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.