“In the past decade alone, I count at least six significant literary retellings of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ in novels and poems,” writes Anne Midgette in Sunday’s (7/14) Washington Post. “In all of the critical responses to books such as ‘The Song of Achilles’ or ‘The Silence of the Girls’ … I have yet to hear the objection that neither novel is the masterpiece that the ‘Iliad’ is.… In my field … I often hear new works dismissed on the grounds that they are inferior to Beethoven…. The stranglehold of the canon, and its continual misuse as a benchmark, is a tremendous obstacle to many female musicians and musicians of color. In literature, the canon appears to represent an exciting challenge…. There’s another key difference between music and literature: For most people, music exists in performance, while literature exists on the page. This difference was illuminated in Katie Mitchell’s production of ‘Norma Jeane Baker of Troy’ [an adaption of Euripides’s play ‘Helen’ by Ann Carson at The Shed in New York City], which ended up obfuscating a text that, while dense, remains eminently elegant. In performance … there was a constant … sense of trying to reach past the obstacles to make out what was meant.”
Posted July 16, 2019
