Classics by Design: H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women: A Comic in Art and Commerce

The deceptive simplicity of the black, textured, rectangular hardcover that encases H of H Playbook (2021, see Figs. 1 and 2, on p.239 above) evinces an item that eludes the exegesis available through the tools and techniques of reading customarily associated with the academic fields of classics and classical reception. The enclosure announces a singular creation, maybe even a gift, so sleek as to be taken for consumer product as much as scholarly or erudite book. Put otherwise, H of H Playbook itself materializes as metaphor, a means of transport from here to there. Think of Carson’s Nox (2010), written in contemplation over her brother’s death, where the book, including its cover art, doubles as the coffin, or the epitaph, a full life and death enshrined in a tomb of words.¹ The thought is not necessarily morbid because with those words the life is continuously evoked, as in Jesus’ “Lazarus, come forth!” (John 11:43). Michael, Anne’s brother, lives eternally through Nox, the book performing the alchemy of Lazarus’ empty tomb. Although the reticence to probe too deeply into Carson’s biography is understandable, given her own laconic self-description, her work as a graphic designer affords us an understanding of some of her tools and techniques beyond the academic disciplines associated with antiquity.² The visual dimension of Carson’s work has been studied, but not as an indelible design feature that is itself as much a vehicle as the words, translations, and tropes on the page.³

Beyond the words, translations, and tropes, design elements like the seal on the cover of H of H Playbook heighten our attention to other modes of understanding outside of literary critical tools. As a process, design thinking is a tool that situates Carson’s work between art and commerce. Originating in art and architecture and scientific contexts, the concept of design thinking “has grown in global significance, placing the design process and its products at the forefront of strategic thinking and planning around the developed world.”⁴ Although it has been applied to development processes in technical, political, and commercial spheres (especially across the Global South), its mooring in art and architecture situates creativity as a central concern for design. As a “combination of ‘novelty’ and ‘appropriateness,’” the design “provide[s] solutions that are useful, efficient and valuable.”⁵ No consumer product captures the moment of design thinking more than the iPhone, which debuted in 2007, and no creative personality embodied the spirit of design better than Apple’s Steve Jobs. Jobs’ “passion for design” is a repeated concept in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Silicon Valley Olympian.⁶ In addition to creativity, the design principles promulgated by Jobs include simplicity, design integrity, and imputation. Jobs “aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity.”⁷ Design integrity makes of a consumer product, such as an iPhone, a work of art. Jobs learned from his father, a machinist, that “[a] true craftsman uses a good piece of wood even for the back of a cabinet against the wall.”⁸ Design features, moreover, convey the work’s or product’s uniqueness to its audience. This is imputation. The design feature may seem unnecessary or extraneous, but it is part of the whole. An example is the home button on the original iPhone, an umbilical feature that centers the cyborg instrument, like the grounding chant of “om” for a yogi.⁹

Whether Carson herself imputed the concepts of design intuitively or from explicit training, they permeate her work and give its audiences an essential point of entry. Moving from graphic art and design to texts, Carson’s tools include language, but her art is not in words alone.

As it pertains to language, metaphor is one of Carson’s creative design features. One of the most memorable passages from Aristotle’s Poetics is the assertion that mastery of metaphor is the greatest type of poetic art because it is one’s own, “cannot be taught” from another person, or “cannot be imparted by another” (an indication of εὐφυία that cannot come παρ’ ἄλλου), “genius,” as it were.¹⁰ If we think of the most powerful and moving works of literature or theater, a compelling trope is at their center, whether it be the imprisoned men at Robben Island as Antigone, the same figure appearing in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown, or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s challenging unjust laws as himself Socrates, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”¹¹ The poetic figure, the creative metaphor, unveils a recognizable human truth that staggers us and reshapes how we see the world. Metaphor accomplishes this defamiliarization by making one thing like another (ὅμοιον).

In Carson’s hands, metaphor becomes a design feature. Metaphor has been a concern to Carson from the beginning. As early as her Eros the Bittersweet (2014 [1986]), Carson focuses her analysis on a trope, in this case love as “bittersweet,” glukupikron, from Sappho fragment 130. The figure, its bidirectional pull surfacing again in Catullus’ odi et amo (Catull. 85), allows Carson to connect a European literary and poetic tradition from the archaic period through contemporary popular culture, in “the ambivalent condition of the lover, that splits our souls and forms our personality.”¹² Through this sleight of hand, Sappho and Simone Weil, Simonides of Ceos and Paul Celan, can all signify in the same vein.¹³ Carson’s is a different take on tradition, inheritance, or reception from what often comes with notions of quality, canon, or obligation. Tradition is rhetorical. For Carson, language, the figure, is where continuity resides, and her innovations live in the metaphors and figures, which are the linguistic design features that work in tandem with her graphic art. H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women: A Comic (2021) exhibit the bidirectional pull of Carson’s use of language in ways that defy notions of translation or adaptation.

As the example of Nox suggests, the genre of Carson’s works has been an elusive question for many of her critics, but considerations of design thinking help to some extent. In a review for The New Yorker, Casey Cep describes H of H Playbook as a “cross between a dramaturge’s dream journal and a madman’s diary.”¹⁴ Although not a play, H of H has much in common with Carson’s translation of Euripides’ Herakles in Grief Lessons (2006), including their structure and the poet’s liberty with language. These commonalities show the work of design as a return to a prototype, a form that the artist repeatedly improves. In Grief Lessons, ostensibly a translation, Herakles “civilizes” the world [ἐξημερόω], a role that continues from the classical period well into the Second Sophistic. As civilizer, Heracles evokes as many modern or contemporary colonizing images as he does images of an ancient object of worship or veneration. H of H Playbook continues to refine the prototype of Herakles as a (post)colonial personage. In this case, the scene is an “airstream trailer parked in front of a house formerly belonging to H of H.” To the language and imagery of an airstream trailer Carson adds costume, dressing Herakles simultaneously as Zeus’ son and, presumably, a rural American: “What’s it like to wear an eternal Olympian overall | held up by the burning straps of | mortal shortfall?” (see Fig. 1, pg.250)

The passage reveals Carson’s multi-modal approach. With costumes and props the reader anticipates H of H Playbook to be a staged tragedy, but visual and graphic design allows the drama to be entirely contained on the page. Linguistic and visual features, metaphor and drawing, work in tandem to complete Carson’s design concept. She conveys the metaphoric potentiality of Herakles’ “eternal Olympian overall” through its “burning straps.” The reader aware of Herakles’ tragic story might take “burning” as an epithet transferred from his rage, the fiery fury that overwhelms him and causes him to destroy his family in what appears to be a psychotic break resulting from combat trauma. Juxtaposed to a drawing of actual overalls, the figurative language becomes concrete. If the character Herakles is to wear these overalls and live in an airstream trailer, Carson has transported the civilizer from Thebes to some place like the American Appalachia. Since Thebes and Appalachia are both a backwater, distinctions between copy and original dissipate.¹⁵ This dissipation results from the integrity of design, where language and image combine to form an artistic unity. Whether or not this scene is ever performed onstage with these specific props and costuming is beside the point.

As a way of approaching Carson’s work, graphic design not only explains her unique amalgamation of metaphor and drawing but also highlights the typographical anomalies throughout H of H Playbook. Like image and the language itself, typography generates meaning. Rhyming with Herakles’ “Olympian overall,” the text of “mortal shortfall” is handwritten. As such, it might be said to fall short of the cutout of typeface on the preceding and subsequent pages. Seen another way, handwriting leaves a clearer trace of the human, manual process than computer-generated typography ever would. That is, Carson’s commentary on human frailty is a design feature, handwriting (whether that of an ancient scribe or that of Carson herself) transporting personality, flaws, and failures in ways that typeface does not. The uninhabited overalls accompany the typeset words “Dumb rhyme | for a complexity more subtle | than the self can ordinarily bear.” The dumb rhyme, overall with shortfall, is the rhythm of life, even the beating heart.¹⁶ The unworn overalls insinuate an absent body, which also jibes, fits, or rhymes with the naked boy on the cover of Nox, the child that becomes the adult corpse of Carson’s deceased brother.

Through these design features, Herakles gains a contemporary personality, although he is still somehow the ancient Olympian. Lykos is his adversary, “the cracker (in jackboots).” The jackboots now move us to the rhythms of a modern army, and through its reference to Lenin the chorus evokes the various civilizing efforts that have devolved into tyranny. Carson makes the paradoxical declaration that “the dictatorship of the proletariat [is] in no way incompatible with personal power.” Paradox is the inevitable result of Carson’s unexpected juxtapositions, her use of metaphoric language. The prototype was already apparent in Eros the Bittersweet. Language, metaphor, pulls in opposite directions by making likenesses of disparate ideas. As Carson puts it, words “flounder in contradiction, while pretending to be simple as a black and white flower.” She conveys these contradictions as much through the various design features she deploys as through the words themselves. These features include drawings, color, typography, and handwriting.

In the hands of another artist, design could detract from the source material, but Carson’s canniness is such that the classic is never too far away from its contemporary garb. The original and the copy flatten as prototypes through which Carson engages in a process of making meaning. The Trojan Women: A Comic illustrates (literally and figuratively) the design process in ways similar to H of H Playbook. As we know, at the end of Euripides’ Hekabe, which Carson also translates in Grief Lessons, the story is told of the queen’s eventual transformation into a dog. We might have anticipated, therefore, that in Carson’s comic Hekabe would be figured as a dog from the beginning, along with a canine and bovine chorus. In this regard Carson borrows from a reception practice already evident in Seneca’s tragedies. Through metatheater, the character is as knowledgeable about her literary and dramatic precedents as the audience is. The Roman philosopher’s Medea, for example, utters the words “I will become [Medea]” because her audience already knows who this Medea is that she will embody: the one who kills her children (Sen. Med. 171), succumbing to her passions in un-Stoic fashion, in Seneca’s hands. This metatheatrical move depends on the seriality of the classic,¹⁷ its reiteration across time and space, which is also a process of design. Like Seneca, Carson stands as one incident in this serial reception, and as such her comic is an innovation. Within the context of design, the feature of a comic strip is an imputation, a design feature like the iPhone’s original home button, seemingly extraneous but serving to convey a central artistic commitment. What is Carson’s commitment here? If the Greek gods are capricious, human action is tragic, but it is also child’s play. So, why not a comic strip?

Women as foxes, cows, and dogs are not exactly the most feminist tropes, but Carson is not responsible for inventing these misogynistic associations. She makes these features part of her imputation. Carson presents Euripides’ play as fable. She puts the longstanding and problematic representation of women directly in our faces (as it were). The innovation of the comic allows these tropes to be read ironically. In Carson’s hands, the figurations of the characters as animals within a fable move us toward something posthuman. Beyond analogy, Talthybius is a scavenger. We might not shoot the messenger, but we question his motives—or lack thereof—in unforeseen ways. The comic, or cartoon, allows Euripides’ characters to be seen in a new light. The chorus leader in Herakles compared himself to a grey bird (πολιòς ὄρνις, Eur. Her. 111). Andromache is a towering tree that consumes the page, one that no longer bears fruit, given Hector’s death and the impending murder of Astyanax. It might be said that these images are consistent with ones found throughout Homer and the tragedians, but in Carson’s hands they diminish any exalted sense of humanity as exceptional. The trope becomes the truth of Carson’s world. If Andromache is a tree, we imagine her demise in terms of an environmental Anthropocene.

It is worth reiterating that the performability of these works as staged plays seems irrelevant. Classical scholars and those in classical reception studies—indeed, colleagues across literature, poetry, and performance—have long discussed the range of possibility between translation and adaptation.¹⁸ Neither H of H nor The Trojan Women fits neatly into these discussions. Something different, more akin to architectural, commercial, or industrial design, is functioning in these works. Language, or metaphor, becomes a design tool, a model that also conveys the complexity—the seriality, the iterability—of myth and how these stories have become classics across time.

Design thinking has become a kind of cliché in corporate and capitalist settings, where the material benefits of the outcome, or product, supersede the notion of process. The elements of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototype, and test originated in artistic and creative settings. Design is a useful framework alongside translation and adaptation for discussing Carson for several reasons. First, Carson is a creative artist, a poet attuned to the process-orientation of graphic design. The reader detects her background in graphic design in the artwork that complements her translations and narratives. Secondly, as one does in the design process, Carson comes back to the same texts and ideas iteratively. Euripides’ Herakles and Trojan Women become blueprints in a prototype for living. Whereas graphic designers use color, light, and material in their iterations, for Carson we add metaphor to the available media. Cep’s New Yorker review notes Carson’s seeming obsession with Herakles, but the same could be said of Hekabe, considering The Trojan Women. There is for Carson a hero-design, where Herakles can later figure in a Leninist or socialist context, or as a rural American. Thirdly and tellingly, in all these texts Carson preserves the original structure, that is, the design, of the Euripidean blueprint, so that in some ways H of H and Trojan Women are closer to Euripides’ plays than some theatrical adaptations. Language, myth or metaphor, is the design, the bittersweet sensation upon which Carson riffs. Thus, the “comic” in Trojan Women is the modern invention, that is, the comic strip, as much as it is the Greek genre, where the chorus is embodied in non-human form. Metaphor is Carson’s top tool, her playbook, in the sense of the “stock of usual tactics and methods.”¹⁹ These tactics and methods can be poetic, diagrammatic, or visual.

A final consideration that the idea of Carson as a designer clarifies is that of the commodity. Ella Haselswerdt and Mathura Umachandran have written about Carson’s place in a marketplace of commodities. They remind us that Simonides, a poet to whom Carson continuously returns, commodified poetry, charging money for his work. Their sense of the “precarious balancing act between multiple competing systems of values” could well be applied to Jobs’ approach to industrial design.²⁰ Surely, he made a fortune from Apple and the iPhone, and it might be argued that this commodity is overvalued in the marketplace. Similarly, Haselswerdt and Umachandran see that “commodity-form not only renders objects alienable but also alienates us from one another.”²¹ And yet Carson, like other artists and creatives in the capitalistic marketplace, plays a game of “simultaneously demonstrat[ing] mastery of these rules and transcend[ing] them by exploiting their loopholes for all their worth.”²² The idea that excellent design, marked by empathy, prototyping, and creativity, makes the classic challenges positions in classical reception that valorize intrinsic aesthetic beauty. Whereas in graphic and industrial design the beauty is in the use, metaphor is the beauty, or the genius, of language.