Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson. New Directions, 64 pp., $11.95.

I am that Persephone

Who played with her darlings in Sicily

Against a background of social security.

Oh what a glorious time we had

Or had we not? They say it was sad

I had been good, grown bad.

— from “Persephone” by Stevie Smith

Can one suffer from too much experience? Anne Carson’s new play, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, returns several times to the above lines by Smith to ask, what do we do when we’ve grown bad? The suffering caused by poverty, hunger, and ignorance is well-documented. The people were hungry and poor, so we discovered industry. The people were ignorant, so we educated them. The people lacked culture, so we found ways to deliver them the finest sensual goods culture has to offer on movie screens and televisions — Marilyn Monroe’s smiling face on handbags, posters, and film. Does modern society really suffer primarily from lack? Marxist Walter Benjamin characterizes the problem in “Experience and Poverty” (1933): 

With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely… For what is the value of all our culture if it is divorced from experience? Where it all leads when that experience is simulated or obtained by underhanded means is something that has become clear to us from the horrific mishmash of styles and ideologies produced during the last century… Indeed (let’s admit it), our poverty of experience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human experience in general. Hence, a new kind of barbarism. [1]

Benjamin answers this modern condition of poverty, resulting from the overfullness of life, with a “positive concept of barbarism.” What should you do when you’ve grown bad? The barbarian is forced to “start from scratch” and “make a little go a long way.”

When one looks at such an accumulated wreckage of history and culture, how could one not sympathize with Euripides? In Helen, Euripides summarily trashes the meaning of Homeric epic — its thousands and thousands of lines — and appropriates its most one-dimensional character as the basis for new art. As Norma Jeane sings at the start of Carson’s translation, “I expect you’ve heard of the Trojan War / and how it was caused by Norma Jeane Baker, / harlot of Troy. / Well, welcome to Public Relations. / That was all a hoax.” Behind the tragedy of Norma-cum-Helen’s situation, the destruction of her reputation, her confinement in Los Angeles, and the subsequent peril faced by her daughter, there is a diabolical energy in her blasé tone. Did Marilyn Monroe ever sound so demonic in her Hollywood pictures? Certainly, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is not the forlorn Hollywood sex icon we inherit from popular culture. 

Much has been made of the feminist bona fides of Carson’s translation. A quote from Anne Carson noting that “we need new ways of thinking about female icons” is slapped on the back of the published play along with some words from a New Directions employee about the “destabilizing and destructive power of beauty.” This theme is elaborated in the prevailing critical interpretation of Norma Jeane, the Bookforum review of the play by Audrey Wollen. According to Wollen, the “kernel” of Carson’s translation is rape, the disaster of girlhood. Norma Jeane’s knitting of Helen’s tapestry of Troy, one of the only stage directions in the whole play, is for Wollen “like structuralist film, exposing the mechanism behind what we are seeing as we see it,” the mechanism being “the labor of femininity.” Carson’s translation is then the reenactment of the eternal rape of woman (Persephone, Helen, Norma Jeane Baker, the 21st century #MeToo idol) that is able to express the truth of this eternal condition through the aforementioned deconstructive gesture — translation as “worship,” Wollen declares.  

But what of translation as conquest? Or, put differently, is Carson’s translation really the worshipping of the accomplished fact in language and history, merely represented from a “destabilizing” and “feminine” viewpoint? This echoes an abiding question for recent contributions to Caesura by Austin Carder, who points out that when “we pay our respects” in translation it is “always cheaper than reflecting on that for which we pay.” In opposition to Wollen’s translation as worship, “Translation as conquest is only the decision to become the subject of past action, in addition to the object that we already are. The past already overcomes the present. Can the present overcome itself by conquering the past?” Wollen, enraptured as she is by the eternal violence of language, would do well to listen to Norma Jeane’s warning in the prologue: “The play is a tragedy. Watch closely now / how I save it from sorrow.”

How does Norma Jeane save the play from sorrow? Let us attend to Wollen’s recognition that Norma Jeane’s knitting is lifting the veil on the mechanism of the play without conceding to Wollen’s easy resolution of this technique as women’s work. The gesture, through its repetition, is liberated to take on an autonomous life within the play, following Brecht’s liberation of the gesture in his epic theater. This technique is a favorite of Carson’s. She uses it in Antigonick, her translation of Sophocles, in which a silent part measures objects on stage for the duration of the play. Antigonick also makes reference to Brecht’s translation of Antigone, in which Antigone is made to carry a door on her back in every scene. In Norma Jeane’s “History of War: Lesson 8,” she explains that in ancient Greek the technical word for weaving and the word for mortal spots on the armored human body are nearly identical, and both sound like the Greek word meaning “the exact right place and time for something to happen, the critical juncture, the perfect opportunity.” When Helen weaves her tapestry within the confines of Priam’s castle, she recreates the battles of Troy, much as Euripides’ Helen replays the sacking of Troy with her husband to escape from the Nile. The suffering of Menelaus and Helen is ultimately redeemed by the promise that their daughter Hermione will be able to marry now that Helen’s reputation is recovered. 

In the final episode of Carson’s play, as Norma Jeane and Co. ride her city-destroying tsunami to New York to find Hermione, she imagines arguing with her daughter about buttoning up her coat. The knitting reaches a demonic single-mindedness:

…me doing up a button and her pulling away exasperated, undoing it. Doing it, undoing it, doing it, undoing it, doing, undoing, doing, undoing, doing — like some crazed German expressionist film from the ‘30s — 

I get out my knitting. 

People laugh when I say it keeps me sane. 

She tells Miss Pearl Bailey that she is weaving the fall of Troy. The lines of the play themselves become the images of the tapestry, describing scenes at Troy, until suddenly the weaving of her singing is interrupted by the announcement that a doorbell has rung somewhere. The lines become images of the wreckage around her; Norma Jeane sees relics of culture floating in the deluge (“Bibles, a stop sign, a Santa hat, people”), which the play appropriates for its weaving. She pushes away all the drowning victims clamoring to get on her boat, for they are not her daughter. We could say that Norma Jeane has concentrated all her thoughts on “a simple but ambitious plan”: to rescue her daughter and redeem the wreckage of her own history, now the wreckage of all of Los Angeles. [2]

As for mechanism, the work itself has taken on her weaving as an autonomous activity. What is its task? To find the “exact right place and time for something to happen, the critical juncture,” through which Helen’s thread may be pulled so that we in the present can become the subject of the horrors of history, rather than its passive object. The play sets itself the task of redeeming Persephone, Helen, and Marilyn, but perhaps also Jack the Ripper! When Norma Jeane says that knitting keeps her sane, we should recall the horrid “blooming” of Jack’s insane mind from “Lesson 6,” which morphed into the love of Truman Capote’s lover, Jack Dunphy, in the chorus and has now become Norma Jeane’s apocalyptic weaving after her suicide. 

Carson is supremely aware of the difficulties of translating Euripides in her exact time and place in history. In “Lesson 2,” the audience is asked to “compare and contrast catching a spear in the spleen with utter mental darkness,” to “consider ancient vs modern experience,” and to consider if these are “what is meant in poetry by ‘a beautiful death.’” Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, which occurs (and does not occur) obliquely at the end of episode four, is a distinctly modern experience. Ancient suicide usually occured when one failed to die in a battle where one’s culture and values are completely defeated by an enemy to which one will be enslaved. It was a substitute for “catching a spear in the spleen.” Marilyn’s death was not caused by the loss of her culture, but rather by its horrid “blooming” in her mind and in the world, where her image was reproduced endlessly in popular media. So too do we suffer in the present from our own history and potential. When Carson writes that “language should cover its own eyes when it speaks,” the image repressed is not of a horrible thing that is language, as Wollen would suggest, but rather that of a process that is unfolding and still subject to transformation.

Euripides redeemed the meaningless rape of Troy with the meaningful rape of the Nile and the promise of a restored Sparta. Carson does not worship this history by deconstructing it. Rather, she conquers Euripides’ radical attempt to destroy and redeem his culture and history, but for modern times and modern men — modern men who suffer from an overfullness of experience that impoverishes them. In a recent interview, Carson commented that Euripides’ Helen was a recurring problem for her, “partly because of the sheer boldness of his reimagining… which was not just a reimagining of the structure of Helen’s fate but of Helen as a moral and emotional quotient. Her passions are here directed not at men or sex but at her daughter. Euripides takes the flat cartoon of the mythic Helen and makes it into a completely different kind of credible human complexity.” Here we see precisely Benjamin’s positive concept of barbarism, the need to “make a little go a long way.” Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy appropriates that “flat cartoon” of Marilyn Monroe to remind us not only of what we have been, but of what we may yet become. //

[1] Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, ed. Michael W  Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

[2] The phrase is used by Walter Benjamin in the essay cited above. He is quoting German author Paul Scheerbart: “You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan.”