36 The year of my infatuation with the Obscure Object, the play Mr. da Silva
selected was
Antigone
. There were no auditions. Mr. da Silva filled the major roles with his pets from Advanced English. Everyone else he stuck in the
chorus. So the cast list read like this: Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio as Creon; Tina Kubek as Eurydice; Maxine Grossinger as Ismene. In the role of
Antigone herself —the only real possibility from even a physical standpoint—
was the Obscure Object. Her midterm grade had been only a C minus. Still, Mr. da Silva knew a star when he saw one.
“We have to learn all these lines?” asked Joanne Maria Barbara Peracchio at our first rehearsal. “In two weeks?”
“Learn what you can,” said Mr. da Silva. “Everyone’s going to be wearing a robe. You can keep your script underneath. Miss Fagles will also be our
prompter. She’ll be in the orchestra pit.” “We’re going to have an orchestra?” Maxine Grossinger wanted to know.
“The orchestra,” Mr. da Silva said, pointing to his recorder, “is I.” “I hope it doesn’t rain,” said the Object.
“Will it rain the Friday after next?” said Mr. da Silva. “Why don’t we ask our Tiresias?” And then he turned to me. Eugenides 331
Still in relation to the play, Calliope o n the novel directly states “Yeah, I’m
blind. I’mTiresias” Eugenides 390. When the main character was at her age that
time, she didn’t know that later she will experience the same thing like Tiresias, “Tiresias had also been a woman, of course. But I didn’t know that then. And it
wasn’t mentioned in the script” Eugenides 331. For the reader, it can be a clue of the possibility of what happen next to the main character.
2. Calliope
a. The Name of the Main Character
Calliope is the main character of Middlesex. The name Calliope itself is taken from the name of one of the nine muses. Muses are the children of Zeus given by
Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Each muse represents one branch of art.
37 Calliope is the eldest and the wisest of the Muses and she is in charge of epic poetry.
In the novel we can find “Calliope, our muse, will start us off” Eugenides 198. This is also stated in the novel when Calliope meets Dr Luce, a sexologist who will
examine her, for the first time. “You must be Calliope.” He was smiling, relaxed. “Let’s see if I can
remember my mythology. Calliope was one of the Muses, right?” “Right.”
“In charge of what?” “Epic poetry.” Eugenides 408
b. As the Narrator of the Story
Besides being the main character of the novel, Calliope is also the narrator of the story. Whether Calliope as goddess in Greek mythology or Calliope as the main
character, they have the same duty to narrate the story. If goddess Calliope is in charge of epic poetry, then, Calliope in this story is responsible to narrate the history
of “the creation” of her. “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of
Mount Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped” Eugenides 4. The
expression „Sing now, O Muse’ or such similar expression is commonly used by ancient writers at the beginning of their work. In fact, “Homer asks the Muses both in
the Iliad and Odyssey to help him tell the story in the most proper way…” The Nine Muses of the Greek Mythology.
Calliope is a first-person narrator who knows everything. Eugenides in a question and answer in Oprah book clubs states the reason why he uses Calliope as
38 narrator of the story as below:
On the one hand I wanted a first-person voice that could relate Cals own life history from the inside. A first-person voice also allowed me to avoid the
pronomial clutter you had to step over in your question the hisher problem. Much better, more truthful, and more individualistic to say I. QA With
Jeffrey Eugenides In addition, the author also gives explanation about the inspiration and the
reason to create a narrator like Calliope. You could say, then, that Middlesex is a modern myth. Its a modern myth
about adolescence. What Calliope goes through is what we all go through, in the maelstrom of puberty. Her experience of the process, physically and
psychologically, is merely more dramatic than our own. Callies life differs from ours in degree but not in kind. So you saying that Calllies story is one
that most people can relate to is exactly right. Or at least, its precisely what Id hoped for. QA With Jeffrey Eugenides
c. As an Irony in the Main Character’s Gender Transformation
