H of H Playbook: a review

Anne Carson is an author worth knowing. Her Autobiography of Red and Red Doc> are elliptical, heartfelt reinventions of Greek myth. In both the central character is Geryon, the red-winged man, and his relationship (sometimes erotic) with Herakles.

In her most recent, H of H Playbook, she zooms in on Herakles and deconstructs Euripides’s tragedy about his return home after his Twelve Labors — and by “deconstruct” I mean she literally and figuratively takes it apart and glues it down on the page.

Each page of the book is a reproduction, a photograph of an original scrapbook format. Carson’s terse, telegraphic dialog is printed out, cut out with scissors, and glued down to the page. Illustrations (by the author) are mostly abstractions in oil pastels, rubbings and smearings in a limited palette.

I got H of H Playbook a couple of months ago and read it quickly — there’s not a lot of text. I was struck by it, but I knew that I needed to read it again, more slowly and deliberately, and this past week I did so.

What. A. Creation. And I have so many questions. How did she decide to illustrate it, and why with the little abstractions? What was the process to select which illustration for which page? (Just kidding: We all know it was ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS > GESTALT > SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.)

It took me until this second reading to realize that the text is mostly in rhyming couplets, which is deft. Unlike the 17th–18th c. translations, though, these are not stodgy, overpadded heroic couplets. They’re terse, slangy, rapid-fire snippets of TV crime dramas, prose that happens to rhyme.

It’s very hard to describe the impact of reading H of H Playbook. You’re reading, absorbed in the text, then turn the page and are confronted with a cryptic drawing, or a half-page of paper, or a blank. You’re brought up short, then your brain wants to make the connection, the cause-and-effect. Then you keep reading.

Carson’s “script” includes stage directions and voice-overs, so the piece does come across as more television than amphitheatre, a challenging work of Western classical literature boiled down to a single 30-minute episode. It works. We understand every character’s hopes, fears, motivations, and the impact of the violence (still offstage) remains crushing.

Euripides was excoriated by the purists of his day for “corrupting” the Dionysian rites of theatre, and with the ending of his play and of H of H Playbook it is easy to see why. Driven to madness by Hera out of revenge and jealousy, Herakles kills his wife and sons. When he awakens from his fit and is told what he has done, he wants to commit suicide but is talked out of it by Theseus, who has arrived on his way home to Athens.

“Don’t beat yourself up too much,” advises Theseus. (Wait, what??) “These things happen. Even the gods do awful things, and they still dine on Olympus.”

Herakles retorts that all those myths are just stories; there are no gods. (This is the man who rescued Theseus from Hades and brought Cerberus back to the surface…) Nevertheless, he agrees to go to Athens with Theseus and to get over his unbelievable crimes.

Anne Carson plays with Euripides’s ambivalence and ambiguity in ways that are purely postmodern, yet true to the original. Modern readers — inured as we are to the rich and powerful skirting the law — will feel the same unease at the ending as the original Athenians did.

In sum, I highly recommend H of H Playbook.