Home Fire

Finished Kamila Shamsie's reworking of Antigone, Home Fire, last night. Because I didn't sleep well, I am still confounded by dreams and am only partially present inside my own body. What follows will reflect this state of mind and body.

(Note: this is not a review. It might not even be coherent).

I read this book more slowly than I normally would. These days, when I can barely hold a thought from the time I begin any action to when I finish it, many details remained vivid, not all of them visual (which is why it would be hard to recount them here; they often depend on how they were said). Shamsie has become very very good at this.

Shamsie has such a light touch with her storytelling - and this is a thing to be celebrated - but I've often felt disappointed, sometimes about specific things and sometimes that the writing fell short of her ambitions. I've wondered why that should be. Here, though, the foundation text by Sophocles, with the resonances accumulated by all the other versions (Shamsie acknowledges Anne Carson and Seamus Heaney but I read this, inevitably, also through Jean Anouilh) makes for an unshakeable foundation that holds Shamsie steady as she recontextualises the fundamental opposition of [any kind of] individual and the State, the State and its declared enemies,  of law and justice, of morality and pragmatism.

She gives Isma/Ismene, Eamonn/Haemon and Parvaiz/Polynices (who is only ever an already-dead body in other versions) entire sections of they own and these first three sections are the very heart of the book.

I did not realise this. I reached the end of the section titled Parvaiz and though I wanted to keep reading, I told myself that the best bits, the crucial encounter between Aneeka and Karamat (Antigone and Creon) needed my complete attention and a good chunk of time.

I'll just state very briefly that my first and continuous reaction to the Aneeka section was, 'Oh dear. Oh no. Why?' 

I should also say immediately that my disappointment was not a deal breaker, because what had gone before was so impressive and immersive that for the first time in the book, I was able to hold myself back and ask questions even as I was reading.

I don't have definitive answers, of course. Only Shamsie - and maybe not even she - knows why this section plays out as it does. My hunch is that all this time, Aneeka is seen through the eyes of all the people who love her most. And yet, through each person's eyes, though something new is revealed, much more remains mysterious. The moment that Shamsie entered Aneeka's mind is the moment we could reasonably expect to know this character at last. There would be no Antigone, whatever the versions are called, without the speaking, thinking, vocalised presence of this character.

Unfortunately for Shamsie, she steps into Aneeka's point of view at the moment when Aneeka is utterly disintegrated by grief at the death of her twin. She is confounded, the very manifestation of the phrase out of her mind and Shamsie attempts to chronicle this by a peculiar kind of fragmented narrative. Sometimes these are in the form of tweets or media reports; at other times, something that reads like a diary but cannot possibly be, because though it might be in Aneeka's voice, she is also present in these brief pieces of text in the third person. 

Because Shamsie takes away from Aneeka the power of speech, what direct speech there is is far from powerful. I don't have the book to hand as I am writing this, but when she speaks to Isma, she is petulant (Get off his shed, she says, I think); with Abdul, to helps her get out of the country and to Karachi, her conversation consists of telling him she knew before he did that he was gay. The point of this conversation is not what she says, but his confession and explanation for why he needs to make amends.

The only word of power uttered in this entire section - that I hoped would be the first part of the battle with Karamat (which was always the symbolic heart of the story) - is the word 'Justice' : her single word reply to a reporter asking her, as she leaves for her flight, what she hopes to achieve by going to Karachi.

Aneeka has lost her power of speech, upon which so much depends. But this is a novel and not a play, and in a visual world, we expect actions to speak louder: a gallery exhibition of images, each squeezing out a thousand words.

So that, when we reach the last fifth of the book and step into Karamat's point of view, we have plenty to see. Once again, we're watching Aneeka from a distance, through someone else's eyes, and this particular perspective is a shrewd, calculating one. What might have been simple acts of grief gain a certain political heft because it is Karamat who, representing the State, watches Aneeka enact an opposition that cannot be anything but hostile to everything he is.

Novel though it is, a clash of thhe kind between Antigone and Creon, Aneeka and Karamat, cannot be conducted through actions only. Ideas are central to this battle and they needs words. Shamsie's dialogue through the book is sharp, quick and supple in its ability to be wry and witty and to cut when necessary.

Sadly, Aneeka and Karamat never talk in person. Shamsie outsources to Eamonn and Isma what Aneeka might have said to Karamat. And their words, though they find their mark, are softened by the characters they are. We never do find out what Aneeka's idea of justice actually is - beyond that the law and justice are not the same thing and that the UK must allow her to bring Parvaiz's body back to he can be buried with his mother.

This, really, is what makes Home Fire merely a very good book when it could have been great, even brilliant. 

Not ending on that note, however. It also occurs to me that though Aneeka may not have been the one to articulate all of the arguments in opposition to Karamat's stateist position, there is nothing inaccurate in the way Shamsie shows a more diverse, multi-directional critique of power.

__

I cannot help mentioning that I look for and invariably find a particular thing - I hesitate to call it a tic -  that Shamsie has in all of her novels. Some years ago, it would cause me to roll my eyes a little bit, but now I found myself recognising it here with a kind of affectionate amusement.

No, I am not going to tell you what it is. 

On Carson's Antigonick

Excellent essay by Pierce Penniless on Anne Carson's Antigonick here:

One of the unsettling pleasures of tragedy is to see the ineluctable consequences of action work themselves out on stage. Real life is rarely so neat. Antigone contains a famous crux about theatrical timing, about when Eurydike exits the stage to her suicide. Eurydike is not a character you notice much: she spends most of the play inside the house, exiting only to hear news of her son’s suicide, and then wanders back inside to kill herself, cursing her husband. I say ‘wander’, because it is not clear in the original quite when she exits the stage. There is theatrical potential here: she can drag herself, heavy with fate, back into the oikos, while conversation continues around her silent form. Carson transforms her short, unexceptional ten lines into a jagged meditation on the whole play – it is an exceptional piece of writing, one of the moments in the text that Carson’s critical and poetic faculties are seamlessly blended:

EURYDIKE: THIS IS EURYDIKE’S MONOLOGUE IT’S HER
ONLY SPEECH IN THE PLAY. YOU MAY NOT KNOW WHO
SHE IS THAT’S OK. LIKE POOR MRS. RAMSAY WHO DIED
IN A BRACKET OF TO THE LIGHTHOUSE SHE’S THE WIFE
OF THE MAN WHOSE MOODS TENSIFY THE WORLD OF
THIS STORY THE WORLD SUNDERED BY HER I SAY
SUNDERED
BY HER THAT GIRL WITH THE UNDEAD STRAPPED TO
HER BACK. A STATE OF EXCEPTION MARKS THE
LIMIT OF LAW THIS VIOLENT THING THIS FRAGILE THING
TRY TO UNCLENCH WE SAID TO HER SHE NEVER DID. WE
GOT HER THE BIKE WE GOT HER A THERAPIST THAT POOR
SAD MAN WITH HIS ODD IDEAS, SOME DAYS HE MADE
US SIT ON THE STAIRCASE ALL ON DIFFERENT STEPS
OR VIDEOTAPED US BUT WHEN WE WATCHED
IT WAS NOTHING BUT SHADOWS. FINALLY WE EXPELLED HER
WE HAD TO. USING THE LOGIC OF FRIEND AND FOE THAT
SHE DENIES BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY
THE
RULE
TO
WHICH
SHE
IS
AN
EXCEPTION IS SHE
AUTOIMMUNE NO SHE IS NOT. HAVE YOU HEARD
THIS EXPRESSION THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A NICK
I ASKED MY SON WHAT
IS
A
NICK
I ASKED MY SON
WHEN THE MESSENGER COMES I SET HIM STRAIGHT I
TELL HIM NOBODY’S MISSING WE’RE ALL HERE WE’RE
ALL FINE. WHY DO MESSENGERS ALWAYS EXAGGERATE
EXIT EURYDIKE BLEEDING FROM ALL ORIFICES
[EURYDIKE DOES NOT EXIT]

Carson’s version here is far from the speech in the original, retaining only Eurydike’s relationship to the messenger, and foregrounding the figure of the messenger as the bearer of off-stage (literally ‘obscene’) horror to those we see. There is much to unpack: the reference to Woolf and marginal women, or the grammatical pun on Kreon’s moods tensifying the play – Kreon has been throwing around verbs which come back to haunt him in different moods. The reference to autoimmunity and the obscure shadows of private and familial relations picks up both the inscrutable riven motivations of Antigone herself and Kreon’s accusation, her willing severance of social obligations. Her horror of what she’s about to hear is all too obvious – so much that she scrabbles for the unreliability of the messenger rather than face the truth.

But time and law dance around each other in Eurydike’s speech. Eurydike, for all her marginality, is the only figure who understands what Antigone is, and her relationship to law and the city: she is its product and its negation. As such, the only thing the polis could do would be to expel her. She is irrecuperable. What is the nick of time? The nick of time is something that does not exist for Eurydike, nor anyone else in the play. The nick of time is that swerve which averts disaster for all on stage, something done at just the last moment which resets all the assumptions and trajectories of the play. The nick of time is the essence of comedy; in tragedy it does not exist.

My attempts to wheedle a review copy out of New Directions failed. I still want this though.

The 2nd Chorus from Jean Anouilh's Antigone

One of the most stirring moments in theatre occurs in Jean Anouilh's Antigone. The play itself is was an important one, especially when it was first staged in 1944, because Antigone was seen as representing the French Resistance. But the most interesting thing about the play is that it constantly digresses, in key moments, into the kind of philisophical discussions that playwrights today ought to study: no one can say these make the play boring or unwatchable, or that they dissipate the drama.

The second Chorus, in both the Sophocles and the Anouilh versions, is said after Creon gives the order to uncover the body of Polynices that Antigone has attempted to bury. In the Sophocles version, the Second Chorus is a celebration of Man. "Nothing is beyond his power" the Chorus declares, but ends on a cautionary note, warning against pride, as any self-respecting Greek tragedy ought to do.

Jean Anouilh's Second Chorus, however, meditates on the nature of tragedy. Anybody who has read Sophocles' Antigone cannot help noticing that whereas Sophocles makes man responsible for his own condition, for the tragedies that befall him as a result of his own hubris, Anouilh says that tragedy comes when Man refuses to surrender to his destiny or when he imagines that he can take charge of his fate and change it.

The whole Second Chorus from Anouilh's Antigone below. It never fails to bring on the goose pimples.

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job. Anything will set it going: a glance at a girl who happens to be lifting her arms to her hair as you go by; a feeling when you wake up on a fine morning that you'd like a little respect paid to you today, as if it were as easy to order as a second cup of coffee; one question too many, idly thrown out over a friendly drink--and the tragedy is on.

The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled since time began, and it runs without friction. Death, treason, and sorrow are on the march; and they move in the wake of storm, of tears, of stillness. Every kind of stillness. The hush when the executioner's axe goes up at the end of the last act. The unbreathable silence when, at the beginning of the play, the two lovers, their hearts bared, their bodies naked, stand for the first time face to face in the darkened room, afraid to stir. The silence inside you when the roaring crowd acclaims the winner--so that you think of a film without a soundtrack, mouths agape and no sound coming out of them, a clamor that is no more than a picture; and you, the victor, already vanquished, alone in your desert of silence. That is tragedy.

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama--with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.

In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from
them.

In melodrama, you argue and struggle in the hope of escape. That is vulgar; it's practical. but in tragedy, where there is no temptation to try to escape, argument is gratuitous; it's kingly.