Let us look at a single aspect of Carson’s Greek, her translation of plays by Sophokles and Euripides. Carson’s engagement with this literature has offered her the opportunity to explore a mind-world in which the immortality of certain entities, and the nature of Hades as a location to which one might travel—a place in which the dead live—turn life and death into two points in a set that represents an extended spectrum of being. For the ordinary person there are just two settings, of which one is temporary until we switch for good to the other; we feel the concreteness of this binary as we watch or read a play that shows a range of possibilities that are not for us. This generates the sense of dis-ease in Carson’s tragedies. “YOU’VE MADE A STRUCTURAL MISTAKE WITH LIFE AND DEATH MY DEAR” Teiresias tells Kreon in Antigonick (Carson’s Antigone), “YOU’VE PUT THE LIVING UNDERGROUND AND KEPT THE DEAD UP HERE THAT IS SO WRONG”: “THIS BOY IS DEAD STOP KILLING HIM”. 

It is her version of the Alkestis however that this writer particularly has in mind, a woman who chooses death in order to save her husband, and not only out of love. Early on in the play, a servant tells the chorus that it is “Possible to say she is both alive and dead”, she being promised to death. “The dead are dead” Admetos says, reassuring his friend that it is appropriate to carouse in his house. “The dead do not come back to light” he also says, but has cause to ask pages later “How did you send her back to the light?”. Herakles has accosted Death in the meantime, but assures Admetos that he is “no ghost handler”—so ghosts exist as well! Yet another category, another notch on the scale.

When Herakles hands Alkestis over to Admetos, she is veiled. Before Admetos realises that the woman being presented to him is his wife, he demurs from Herakles’s instructions to take her in. He fears “blame from everyone in town […] Blame from Alkestis herself”: so the woman he believes is dead is nevertheless capable of blame. That being the case, perhaps death is a failure of imagination. For if the dead can do certain things, then perhaps they can do many things, all the things of the living, and the word dead means something different to dead. The chorus reflects on this in the closing lines:

Many are the shapes of things divine.

Many are the unexpected acts of gods.

What we imagined did not come to pass-

God found a way

to be surprising.

That’s how this went.

Stop expecting death; prepare to be surprised. Some god’s reach might stop the switch, might flick it back; in divine boredom might they act. After all, this is what it means to be a god. We see how Herakles quite idly reveals that the hidden woman is Alkestis as he makes a hasty and gnomic retreat, spinning some feeble moralising content:

She’s not allowed to use her voice until three days have passed

and she is purified of death.

But take her in. And be a man of justice

in the future. Reverence your guests.

Now farewell. My labors call me.

So he heads back to his own story. The play stops well short of the three days before we could hear what Alkestis, purified, has to say. In her introduction Carson tells us that some critics have doubted that the woman is Alkestis, but how would even those closest to her know what she could look like, sound like, when we are insensible to what it is to be now-alive having been dead? She was dialled up, or down, the spectrum, to death, then through the strength of the strongest man, wrenched back to the setting of human life. She is a knower of death.

Carson’s brother disappeared for decades: a living being so long not-here that he had to be treated as one of the dead. Her father also disappeared—she used this word in an interview—into dementia. These too are steps away from life, settings deathwards of the person writing or reading these words.

All of which is to say that this artist so interested in the sleep side, as she has said, is necessarily accustomed to exploring the death side. And what does it do to language when the life-death binary is loosed? Would it not make sense in response to loosen language as such? Is it not the least you could do, as an artist building things of words? Or perhaps it is the other way around: her word-knowing opened up for her the set of life-and-death: she has learnt to see spectres, a crowd of them, each holding their own designation—given to death, visitor of the dead, alive again, ghost, dementia, disappeared—amongst whom she walks in carrying out her work.