Nox, by Anne Carson (Photo: Tony Cenicola)
I’ve followed Anne Carson’s work for many years. She’s a complex persona—part professor of classics, poet, novelist, essayist, critic and all around category buster—exploring a wide range of topics, approaches and methodologies. Meghan O’Rourke’s description is apt: “Anne Carson has somehow become a culture hero—the ‘anti-bourgeois’ variety of icon that, as Susan Sontag once noted, appeals by being ‘repetitive, obsessive, and impolite.'” But this is repetition, obsessiveness and impoliteness I can’t get enough of.
One of the most memorable Carson pieces for me is a short essay she wrote about one of my favorite all time plays, The Invention of Love*, Tom Stoppard’s extraordinarily erudite play that deals with the life of poet A. E. Houseman. (Carson’s piece was included in a handout and audience “aid” written by classicists and dramaturges when Stoppard’s play was performed in New York City a few years back. It is in my bookshelves, somewhere…) One of her earliest books, Eros the Bittersweet, is a fascinating treatise on the role of eros in Ancient Greek culture and has developed a kind of cult following. Her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, permanently reframed my relationship with the Heraklean myth cycle.
So of course I would be interested in her latest conception. This is how Ben Ratliff begins his New York Times review of her most recent book, Nox:
Anne Carson’s new book comes in a box the color of a rainy day, with a sliver of a family snapshot on the front. Inside is a Xerox-quality reproduction of a notebook, made after the death of her brother, including text and photographs and letters, pasted-in inkjet printouts, handwriting, paintings and collage. “Nox” has no page numbers, and it’s accordion-folded. It carries a whiff of visual art multiple or gift shop souvenir or “Griffin & Sabine.” But trust me: it’s an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best.
Carson, a university classics professor by trade, is usually described as a poet, though that’s not her problem. None of her books contain all verse in any traditional sense — not counting her translations — and some contain none. There’s not much poetry in this one, yet the whole thing is poetry of a kind you’re not used to. Her words are often not very melodious. Even on the hot subjects of desire and impermanence (sex and death and all their implications), she’s analytical, pedagogical, privately plain-spoken, stonily amused. In “Nox,” the linkage of ideas approaches a kind of music; the language works only in their service, without much extra show.
Carson’s book is wrapped around the story of her real life brother Michael, a man who struggled with drugs and with staying out of jail, a drifter with whom Carson was never close. It doesn’t sound like a strong foundational start for a project of this scope. And yet based on Ratcliff’s review, it succeeds.
More from Ratliff’s review:
Every thought runs together in “Nox.” Elegy and history are cousins, she explains, because they’re both forms of autopsy. She describes translating as being in “a room . . . where one gropes for the light switch”; it’s her own nox. But Michael, whom she still does not understand, is her night as well, her dark room whose light will never go on. (“A brother never ends,” she writes.) Of course, her subject’s life was full of night, too: he traveled on a false passport. Even the dictionary entries are rolled into the big theme: the discussion about the metaphorical dark room leads her to talk of “entries” as endless ways into “a room I can never leave.” The book is totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed, precious in the word’s best sense.
Her risk taking, her unpredictability, her exploratory mashing up of forms and functions, all part of what makes Carson’s work so compelling and inspiring. I love Ratliff’s phrase to describe this book—“weirdly clear”. It seems a fitting description of her work in general.
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* If I could find my copy of that handout I’d quote from Anne Carson herself. But since I can’t, here’s a memorable description of Stoppard’s play by the old lion of the American Repertory Theater himself, Robert Brustein: “The Invention of Love (…) may well be the showiest of all of Stoppard’s intellectual exercises. (…) There is not enough plot here for twenty minutes of action, but there is enough erudition for a fortnight.” Oh yeah. Bring it on.
You and Leslie should talk. She’s been obsessed with Nox for months.
Oh, I love knowing that. I will definitely contact her. And you VV, what do you think? (I know you have an opinion!)
Dangerous, dangerous question! I’m not a Carson fan in general, and what I know of Nox, I’m deeply suspicious of. I still haven’t dragged myself down to the bookstore for a copy though. What Leslie’s described to me reminded me of the way Sophie Calle puts together some books. And I thought too of what someone like Jenny Holzer does with text, and what A.M. Homes has done in illustrated appendixes to her novel, The End of Alice. I find a lot of textual pairings with images reductive in nature. I think of what storytelling is supposed to do–to articulate the sea inside us, to bear witness to our experiences and deliver them back to us in ways we can both recognize and understand–and I get very angry then at what I feel are symbolic gestures. Also, why is Nox getting so much attention in the first place? Hasn’t the narrative collage thing been done to death? My best friend in college was working with Cathy Opie and did these haunting collage books while her father was dying of a brain tumor–there were polaroids (almost always staged to look candid) and weird pieces of upholstery that she’d tack or sew right in and photocopies of legal documents and medical records and then her drawings often overlaying everything–and then she had me write the text for them, which were “true” pieces that I purposefully faked. Even back then, I’m sure we were ripping off things we’d seen, and somehow I’m blanking on those things, but I know they were floating around in our heads. I’d ask my old friend but we no longer speak. Maybe you can help refresh my memory? I know I’ve seen a bunch of narrative collages books. I’ve just lost my mind!
I bought Nox as soon as I saw it was out. It’s something to spend time with. . . to unfold the pages is to try to understand what resists being known, all the irretrievable bits of a life, the impossibility of recovering time never shared. It’s more than a book, not really memoir, a kind of epitaph and also a translation of grief. It seems so intimate a portrait of loss. And in every sense amazing.
What rich commentary from two of my favorite blogginators. VV, I just loved what you have said here–“I find a lot of textual pairings with images reductive in nature. I think of what storytelling is supposed to do–to articulate the sea inside us, to bear witness to our experiences and deliver them back to us in ways we can both recognize and understand–and I get very angry then at what I feel are symbolic gestures.” And like you, I have had a heightened code orange manipulation alert whenever I came across these hybrids. So experience would suggest this won’t work for me, right? But OMG, it’s ANNE FUCKING CARSON, so it can’t be like the others.
Unlike Maureen who is the fastest draw on new books in the known world, I haven’t received my copy yet so I cannot speak to me personal assessment just yet. But I promise I will. I really resonated with your words Maureen, and am hopeful there is room for me to connect with it deeply.
Back to your question VV about other examples. I am over 50, so I don’t get same day delivery on memory retrievals. Let me think about it.
And as for the Opie project, I had no idea the extent to which you participated in that undertaking. Hats off you hot shot you. CO is a hero of mine too.
Deborah, I’m sorry, I should have said studying not working with Opie. But that’s how I met her anyhow, and then she was so kind to help us out later with the lit mag. Anyway, I look forward to hearing what other examples you might come up with–you know I’m going to be obsessively mining around for junk until I figure it out!
Greetings, Deborah, VV, and Maureen!
I am a huge Carson fan–I’m pretty sure I own a copy of all of her books, and I think she is the only poet/writer with a substantial body of work that this is true of.
Virg, I think yes, this kind of project has been done and done maybe to death, but so has poetry. For like thousands of years. And stories. And paintings all the way back past Lascaux. And still we write, still we paint, still we try to join our voices to those others. There is a river; we jump in.
There are a number of things I find compelling about Nox. The first is that it is essentially an elegy for someone she did know know–how do you remember (re-member, as in reassemble) that which you have no clear memory of, no long shared history with, no primary assembly to reconstruct but still love? What do you do with a love that is both absolute and empty? What do you do with such thin fragments scattered over a lifetime? What do you do when the things you’ve spent your life working on and with (language, the classics, Latin) are utterly insufficient to say what cannot, in any case, be said, when the thin threads of connection between you and your lost brother are visual, physical objects, not language?
I think what you do is Nox. I think you make something and desire to share that something as a way of keeping this beloved stranger in the world as a way of valuing one of the lives lived in literal obscurity–he lived abroad and under an assumed name–his death erased him more completely than death does to most of us. She is trying to write him back into the world and using all the tools she has, all the pieces that are all she had left.
It is brave; it is beautiful; and however you come down on whether or not it is art, I am glad it is in the world, that she made the attempt to reclaim someone lost and then shared this with us.
LH, what a write up. So well stated, so well expressed. Thank you for stopping by, jumping in my river and leaving an unforgettable tribute to artmaking, poetry, the brave and the beautiful, and to Anne Carson’s extraordinary oeuvre.
[…] for the poet Anne Carson has been intact for some time. (I’ve written about her work here.) But with the recent publication of Nox and her extraordinarily successful category bleed from […]