“Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die” Anne Carson says in her preface to Grief Lessons, her 2006 translation of Herakles and three other plays by Euripides.[1] She goes on:
There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action.[2]
In tragedy, actors become soldiers, your representatives in grief and rage—as soldiers are our actors in war, our representatives abroad, shouldering the brutality necessary for maintenance of the nation-state and shielding civilians from the truth about that brutality in order that they maintain their comfortable lives. National hostility is channeled through soldiers as collective grief is expressed through the tragic actor, an aperture through which civilian rancor might be expressed. Can a person’s body be the frame we use to contain our grief and rage—the actor shuttled between stage and home, having to shift through their real and adopted identities, or the soldier, shuttled between antagonist countries via military transport plane, American-made automatic weapon in hand? Euripides thinks not; Carson thinks not.
In H of H Playbook (Anne Carson. New York: New Directions, 2021.), Carson’s new “translation” of Herakles, Carson resituates the text she originally translated in Grief Lessons within a pseudo-contemporary space (“set: / / dusk / Airstream trailer parked in front of a house formerly / belonging to H of H, now to Lykos,” (np.) this new version begins), allowing us to unpack some of these questions about actorhood, soldierhood, and what it means to be half medium, half trash bin for the public’s emotional life. Though she calls it a translation, this resituation in itself is a reworking of the play’s material. The original Euripides play, too, reworks the material of the Herakles myth at its most canonical. In most versions of the myth, Herakles (or Heracles, or the Romanized version of his name, known more widely throughout the west, Hercules), son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, is driven mad by Hera as revenge for Zeus’s philandering, murdering his wife and children. To atone for his violence, Herakles performs twelve labors, traveling around the world and to the underworld murdering monsters. In Euripides’s version, Herakles has already been away performing his labors when he returns to find his family imperiled by Lykos, who has usurped Thebes from Theseus. After he murders Lykos offstage, Iris and Madness appear to drive Herakles to murder his wife, Megara, and his three children. Carson explains in the preface for her 2006 translation that this act not only overturns the heroic cliché, but also:
every stereotype of a Desperate Domestic Situation and a Timely Hero’s Return in order to place you at the very heart of Herakles’ dilemma, which is also Euripides’ dilemma: Herakles has reached the boundary of his own myth, he has come to the end of his interestingness. Now that he’s finished harrowing hell, will he settle back on the recliner and watch TV for the rest of time?[3]
Soldiers do occasionally come back home and murder their families instead of watching TV, and we can read Euripides’s reversal of the usual order of Herakles’s story as knowledge of soldiers returning from battle afflicted with PTSD and sometimes becoming violent as a result of their trauma. The oldest accounts of soldiers suffering from symptoms that appear to be post-traumatic stress disorder come from Herodotus, who describes an Athenian spear carrier’s psychogenic mutism, and from Mesopotamia during the Assyrian dynasty, which lasted from 1300 to 609 BC.[4] For Mesopotamians, the disorder was considered a “spirit affliction; the spirit of those enemies whom the patient had killed during battle causing the symptoms.”[5] Euripides similarly appears to attribute those symptoms to rancor among the gods. So the disorder existed, even when soldiers fought with less sophisticated killing implements—and, as Carson says in Grief Lessons, “One thing that was really going on for much of Euripides’ lifetime was war—relatively speaking, world war. The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC and lasted beyond Euripides’ death.… He used myths and legends connected with the Trojan War to refract his observations of this woe.”[6]
If Euripides’s plays are refractions of myth, Carson’s H of H Playbook is a refraction of that refraction, a translation of a translation, the story’s center ticking over with each new version. Carson sees Euripides’s innovations on the myth from her particular vantage in what is, to him, the distant future; this allows her to translate the play toward us, toward modern Americans and how we now understand war and violence. In the very act of writing H of H, Carson enacts her observation, from Grief Lessons’s preface, that, “to be a prophet … requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you. Out of the present the future is formed.”[7] That Carson is able to press these two times together and make them stick like lumps of clay is a testament to their oneness of material.
So, Euripides’s retelling of the Herakles myth appears to correct the myth’s less probable timeline. Do some soldiers experience and act on flashbacks before they encounter the violence of the battlefield? No. The violence of the battlefield is what prompts their break from reality, their return to terror and hyperarousal. Where they have previously framed the public’s grief and rage, which needed a strong container, here they break and grief and rage explode onto those nearest them. The violence the government enlists some soldiers to enact is undigestible, so unpalatable that it swirls around in them, is spat back out. Herakles suffers from such a break. In Carson’s original Grief Lessons translation, a messenger describes it:
He stood perfectly still,
about to dip the torch in the water.
Everyone stared.
And all of a sudden he changed.
His eye rolled back to the blood roots.
Foam dripped from his chin.
…
Then in his mind he saw a chariot,
mounted it, rode off,
lashing with an imaginary whip.
…
Up and down the rooms he ranged
and thought he had come to the city of Nisos,
though he was in fact in the midst of his own house.
…
His father touched his hand and said,
“O child what’s happening to you? What is this strangeness?
Has the blood of your killings made you mad?”
But taking him for the father of Eurystheus
Herakles thrust him off
and got out his bow to use against the children—
thought they were Eurystheus’ children—
darting in terror this way and that,
one to his mother’s robes, one to the shade of a pillar,
one hunched under the altar like a little bird.
The mother screamed, “You are their father!
Do you kill your own sons?”
…
But he circled the pillar to get at his son
and with a dreadful pivoting move
shot him right through the liver.
The child fell back
and stained the stones red.
Herakles let out a war cry:
“That’s the first one dead of Eurythesus’ litter—
to repay me for his father’s abuse!”
Then he aimed his bow at another child
crouching by the altar as if he could hide.
This one ran out and reached for his father’s
knee, chin, neck, wailing,
“Don’t kill me father—
I’m yours, not Eurystheus’ son!”
But he, with a blank gorgon stare,
took his club (the boy stood too close for the bow)
and like a blacksmith at his forge
brought it down on the small fair head,
smashing the bones.
Now the second son was dead,
he went for the third.
But the poor mother grabbed her child
into the house and shut the doors.
Then he, as if assaulting the Kyklopean walls themselves,
levered up the doorframes and tore out the posts
and laid the mother and child low with a single arrow.
And at that point he was ready to ride down his father
but there came a phantasm—it looked like Athena—
shaking a spear above her helmet
she hurled a rock. It hit Herakles’ chest,
stopped his death rage.
Knocked him out.[8]
In Carson’s H of H, the chorus adds, dryly, “‘Psychic episode’ / says Special Ops. / ‘Unrelated to battle experience.’ / They discharge him, misconduct.”
Violence can be a hyperarousal symptom of PTSD, especially in post combat disorders. Carson, with her contemporary eye, knows stories of soldiers returning from war to engage in violence at home. Contemporary discourse about psychology and trauma sensitizes her to how the state-sanctioned and supposedly outwardly-directed violence of war trickles down through the citizenry. She highlights this here, entering the brain of Herakles, whom she’s renamed H of H:
H of H [voiceover]:
All those years. Hitchhiking everywhere. Rock my pillow. Rain my liquor. Being told to throw myself into every kind of fire. Being given to believe I could burn away the weak parts, keep only one father (god), get rid of the other (the emotional), skip wife, skip kids, steal a Corvette, read dictionaries at night and beat the blue devils. And great acclaim being predicted for me based on my looks alone! And those being good times! So I get done with the Labours, I come home, I look in the mirror and the mirror is uninhabited.
While much of H of H Playbook sticks close to Carson’s translation from Grief Lessons—often offering a faithful but truncated, more pithily Carsonian and modernized version of the script—these voiceover sections are totally new additions, inhabiting the more contemporary theatrical space—a trope from cinema, rather than theater—in which the character’s interiority can move into the collectively acknowledgeable area of the stage. In voiceover, narration appears over images rather than as a synchronous, spoken monologue occurring in scene; the voiceover is more intimate and of-the-brain than the monologue or the dramatic aside, which visibly emerge from bodies onstage and are often directed at the audience, which becomes, in that moment, a character of its own. Madness and Iris still descend in Carson’s new version of the story, but we’ve heard what H of H felt and thought and know, therefore, that Madness and Iris are anything but external. That, instead, H of H’s experiences have primed him for continuing violence, for this disillusionment and loss of self. H of H is already in distress before he murders his family. He has been robbed of something—his personhood, the non-god part of himself, the emotional part—by the violence he was conscripted into. His is a body “uninhabited,” as if the grief and rage he was meant to serve as medium for were already pushing beyond their frame. In his voiceover, he goes on:
It jars me. I remain in control but groping, grappling, wrestling with how to think of it. Here’s one way. All those years, all those Labours, I’m living a completely socialist existence. The Labours have to be done and that is that. The Labours tell me when to go to bed, what to eat, what to wear, who to kill and what next. Then I come up from hell, Labours done and they say, Magic! Two o’clock today and you are a capitalist! Figure it out! I find no assistance only degradation. I know no rules. I am assigned a therapist who tells me I’m fine. I watch myself become debased, hateful, resentful, mean, I yell all the time. You think psychopathy has nothing to do with the capitalist system? You’re wrong. Capitalism farts cruelty like gas from a lawnmower.
This passage recalls accounts of contemporary soldiers, in which they describe just this phenomenon—an enculturation into a completely regimented organization, and then an unceremonious ejection into very solitary, very disorganized, laissez-faire civilian society. “I remain in control,” says H of H, but by the skin of his teeth—and rather than being helped by his assigned therapist, H of H is dismissed by him and, thus, by the organization that led him to need a regimented life in the first place. For soldiers, the government is protective until it’s not. For H of H, “Zeus was his sunshade while he ranged the alien corn // and the Labours went on. / Now the Labours are done // and rounding the turn of his terminal lap / H of H comes into the full glare of Hera’s mantrap,” as Madness and Iris say. That Carson associates this vulnerable civilian life with capitalistic unrestraint—the lawnmower whose gas is the cruelty capitalism farts so that we may make our lawns sufficiently suburban—makes us think, too, that there is an element of consumption in the way H of H is spent by his labors—though he comes out of them alive (and even survives killing his wife and children: “So, the future. What’s next for H of H?” asks Theseus, at the end of H of H Playbook. “Jump from a cliff. Stab myself in the liver. Burn this flesh away with fire and cleanse its infamy,” H of H replies—but instead Theseus tells him to “forget suicide. Leave Thebes and follow me,” and H of H does) something in him has nevertheless been destroyed, consumed, to fuel the ongoing economic and social life he can no longer participate in. He was consumed as he consumed, perhaps:
Depending on how you count them, the list of my Labours looks philanthropic for about the first half then begins drifting toward trophyism. Stealing “the girdle of the Amazons” didn’t make the world a better place, it just demoralized the Amazons and gratified a wealthy collector. Same with fetching up poor old Cerberus, the two-headed dog who guards the gates of hell. Cerberus doesn’t know his right paw from his left—he’s been drunk for centuries, they usually let him sleep behind the bar. I left him there.
If anything overturns the heroic cliché, the idea that the hero’s violence was unnecessary, illegitimate, and profitable certainly does. Carson, and in her reading, Euripides, are skeptical about a human person serving as frame, as structure capable of containing nationalistic grief and rage—especially when their project is tainted by the profit motive of that person or the government they serve. As Iris and Madness take over, Carson’s chorus chimes in:
Hero cult is a civic cult.
We all profit from him
…
It’s human nature
to be joyful
when friends secure our stature
and enemies fall.
Soldiers are ill-used, intractably altered, and disillusioned by their experiences. The “cliché of heroic autonomy,”[9] as Carson calls it in her preface, extracts and maintains our—the public’s—consent for the acts of violence we ask these soldiers to enact. But—to return to Carson’s thoughts about actors— “They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life.”[10] These acts aren’t separate from the lives of civilians—indeed, they are in “deepest intimacy” with them. In seeing Euripides’s play and in reading Carson’s new translation of it, we come closer to the necessary and immediate knowledge of the violence underpinning our view from the audience.
Notes:
[1] Anne Carson, preface to Euripides, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, trans. Anne Carson (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 7.
[2] Carson, 7.
[3] Carson, 14.
[4] Abdul-Hamid, Walid Khalid and Jamie Hacker Hughes. “Nothing New Under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World.” Early Science and Medicine, 19 (2014), 549-557, 557.
[5] Hamid et al., 549.
[6] Carson, 8.
[7] Carson, 8.
[8] Euripides, “Herakles,” in Grief Lessons, trans. Anne Carson, 901-980.
[9] Carson, 17.
[10] Carson, 7.