Vol. 31 No. 11 · 11 June 2009
pages 17-18 | 3195 words
Let’s Cut to the Wail
Michael Wood
- BuyAn Oresteia translated by Anne Carson
Faber, 255 pp, $27.00, March 2009, ISBN 978 0 86547 902 9
Some time ago the scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant reminded us that Greek gods are not persons but forces; and in Anne Carson’s Oresteia, her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,[*] I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought. These gods are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise name and must still name somehow.
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[*] Grief Lessons (NYRB, 312 pp., £7.99, February 2006, 978 1 590 17180 6).
Letters
Vol. 31 No. 12 · 25 June 2009
From Leo Robson
‘When I said there was a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan, I was simplifying wildly,’ Michael Wood confesses in his review of Synecdoche, New York. ‘There is a replica of the warehouse in the warehouse, and perhaps another one inside that.’ In fact, there are four warehouses (at least); so Wood was simplifying even more wildly than he thought.
Leo Robson
Leamington Spa
Vol. 31 No. 14 · 23 July 2009
From Frederick Sweet
Michael Wood observes that when Orestes is acquitted in The Eumenides, it is because Apollo pleads for him (LRB, 11 June). In fact, as counsel for the defence, Apollo is something of a dud (one of his key arguments is that the mother of a child is not a parent but merely a vessel for the seed). Wood also notes that it is curious that Athena makes her tie-breaking move – the exoneration of the matricide Orestes – before she knows there is a tie. Although, admittedly, a legally questionable procedure, this is not necessarily a surprising move on Athena’s part. The Eumenides may well mark the epochal advent of the rule of law; but this enlightened construct is to be underpinned by the enduring reality of male dominance. This is what Athena – sprung from an Olympian male brain – is publicly and everlastingly sanctioning.
Frederick Sweet
Toronto
