Repeating after Carson

In both H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women: A Comic by Canadian poet Anne Carson (and, in the latter case, also the illustrator Rosanna Bruno), overalls make an appearance. But before that, on the first page of text in H of H Playbook, Amphitryon is introduced as “father of H of H.”² A couple pages later, the book reads, “Zeus claims to be the other (father): there begins H of H’s glory / and a fair amount of worry / ontologically.” A problem of doubles.

From there, Carson strings a question across three pages:

• What’s it like to wear an Olympian overall

• [page break]

• held up by the burning straps of

• [page break]

• mortal shortfall?

On the next page come the overalls (Fig. 1).

Two legs, two cuffs, two straps.

In The Trojan Women: A Comic, the overalls also arrive near but not at the beginning, and around an auspicious introduction: “Enter Athene, a big pair of overalls, carrying an owl mask in one hand” (Fig. 2).

Two legs, two cuffs, two straps.

The Kansas Historical Society, a website of “your stories our history,” says that overalls, what the British call dungarees, were invented for the British army in the 1750s,³ but the overalls of the British army in the 1750s had no straps to hold them up. They were closer to what the British call trousers, what the Americans call pants. Pants are what the British call underwear. Two names for everything but no straps to hold them up.

British army or no, Athene already knew overalls were, as The Trojan Women indicates on a single patch on her front pocket, for “warhartt[s],”⁴ which is a play on a Detroit-based brand of workwear, but also a homophone for war-heart. Two words, one sound.

In The New Yorker, the writer Casey Cep says that the poet, the writer, the translator, Anne Carson is obsessed with Herakles, that she keeps coming back to him, and that her language recognizes that “the whole of history exists in our minds simultaneously with whatever happened yesterday and what we think might happen tomorrow.”⁵ “That,” Cep says, “is why Herakles wears overalls—OshKosh B’gods, basically. His divinity is draped over him protectively but not entirely, a provocation reminding us that the problem of Herakles is the same as the central problem of Christology: Is he fully man, fully divine, or fully both?”⁶

So, Herakles in overalls is the Christ-problem, repeated in the anterior. But Christ had other problems. And others had Christ-problems too.

In “TV Men: Lazarus,” Carson writes:

• nausea overtakes me when faced with

•  

• the prospect of something simply beginning all over again.

• Each time I have to

• raise my slate and say

• “Take 12!” or “Take 13!” and then “Take 14!”

• I cannot restrain a shudder.

•  

• Repetition is horrible. Poor Lazarus cannot have known

• he was an

• imitation Christ,

• but who can doubt he realized, soon after being ripped out of his

• warm little bed in the ground,

•  

• his own epoch of repetition just beginning.

• Lazarus Take 2!⁷

Men in the Off Hours, home to “TV Men: Lazarus” as well as other Lazarus poems, came out from Knopf and also Jonathan Cape in the year 2000, four years after the American TV show The Lazarus Man was cancelled by its network, TNT. In the show, Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard comes back from the dead after failing to save the president from assassination. He has no memories, but later gets hypnotized, and then he does, and he’s got to go through it all over again. He had forgotten, but then he remembered, and then: we’ve seen this one already.

In Nox, Carson writes: “You can think of Lazarus as an example of resurrection or as a person who had to die twice.”⁸ And there’s something that keeps coming back (resurrection). In The Trojan Women, for example, Carson writes that “Hekabe’s been murdered so many times, no spit left in her.”⁹ She’s a regular Lazarus Woman take 12 or 13 or 14, and the result of all this rising from a violent death repeated is more than nausea—a lack of spit. Because maybe the nausea of repetition leads to the relief of sickness eventually, but after a while, we’re just out of fluids to pass.

That’s not to say that we get a break. It turns out that even in the era of television, we’ve still got to do the same thing over and over again, and the thing that airs, that shows as a seamless one, the thing that takes, takes many takes.

We might think that the repetitions that stretch themselves across The Trojan Women and H of H are owed to Carson’s partial occupation. She is a scholar and translator of the classics, and a poet whose poetry is constantly taking new takes on her source material—material in the form of cultural inheritances that have been (and will be) subject to continual reinterpretation with each increase in the centuries separating then from now.

The scholar of translation Matthew Reynolds notes a “prominent” way (not his) of explaining why translations, specifically, accumulate and generate more of themselves. It’s that they “age in a way that source texts do not: new versions therefore have to be made to replace previous ones that are becoming elderly and somehow ceasing to function.”¹⁰ The take that takes takes many times, then. And we, like translations, are aging toward “ceasing to function.” A euphemism for death. And we repeat on the way, and after the way, others repeat after us.

Carson writes in H of H, “Important poets made songs of praise. Some had different versions, different lists, revisions, omissions. Canonically the list was twelve.” Here, she is talking about the labors, the labors of Hercules aka Herakles, who had to do them, but also the rest of us, who had to tell them, and then retell them. In Carson’s book, the (from our perspective) long-dead Herakles, who, post-twelfth labor, is also the having-come-back-from-the-land-of-the-dead Herakles, tells it himself. “Everybody knows the first one,” he says, because he is merely repeating what has already been repeated many times about him. “I wear the skin,” he says in the first person, and then: “That lion was ‘ravaging Nemea’ is what I was told,” he says as a second-hand account delivered again in the first person. Herakles is here repeating some(one’s) version of a labor already done in twelve (canonically).

But sometimes we go for a baker’s dozen, and then some more. Telling and telling and repeating what we heard until our own efforts at remembering get folded right into what someone else heard and said and kept on saying. Where is Herakles in time as he tells his own story told to him? He’s in “a blurred and breathless hour”;¹¹ he’s in the repetition.

Herakles is one H of H of H, and in The Trojan Women the multiply-murdered Hekabe is also H, as well as, according to Helen, “top bitch.”¹² Helen is another H (Fig. 3) and, according to Hekabe, is also “the cause of it all, the salt in my wound, the splinter under my nail, the acid in my eye, the reason, root, purpose, occasion, foundation, basis, motive, hinge, axis, determinant, why and fucking wherefore of it all.”¹³ That’s 15 names for Helen, or maybe 16. We could take “why and fucking wherefore” as a redundant compound phrase, or we could take it in twos, as the close of a series that refuses the serial comma.

Anyway, the point is that this can go on for a while, this repeating. And even death doesn’t do it in. Because how do the dead speak? “According to the fiction of epitaphs,” the scholar of poetry Debra Fried writes, “death imposes on its victims an endless verbal task,”¹⁴ which is basically to say: I am dead, and you will be too. And, per Fried, “to prepare ourselves to follow the dead would mean, in part, to prepare ourselves for the shock of repetition.”¹⁵ Lazaruses we all.

“Anyway, the Labours,” Herakles says in H of H. They aren’t all the same, but first he has to do them and then he does two more. Finally, he comes back from the deadlands and finds everyone telling the same stories over and over. May as well join in. Fried says that “[w]hat death does to men the style of the epitaph does to language: makes it repetitive, incantatory, static, self-righteous but stunned, unable to untie the strands of cause and effect, literal and figurative.”¹⁶

But with an eye toward the audience who’s seen it all before, we mix it up a bit. Herakles, for instance, says “well, damn, you cannot escape yourself,” but we can make little substitutions along the way. For instance, he quotes Percy Shelley—“Like troops of ghosts on the grey wind passed”—except Shelley didn’t say “grey,” he said “dry.” They don’t mean the same thing, those words, but we could be forgiven for mishearing.

If we want to stick to repeating what we mean, well, “that one woman,” “Helen” could also be “the cause of it all” or maybe, this time, the “determinant.”¹⁷ The art historian Maeve O’Donnell introduced me to the kind of excessive synonymy that Hekabe uses to identify and reidentify Helen in the same, but not quite the same, way. It was said to have been invented by Isidore of Seville, who was born around the year 560 of our common era, though he was probably just repeating something he heard.

Fittingly, as philologist Claudia Di Sciacca writes, his “Synonymorum de lamentatione animae peccatricis libri duo are attested with various titles.”¹⁸ “Recently,” she later says, “two recensions of the Synonyma have been identified and designated with the Greek letters Λ and Φ. Apparently, Isidore developed two parallel versions from a ‘primitive’ text and eventually corrected the two versions separately, from which the two recensions stemmed.”¹⁹ Of course they did. The things that take take many takes.

And here is Isidore going on and on, and in translation too:

and then again, here:

But he wasn’t really the first to repeat this way. As Di Sciacca reminds us, “the synonymical variation and paraphrase, which are the most striking feature of this work, seem to be a sort of late version of the classical interpretatio recommended by Quintilian to would-be orators wishing to improve their fluency and to widen their vocabulary or copia uerborum.”²² Though that wasn’t the first time either. “[A]nother antecedent—even more ancient than the classical one—of the synonymical style could be found in the Hebrew verse of the Semitic genre of lamentation as represented in the sapiential books of the Bible, especially the Psalms and the book of Job, and in the book of the prophet Jeremiah.”²³

Lamentations. We’ve seen those before, and after. We’ve seen them in both H of H and The Trojan Women. In H of H, after Herakles finds out from Amphitryon aka A that he, H of H, has killed his whole family, we find a synonymy of lamentation that collapses in on itself—rather than repetition of like, we have repetition of same. It then widens out again toward death:

• H of H:

• Alas.

• [page break]

• A:

• Alas.

• H of H:

• Alas.

• A:

• Alas.

• H of H:

• Alas.

• Let me die.

In The Trojan Women, when Astyanax’s body is carried in on Hektor’s shield, the chorus ignites this cycle, telling Hekabe:

These are living voices alas-ing, though, if we remember, Hekabe is kind of already dead in The Trojan Women, or at least multiply-murdered. The writer Zach Davidson points out that “[a]ccording to tradition, Hekabe is changed into a hell-hound after her death,” which is a point worth remarking because in “The Trojan Women by Rosanna Bruno, text by Anne Carson,” Hekabe is already depicted as a dog, “an ancient emaciated sled dog of filth and wrath.”²⁵ “To portray her as a canine here, while she is alive,” Davidson writes, “suggests that to survive war—particularly as a female prisoner of one—is to endure a living death.”²⁶

We know from “TV Men” that this is where the real repetition gets going—just as Lazarus is “ripped out of his / warm little bed in the ground,” at the point of his post-death rebirth.²⁷ So all these laments, these alases, proceed from the living dead, and unlike life, but very much like a life that won’t end, the repetition is only, in Carson’s words, “just beginning.”²⁸ A repetition that keeps on taking, taking its time.

But it’s not always the dead who get to speak from their own mouths. In H of H, Herakles hears his own story repeated back to him and what we’re hearing, really, is Carson doing all this repeating, returning, speaking for the dead. Or, actually, writing for them (drawing too).

Fried says, “An inscription on a gravestone is an extreme form of writing aware of itself as writing because aware of its divorce from voice, of its condition as a distant trace of a voice now stilled.”²⁹ We’ve seen this before. “When my brother died,” Carson writes on the back of the box containing Nox, “I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book”³⁰—“an extreme form of writing.”³¹

“Important poets made songs of praise,” we heard in H of H. First, they make them, and then they sing them over and over again. For us, this includes Anne Carson. For Fried, this includes poets like Whitman and Poe “that use refrains to interpret the tendency of voices from beyond the grave to repeat themselves in their desire to foster remembrance.”³² So, poets say it again, whatever it was that was being said already, for at least two reasons. One: on behalf of the voices who have gone before the grave. Two: to remember.

But do we ever get to remembering by way of repeating? Another F, founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, says that “repetition is a transference of the forgotten past . . . on to all the other aspects of the current situation.”³³ So we repeat because we’ve already forgotten what we can’t quite remember. And this may help us consider why Carson keeps returning to repeating, which is a question people keep asking. For example, reviewer Emma Heath wonders about Carson’s H of H: “[W]hy return to a play that she [Carson] has already translated?”³⁴

In line with Fried, we can say that she is “foster[ing] remembrance” as here we are, talking about Euripides again.³⁵ Or in line with Freud, maybe we say this is more about transferring a “forgotten past” into an ever-in-motion present.³⁶ Heath answers her own question, anaphorically: “Maybe because the questions Euripides asked about democracy and populism feel relevant today. Maybe because Herakles has become something of a personal fascination for Carson. Maybe because in 416 BCE, Euripides created an open wound and Carson can’t keep herself from picking at the scab.”³⁷

Maybe because, in Reynolds’ words again, Carson’s previous Euripideses are “becoming elderly,”³⁸ edging toward death, a great cliff of forget, though none of these texts really ever makes it to what comes after life, except in the sense that all translations emerge already drinking, as the theorist Walter Benjamin says, from the spring of the “continually renewed.”³⁹ Because in Carson’s world, each death can always turn out to be a new nauseated beginning. Back to life.

Freud says that “the patient repeats instead of remembering.”⁴⁰ So, contrary to what Fried says that Poe and Whitman aim to do with refrain (“foster remembrance”),⁴¹ Freud says this repetition is an alternative to remembering, and honestly it’s starting to get in the way of what we’re trying to do here. “As an extreme example of this,” Freud writes,

Before he “had had time.”⁴³

The thing that takes takes time, and also it takes preventing, a coming-before to stop the thing that might have started onto its “endless verbal task” if we hadn’t gotten there first.⁴⁴ But once it has started, how do we get back?

In H of H, there is a “Brief pause.” And then:

Here, the repetition tries to get going, but the first repetition, the one before things get going, is assuredly crossed out with a pencil. It takes preventing.

At the end of The Trojan Women, Hekabe tries to call out beyond the grave—

• H: Children! Hear me! You know my voice!

  —but it doesn’t work.

• CH: Hekabe, they’re all dead.⁴⁵

  And the book ends when things start going missing (Fig. 4):

• H: I can’t see my house, it’s nothing but smoke.

• CH: Even the name Troy will be erased.⁴⁶

The thing that takes is taking names, a reverse-Genesis that unspeaks the world before it can get to repeating. A forgetting that comes first, before we finally get to go—maybe I’ve said this before—forward.

• In The Trojan Women:

• H: Start me up, left leg.

• Forward to the day of slavery.

• We can’t go on. We go on.

• [page break]

• CH: We go on.⁴⁷

  In H of H:

• Th:

• So we go.

• H of H:

• Go.

• Th:

• Forward only.

• H of H:

• Forward only.⁴⁸