H of H Playbook by Anne Carson

  There will come a day, or series of days, when I finally stop confusing Anne Michaels and Anne Carson, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. The last time I read Anne Carson was when I picked up The Autobiography of Red, and when my partner and I saw the format of H of H Playbook in the poetry section of a book store, she picked it up immediately, knowing nothing about it.

The reason for that is because H of H Playbook is an oddly shaped rectangle that opens up to part play-script part scrapbook part art collection. That’s one of the highlights of Carson’s book: there’s a haphazardness to it, as though these fragments are compiled from an ancient manuscript for a play about Herakles lost to time. In fact, one of the opening pages denotes the book as a translation of Euripides’ play first performed in 416 BC—a statement that quickly becomes ludicrous when reading the rest of the text.

Carson’s “translation” is replete with modern colloquialisms and allusions to events that happened centuries after Euripides’ death. In particular, there are references to Jane Austen and the Bolshevik revolution, and so on. This approach gives the book a whimsical freshness that helps to enliven the classic tale, which is, in my view, in need of it.

I’m not a classicist. I know very little about the ancients and discussion of Greek gods often slips through my ears. Reading the back of the book was critical for me to really process the book. Herakles is a hero who goes off on labours to defeat enemies and kill monsters and whatnot. The book makes reference to about two of them explicitly and then glosses over the other ten as boring retrod ground. Apparently, Herakles also went beserk and killed his whole family before considering suicide. In Anne Carson’s version, it’s somewhat implied that he has PTSD and that he has a psychotic episode in the same way a Vietnam veteran might. At the same time, it’s as though he’s controlled by malicious Gods. Again, Carson blends the ancient explanations for more contemporary ones.

A number of aspects of the book remain obscure to me. It’s one of those unfortunate things about revising the classics: the commentary and elaboration of the classics is often more impressive to me than the classics themselves, but I also don’t know the source material well enough to make the discussion truly meaningful. So, when the redwinged man shows up or when Theseus shows up to guide Herakles away, the significance is sort of lost on me.

The artwork is what really helps to clarify the spirit of the book. First, the text is presented in small fragments, sometimes isolating a single phrase on a page to elevate its emotive power. The artwork throughout the book embodies a kind of loose style, occasionally depicting sketched human forms and often splashes of colour. Red for violence and blood. Yellow and blue strips when the mood changes. All of them adding to a sense of disorder mimicking Herakles’ disordered misadventures, perhaps.

I’ll have to admit: the story of Herakles is not close enough to my heart for this book to really rock my world. It’s a nice, short book, but one I’m not likely to return to or have linger with me. I appreciate its inventiveness as an experiment and multigenre text and the way it makes time fold over itself. I’m sure there’s a genius at work here; I’m just not smart enough to really let this book thrive.

Happy reading!

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

    I am a man not unfamiliar with making missteps, and there are two that feed into my reading of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. First, I picked up the book because I mistook the author’s name; I thought I’d found a free copy of one of my prof’s old books—it was only when I brought it home that I remembered Elizabeth was not her first name.

    The second misstep I took when reading this book is that I read the foreword. I generally try to avoid reading the foreword to books, but after reading Angela Davis’ helpful introduction to Assata Shakur’s autobiography I decided to go for it. Unfortunately, it did what I fear of forewords: it coloured my reading of the text in a way that narrowed the book. The introductory comments painted a narrative of epic / mythic allusions as foundational to the text—it’s not wrong, but I did feel that the richness of the text was reduced by examining it in such a particular framework. [Also, I tend to have an anti-epic bias due to my own ignorance of Homer, Ovid, and so on, so the significance of many of the references is probably lost on me].

    In any case, after my missteps I persisted in reading By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It’s apparently quite a ‘big deal’ (Morrissey recycles phrases from the text!) but somehow I had never heard of it. The book is, to some extent, a novel, though only the faintest sketch of one. Really, it’s a work of prose poetry. The narrative emerges in hints of shadows but the real heart of the story is in the interior experience of the central character and her emoting through flowery and incisive language.

    From what I can divine of the story, the central character falls in love with a taken man (I’m a little unclear on whether he and his other partner are married or not). She travels to stay with him and his partner. It presents an initially uneasy idyll where I found the narrator actually spends a fair amount of attention on the other woman, with some of the most tender and lovely passages dedicated to her:

“Then she leans over in the pool and her damp dark hair falls like sorrow, like mercy, like the mourning-weeds of pity. Sitting nymphlike in the pool in the late afternoon her pathetic slenderness is covered over with a love as gentle as trusting as tenacious as the birds who rebuild their continually violated nests” (23).

Smart returns to the hair imagery later in the text, noting, “her hair, falling like grief, floats in the deserted park, lifted with every dead leaf the wind disturbs; or her gesture that stumbled with too many meanings to stroke his temple with the back of her hand” (86).There’s a wispy gentleness in the description of the lover’s lover that shines brightly against the underlaying infidelity; I also appreciate the tenderness toward the betrayed. She first seems like Narcissus at the pond, oblivious to her similarity to “birds who rebuild their continually violated nests.” After Narcissus, we get an Echo of nest imagery: dead leaves in the wind. It’s a beautiful, if sombre, depiction of the poor woman.

    While staying with the couple, the narrator and the man have a charged attraction and, eventually, under the pretence of being the man’s stenographer for his own writing, they find some alone time to consummate their passion. The narrator’s account reads: “For excuse, for our being together, we sit at the typewriter, pretending a necessary collaboration” (25). You can see how Smart embellishes the moment that takes the work from a novel into poetic flare: “He has a book to be typed, but the words I try to force out die on the air and dissolve into kisses whose chemicals are even more deadly if undelivered. My fingers cannot be martial at the touch of an instrument so much connected with him. The machine sits like a temple of love among the papers we never finish, and if I awake at night and see it outlined in the dark, I am electrified with memories of dangerous propinquity” (25). The personification of words is a nice way to elevate the scene—words dying on the air, the mess implied by the papers never finished, and the disconnect between a manual typewriter and the electrification the speaker experiences are all great ways to take an ordinary moment into something more grand.

    Following their initial tryst, the relationship seems doomed. At one point, there is something involving authorities at the border; whether this is a metaphorical or literal barrier to their love is of secondary importance. From an outsider perspective, following this moment, the relationship looks one-sided. While the narrator battles her parents over the immorality of the relationship, the narrator’s love remains with his other partner. He seems committed to his other partner, and the middle section of the book is largely an outpouring of frustrated and complicated emotions of a lover scorned but devoted. To be honest, the initial charm of the book starts to wear off in this section; the combination of catharsis and inaction is a difficult position for an author to navigate; it is only through Smart’s linguistic flourish and variety that the book doesn’t fall apart at the seams.

    As the book continues, there is a surprising pregnancy and birth, the child of which comes to bear symbolic significance for the narrator’s connection to her now absent lover. I found that the book sort of peters out; by the end I’m not sure what is left to say from a position of such stasis. 

    Central to the text is the antithetical, paradoxical relationship between despair and hope, which is also reflected through the intensity of Smart’s style in moments of profound despair or hope, and, at her best, both at once. In one moment, the narrator is skulking through streets hoping to pass by unnoticed and says, “But I was afraid, I was timid, and I did not believe, I hoped. I thought it would be like a bird in the hand, not a wild sea that treated me like flotsam” (42). The way Smart problematizes hope as non-linear feeling is fantastic; hope is not a thing with feathers, but a storm. Those contrasting images perfectly encapsulate the complexity of such feelings.

    For a book that is so focused on a love story, Smart engages in a fair amount of violent imagery. Again, reversing the expectations of despair, Smart includes passages where something extremely dark gives birth to something more optimistic: “Letters blackly scarred with the censor’s knife translate the unimaginable: ‘I heard a child ask where its legs were.’ ‘We think with longing now of onions and lemons.’ The radio voice says: ‘Out of privation and the death of friends arises a new determination.’” (79). These ideas emerge in the context of war, and it is such passages that seem to resonate: “Bombs are bigger, but the human brains they burst remain the same” (79). Smart continues, “It is the faces we once kissed that are being smashed in the English coastal towns, the hands we shook that are swept up with the debris; the headlines speak to us of our private lives: yet still the mangy dog skulking under our window arouses a realer pity. Babylon and Sodom and the Roman Empire fell, but the winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever, and love still uproots the heart better than an imagined landmine” (79). It’s worth noting how grandiose Smart’s metaphors are, but the animal imagery is what really speaks to me here. The notion of mangy dogs inspiring “realer pity” than humans is a heartbreaking reality and the “winter buzzard cuts as cruelly as ever” is just a great line—despite buzzards being associated with the desert, aligning them with winter gives them a new dimension. If you’d like to do a little experiment, take that passage and add some line breaks: the poetry will emerge even more clearly.

    Tragedy is at the core of the book, and some of the lines encapsulate such a wonderful sadness. Smart’s description of depression is often apt and touching: “For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action” (83). Just wonderful.

    The risk of such a text is to become to self-absorbed, but there are moments when the tenderness of the central character emerges beautifully. There’s some controversy around pregnancy early in the novel and it seems like the lover’s lover lost a child. The narrator takes responsibility on herself and notes, “I have broken her heart like a robin’s egg. Its wreck reaches her finite horizon” (35). Again, the depth of feeling is never easy. Despite experiencing such intense love, it is necessarily at the expense of someone else. Immediately after the moment of sympathy, the narrator notes: “But it is not for her my heart opens and breaks: I die again and again only for myself. For her moving image prevents even my cry to him for help. For even if he loves me, he is in her arms” (86). Once again, love is rendered selfish.

    For a book so intensely focused on language, there are actually moments where it fails beyond repair. It begs the question of whether words give voice to feeling, or whether they give rise to them—do feelings exist without the words to describe them? In the midst of her tumultuous longing during the early visit, she notes that “days go by without even this much exchange of metaphor, and my tongue seems to wither in my throat from the unhappy silence, and the moons that rise and set unused, and the suns that melt the Pacific uselessly, drive me to tears and my cliff of vigil at the end of the peninsula” (21). Elsewhere, she notes that “texts are meaningless, they are the enemy’s deception” (35). These seem to emerge in moments of particular destruction: “My foot danced by mistake over the helpless, and bled no solace for my butchery. My heart was not great enough to assuage my guilt. Tell me how to atone, dove in the eucalyptus, who speak with thunder of the future’s revenge” (35). As texts and words disappear, an incantatory tone emerges—it makes me think of the poems people used to write prior to the poem they actually wanted to write, a kind of prayer to a muse. She continues, “A wet wing brushes away the trembling night, and morning breathes cold analysis into my spectre-waiting mind. The vines assume their social airs, ingratiating green with children’s fingers” (35). I find the language here so evocative; moreover, it speaks to a contrast between artful language and more ‘cold’ methods for perceiving the world. She describes “cold analysis” here, and elsewhere she refers to “the irregular graph of my doom, merciless as a mathematician” (21)---funnily enough, the “lowest vines conspire to abet my plot, and the poison oak thrusts its insinuation under my foot” (21). There’s a kind of angular violence associated with mathematicians and scientists and the fluidity of artful vines assists the evil plans of the narrator—perhaps ploys are only bad when you’re not the one doing them.

    Incidentally, I did a little bit of searching on the author of the book. From what I can tell this novel is essentially autobiographical. There are so many parallels (her being mistress to a married man, bearing children with him, him not leaving his wife, her working in the war, and so on). If we consider the book a journal, it’s one of unparalleled poetic turns of phrase. If we consider it a novel, it’s a bit awkward how closely it follows her life.

    Ultimately, this is a complex little book that confronts some uncomfortable paradoxes and contradictions. Despite not resolving them, the book is reasonably engaging, if somewhat solipsistic. Towards the end of the novel, something seems to go wrong for the beloved. There’s a poetic, paradoxical question I’d like to end on; because the book ends without real closure, I’ll follow Elizabeth Smart’s lead:

“How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his?” (108).

    Happy reading, folks!

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

    Let’s start this new year in the hopes that things will not fall apart. Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel is a classic of Nigerian literature that offers a unique, if problematized, examination of an Ibo village. The novel seems to focus, loosely, on Okonkwo, a man of significant esteem in the village who struggles with the changing times. Indeed, the opening epigraph and title of the novel are from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” in which “the centre cannot hold.”

    The novel is thematically consistent unto itself with respect to considerations of masculinity, fatherhood, and so on. Okonkwo, for instance, is a patriarchal figure who enacts violence against women and children who do not fulfil their roles in relation to him.There are a number of moments where Okonkwo proclaims his commitment to a masculine role and eschews “effeminate” men, who might be effeminate for any number of things, including enjoying hearing stories and being Christian. In Ibo, they are referred to as “efulefu”--a worthless man like a sheath without a knife. To modern and North American sensibilities, seeing the central character align so directly with the patriarchy is uncomfortable—and yet I find my allegiances for characters in the book torn.

    The reason for my difficulty is that about halfway through the book white colonizers come and begin to take over Nigerian villages through violence while converting the inhabitants to Christianity. I, of course, tend to side against colonizers (for obvious reasons). And yet here, it’s hard to reconcile because in this case the colonizers’ way of life seems more humane than some of the customs of the Ibo people. For instance, when twins are born in Ibo villages superstition prompts their parents to disposed of them—a practice the Church condemns. In turn, I’m placed in a no-win situation.

    The destructive customs surrounding masculinity and myth-making run throughout the text. At first glance, the colonized and the colonizers are far apart, ideologically. However, upon closer inspection, more parallels seem to emerge. While Okwonko is obsessed with raising his children to follow their father’s customs, the Christians also encourage their figurative children to follow their Father’s customs. Okwonko himself has a God-like moment where his adoptive son (a son not born to him—sound familiar?) is sentenced to death to appease a higher power. Okwonko is advised by The Oracle not to have a hand in his murder, and yet he cannot show mercy. When his adoptive son has been stabbed, he runs to his father, and Okwonko delivers the killing blow for fear of being seen as unmasculine for having sympathy. Religious and earthly fatherhood run concurrently and the scene is quite tragic and one of the most moving sequences in the story.

    The story itself is generally told in a more mythic register. There is a directness to the narration that outlines the experiences of the characters in a simply-stated style that evokes the “once-upon-a-time-s” of fairy tales. The motif is reinforced as characters tell one another the myths and aphorisms of the land that govern their customs. My particular favourite was the story one character recounts about a turtle who gets a bunch of birds to carry him to a feast. He invents a custom that everyone takes on new names and so he chooses the name “All of you” so that when the feast is presented to “All of you” he gets to help himself. In an act of revenge, the birds tell his wife that the turtle requested all the hard objects in the house placed outside (rather than the soft ones he actually requested) and then the birds drop him onto the hard materials below. Those types of little stories are a nice addition to the characters that read as types throughout the text. 

    Culturally, I’m not sure how accurate the novel aims to be. The narrator describes some of the customs. I think it would be ill-advised to accept all fiction as a kind of ethnographic study, but I did find the ideas Achebe brought up to be compelling and believable enough that it feels like these are the authentic Ibo people. One myth is that of the ogbanje; an obanje is a changeling child who continues a cycle of dying, returning to his mother to be born again, and then dying again. In our minds, it would be most logical to consider the causes of miscarriages or infant mortality, but for the Ibo people they have elaborate rituals of having medicine men forcing the obanje to lead them to an iyi-uwa, a special stone that forms the link between the obanje and the spirit world. The stone must be destroyed in order for future children to not die. I found those rituals compelling and strange, but imbued with that mythic quality that feels true. As one character says of a myth in the story, “There is no story that is not true” (141) and so these little vignettes ring with a sincerity which I quite appreciated.

    It is one of these cultural norms that ultimately force Okwonko to leave his village. Following the death of an elderly man, Okwonko says something to the effect of, “If anyone caused his death I want them to be punished forever” and by accident the deceased man’s son is shot and killed. The “murder” falls on Okwonko and he is exiled to his mother’s village for seven years. That shift is a pretty interesting one.

    In fact, it isn’t really until the second act, halfway through the novel, that the plot starts to feel cohesive. The opening feels like a series of vignettes that largely orbit around Okwonko, though he may not be driving the action of the story. In fact, the story generally does not follow a satisfactory narrative structure. The conflict does not escalate in increments; instead, a series of scenes take place. Perhaps that’s why the shift into the second act feels more satisfying: an event has a direct cause on another event of greater significance.

    To offer a charitable reading of the novel, Okwonko’s general insignificance to the overall plot is perfectly aligned with his own anxieties of fading away into insignificance as Christianity takes over as the authority of the village. Okwonko’s own lack of centrality to the plot fits in exactly with the idea that “things fall apart” without a centre. The back half of the novel, where Okwonko is removed from his environment feels more focused and engaging, in part because this is where there is a more obvious problem: colonization. Seeing the effects of colonization is the troubling part of the plot that is also most thought provoking. For instance, Okwonko’s son decides to convert to Christianity. Political moments are best presented in novels alongside personal conflicts, and this is where Things Fall Apart shines. Okwonko disowns his son, threatens to haunt his other children if they follow Christianity, and so on. The blend of personal-political is well-achieved in that respect—but again, remember how problematic holding on to the ‘old ways’ of the Ibo villages may be. Is there an endorsement either way? It’s hard to know for sure.

    The ending of the book is worth some comment, and I’ll spoil the final moments in this paragraph. In the final chapters, the conflict between the Christians and the more traditional Ibo people escalates. A Christian messenger arrives to, basically, assert their power and Okwonko murders the messenger. Knowing that consequences are coming, Okwonko commits suicide by hanging. It’s an interesting moment in several respects: 1) It’s clear that Okwonko is increasingly alone in his beliefs and 2) suicide is seen as ‘feminine’ and for a hypermasculine character who routinely derides womanly behaviour to clearly betray his own values brings him closer, ironically, to the Ibo people who have abandoned his way of seeing things. It recalls to me the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, in which an oppressed group tries to communicate their discontent via suicide. I’m always interested in the question of how oppressed groups can communicate with dominant groups on their own terms while still being understood. Okwonko’s death is a product of a double-bind. He’s resisting the dominant culture through his suicide, but at the same time his suicide is coded differently for his class—in his mind it seems to be either a recoding of the feminine as masculine resistance OR a resignation to his society’s changing mores. Of course, with something like suicide the intent can never be defended, and so the double-bind of the ending feels all the more constricting (perhaps a double-bind that the audience experiences all the more intensely for seeing the flaws in both the colonizer and the colonized and feeling compelled / repelled simultaneously).

    Ultimately Things Fall Apart is worth reading as a classic of Nigerian literature that can bring you into several important and timely conversations. As a novel, I feel like it’s reasonably accomplished, if a bit unfocused and problematic in its focalization on such a misogynistic central character. Nonetheless, it provokes thought and discourse and has had a longevity that extends beyond the immediate.

    Here’s hoping for a new year of wonderful reads. Happy reading!