H of H and the Combustion of Thought

It happens that my first reading of H of H began with the back cover. That part of the playbook feels smooth to the touch, although its features seem hard to make out. The blurb’s text has been center-aligned in a muted silver font, barely visible against the charcoal that fills the background. It reads: “H of H Playbook . . . drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides.” I pause, browse the content, and return to the blurb once more. “Drawings and language”: for me, this detail doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what Carson has included in this experimental piece. The list is not just long. It speaks, once more, to the “dazzling hybridity,” “gymnastics of the mind,” and material poetics that has characterized her classically inclined production for nearly four decades:¹

• smudges and stains

• red ink bleeding through the page

• yellow brushstrokes frantically drawn in and out of frames

• pencil-sketched human figures

• pencil notes

• typed text on pieces of paper roughly cut out and glued to the page

• ripped pages

• facsimiled materials

• bright yellow and furious red

• soft blues and brassy browns

• collages

• Carson’s own works of art

• unpunctuated lines and absence of capitals

• the translator’s name typed in lowercase on a piece of paper roughly cut out by hand (it reads, “translated by anne carson”; here the tops of the letters t, r, a, and n in “translated” are partially ripped out, with the n of “carson” barely making it inside the right-side frame)

• two maps bookending the playbook: the first of ancient mainland Greece, with Thebes circled in red; the second a plan of eighteenth-century Athens, also circled in red, taken from Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, an imaginary voyage of the philosopher Anacharsis from the Black Sea to Athens in the sixth century BCE (in book 6, Anacharsis passes through Thebes).

All these elements have been artfully xeroxed to give the playbook a unifying yet highly textured effect. One could simply call this a playful translation. Yet, it is also a curious book about haptics and optics. Charcoal is also the color dominating this part of the book and its finish. There is a small, roughly cut-out circle or dot in the middle of the cover, partly whitish, partly charcoal, and with something that looks like pieces of cotton stuck on one side. The shape partially recalls the red dots on the covers of some editions of Autobiography of Red (1998) and Red Doc> (2013), which also feature the myth of Herakles’s twelfth labor. This new Heraclean dot, then, comes with its own intra-/intertextual baggage if you have read these previous works; but I choose not to go in that direction and focus instead on the haptic and optical experience. Depending on how the light falls, and at what time of the day, the title and name of the author can become nearly invisible, although you can still feel the letters in relief if you run your fingertips over them: “Anne Carson,” “H of H Playbook” (Figs. 1 and 2). There is an effort involved in making out these words. One must turn the book in specific ways to see who authored the work, what the title is; and once we make all this out, we might still wonder: “What does ‘H of H’ mean?” “What is it about?” So the playbook begins, with its front and back covers slowly showcasing the chemistry of its content right from the start.

Moving to the unpaginated translation, I find aleatory strategies and giddy temporalities. I’ve noticed such things before,² although these feel curiously new. Here, Euripides’ narrative of Herakles’ return to Thebes under the rule of Lykos is filled with deliberate anachronism. Carson has transported the entire cast to a series of memorable points and events in the social, economic, and cultural histories of the twentieth-century West: capitalism and its commodities, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, the police state, nuclear catastrophe, and environmental crisis, among others (and not without passing through abstract German art on the Holocaust, the modern classics, and eighteenth-century literature on imaginary voyages to mythological Greece). One can find some examples embedded in the five voiceovers (in lieu of the traditional monologues in Greek tragedy) punctuating the play:

1. H of H, who recalls his hitchhiking years, stealing a Corvette, and forgetting himself;

2. Megara, after H of H returns to Thebes, who describes his state of mind as a silent glacier, “until it snaps”;

3. Iris and Madness on H of H’s ordering “a pizza for the kids” on the phone as a kind of “blast” (the explosion here seems to break up the narrative between mythological memory and everyday reality);

4. Amphitryon, who ponders and panics about H of H’s predicament, while reading a book by “a Russian guy” (this happens to be Victor Serge, author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary [1945]) on dead bodies in plastic bags (another “shocker,” if we conceive of the dead bodies of Herakles’ wife and children wrapped up in the modern material, as if in a Nordic noir series);

5. Theseus, on H of H’s similarities to the whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).

Anachronism is also introduced via assorted objects, persons, movements, and events: a trailer, an OshKosh-style overall, jackboots, school knee-socks, the telephone, the TV, a Corvette, lawnmowers, more plastic bags, capitalism, Leninism, the proletariat, Chernobyl, nuns, Special Ops.

The mind begins to reach a first boiling point: how should I hold these two main points in time (archaic, mythological Greece and the twentieth-century West) together, as I follow a multilayered translation-collage that seems to be taking me to so many points in place and time at once? (I even ponder if this is a translation after all, or perhaps something else. I leave this thought for another writing puzzle.) I then recall some conceptual guidance in Economy of the Unlost (1999), in which Carson opens with a “Note on Method” about the serendipitous connection she managed to find between the fifth-century BCE Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos and Romanian-born German poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). “Attention,” she tells the reader, “is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling.” Then she adds:

The anachronisms introduced in H of H stage a similar modality of reading. Instead of “two men at once,” one is invited to imagine a background of two (disconnected) eras at once as the background of the story of a “two-part man.”⁴ Here, “moving and not settling” is the concordant rhythm that sends off a kind of vibrating connectivity as you “keep attention strong.” In H of H, if you maintain this level of attention, you might sense a vibrating thread running throughout Carson’s narrative enterprise. It gives the dramatic stage a certain edge, as one begins to detect, for instance, random atmospheric activity informing the story, such as “blasts of winds” and “electric storms” that set the ambience in which H of H begins to sense his existential crisis:

Such mind-vibrations later become nuclear and volcanic. This happens around the middle of the playbook, as Carson reworks the pivotal reversal of fortune in Euripides’ play. By then, a dramatic red begins to feature more predominantly in the playbook, together with the bright yellow brought by the entrance of Hera and Iris (Fig. 3). H of H now feels the adrenaline passing through him, as he grapples with an increasing sense of split identity: H as hero and savior versus H as something altogether different; H the son of Amphitryon versus H the son of Zeus; H of the mythical Theban past versus H of a future Athens; H of labors and carefree existence versus H facing domesticity and familial responsibility; H the rational man versus H seized by Madness. The list goes on. If we try to keep our attention strong, here the sense of mind-vibration reaches a highly tense point. Then an explosive effect follows with the reference to the nuclear detonation at Chernobyl in 1986 (Fig. 4) and the inclusion of Carson’s own painting of a(n ancient or modern) volcano in full eruption (Fig. 5). Both follow H of H’s entrance to the palace of Thebes, halfway through Euripides’ and Carson’s play:

I recall the note on method in Economy of the Unlost once more: “Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.” I then try to translate this to H of H: “Sometimes, if you keep thought vibrating, you will see the eruption that is H of H’s madness at Thebes better by looking at Chernobyl after the blasts in 1986 or an Aetna at eruption point.” Yet this is not all when it comes to keeping two objects from settling. Think of “H of H”: the name, the title, the idea. “How do we keep these two H’s from falling into one meaning?” was the recurring question my students raised in class with me. We wondered: “Is there a ‘foundation’ meaning encoded in this name? But would this not be letting our attention fall?” “This is mind-blowing!” said one of them, flicking through the playbook, trying to find more explosions of thought.

Later, after class, I return to the blurb with these images and questions in mind. A double space has been entered after a succinct description of Euripides’ play, casting the following quotation into starker relief:

I pause once more. I am beginning to get a feeling that has become familiar to me when reading Carson, especially in relation to her keen interest in continental visual art and philosophy.⁵ It is a kind of experience that has taken my mind in wandering, bifurcating directions before, not least in reading her Decreation (2005) and Nox (2010). But perhaps that’s just me. “When reading Carson, it’s best to let her words wash over you,” says Alice Oswald.⁶ I quite agree. I have recently learned this first hand.⁷ Yet the blurb’s reference to Kiefer is not casual.⁸ Turning from the back cover to the text, it will be repeated twice by the “Chorus of Theban vets,” in the gnomic, ritualistic manner of the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy:⁹

“One of the functions of the tragic chorus is to reflect on the action of the play and try to assign it some meaning,” explains Carson in the preface to her 2006 translation of Herakles.¹⁰ It is hard not to detect a similar function, whichever meaning we attach to it, in the Kiefer-styled tragic chorus repeated twice in H of H. In a recent interview, Anselm Kiefer, whose collage-like oeuvre, like Carson’s, engages intimately with the poetry of Paul Celan,¹¹ says:

With these traces in mind, I now turn to the title page (Fig. 6), which follows a map with ancient Thebes circled in red, and then a blank page too closely stuck to the interior spine. (Is it meant to be like this or is it only my own copy? Thinking of “explosions,” errancy and imperfection here seem to be the elements combusting one’s thought once more, right from the start.)¹³ Then comes the title page: H of H Playbook. The two H’s are drawn somewhat oversized in pencil, with the other two words (“of” and “Playbook”) made from pasted pieces of paper with the printed text in a very small font size. I can still make this out if I wear my glasses, but my glasses won’t tell me what it all means.

In her New Yorker review of the playbook, Casey Cep says: “Whatever ‘H of H’ might mean—it isn’t clear at all—the book is really ‘H of C . . . Herakles of Carson.’”¹⁴ I guess so, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.¹⁵ I continue to turn the unpaginated pages: it seems that H of H is also in a quest to find out who he is, who he has become as “H of H.” He is now back home in Thebes, notably uncomfortable with the domesticity it has to offer, after his twelve canonical Labors—so many that Carson edits some out, jumping from 3 to 9 and from 9 to 12. Then Hera and Iris arrive, and that early title page seriously combusts now:

Could H of H then be the “Hera of Herakles”? The madness of Herakles? Not so fast. During my previous glance over the playbook, I had already noticed H of H’s mind splitting in two directions: the red of Autobiography of Red, featuring a version of Geryon, the red-winged monster, and the yellow that comes with the madness of Hera and Iris. Is this part of the madness of his name? But just when I think I have it, the page combusts once more: H of H could also point to the pivotal half-play, which Carson masterfully aligns with the key reversal moment in Euripides (“Herakles is a two-part man. Euripides wrote for him a two-part play. It breaks down in the middle.”).¹⁶ The two H’s in H of H now pull in two opposing directions, stretching my attention to the breaking point: Will he walk back to his own (Euripidean) myth? Or should he walk out of it (into Carson’s own take)?

I keep my attention strong. I glance at the cover image of Grief Lessons. It features a man and his shadow in a way that speaks closely to the double positioning and dilemma brought to bear by H of H (Fig. 7):

That’s right: it may be best to seek no settling of meaning when reading this new translation, even as I do feel a certain revealing “boom!” about to ensue (perhaps the tensest of points in my combusted mind so far). Then comes Theseus as a sort of balm, offering H of H, this “two-part man,” a chance of renewal, the possibility of rediscovering what H of H means for him and his myth as he looks forward to Athens. You know the rest of the story. The playbook then ends with an eighteenth-century plan of Athens and adjacent regions of mainland Greece from Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce: one last ekphrastic anachronism.

Carson has endowed her H of H (the title, the name, the theme, the translation of Euripides’ Herakles) with a mode of reading that is always already on ignition mode, never fully allowing meanings to settle on the page. It’s a kind of chemistry, if you will, one that Carson herself already identifies in the tenor of Euripides’ plays:

In the preface to Grief Lessons, Carson touches on Euripides’ technical approach, arguing that his is a technique that has a curious effect on his characters and audience:

“Chemical curiosity” interests me because this is very much how I’ve experienced my reading of this playbook, and I suspect I will revisit Euripides’ Heracles in my next Greek class. Benjamin surely uses the expression to illustrate an artistic mood that breaks up the substance of things, of human experience, in such a way that you can see it happening but cannot quite put it into words. It is a mood that thrives on tensions, boiling points, and near-explosions of thought. Carson has experimented with this approach throughout her artistic career. Consider her Eros the Bittersweet (1986), with glukupikron (lit. “sweet-bitter”) being the oxymoron that splits the mind into the unresolvable substance that is eros (“One moment staggers under the pressure of Eros; one mental state splits”),¹⁹ the experience of which also escapes cohesive narrative and meaning. Then Carson’s novel in verse, Autobiography of Red (1998), whose narrative is both “unsettling and strangely moving,” not least by the “electricity . . . of [Carson’s] writing,” which “exposes . . . the mythic underlying explosive everyday” experience.²⁰ And Decreation, perhaps the most difficult of Carson’s writings, which explores a similar phenomenon—the “undoing [of] the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self and defined by self”²¹—that she finds in Sappho, the thirteenth-century French-speaking mystic Marguerite Porete, and early twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil.

In these works, Carson breaks up the substance and experience of things in a way that speaks powerfully to existential quests and dilemmas, like that of her Herakles, split into two H’s. We don’t quite know what these letters mean or where they will go next. It is a chemical curiosity, or mannerism, that keeps ideas from settling and meaning from being fully realized. In fact, to keep one’s thought engaged in this kind of chemistry through splits, shocks, eruptions, and scattered explosions goes beyond H of H (although this is arguably where the approach becomes most performative, immersive, explicit). I would argue that it is an approach one finds at the core of Carson’s artistic philosophy and classical translation practice: to ignite, combust, shock, and split one’s thought and assumptions in a way that confronts and transforms the sense of stable authority that often characterizes the discipline in which she was originally trained. When it comes to her chemical poetics, indeed, she also “breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don’t catch them, theories don’t hold them, they have no use.”