Carson, Anne -"Chez l'Oxymoron"

Ben Sonnenberg

Chez l'OxymoronAuthor(s): Anne CarsonSource: Grand Street, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 168-174Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25007148 .

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GRAND STREET

CHEZ L'OXYMORON

Anne Carson

Oxymoron: [ancient Greek Wti.wpov, substantive use of neuter of Ovlflwpor pointedly foolish, from 4tv0 sharp + ,uwpos dull, stupid, foolish] a rhetorical figure by which contradictory or in congruous terms are conjoined so as to give point to the statement or expres sion; an expression, in its superficial or literal meaning, self-contradictory or absurd, but involving a point.

Oxford English Dictionary

"I am Heathclif." Catherine Earnshaw

nce I went to South America to look at the edges of shadows. It was July. I was living in a small town

near New York. The moon waning. Night after night un able to sleep because of the shadows, I got up, followed them along the wall, down the stairs, outside. They lay stretched across the lawn like a sound, blacker than any sound. They lay having a solidity like objects and a hard, whole life in them that is withheld from us. The edges cut away from us back into a world of a different kind. Can you stand there, I thought, can you balance, can you glance in? It became my endeavor to stand on the very edge of shadow. Night after night I practiced my attempt. Night after night I failed. There is shadow and there is no shadow and you can see the difference between them you can stare at it, measure it, describe it, you can show it in a mirror, but to stand on that edge-no, you can't do it. I traveled to South America hoping that, in the in verted relationships of that hemisphere, edges might as sert themselves differently, shadows would be as solid as categories, but no. The edge where shadow and no shadow come together and lie side by side is a point without space. A contradiction without terms.

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Yet we do have terms for such things, if the world of phenomena does not. We do contrive, in forms of lan guage, to balance on the edge between shadow and no shadow, seeking a point of insight that is to be found no

where else. One of the forms we contrive is oxymoron. "How far is oxymoron, so dear to tragic texts, essential to the representations that tlhe city gives of itself in drama?" asks Nicole Loraux in Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Harvard University Press). Her answer is an inquest of pleasure, the special pleasure we take in watching women die on the stage of fifth-century Greek tragedy. Oxymoron informs every aspect of this pleasure, she finds. Female death, as we see it enacted in classical drama, is a rhetori cal compound of masculine and feminine idioms forced together at high pressure into certain anomalous shapes and unthinkable thoughts: pleasurable to the extent that they remain unthinkable even as you think them, remain anomalous as they take shape. Balanced on the edge be tween male and female, and arguably unique to the tragic response, is a pleasure that sways in the inind like fragrance-a whiff of cool sweat as the actor lifts the female mask to place it over his face.

Oxymoron is a word that enacts itself. Its two com ponents, the adjective ofev (meaning "'sharp" or "pointed") and the adjective 1tuop6v (meaning "dull" or 'foolish"), lie contiguous but distinct, like rooms on either side of a con necting door. So too the ancient tragic stage is composed of two spaces and a connecting door. Through this door the tragic heroine purposing to die conventionally disap pears, into the interior of her house, so as to do the deed in private; some time later a messenger or servant arrives on stage to report her death in a lengthy set-speech. But, as Loraux is not the first to observe, tragic protocol is a curious business. The messenger-speeches that announce women's deaths in fifth-century tragedy are raw and alarmingly beautiful narratives, much more intrusive than plain performance could ever be. Here you see women in physical and mental extremity, exposing themselves to ultimate violation-as if they thought themselves un watched. Words betray the dying woman to you. Words

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withhold her death from dramatization in order to exhibit it all the more fully on the screen of your imagining mind.

Words wrap the woman herself out of sight and at the same time thrust you into the private parts of her suffer ing. Words render her as tragic pleasure, a pleasure con tingent upon a closed door.

Behind a closed door was where ancient opinion pre ferred to locate the feminine presence; Greek propriety, in general, denied to women the public caress of fame. A reputable woman lived her life out of sight and vanished at death into her husband's memory. As Pericles put it, 'The glory of a woman is to have no glory." Except on the tragic stage: here you see women strut and die as darkly as men, more darkly in fact. For death can impart a manly glory. But, to be feminine, glory must blot itself out: sui cide is the match with which most tragic heroines kindle their own fame. Tragedy takes special pleasure in staging this oxymoron of female glory, Loraux claims. She traces its etiology to the deepest places of the Athenian socio cultural imagination, where you see one image replicate itself again and again. It is the image of a woman hanging up a noose.

That hanging is "a woman's way of death" was a truism of ancient aesthetics, but why? The sword makes practical and symbolic sense as the typical instrument of masculine destruction, but what is particularly feminine about the rope? Loraux offers several explanations. Hanging was, in Greek eyes, the ugliest form of death, called ao.Xn,uwv ("formless"), Xw,81 ( "multilation"), ,p4acrpxv ("pollution") and incurring utmost dishonor. Yet a certain physiological appropriateness can be claimed for this ugly act: "As it closes forever the too open bodies of women, hanging is almost latent in feminine physiology," says Loraux. In dramatic practice, moreover, hanging gives infinite play to feminine artifice, for the suicidal women of tragedy commonly replace ropes with some item of female ac couterment-veil, girdle, headbinder-and so end their lives hoist by their own allure. At the same time, hanging preserves both feminine allure and feminine physiology from the intrusion of "weapons that cut and tear, those that draw blood."

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B ut the Athenian tragic aesthetic was not interested in Dmaking a clean distinction between male and female

deaths on grounds of gore. Loraux draws our attention to a deliberate confusion of sexual styles at the moment of decision. There are, for example, women who seize the sword and die in blood like men (Sophocles' Deianira and Eurydice, Euripides' Jocasta). There are womanish heroes who entertain notions of hanging themselves (Euripides' Admetus) or die by inadvertent strangulation (Euripides' Hippolytus). More interesting, there are locutions that refuse to make a choice between rope and sword, like the untranslatable 406vtov aIWp'q?.ua of Euripides' Helen. This heroine flirts with mortal possibilities in the terms:

I shall put my neck in a deadly dangling noose (po0vtov at6p,71,a), or in a mighty effort sink the whole blade of a sword into my flesh....

"Deadly dangling noose" is a fudged translation of the adjective 40v&ov ("bloody") and the noun a"6pLq,Pa ("hanging" or "suspension" or "hanged object'). Balanced on the edge between blood and bloodlessness, Helen's oxymoron is a microcosm of the female relation to dra

matic death, Loraux seems to suggest. For the female is at liberty (as the man is not: no man actually hangs him self in tragedy) to "play the man" in her death if she chooses. No small part of your tragic pleasure consists in

watching her engaged in that play with the sexes of death. Playing with death by play upon language is a game

you have learned to enjoy as a spectator of the Greek theater. Women play the game best, perhaps because they are, in the ancient assumption, preternaturally devious.

At any rate, Helen's tricky word aIWp-pr/,xcx ("suspension") provides another example of the oxymoronic logic of fe male death. Tragic diction uses this word of motion in two opposite directions: both the woman who hangs herself up in a noose and the woman who hurls herself down from a rock (for example, Evadne in Euripides' Suppliants) call their action a By comparing with this usage the tragic convention of "escape odes," in which despondent

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heroines or female choruses voice a desire to find death by flight through the air, Loraux unfolds an important mytho poeic distinction between male and female in terms of fixity and movement.* "Identified as he was with the hoplite model, a man had to hold his ground and face death head on." And again she demonstrates that tragedy realizes this distinction by playing with it, asserts cate gories by confusing them. Thus Sophocles' Ajax exacts a queer compromise from death: planting his sword firm as a hoplite, this hero hurls himself upon it like a woman leaping into the void. Deianira, too, mixes the options of tragic suicide tellingly. She seizes a sword and plunges it into her side, as if to escape female categorization once for all, only to be caught by the heel of a Sophoclean word play. "She has set off for her last journey on a foot that does not move," is the sentence in which the chorus report

Deianira's death by the sword. Deianira's "motionless foot" (Eeg &KLV 4IOV iro0&) is an interpretational crux to which

Loraux gives an entirely original reading. The locution is intended to evoke, she believes, a conventional back ground of tragic heroines swaying in nooses and so to contrast Deianira's manly preference for a death with both feet on the ground. Fastened to death by an oxy moron that deserves comparison with Helen's "bloody suspension," Deianira brings you again to that unique point of balance, between a wound and its own blood, where your intensest tragic pleasure seems to lie.

It is this same keen edge of pleasure that cuts the throats of female heroines like Iphigenia, Polyxena, Macaria.

Virgins in fifth-century tragedy do not generally kill them selves, Loraux tells us, for they have less autonomy than

mature women. Virgins instead are slaughtered by men,

* It is odd that Loraux does not engage the precisely contrary find ings of her countryman Jean-Paul Vernant, whose celebrated study of Greek social space, "Hestia-Hermes. Sur l'expression religieuse de l'espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs" in Mythe et pensee chez les grecs I (Paris 1974) identifies woman with the fixed principle of the hearth and man with the infinitely mobile

Hermes. Perhaps we are meant to understand that death reverses all such categories; perhaps a deeper (in?)coherence deserves examination. "Les mythes se-representent entre eux," Levi-Strauss

warns.

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in fictive transgression of taboos against human sacrifice. Their maiden status gives a ghastly inverse realization to traditional Greek metaphors associating marriage with the funeral rite. For these girls, to be put to death is indeed a kind of wedding, in which Hades plays the role of the waiting bridegroom and the sacrificial knife performs an act of surrogate defloration. And once again, in a different sense, you see the tragic heroine balanced on an edge be tween blood and bloodlessness, in this "'paradoxical image of the sacrificed virgin whose virginity is taken from her at the very moment when she is being exalted for puri ty." Oxymoronic modifiers like vylu.7r a0vv,puoq 7rapOEvos a7rapOEvOs ("maiden lacking maidenhead, virgin not vir gin," Euripides' Hecuba) adorn these heroines as they face death, in order that they may "satisfy at once the anger of the gods and the dreams of the spectators."

Loraux's final chapter is an autopsy of the female body as constituted by the tragic imagination of the Greeks. According to her finding, death comes to women primarily through the throat (&Epr ), a locus of beauty as well as of greatest vulnerability-whether to noose or knife. The

male body, in contrast, is much more diversified for access by death. A man's side, stomach, chest, lungs and liver are all fatally vulnerable. Thus, when Sophocles' Deianira pierces her side "with a two-edged sword rammed home between the liver and the diaphragm" (Trachinae), she is usurping not only the weapon and action, but the anato

my of masculine death. Deianira's blow is problematic, however. In order to strike herself below the liver, Deianira uncovers the left side of her body. Various explanations of this anomaly, more and less insulting to Sophocles, have been proposed; Loraux reads it, ingeniously, as a 'textual ruse." Sophocles knew Deianira's liver to be on her right side but also shared a common fifth-century understand ing of the left side of the body as "the female side" and the right as "the male side." The poet is creating a deliberate anatomical oxymoron in order "to emphasize that a wom an's death, even if contrived in the most manly way, does not escape the laws of her sex."

Oxymoron is mapped out as theatrical choice, at the climax of Euripides' Hecuba, upon the anatomy of Poly

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xena. At the moment of being sacrificed, and having just declared herself ready to proffer her throat to Neopto lemus' knife, the maiden suddenly changes her mind. Ex posing her flesh from neck to navel, she drops to one knee and cries out:

Here is my chest, young man. Strike there, if you like. Or if you prefer the neck, here is my throat ready.

Neoptolemus hesitates, as do commentators on this text, to take Polyxena's point; in the end he decides to go for the throat. While commentators traditionally proceed to claims of Euripidean "eroticization," Loraux prefers to see in Polyxena's alternative a graphic female claim upon av8peia, the masculine virtue of martial courage. Euripi des celebrates the contradictory quality of this "manly woman" by juxtaposing two loci of death: in the chest like a warrior or in the throat like a victim of sacrifice.

With her throat cut, Polyxena is "reclaimed at the last moment for feminity," and so a tragic heroine had to be, Loraux argues, for reasons of cultural stability. "Tragedy does transgress and mix things up-this is its rule, its nature-but never to the point of irrevocably overturning the civic order of values." In other words, the oxymoronic confrontation of male and female within individual psy ches on the tragic stage is a luxury bought at the price of genuine aberration-a cage gone in search of a bird, Kafka would say. To good citizens like yourselves, tragedy of fers "the controlled pleasure afforded by an enjoyment of the deviant when it is acted out, reflected upon and tamed"-the deviant maintained as deviant. Female glory asserted as a paradox. Shadow as nullity. I think it was in a bar in South America a man said to me, "By means of a box of matches you can represent everything, except a box of matches."

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Carson, Anne -"Chez l'Oxymoron"

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