O Brother, Where Art Thou?

T.S Eliot might have been thinking of Anne Carson when he suggested that “only those [writers] who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.” Of course, going too far often entails out-running one’s readers and being dismissed as too experimental or elitist. On the evidence
of her last two creative books, Decreation and Nox, these issues do not seem to trouble Anne Carson’s muse, which ranges across a remarkable array of forms and styles, draws on the entire western tradition and engages Sappho as amicably as Marguerite Porete (who?) and Jean-Luc Godard. Nox is the latest in a series of usually unclassifiable books that have established her as one of the most original, ambitious, unpredictably inventive, exciting and wildly uneven writers of her generation. She writes on the passport-free border between literature and philosophy where Sappho, Emily Brontë and Eliot sit in the Café Mitwelt discussing “Die Angst offenbart das Nicht” with Heidegger, Karl Barth, Simone Weil and Monica Vitti. She brings to the table her interest in classical Greek, volcanoes, the ambiguous place of eros in the self and God’s silence. Like Marilynne Robinson, Carson is one of those rare writers troubled by the fate of spirit in our time.

In calling her original I want to invoke the two major senses of the word: even though her writing often draws on classical sources, she is never simply derivative. Whatever work she engages, from Stesichorus to Antonioni, she makes her own; in Pound’s terms, she makes it new. Nox, for instance, is profoundly indebted to its “original,” Catullus’s great elegy for his brother, but it is pure Carson— playful, unpredictable, irritating, occasionally tedious, beautiful and troubling.

Carson has never been shy about establishing a dialogue with her major predecessors. Short Talks, her first creative book, is a series of parables about, among others, Hölderlin and Van Gogh. The latter anticipates some of her later concerns: “The reason I drink is to understand / the yellow sky the great yellow sky, / said Van Gogh. When he looked at / the world he saw the nails that attach / colours to things and he saw that the / nails were in pain.” The neurotic unease about the sometimes excruciating relationship between life and the artist returns in her most popular work, the verse-novel Autobiography of Red. There, it is part of a complex story, based on a Greek poem, where “the human custom of wrong love” (lovely phrase) is refracted through myth, philosophy and autobiography. Yellow gives way to red; Van Gogh to the writer- photographer Geryon. The pain remains.

Like much of Carson’s work it plays with genres. My point is not that Carson, like Pushkin or Lawrence, writes in different genres; she ignores them. Take “The Glass Essay,” a work that continues to surprise me on every reading. It is a closely organized narrative poem that intertwines a woman’s visit to her parents, a sometimes scholarly narrative about Emily Brontë and her family, and the story of the break-up of a marriage. The reticent title only makes sense when we finish the book. Why “glass”? There are at least half a dozen simple possibilities—fragility—as well as a possible allusion to Duchamp’s famously damaged “Large Glass” (1915–1923). If pressed Carson would probably answer with a sentence from Decreation: “I have no idea what this … means, but it gives me a thrill.”

Almost all relationships in her books, even brother and sister in Nox, turn on rejection or the “moment like no other / when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you any more.” When God enters or absents the scene, we find ourselves in the numinous dimension of her fertile imagination. Put simply, he represents another unfulfilling relationship: “My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it” (“The Truth about God”). Disappointment and pain are among the most common words in her lexis. They morph into a subtle, even insidious form in the title of her brilliant first book, Eros: The Bittersweet. As she points out, the “sweet” precedes “the bitter” in Sappho’s use of glukupikron (a word also used to describe her brother in a later poem). The word hints at her dominant emotional and psychological pitch and the direction of the troubled pilgrimage in which eros entails a barbed dialectic between the profane and the sacred. For her, as for Proust, carnal or spiritual fulfillment depends on the inevitability of the bitter trumping the sweet. No authentic self without an unhappy life; no art without an unhappy self: Carsonland. But Carson is also tempted by the mute atonalities of mysticism. Here our commonplace notions of the self undergo what, following Simone Weil, that almost Catholic Jew, she calls “decreation” or the undoing “of the creature in us.” Concurrent with her several narratives of failed secular love with men who have a “secret … or unreachable self” is the lure of transcendence, or, more playfully, what she paints as “that poached-in-eternity look Beckett has in his last photos.” Carson sometimes seems a tentative acolyte of a negative theology without a religion. The truth about God is that there is no truth about God and Samuel Beckett is his prophet.

Death, the subject of Nox, opens the possibility of closure on the dilemma of being merely human. Nox is a notebook and a memorial to her brother Michael, whose dissolute vagabond life-on-the-run and absence have haunted her for two decades. We have met him before. He is in one of the Short Talks; he is the swimmer in Plainwater; he is behind the older brother in Autobiography of Red; and he is also the subject of “Swimming in Circles in Copenhagen,” published in 2000, the year he died. Her response to his death is a complex of remorse, confusion resentment, envy, wonder, anger, relief and admiration. He is her dark other, the one whose way of life rejected the Greek virtue of sophrosyne (temperance, self-control) that, up to a point, has been essential to hers (see “The Gender of Sound”). As so often with elegies, the poem is an unavoidable mottled mirror.

This beautifully designed book is a brown box with a white spine on which are printed “ANNE CARSON” and “NOX.” The title teases the reader without giving anything away: for those with some Latin, the word is night, darkness, a primal goddess, death, nothingness and, in due course, the brother; in English NOX offers a concealed “NO” followed by the scissor-like “X” with which Atropos, one of the Fates, cuts our life’s thread. The front cover has a rectangular segment of a photograph of a boy in a bathing suit wearing large goggles and swimming flippers. Inside you find a stack of unnumbered joined pages that in another life could double for an accordion or the seducer’s journal in Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni. They are a journal that is an epitaph for “[my brother] … the last gift owed to death.”

Nox is actually two thematically linked books in an often oblique dialogue. The verso of each leaf is an idiosyncratic commentary on Catullus’s elegy—a favourite of Montaigne’s—through lengthy etymologies of its words. The recto has journal entries, quotations, scribbles, letter fragments, collages, and black and white family photographs. Most of the etymologies say something about night and we gradually realize that Michael is the night brother who has fulfilled one of Carson’s perennial temptations: he has taken the journey into what she describes as the nothingness and “silentia muta noctis / the speechlessness of night” that she sometimes treats as substantive, especially when flirting with spiritual issues.

As Cohen said of Joplin, another night traveller with a one-way ticket, “But you got away, didn’t you, babe?” (“Chelsea Hotel”).