\u00a0 The illustrations form another \u2018translation\u2019, mirroring and distorting Carson\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

Translation is once again Carson\u2019s core concern, her true theme.\u00a0 In If Not, Winter, <\/i>her much-celebrated translations of Sappho\u2019s fragments, she embraced space and echo as a method of delighting in their partialness.\u00a0 One can almost sense a wistfulness for that sort of fragmentation in Antigonick. <\/i>\u00a0Carson works most sparklingly when she is assembling her own material; here Sophocles seems to inspire a tendency to prise apart, to excavate, that gives rise to some brilliantly startling segments but a lesser poetic triumph overall.
\n 
\nJennifer Thorp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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