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[The Throne of Labdacus] (By: Gjertrud Schnackenberg) [published: December, 2001]
In this book-length poem, Gjertrud Schnackenberg tells the story of Oedipus, and of "what happens outside the play," in the experience of the god who is its presiding Apollo, the god of poetry, music, and healing. Given the task of setting the Sophocles text to music, the god is reluctantly woven into its world of riddles, unanswered questions, partially disclosed oracles, and hearsay - a world where gods, as much as humans, are subject to the binding claims of fate and necessity.
- GenresPoetry
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First published January 1, 2000
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April 23, 2009
The subject of Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s book length poem Throne of Labdacus is the Oedipus myth--as told by Sophocles in his famous play “Oedipus the King.” Schnackenberg’s approach will at first startle those familiar with her work. Gone is the lush language of her previous efforts, replaced now by an austere imagism that recalls H.D., in particular, that poet’s Helen in Egypt. Schnackenberg seeks to tell those parts of the story “outside the play,” with the god Apollo providing the fresh viewpoint for the ancient story.
In Part One, “The God Tunes the Strings,” the first ten lines tell the whole story:
The first warning passing through Thebes -
as small a sound
As a housefly alighting from Persia
And stamping its foot on a mound
Where the palace once was;
As small as a moth chewing thread
In the tyrant’s robe;
As small as the cresting of red
In the rim of an injured eye; as small
As the sound of a human conceived--
The last couplet closes the circle, with its image of a gouged eye, followed immediately by the “sound” of conception--itself no louder than a fly stamping its foot. This is an impressive compression, with its quick flash of communication. The life of Oedipus, his fate, as well as the fate of plague-doomed Thebes, are all suggested in these ten lines. Moreover, this “flash” (suggestive of Part Two’s title “The Shape of Lightning”) with its loaded imagery comes from on high (Zeus--or beyond) to the listening god Apollo. Apollo is meant to be the conduit for this tale. And the god begins immediately, “mouthing the words,” committing them to memory, and then to music. But, as the god turns the squeaking pegs in their holes, he feels unease, for he himself is “frightened / By the self-blinding..” and by a story “The meaning of which nobody knows.”
The Throne of Labdacus is divided into ten parts, though it isn’t always easy--without careful rereadings--distinguishing the “why” of each part, since this is not a linear retelling of the story. Instead, what the reader finds in Schnackenberg’s vision is an intense meditation on images and events drawn from the play. To some extent this can be hard to follow at times; nevertheless, the impression grows, as the poem proceeds, that the poet is doing some fine (and elaborate) weave work. Familiar images from the Oedipus story bleed into each other: a peg turning in its hole becomes the wheel of a chariot; the wounded feet of a baby become the wounded foot of a young man slaying his father, and the feet of father and son blur together as both cross into Jocasta’s bedchamber; Jocasta’s rope becomes a broken lyre string, and so on. The effect is cinematic and cumulative as Schnackenberg assumes the camera’s eye--a poetic Eisenstein.
Schnackenberg also draws on sources outside of Sophocles. This is reflected throughout the poem in the refrain-like “Others say..” or “Some said...” as different (and sometimes contradictory) tellings are worked into the poem. The purpose for this is to plot the story historically by suggesting a variety of contexts: its ancient beginnings in “gossip,” to folklore, and finally the play itself. At one point, Schnakenberg goes so far as to state “everything is true.” When it comes to Sophocles, she questions how the dramatist’s Athenian version differs from how it was understood centuries before at its roots -- in Thebes:
In Thebes, the people see unfathomed sacrilege
In swiftly succeeding, savage episodes;
But in Athens the people quarrel
Over what is meant -
The dilemma over what the Oedipus story means has been debated for centuries. The classicist, Bernard Knox, in his essay “The Freedom of Oedipus,” sees Oedipus as heroic, not feeble. This, according to Knox, was the understanding the Greek playgoer of the 5th century would have had upon seeing the play “Oedipus the King.” Schnakenberg seems conscious of Knox’s opinion--though in the end rejects such an interpretation as a fairly common “face-value” reading. In an endnote to the poem, she states that in “the Greek religious view, fate and free will need not be paradoxical and opposed...”. Where Schnackenberg finds room for maneuver is in what the gods don’t say. Since the gods (or more precisely Zeus) do not disclose all and humans are not all-knowing, what we humans perceive as free will may, in fact, be fated.
It is Apollo, the relayer of the prophecy, who must witness firsthand Oedipus’ fate in all its starkness:
The god simply says,
I saw what I saw --
A throne of snow.
A threatening goad.
A digger’s foot tamping down
And tamping down a mound at the place
Where three roads meet, leaving no visible evidence
Of who was buried there -
In part three (“What-Is And What-Is-not”), Apollo himself flees fate - or as Schnackenberg often prefers--Necessity: for the gods, like men, are also fated. The throne of snow will in the end be an empty throne. Both Olympus and Thebes will share a similar fate. Apollo senses the handwriting on the wall. However, such flight is desperate and useless and recalls the oracle given to Oedipus: “Flee birth.”
Being the god of poetry, Schnackenberg sees Apollo’s nature as not so mechanical. If there is any wiggle room in a cold universe, it lies with Apollo--a poet. But Necessity’s messenger (Necessity represents some sort of universal trump--card over both gods and men) finds Apollo hiding out among the debris of history. The messenger places the tablets of the Oedipus story into the unwilling god’s hands:
The god touched the tablets like a blind man,
Then wiped with his palm
The tale of Oedipus into a smear
And substituted, on behalf of Zeus, a law
That vibrated in the heavens
With Zeus’s pity:
The human being, in the end, is an injured body.
An injured body that lies where no law
Can touch it. An injured body that lies unburied
Outside the bourne of right and wrong.
But he had written this in the language of the gods:
The tablets showed only an expanse of illegible waves
Like a depiction of Zeus’s rain in undulating sheets
Whipping a storm through Thebes
This message of pity - perhaps even mercy in the New Testament sense--isn’t, as long as it remains in god-speak, communicated to the human race. Or, perhaps worse, it’s a deliberate lie issued out of pity. In either case, truth seems lost in a rain-driven scene straight from Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Truth, as revealed in the poem, is multi-faceted, perhaps meaningless. But for whatever reason, the text is eternal--always reemerging, even though each reemergence is like the recurring “paths worms make in excrement.”
Apollo’s own isolation increases as the poem progresses. In one poignant passage, Schnackenberg has Apollo calling to Oedipus, while at the same time recognizing that he himself has, from up above, been cut off from answers and explanations.
The god, on behalf of Zeus,
calls Oedipus! Oedipus!
The only name he has to call him by.
Then strains to hear a reply.
He leans forward in his shining chair
In Delphi;
Nothing. Far up, he sees
His father’s empty throne of snow,
And Olympus dripping silence; silence; silence.
As if there is nothing that Zeus wants.
Oedipus! Oedipus! Nothing.
Yet Oedipus has heard the god;
And, seated on a throne of rock
In a shadowy wood, he lifts
His bandaged face in response.
Riddleless. Answerless.
Interestingly, in Schnackenberg’s poem both Necessity and Oedipus are described as “Eyeless,” and even Apollo is likened to a blind man. To what degree they are all joined at the hip is a clear reference to Heraclitus’ maxim that character is fate (also alluded to in an endnote by Schnackenberg). Such a joining is here effectively depicted as both grotesque and heartbreaking. Before it, the reader also feels riddleless and answerless, as if viewing a horrific drawing by Goya:
A story sent to the god
By Faceless Necessity
Who had held a clay tablet up
To the bandaged eyes
Of a Bound Man
Playing his harp with his feet...
Despite all this fluidity, however, Schnackenberg does believe in a primal event behind the story, and by poem’s end, she returns to the enduring tableau:
At the heart of the music,
A slamming silence in the heart of Greece.
At the heart of the slamming silence,
A wobbling cart appears in the far distance,
A royal chariot that stalls at the crossroads...
However, if death is on all the borders of this tragedy, Schnackenberg also finds there is, at its heart, an act of mercy. The unnamed shepherd (who Schnackenberg reveals as Apollo) acting on impulse, and without consideration of past or future, saves the abandoned and maimed infant, Oedipus. If Schnackenberg sees heroism, or more importantly, freedom, it is here and not with the more familiar self-blinding that occurs later. For all the poem’s inevitability and seeming lack of consolation, Schnackenberg closes with an act of kindness that makes what was once a distant god manlike, the poem heard, the gap between heaven and earth painfully bridged:
Far up in the glinting, undefiled
Cleft of Delphi, music is being made
By the god, who turns from the sight
And closes his eyes--
I was riveted, chosen beguiled --
The god who, delicately,
As if plucking a single fate
From a heap of entangled fates,
Touches a string and replies:
I rescued the child.
In Part One, “The God Tunes the Strings,” the first ten lines tell the whole story:
The first warning passing through Thebes -
as small a sound
As a housefly alighting from Persia
And stamping its foot on a mound
Where the palace once was;
As small as a moth chewing thread
In the tyrant’s robe;
As small as the cresting of red
In the rim of an injured eye; as small
As the sound of a human conceived--
The last couplet closes the circle, with its image of a gouged eye, followed immediately by the “sound” of conception--itself no louder than a fly stamping its foot. This is an impressive compression, with its quick flash of communication. The life of Oedipus, his fate, as well as the fate of plague-doomed Thebes, are all suggested in these ten lines. Moreover, this “flash” (suggestive of Part Two’s title “The Shape of Lightning”) with its loaded imagery comes from on high (Zeus--or beyond) to the listening god Apollo. Apollo is meant to be the conduit for this tale. And the god begins immediately, “mouthing the words,” committing them to memory, and then to music. But, as the god turns the squeaking pegs in their holes, he feels unease, for he himself is “frightened / By the self-blinding..” and by a story “The meaning of which nobody knows.”
The Throne of Labdacus is divided into ten parts, though it isn’t always easy--without careful rereadings--distinguishing the “why” of each part, since this is not a linear retelling of the story. Instead, what the reader finds in Schnackenberg’s vision is an intense meditation on images and events drawn from the play. To some extent this can be hard to follow at times; nevertheless, the impression grows, as the poem proceeds, that the poet is doing some fine (and elaborate) weave work. Familiar images from the Oedipus story bleed into each other: a peg turning in its hole becomes the wheel of a chariot; the wounded feet of a baby become the wounded foot of a young man slaying his father, and the feet of father and son blur together as both cross into Jocasta’s bedchamber; Jocasta’s rope becomes a broken lyre string, and so on. The effect is cinematic and cumulative as Schnackenberg assumes the camera’s eye--a poetic Eisenstein.
Schnackenberg also draws on sources outside of Sophocles. This is reflected throughout the poem in the refrain-like “Others say..” or “Some said...” as different (and sometimes contradictory) tellings are worked into the poem. The purpose for this is to plot the story historically by suggesting a variety of contexts: its ancient beginnings in “gossip,” to folklore, and finally the play itself. At one point, Schnakenberg goes so far as to state “everything is true.” When it comes to Sophocles, she questions how the dramatist’s Athenian version differs from how it was understood centuries before at its roots -- in Thebes:
In Thebes, the people see unfathomed sacrilege
In swiftly succeeding, savage episodes;
But in Athens the people quarrel
Over what is meant -
The dilemma over what the Oedipus story means has been debated for centuries. The classicist, Bernard Knox, in his essay “The Freedom of Oedipus,” sees Oedipus as heroic, not feeble. This, according to Knox, was the understanding the Greek playgoer of the 5th century would have had upon seeing the play “Oedipus the King.” Schnakenberg seems conscious of Knox’s opinion--though in the end rejects such an interpretation as a fairly common “face-value” reading. In an endnote to the poem, she states that in “the Greek religious view, fate and free will need not be paradoxical and opposed...”. Where Schnackenberg finds room for maneuver is in what the gods don’t say. Since the gods (or more precisely Zeus) do not disclose all and humans are not all-knowing, what we humans perceive as free will may, in fact, be fated.
It is Apollo, the relayer of the prophecy, who must witness firsthand Oedipus’ fate in all its starkness:
The god simply says,
I saw what I saw --
A throne of snow.
A threatening goad.
A digger’s foot tamping down
And tamping down a mound at the place
Where three roads meet, leaving no visible evidence
Of who was buried there -
In part three (“What-Is And What-Is-not”), Apollo himself flees fate - or as Schnackenberg often prefers--Necessity: for the gods, like men, are also fated. The throne of snow will in the end be an empty throne. Both Olympus and Thebes will share a similar fate. Apollo senses the handwriting on the wall. However, such flight is desperate and useless and recalls the oracle given to Oedipus: “Flee birth.”
Being the god of poetry, Schnackenberg sees Apollo’s nature as not so mechanical. If there is any wiggle room in a cold universe, it lies with Apollo--a poet. But Necessity’s messenger (Necessity represents some sort of universal trump--card over both gods and men) finds Apollo hiding out among the debris of history. The messenger places the tablets of the Oedipus story into the unwilling god’s hands:
The god touched the tablets like a blind man,
Then wiped with his palm
The tale of Oedipus into a smear
And substituted, on behalf of Zeus, a law
That vibrated in the heavens
With Zeus’s pity:
The human being, in the end, is an injured body.
An injured body that lies where no law
Can touch it. An injured body that lies unburied
Outside the bourne of right and wrong.
But he had written this in the language of the gods:
The tablets showed only an expanse of illegible waves
Like a depiction of Zeus’s rain in undulating sheets
Whipping a storm through Thebes
This message of pity - perhaps even mercy in the New Testament sense--isn’t, as long as it remains in god-speak, communicated to the human race. Or, perhaps worse, it’s a deliberate lie issued out of pity. In either case, truth seems lost in a rain-driven scene straight from Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Truth, as revealed in the poem, is multi-faceted, perhaps meaningless. But for whatever reason, the text is eternal--always reemerging, even though each reemergence is like the recurring “paths worms make in excrement.”
Apollo’s own isolation increases as the poem progresses. In one poignant passage, Schnackenberg has Apollo calling to Oedipus, while at the same time recognizing that he himself has, from up above, been cut off from answers and explanations.
The god, on behalf of Zeus,
calls Oedipus! Oedipus!
The only name he has to call him by.
Then strains to hear a reply.
He leans forward in his shining chair
In Delphi;
Nothing. Far up, he sees
His father’s empty throne of snow,
And Olympus dripping silence; silence; silence.
As if there is nothing that Zeus wants.
Oedipus! Oedipus! Nothing.
Yet Oedipus has heard the god;
And, seated on a throne of rock
In a shadowy wood, he lifts
His bandaged face in response.
Riddleless. Answerless.
Interestingly, in Schnackenberg’s poem both Necessity and Oedipus are described as “Eyeless,” and even Apollo is likened to a blind man. To what degree they are all joined at the hip is a clear reference to Heraclitus’ maxim that character is fate (also alluded to in an endnote by Schnackenberg). Such a joining is here effectively depicted as both grotesque and heartbreaking. Before it, the reader also feels riddleless and answerless, as if viewing a horrific drawing by Goya:
A story sent to the god
By Faceless Necessity
Who had held a clay tablet up
To the bandaged eyes
Of a Bound Man
Playing his harp with his feet...
Despite all this fluidity, however, Schnackenberg does believe in a primal event behind the story, and by poem’s end, she returns to the enduring tableau:
At the heart of the music,
A slamming silence in the heart of Greece.
At the heart of the slamming silence,
A wobbling cart appears in the far distance,
A royal chariot that stalls at the crossroads...
However, if death is on all the borders of this tragedy, Schnackenberg also finds there is, at its heart, an act of mercy. The unnamed shepherd (who Schnackenberg reveals as Apollo) acting on impulse, and without consideration of past or future, saves the abandoned and maimed infant, Oedipus. If Schnackenberg sees heroism, or more importantly, freedom, it is here and not with the more familiar self-blinding that occurs later. For all the poem’s inevitability and seeming lack of consolation, Schnackenberg closes with an act of kindness that makes what was once a distant god manlike, the poem heard, the gap between heaven and earth painfully bridged:
Far up in the glinting, undefiled
Cleft of Delphi, music is being made
By the god, who turns from the sight
And closes his eyes--
I was riveted, chosen beguiled --
The god who, delicately,
As if plucking a single fate
From a heap of entangled fates,
Touches a string and replies:
I rescued the child.
July 2, 2007
This is a poetic re-telling of the story of Oedipus. The god Apollo is given the task of putting the story to music, and you see the events happening through the god's eyes- even the gods are unable to stop Fate or Necessity. The book is simple sometimes, a bit obtuse at others; it might not make sense to you unless you have a good understanding of the myth and Greek culture in general. She gives a lengthy introduction in the back of the book though, which could be helpful.
Certain portions of the poem are breath-taking, some are genius. She does a fantastic job of preserving the feeling of the original myth; she re-tells the story in great detail, but she doesn't add too much, or make it too elaborate. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in or familiar with Greek tragedies. I read it twice through just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Certain portions of the poem are breath-taking, some are genius. She does a fantastic job of preserving the feeling of the original myth; she re-tells the story in great detail, but she doesn't add too much, or make it too elaborate. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in or familiar with Greek tragedies. I read it twice through just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
November 6, 2016
In Literature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso notes that the Romantics' interest in the Greek gods was focused on the gods' own subjection to the divine law of fate:
Like many readers, I first encountered Schnackenberg through her frequently anthologized "Supernatural Love" (1982), a formally dazzling poem about the speaker's childhood remembrance of piercing her hand with a sewing needle as her father traced floral etymology in a dictionary back to Christ's Incarnation. While The Throne of Labdacus echoes "Supernatural Love" in large and small particulars (from the focus on the fragility of the flesh to the sonic imagery of plucked strings and dissonant squeaking), the later poem seems to be without the earlier's Christian consolation, though I will argue eventually that it is present by its absence, its invisible contour formed by the poem's jagged melancholy.
Divided into ten brief cantos, The Throne of Labdacus does not tell Oedipus's story in order—though Schnackenberg does so in her notes in the back of the book—but brings it to us in shards as Apollo tries to assemble it, only after trying to efface it. Apollo received the myth, we are told, from "ice-crowned Necessity," and upon receiving it,
"The bourn of right and wrong" is a recurring phrase in the poem, its echo of Hamlet on death ("from whose bourn no traveller returns") bringing Oedipus nearer to us, and it first occurs early on in the brilliant aphorism about necessity's amorality: "What is: a leaking-through of events / From beyond the bourn of right and wrong…" Tragedy is beyond good and evil, a state of affairs the poem laments through its anguished Apollo.
A related theme is that of language. Apollo's desire to extirpate the story is such that he destroys writing among human beings, but "The story floated forward. / As if the story were telling itself." The poem's most bravura canto, "The Alphabet Enters Greece," roots each letter of the Greek alphabet in the most painful aspects of the Oedipus story, so that iota is a "fever-laden mosquito," theta is a "human infant's face / Crossed out," lambda "like a lame man leaning on a stick," and so on. With this alphabet, the story is told again, and then mounted onstage. The effect of this is to de-moralize humanity by converting it into a spectator, as the gods are:
Schnackenberg explains in her notes that legend credits Oedipus's city of Thebes with the introduction of writing, from Phoenician sources, into Greece; it is as if the horrible myth itself generates writing so that it may be represented, but what end does this representation serve? Schnackenberg seems to see our arts as evasions, turning us callous as the gods, learning a moral helplessness that is the poem's chief ethical worry, the squeak that mars its lyricism. It is significant here that Schnackenberg makes Apollo and not Dionysius her hero. I think of Tim Park's recent thought-provoking essay against the provocation of feeling through fiction.
The chilly austerity of this poem—its Mount Olympus is snow-covered, which Schnackenberg admits in her notes is not faithful to the Homeric vision—seems more Nordic than Greek, unless I am misled by the poet's elaborately Germanic name; its vision of necessity without reason or redemption (there is no thoughtful chorus, no political deliberation, no ideological debate as in Antigone, no saving miracles as in Oedipus at Colonus), is grim and terse as an Icelandic saga. (Lending credence to my fanciful thesis of a Northern-Southern conjunction, I notice on the copyright page that the book design of the first-edition hardcover is credited to one Gertrude Achilles.)
But the poem does have a countervailing discourse to its vision of pitiless necessity and inadequate artistry. A one-page canto is given to the slave who, ordered by Laius to expose Oedipus on a hillside, saves the child instead, turning his gaze from the outward world and only meeting the gaze of another, pleading solidarity and compassion over obeisance to the supposedly necessary:
It is the immediate that escapes not only men but the gods too: "The immediate, strictly speaking, is as impossible for the gods as it is for men." Hölderlin is referring here to the lines where Pindar speaks of the nómos basileús, the "law that reigns over all, mortals and immortals alike."Contemporary American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg also dwells on this aspect of the gods' experience in her book-length poem on the Oedipus myth, The Throne of Labdacus (2000):
Laius, don't have a child. But the godThe god in question is Apollo, "hero" of the poem as he attempts to sing of Oedipus's story despite its incomprehensibility and awfulness. This extract gives a sense of the poem's method: it is comprised of free verse couplets, terse, imagistic, and often aphoristic, with irregular rhyming (sometimes internal and sometimes at line ends; sometimes slant rhyme and sometimes not) and plenty of subtly managed alliteration, assonance, sibilance, and other such effects. The tone of the poem is high and austere as well as oblique, something like late Eliot: there is none of the Poundian swagger of Christopher Logue or the Steinian whimsy of Anne Carson, to cite two perhaps better-known contemporary poets who have turned to Greek myth or classics for their material.
Cannot choose who is born.
Past and future tangle in his strings
Together with oracles crushed under wheels
And resin powder squeaking against wood,
Dusting the ivory and silver and carved horn
Of the lyre with the squeak
Of the pegs, like the foot of Laius on the night
He crossed Jocasta's threshold…
Like many readers, I first encountered Schnackenberg through her frequently anthologized "Supernatural Love" (1982), a formally dazzling poem about the speaker's childhood remembrance of piercing her hand with a sewing needle as her father traced floral etymology in a dictionary back to Christ's Incarnation. While The Throne of Labdacus echoes "Supernatural Love" in large and small particulars (from the focus on the fragility of the flesh to the sonic imagery of plucked strings and dissonant squeaking), the later poem seems to be without the earlier's Christian consolation, though I will argue eventually that it is present by its absence, its invisible contour formed by the poem's jagged melancholy.
Divided into ten brief cantos, The Throne of Labdacus does not tell Oedipus's story in order—though Schnackenberg does so in her notes in the back of the book—but brings it to us in shards as Apollo tries to assemble it, only after trying to efface it. Apollo received the myth, we are told, from "ice-crowned Necessity," and upon receiving it,
The god touched the tablets like a blind man,The implication here is that the gods are no less aghast than is humanity by what Necessity decrees and would rather choose pity for the fact of the human plight than narrative about that plight. This passage connects to many other motifs of the poem. Injury, for one—blindness is expectedly emphasized, but so is Oedipus's name, which means "swollen foot," deriving from his father's attempt to hobble him in infancy to prevent him from fulfilling the oracle that predicts his eventual parricide. Schnackenberg cites Artemidorus's book of dream interpretation: "A foot signifies a slave, / An injured foot, a failed escape—" The foot, being the body's lowest member, represents the ultimate baseness and subjection of humanity, and an injured foot emphasizes our vulnerability; this motif, taken from Sophocles (not only Oedipus but also Philoctetes), resonates at the end of the twentieth century with Beckett's chastened awareness of frailty and futility, as I've observed elsewhere—except that Beckett is funny and Schnackenberg is not. Likewise, the injured eye represents the failure of vision—its inability to bear the sight of the unendurable, its inability to see the transcendent beyond the given.
Then wiped with his palm
The tale of Oedipus into a smear
And substituted, on behalf of Zeus, a law
That vibrated in the heavens
with Zeus's pity:
The human being, in the end, is an injured body.
An injured body that lies where no law
Can touch it. An injured body that lies unburied
Outside the bourn of right and wrong.
"The bourn of right and wrong" is a recurring phrase in the poem, its echo of Hamlet on death ("from whose bourn no traveller returns") bringing Oedipus nearer to us, and it first occurs early on in the brilliant aphorism about necessity's amorality: "What is: a leaking-through of events / From beyond the bourn of right and wrong…" Tragedy is beyond good and evil, a state of affairs the poem laments through its anguished Apollo.
A related theme is that of language. Apollo's desire to extirpate the story is such that he destroys writing among human beings, but "The story floated forward. / As if the story were telling itself." The poem's most bravura canto, "The Alphabet Enters Greece," roots each letter of the Greek alphabet in the most painful aspects of the Oedipus story, so that iota is a "fever-laden mosquito," theta is a "human infant's face / Crossed out," lambda "like a lame man leaning on a stick," and so on. With this alphabet, the story is told again, and then mounted onstage. The effect of this is to de-moralize humanity by converting it into a spectator, as the gods are:
…the Greek letters,We become interpreters of a story that, we are told on the second page, "The meaning of which nobody knows / Or whose meaning is that nobody knows.."
Waiting in silence to be arranged
Into the comedies and tragedies,
Waiting to turn the people into gods
Who gaze at things tied
Into sequences of knots they can't undo,
Things to discuss, brood on, or quarrel over,
Helpless as gods to intervene…
Schnackenberg explains in her notes that legend credits Oedipus's city of Thebes with the introduction of writing, from Phoenician sources, into Greece; it is as if the horrible myth itself generates writing so that it may be represented, but what end does this representation serve? Schnackenberg seems to see our arts as evasions, turning us callous as the gods, learning a moral helplessness that is the poem's chief ethical worry, the squeak that mars its lyricism. It is significant here that Schnackenberg makes Apollo and not Dionysius her hero. I think of Tim Park's recent thought-provoking essay against the provocation of feeling through fiction.
The chilly austerity of this poem—its Mount Olympus is snow-covered, which Schnackenberg admits in her notes is not faithful to the Homeric vision—seems more Nordic than Greek, unless I am misled by the poet's elaborately Germanic name; its vision of necessity without reason or redemption (there is no thoughtful chorus, no political deliberation, no ideological debate as in Antigone, no saving miracles as in Oedipus at Colonus), is grim and terse as an Icelandic saga. (Lending credence to my fanciful thesis of a Northern-Southern conjunction, I notice on the copyright page that the book design of the first-edition hardcover is credited to one Gertrude Achilles.)
But the poem does have a countervailing discourse to its vision of pitiless necessity and inadequate artistry. A one-page canto is given to the slave who, ordered by Laius to expose Oedipus on a hillside, saves the child instead, turning his gaze from the outward world and only meeting the gaze of another, pleading solidarity and compassion over obeisance to the supposedly necessary:
I knew what the god had said.Later, we find the slave in the company of Apollo—because all humans and all gods are slaves of Necessity—and we also find a recurring image of the child in Apollo's arms as the god averts his eyes, like Benjamin's angel of history, from the spectacle of the tragedy. In the final lines of the poem, Apollo echoes the slave, or becomes one with the most vulnerable, and suggests a higher purpose for art than sensational spectacle or occasion for criticism, namely, the rescue of the innocent, even as Schnackenberg's concluding image brings us at last out of Greek myth (or Northern saga) into the "supernatural love" that saved baby Moses from the bulrushes, the infant Jesus from Herod's massacre of innocents:
I covered my eyes with my hands.
But there are things we do
Not for the sake of the gods
But for other men.
[…]
At the sight of the infant's gaze
I was riveted, chosen, beguiled.
I knew what the oracle said.
And I rescued the child.
Far up in the glinting, undefiledPerhaps The Throne of Labdacus is a Christian poem after all. It is also a brilliant one, if a bit too strained and severe, too free, in the end, of a Sophoclean grandeur and largeness of vision that the twentieth-century poet has no doubt seen far too much to allow herself. Though who knows what Sophocles saw?
Cleft of Delphi, music is being made
By the god, who turns from the sight
And closes his eyes—
I was riveted, chosen, beguiled—
The god who, delicately,
As if plucking a single fate
From a help of entangled fates,
Touches a string and replies:
I rescued the child.
August 3, 2018
literally so confused the entire time???
December 15, 2014
I read/skimmed this book when it first came out, and remember being much more enchanted. Now that I've read Schnackenberg's gorgeous most recent book, this long poem feels like a warmup to Heavenly Questions. I am an enormous fan of her work, but I just don't feel emotionally connected to this poem at all -- unlike her other work, this book seems to exist in a heady ether that I just can't hold on to.
What is: a leaking-through of events
From beyond the bourn of right and wrong;
What is: a sequence of accidents
Without a cause,
Or from which the cause
Is long-lost, like a jewel
Missing from an archaic setting's
Empty, bent, but still aggressive prongs.
What is: a leaking-through of events
From beyond the bourn of right and wrong;
What is: a sequence of accidents
Without a cause,
Or from which the cause
Is long-lost, like a jewel
Missing from an archaic setting's
Empty, bent, but still aggressive prongs.
June 15, 2007
How cool is a name like Gjertrud Schnackenberg?
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March 22, 2013811.54 S357t 2000
December 31, 2015
It was refreshing to finish the year with a great read from an incredibly talented poet.
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