Appetitive: Review-- Anne Carson's Antigonick

A friend of the family gave me a copy of Antigonick for my birthday. I was excited to read it. Two of my best friends both raved over it and I generally love Anne Carson. However, as much as I hate to admit this, I just didn't get it.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really anything. It was a loose, quasi-postmodern translation of the Sophokles play with a sprinkling of moderately interesting language, quotes from Hegal, and some rather confusing drawings. It conveyed a sense of futility and desolation that reminded me of (but did not follow the tradition of) Camus, but not much more.

And there was a weird mute character, Nick, who "measures things". What things?-- well, as an audience, we don't know. My initial thought was that he provided a measure-- like the chorus was supposed to do in the ancient world. The chorus reacted, related stories, and as helpless witnesses, stood in for the audience. However, the chorus often has such insight (in their philosophical or mythical flights of fancy) or such blindness (when they are used for dramatic irony) in comparison to the audience, that I thought maybe, especially for a modern audience, Carson envisioned that it would help to have a character reacting-- thus measuring-- the play as a sort of intermediary. This idea made sense to me. And yet, that's not what he seems to be doing. Nick appears only once in the stage direction at the end of the play on the final page: "exunt omnes except Nick who continues measuring." This, in combination with Kreon and Eurydike's linguistic games surrounding the phrase "nick of time," inclined me to believe he was literally measuring.

I thought that I must be missing something, so I looked up a  couple of reviews online. It seems I didn't miss much. One review saw spirit and inspiration and one review hated the anachronistic touches, but neither seemed to be working with something fundamental that I missed.

One review reminded me that this is the second work of Anne Carson's in succession about mourning the loss of a brother (see Nox, which I loved). However, I'm kind of wary of such a biographical insight for obvious reasons.

Appetitve/Reasoning: Great Getty Resources and the Problems with Publishing Classics Books

There are some really fabulous features attached to the Getty Villa exhibition The Art of Ancient Greek Theater. So even if you are not fortunate enough to go see the exhibit, you can experience some of the fabulous work put together there.

First, there is a slideshow with audio commentary which displays seventeen of the art pieces displayed. Check out the slideshow.

Second, they put up a reading of a fragment of a Sopholces satyr play called the trackers. As far as I can tell, the pronunciation is pretty good. However, my pronunciation and linguistic understanding is still not what it should be. If anyone has any thoughts, I would love to hear him. The audio can be found here.

Although I did not get to peruse them very thoroughly, there are three books that the Getty published in conjunction with exhibit. Two of them, The Pronomos Vase and It's Context and Pot's and Plays, are edited by Oliver Taplin. The Art of Ancient Greek Theater is edited by Mary Louise Hart.

Sadly, the books are all extraordinarily expensive. This, however, is not unexpected given the price of classics books in general. In a thesis meeting, I was told by Messalla, my fabulous thesis adviser, that classics textbooks were originally significantly cheaper (with adjustment for inflation). Publishers eventually realized that a large portion of the audience for these books was comprised of professors and libraries, most of whom had access to some portion of the University budget. As such, the publishers realized that they could increase their profit margin by making the books ridiculously expensive-- thereby cutting out the student and causal-reader market-- and sell the books significantly more expensively from smaller printings (which were more expensive per book to make). I do not have any specifics on the Getty as a publisher, but think that, in general, the expense trend with classics books is ridiculous. Although libraries are a great resource, with public funding decreasing everywhere, a lot of libraries are having trouble affording the same books that students cannot afford for themselves. Also, the rarer and more expensive the books are, the more likely they are to be stolen (a bunch of expensive classics books were stolen from my college last year) and then resold.

I do not believe there is any real way to break the trend of such expensive books. Some publishing houses obviously provide significantly better prices than others. And, of course, I would never want to deny money or publishing access to the scholars who produce the wonderful things that I read. I know this might sound a little hypocritical given my recent blogpost, but would it not be better if publishing houses just made books less expensive, rather than making them really expensive and then putting some portion of the scholarly collection up for free online (see the incredible CDL archive). I love ebooks and free books, but I would not search for them quite so hard if the books I needed were less expensive or appeared in more libraries.

Spirited: Sophocles and the Gods

I used to be a Sophocles hater. I know, it's sacrilege. That was, until I read the Ajax in my Greek Tragedy Class. I was hooked at the first scene, where Athena displays an incredible combination of power, maniacal superiority, and cruelty. She demonstrates this complex nature of the gods (in Sophocles' view) who demonstrate a shocking lack of humanity in their dogged pursuit of a foreign ethics. However, much of the ethics is centered around the general Greek principle of "helping friends and harming enemies," but Athena takes this to a sick extreme.

From that point, I re-evaluated all the Sophocles plays. Although Athena in Ajax the most explicit instance of the gods acting in any Sophocles I have read thus far [1], although they act in sly and interesting ways and often compel or propel the action of the plays. For example, in the Electra, Orestes explains that his plans for revenge by stealth come from Phoebus Apollo (Electra lines 33-39). The entire action of not only the play, Oedipus Tyrannos [2], but Oedipus' life stem from and are foretold by the actions of Apollo as well. Teiresias speaks for the gods, as some kind of a human intermediary between the two.

Sophocles' plays are much more interesting, in my opinion, when considered not from the perspective of Aristotilian interpretations of Greek tragedy [3] or the conflict between oikos (home and family) and polis (city and state), but rather because they paint a complex and fascinating picture of the interaction between heroes and gods. I have been told my view of Greek tragedy can be a little divine-centric, and this may be true, but the tragedians each demonstrate vastly different conceptions of the gods in their plays, which I believe not only provides rich theatrical masterpieces, but also sheds a new light on Greek religion [4].

Endnotes

1. I have read Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus (although I read it twice, I didn't understand it very well either time. it needs to go back on my reading list), Antigone, Ajax, Philoctetes, and Electra.
2. The reason that I refer to this play as Oedipus Tyrannos rather than the more traditional Oedipus Rex is because I think that the Oedipus Tyrannos expresses the irony behind the play better. Rex, the Latin for king, is much more equivalent to the classical Greek Basileus (although in Homeric times this word was used for a lord, and wanax was the word for king) which means king. One of the primary distinctions between basileus and tyrannos (tyrant) was the idea that the basileus came from a line of inherited power and excellence-- the conception that the person was king by right of family. The tyrant, on the other hand, was not justified by hereditary right, but was rather someone who had taken power by persuasion or, more likely, by force. Although Oedipus is technically a basileus, because he is the hereditary heir of Thebes, he is ironically a tyrant, because he killed his father (former basileus of Thebes) and married his mother in order to gain power in the city.
3. One of my favorite secondary sources that I read in the class was E.R. Dodd's "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex" (click this link to download the Microsoft Word version of the document from NYU. Click this link to read as a HTML file). The document is short-- only about 6-7 pages if my memory serves, but it explains the problems with the traditional viewpoints on Oedipus Tyrannos.
4. I plan on doing another blog post about Aeschylus' views on religion, which show gods with a strict social and political hierarchy, and Euripides' views on religion, which seem to show gods with similar faults and flaws of humans, but many times more powerful.

Reasoning: Sophocles' Electra

Getty Production Banner [1]

I saw a production of Sophocles' Electra the other night. The amphitheater has fabulous acoustics and the production used the Roman-style building behind the stage as the house that would appear on a traditional Greek stage. The translation was new, written for the production itself, by Timberlake Wertenbaker (which is just such an excellent name!).

First, I really liked the translation. I have not read Sophocles in the original except for a snippet of the Antigone back in high school, so I cannot comment first hand on the veracity of the translation. However, it seemed like a reasonable translation to me, from reading another version in English. Better yet, a lot of the passionate statements were untranslated, or spoken in Greek and then translated subsequently. I thought this had a wonderful effect of highlighting the characters' emotions, as well as providing a greater sense to a modern audience of the Greek tragic ethos. My one qualm is that the pronunciation was not very good. To be sure, I am not the best person to judge pronunciation (see my recent blogpost), but this pronunciation was not significantly better than mine (which is terrible).

Second, they started the play with a cello. This I thought was an interesting touch. The cellist played throughout the performance, setting the mood for various scenes as well as providing some jarring and foreign-sounding interludes, which may or may not have been in any way close to Ancient Greek music. Either way, it worked very well to preserve the tone of the play and I thought it was a nice touch.

Third, I thought the acting was phenomenal. Annie Purcell (Electra) and Pamala Reed (Clytemnestra) were a strong and brilliant pair. The mother daughter relationship was fabulous and I thought the interpretation between the actors, director, and translator did a nice job balancing the two sides. I also was impressed that Manoel Felciano made Orestes' character believable-- something which I did not find to be the case in the translation I read. Olympia Dukakis was also phenomenal.

The one odd thing about the play was the choice of costumes. I was kind of apathetic toward them. They were generally soft, draping fabric, which alluded to the drapery of classical Greek statues, but they were modern. This was interesting but neither particularly clever nor particularly off-putting.

In general, I thought it was a great performance of a fabulous play, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Endnotes

1. © 2010. The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved