Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator. In the small
world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry, wrote Daphne Merkin in
the New York Times Book Review, Carson has been cutting a large swath,
inciting both envy and admiration. Carson has gained both critical accolades and a
wide readership over the course of her unclassifiable publishing career. In
addition to her many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as
Sappho and Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), she has
published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism, and verse novels that often cross
genres. Known for her supreme eruditionMerkin called her one of the great
pasticheursher poetry can also be heart-breaking and she regularly writes on
love, desire, sexual longing and despair. Always an ambitious poet whatever her
topic or genre, Merkin wrote of Carsons The Beauty of the Husband, I dont
think there has been a book since Robert Lowells Life Studies that has advanced
the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing.
Though Carson is notoriously reticent about her personal life, it is known that she
was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1950. A high-school encounter with a Latin
instructor, who agreed to teach her ancient Greek over the lunch hour, led to her
passionate embrace of classical and Hellenic literature, influences which mark her
work still. Carson attended the University of Toronto, though she dropped out
twice before earning her BA, MA and PhD in Classics. Carson has taught at many
respected universities in both the US and Canada, including McGill and the
University of Michigan. Her publishing career began with Eros the Bittersweet:
An Essay (1986), which also established Carsons style of patterning her writings
after classical Greek literature. Such works as Glass, Irony, and
God (1992), Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995) and Men in the Off
Hours (2001) have helped seal the authors reputation as unique among
contemporary poets. But perhaps the most widely received examples of her
particular specialty are Carsons verse novels, Autobiography of Red: A Novel
in Verse (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29
Tangos (2001).
Autobiography of Red (1998) takes its cue from the legend of Hercules
Herakles in the traditional spelling from the tale by Steischoroswhose tenth labor
was to slay the red-winged monster Geryon. Recasting the story in modern time,
Carson makes some significant choices. In Steischoros, Herakles kills Geryon and
steals his red cattle, explained Adam Kirsch in New Republic. In Carson,
Herakles breaks Geryons heart and steals his innocence. The two characters are
introduced as teenagers, Geryon (still red and sporting wings) a sheltered, sensitive
high-school boy and Herakles a sexy, rebellious roughneck. The two begin an affair
that ends as Herakles cannot match the soul-tearing totality of Geryons
adoration, as Chicago Review contributor Mark Halliday described it. Years
later the two characters meet in Buenos Aires where Geryon falls into a destructive
mnage a trois with Herakles and his new boyfriend, Ankash. The book drew
strong reactions in several periodicals. Halliday felt that the book was willfully

whimsical and delightedly peculiar. The Nation critic Bruce Hainley pronounced
Carson a philosopher of heartbreak and said her epic-length poem made for a
brilliant book about desire, the ancient Greek poet Steischoros, volcanoes and the
joyful brutalities of seeing and blindness Echoing debates that continue to swirl
around the Carsons prose-like poetics, Kirsch wondered if Carson had indeed
produced the verse promised in the books subtitle. The writing is clearly prose,
he maintained, laid out in alternating long and short lines, with no strictness of
measure or rhythm; the division between a long line and a short one is
typographical only, or at best syntactic.
Carsons fable went on to earn nods from prize committees,
though Autobiography of Red did not start out a winner, according to Time
International reporter Katherine Govier. Published to scant notice . . . it was
mainly talked about by writers here and there. Talk became buzz when the book
won Quebecs QSPELL poetry award. From there the volume went on to earn a
National Book Critics Circle nomination, making the Canadian-born Carson one of
the first two non-Americans to appear on the Circles short list. Such word-ofmouth echoes the reception of another Carson book, her early volume Eros the
Bittersweet (1986). According to John DAgata in the Boston Review, the
bookfirst stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it
stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based
essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only
then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as literatureand redesigned for an entirely
new audience, it finally stunned the poets. DAgata sees Carsons earlier work as
an essayist everywhere in her poetry, along with her deep absorption in Classical
languages. Carsons work, DAgata alleges, asks one to consider how prosaic,
rhetorical, or argumentative can a poem be before it becomes something else
altogether, before it reverts to prose, to essay?
Men in the Off Hours, a book of shorter poems which incorporate epitaphs, love
poems, verse-essays, commemorative prose, shooting scripts for purported TV
dramas and poems addressed to paintings, noted Publishers
Weekly writer Stephen Burt, was met with great acclaim. Reviewing the
collection for Salon, Kate Moses described it as a meditation on time, noting too
that it encompasses all of that picnic that time spreads behind itself: life and sex
and love and death. It was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for
the Governor Generals Literary Award and that National Book Critics Circle
Award. In 2001 Carson also published The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional
Essay in 29 Tangos, a verse novel whose subject is the waywardness of lust and
the disaffection of the heart as seen through a marital breakup, as Daphne Merkin
wrote. It also received high praise and was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2000,
Carson was awarded a MacArthur Foundation genius grant
Since her incredible success of 2001, Carson has gone on to publish a volume of
poetry, essays and opera, Decreation (2005). Comprised of short lyrics, a
screenplay, oratorio, and long prose sections that combine literary criticism with
philosophical investigation, the book takes as its title and impetus an idea of the
philosopher Simone Weil. As Carson explains, Weils notion of decreation is an

undoing of the creature in usthat creature enclosed in self and defined by self. As
Deryn Rees-Jones noted in the Independent, in decreating we would, in our
extinction of the self, find a metaphysical fullness, in tune with the
universe. Decreation received high praise from all quarters and Fiona
Sampson, reviewing the book for the Guardian alleged that it outlines one of the
most idiosyncratic intelligences at work in contemporary literature, and despite its
genre-bending contents is most of allinimitable poetry.
Carson continues to be an important and exciting translator of classical
writers. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006) and An
Oresteia (2009) both sparked critical debate. A shocking playwright in his time,
Euripides reached his highest fame during the Peloponnesian War. Grief
Lessons presents four of his lesser-known tragedies and offers a kind of primer
on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology, wrote Hilton Als in the New
Yorker. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that Carson is nothing less than
brilliantunfalteringly sharp in diction, audacious and judicious in taking
liberties. Carsons next translation, An Oresteia, is a composite of plays dealing
with the fate of the house of Atreus and includes Agamemnon by Aeshcylus,
Electra by Sophocles and Orestes by Euripides. The volume received somewhat
mixed reviews for just those liberties; Brad Leithauser in the New York Times
Book Review found Carsons choice of diction irregular and often jarringly
contemporary and failed to findin Carsons translations a feeling of a composite
whole. There are moments when her diction stoops so low I had trouble
remembering I was dealing with men godlike in their splendor. Emily Wilson, in
the Nation, found that though Carson as a scholar is acutely aware of the
differences between the three tragedians, she does not entirely succeed in making
them sound properly distinct from one another, though Wilson described Carsons
translation as a movementaway from the clear ideology of
Aeschylus Oresteia toward the much more complex, ambiguous world of
Euripides Orestes, which makes the work all the more important and pertinent
to the current political climate.
Speaking to poet-critic Stephen Burt, Carson admitted that at heart she considers
herself a visual, not verbal, artist: I didnt write very much at all until I guess my
twenties because I drew. I just drew pictures, and sometimes wrote on them when I
was young, but mostly I was interested in drawing. I never did think of myself as a
writer! Even after several acclaimed volumes, I dont know that I do yet. I know
that I have to make things. And its a convenient form we have in our culture, the
book, in which you can make stuff, but its becoming less and less satisfying. And
Ive never felt that it exhausts any idea Ive had.

Life and work[edit]

In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient
Greece and tutored her privately.[6] Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of
Toronto, she left twiceat the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by
curricular constraints (particularly by a required course on Milton), retired to the world of

graphic arts for a short time.[6] She did eventually return to the University of Toronto where she
completed her B.A. in 1974, her M.A. in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1981. [7] She also spent a year
studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.[8]
A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative
literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from
many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient
Greek literature. She has published twenty books as of 2016, most of which blend the forms of
poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction.
Carson was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall
2007. The Classic Stage Company, a New Yorkbased theatre company, produced three of
Carson's translations: Aeschylus' Agamemnon; Sophocles' Electra;
and Euripides' Orestes (as An Oresteia), in repertory, in the 2008/2009 season. She is
Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University[9] and was a judge for the 2010 Griffin
Poetry Prize.
She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six Books (October 2011), for which
she had written a piece entitled Jude: The Goat at Midnight based upon the Epistle of
Jude from the King James Bible.[10] Once every year, Carson and her husband, Robert Currie,
teach a class called Egocircus about the art of collaboration at New York University.[11] On
November 16, 2012, Carson received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto.
[12]
Carson delivered a series of "short talks", or short-format poems on various subjects, as the
address to the Ph.D. graduating class of 2012.
Anne Carson's 2013 book Red Doc> was reviewed by Kathryn Schulz as,
a sequel of sorts to Autobiography of Red, which was a sequel of sorts to a poem
by Stesichoros []. In Greek myth, a monster named Geryon lived on a red island and
tended a herd of coveted red cattle; slaying the monster and stealing the cattle was the
tenth of the twelve labors of Herakles []. The tale was set down by Hesiod and others
almost 3,000 years ago []. What Red Doc> is greater than is the sum of its parts.
This is Carson's obsession, and her gift: to make meaning from the fragments we get,
which are also all we get -- of time, of the past, of each other. It doesn't last, of course;
the arrow of gravity, like the arrow of time, points only in one direction. Still, for a
moment, she gets it all to hang together up there, the joy made keener by the coming
fall. Sad but great: In the end it seemed to me that Carson had found the proper name
for everything -- her character, this book, this life. [13]
She received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize for Red Doc> and is recognized as a major 21st
century poet.

Eros the Bittersweet[edit]

In 1986, Carson published her first book, Eros the Bittersweet. Named one of the 100 best
nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library, the book traces the concept of "eros" in
ancient Greece through its representations in poetry of the time. Carson considers
seriously how triangular and mimetic desires have been represented in the poetry
of Sappho, as well as the relationship of eros to solitude. Famously, Carson analyzes
Sappho's Fragment 31 as representing "eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry,
organized around a radiant absence - to represent eros as lack."[14]

Last Tango
By DAPHNE MERKINSEPT. 30, 2001
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THE BEAUTY
OF THE HUSBAND
A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. By Anne Carson.
147 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $22.
The writing of poetry is regularly deemed a dead art, so it is little wonder
that its living practitioners are a somewhat petty and xenophobic bunch
-- or that the enterprise itself has come to seem, except in the hands of a
few populist types like Sharon Olds, Philip Levine and Billy Collins,
almost willfully insular. ''Contemporary poets,'' noted the Polish poet
Wislawa Szymborska in her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech ''are skeptical
and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves.'' One can
hardly blame them, of course, seeing as how most people return the
compliment by avoiding the stuff altogether.
In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry,
Anne Carson, a Canadian professor of classics, has been cutting a large
swath, inciting both envy and admiration. Her publishing trajectory has
been something other versifiers can only marvel at, having propelled her
from a position on the periphery to her perch as a MacArthur Fellow and
a commercially viable author at a prestigious mainstream house. It was
clear from the start that Carson's writing was unclassifiable, even by
today's motley, genre-bending standards. Was she writing poetry?
Prose? Prose poems? Fiction? Nonfiction? Did even her publishers know
for sure? (Her current paperback house, Vintage, calls her first book,
''Eros the Bittersweet'' (1986), ''An Essay'' in its listing of her titles, while
the original Dalkey Archive paperback edition of the book gives it no
such designation.)

Beginning with ''Eros the Bittersweet,'' Carson seemed determined to

pull out all the stops by bringing everything she knew -- specifically her
knowledge of Hellenic literature but also her vast reading in other fields,
including philosophy, fiction and poetry -- to bear on her writing. In the
abbreviated, free-associative mode that she instantly established as her
trademark, any thought might set off any other thought, or even a demithought: a discussion of Sappho's understanding of erotic desire in the
opening of ''Eros the Bittersweet,'' for instance, segues quickly into the
most fleeting of allusions to Anna Karenina. The enclosing context of
Greek myth is everywhere in evidence, but so are the writerly presences
of Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf and Eudora Welty, to name but a few.
Freudian and Lacanian theory also put in an appearance, as does a
passing observation on Sartre's understanding of the experience of
viscosity. And all this by Page 40!
Carson has since gone on to write five more books, each distinctive in the
elusiveness of its style; these have included ''Glass, Irony and God,''
''Plainwater'' (subtitled ''Essays and Poetry'') and the much-acclaimed
''Autobiography of Red,'' published in 1998. This last, billed as ''A Novel
in Verse,'' was based on an obscure Greek myth about a winged red
monster named Geryon, which Carson reworked, improbably but
spellbindingly, into a gay coming-of-age story. The book added Alice
Munro and Harold Bloom to her growing cadre of fans; the latter
recommended her, a bit obliquely, as ''a disciplined version of Gertrude
Stein.''
Continue reading the main story

''Autobiography of Red'' also succeeded in bringing the truly innovative

aspect of Carson's work into sharper focus. This, as it turned out, had
less to do with her dazzling but sometimes tiresome erudition than with
her carefully controlled use of a post-confessional voice -- one that darts
into the text by way of casual snatches of dialogue or raw asides: ''Don't
pick at that Geryon you'll get it infected. Just leave it alone and let it
heal, / said his mother / rhinestoning past on her way to the door. She
had all her breasts on this evening. / Geryon stared in amazement.''
In her second-to-last book, ''Men in the Off Hours,'' Carson continued to
demonstrate her easy familiarity with the history of ideas, both high and
low, through her use of ironic appropriations and cross-pollinated
allusions. The book's characteristically hybrid offerings included a
cinematic rumination on Catherine Deneuve and a poem-essay on ''the
phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.'' But Carson also
continued to exhibit an emotional daring that is rare in this level of
discourse -- and even rarer in a writer who wears her brain on her sleeve.
So a short poem with the fussy title ''Essay on Error (2nd draft)'' skips
across an invented mental landscape, archly strewing references
(including one to her own poem of a few pages earlier, another to a letter

from Freud to Ferenczi, and yet a third to a phrase of Descartes) before

collapsing into a pure, unmediated image of nostalgia: ''After all / what
are you and I compared to him? / Smell of burnt pastilles. / I still
remember the phrase every time I pass that spot.'' It is this very sudden
and unexpected surrender to the rush of experience that makes Carson
unusual -- her willingness to drop her eggheady defenses, the references
to Artaud and Derrida, and risk sounding like Lucinda Williams:
Not enough spin on it, said
my true love
when he left in our fifth year.
The squirrel bounced down a
branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is
afterwords
so
clear.
Goodbye Mr. Derrida, hello Mr. Heartache. (O.K., so she felt the need for
a closing pun. Let her have it.)
Now, less than a year later, comes ''The Beauty of the Husband,'' boldly
and a bit vaingloriously subtitled ''a fictional essay in 29 tangos.'' Its
subject is the waywardness of lust and the disaffection of the heart as
seen through the lens of a marital breakup. ''There is something pureedged and burning,'' Carson writes, ''about the first infidelity in a
marriage.'' Never mind that the union in question probably shouldn't
have occurred in the first place, given that the husband is an inveterate
philanderer who is ''loyal to nothing'' and ''lied about everything.'' The
poet would bid us understand that logic has nothing to do with it:
Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex
possible.

Beauty makes sex sex.

The book, in fact, takes as its overt theme what has been the ever more
insistent subtext of Carson's prior writing -- the ''dilemma of desire'' and
the ways in which intellectual discernment (a familiarity, say, with ''the
passive periphrastic'' tenses in Latin) and erotic taste often pull in
opposite directions. The inexplicable nature of romantic longing, the
insuperable divide between thought and feeling, is a predicament as old
as the hills, and one that, I'd guess, women are more disturbed by than
men -- especially the sort of women who have ''grasped certain
fundamental notions first advanced by Plato'' and still find themselves
doubled over with ''the agony of sexual reasoning.''

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There are other, walk-on characters, including the watchful mother who
instinctively distrusts her daughter's choice in suitors: ''To abolish
seduction is a mother's goal.'' A pair of sisters, named Dolor and Merced,
figure briefly as objects of the husband's attention, but they remain
paper thin and seem to have been chosen primarily for the foreign sound
of their names, like characters who have wandered in from an
Almodvar film. More memorably there is Ray, a gay friend of the
husband who befriends the ex-wife and keeps her posted on the randy
goings-on. A painter by day and a short-order cook by night, he is
introduced in one of Carson's cinematic bursts:
Ray flips two half-fried eggs with one hand
and catches an explosion of toast (too light, shoves it back down)
then spins left
to pick a clean plate off the dishwasher stack.
With his casual insights about the wife's predicament (''You married
people get too tight with things, get all strained in and sprained up'') and
''his beautiful wicked grin like a skirt flying up,'' Ray helps to ground the
book in whatever semblance of narrative it has. But then again, a story
line in any conventional sense is not what fuels Carson's writing -- or
what she cares about, except as it may enable her to ask the questions
that interest her: to what avail are Parmenides and ''the true lies of
poetry'' when set against the ''welter of disorder and pain'' that ''is our
life''? ''How do people / get power over one another?'' (This conundrum
fascinates Carson sufficiently for her to pose it twice within the first 35

pages of the book.) And perhaps most poignantly: ''What does not
wanting to desire mean?''
Carson's willingness to implicate herself in the discussion at hand -- her
refusal to edit out the personal, even at its most pathetically lovelorn -has become more obvious with each successive book, and ''The Beauty of
the Husband'' takes her farther out on the precarious limb she has
claimed as her own. It is always difficult, of course, to gauge how much is
autobiographical in a writer's material, and Carson is trickier than most
in this regard, but ''Husband'' strikes me as being the least cloaked about
its origins in lived life. There is far less of the brainy braggadocio that
has marked her previous work, especially if one looks beyond the tapdancing around the Keatsian equation of Truth and Beauty that is
invoked in epigraphs preceding each section. From the very first ''tango,''
she is cutting pretty close to the bone:
A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound by what shines from it.
Similarly, the voice of sensual lament that Carson has resorted to with
moving effectiveness in the past is here presented without the fig leaf of
fancy cerebration:
Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay
and he licked.
Licked it off.
Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared
it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking.
Diving.
Tongue is the smell of
October to me.
Carson is one of the great pasticheurs, and her influences are diverse -Emily Dickinson is said to be a favorite, although I don't see much of her
in the work, but there are traces of Gerard Manley Hopkins in her use of
bricolage-like constructions and of Anne Sexton in the sudden dips into
the fondly maternal (''Little soul, poor vague animal'') and in flashes of

emotional clarity: ''We are mortal, balanced on a day, now and then / it
makes sense to say Save what you can.'' Overall, one would wish for less
archness, which too often gives the writing a brittle patina of self-regard,
and I wonder when Carson will realize that not every performance has to
be a bravura one. Sometimes, too, the images strain credulity -- He could
fill structures of / threat with a light like the earliest olive oil'' -- and
sometimes the writer seems lost in an enterprise of her own devising.
But these are quibbles. I don't think there has been a book since Robert
Lowell's ''Life Studies'' that has advanced the art of poetry quite as
radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing. Although I can
understand why Carson's peers might bristle at the grandness of her
ambition and squabble about her imperious disregard for even the laxest
of forms, it seems to me that there is only one relevant question to be
posed about her writing. What her fellow poets would do well to ask
themselves is not whether what Carson is writing can or cannot be called
poetry, but how has she succeeded in making it -- whatever label you
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/books/last-tango.htmlgive it -so thrillingly new?

Interviews
Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88
Interviewed by Will Aitken

Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers workshop in Canada,

and have been reading each others work ever since. The interview that
follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that
preoccupy Carsons workmysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire.
Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final
child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her
father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank. During her childhood, the
family moved about from bank to bank in small Ontario towns like Stoney
Creek, Port Hope, Timmins.
In the 1970s Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and
then ancient Greek with the renowned classical scholar Kenneth Dover at
the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1981, she returned to the
University of Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho, which later
became Eros the Bittersweet a brief, dense treatise on lacks centrality

to desire. Today, Carson lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches classics
and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.
Although she has always been reluctant to call herself a poet, Carson
has been writing some heretic form of poetry almost all her life. Her work
is insistent and groundbreaking, a blend of genres and styles that for years
failed to attract notice. In the late eighties, a few literary magazines in the
United States began to publish her work. Canadian venues were
considerably less welcoming, and it was not until Carson was forty-two
that a small Canadian pub- lisher, Brick Books, published her first book of
poems, Short Talks.
By the mid-nineties, Carson was no longer trying to find publishers;
rather, publishers were clamoring to find her. In short order, three
collections of poems and essays appearedPlainwater: Essays and
Poetry (1995); Glass, Irony and God (1995); Men in the Off Hours (2000)
as well as a verse novel, Autobiography of Red (1998), which seamlessly
blends Greek myth, homosexuality, and small-town Ontario life. Two
ostensibly academic books followed: Economy of the Unlost and her
translation of Sapphos poetry, If Not, Winter, both in 2002.
Awards and accolades came tumbling in: a Guggenheim Fellowship
(1995); a Lannan Award (1996); the Pushcart Prize (1997); a MacArthur
Fellowship (2000); and the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001). In 2002
Carson became the first woman to receive Englands T.S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
For the past several years, Carson has been working on a spoken-word
opera about three women mysticsAphrodite, the fourteenth-century
French heretic Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil. Next year, Random
House will publish Decreationthe eponymously titled operaalongside
new poems and essays.
We started the following interview just after Christmas in 2002.
Exhausted by the joyous demands of the season, Carson stretched out on
an orange velveteen sofa and we talkedfortified by cups of oolong tea
for several hours.
Will Aitken
INTERVIEWER

I want to start with your poem Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions. Theres a

line in there that stopped me right in the middle: My personal poetry is a
failure. It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal
poetry? And do you really feel its a failure or is that just the poems
persona talking?
INTERVIEWER
Well, I think there are different gradations of personhood in different
poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the
up-close ones generally dont say what I want them to say. And thats true
of the persona in the poem, but its also true of me as me.
INTERVIEWER
When you look back on The Glass Essay, for example, do you
consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?
CARSON
I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I
wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to
record sensual and emotional factsto construct a convincing surface of
what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote
The Glass Essay, I also wanted to do something that I would call
understanding what life feels like, and I dont believe I did.
I also dont know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia
Woolf or George Eliot, theres a fragrance of understanding you come
away withthis smell in your head of having gone through something that
you understood with the people in the story. When I think about my
writing, I dont feel that.
INTERVIEWER
Is that because its still part of your ongoing personal experience?
CARSON
Well, thats possible. But how can one ever judge those things?
INTERVIEWER

Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else

who picks it up?
CARSON
I think so, because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is
useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their
own act of understanding. But I still dont think I finished the thinking.
INTERVIEWER
Theres another line in Stanzas, Sexes, SeductionsI want to be
unbearablethat strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.
CARSON
I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt
like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier
comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that
its accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on
people. I dont know exactly why thats the case.
INTERVIEWER
You once said you meant unbearable in a metaphysical sense.
CARSON
Well, yes, it couldnt be physical, could it? Unless I went around
hammering people.
INTERVIEWER
There are those days.
CARSON
With sharp objects. Its true, thats why I go to boxing class, to learn
those skills. But thats just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say.
INTERVIEWER
You dont actually get to hit anyone?

CARSON
You dont hit anyone, no.
INTERVIEWER
But you often think about hitting someone?
CARSON
In boxing class, yes. Thats why I go. Its always a surprise who turns
up, in the mind, to be hit. Its not usually the people you expect.
INTERVIEWER
Does your teacher encourage you to shout out names of people who
are the target?
CARSON
No, but that would be a good idea.
INTERVIEWER
My teacher did that. Except I was in a class of mainly women, and they
were shouting out George and Fred and Tom, and so I got into the
spirit and yelled out, Pierre! There was this pause, and then all the rest
of the class yelled, Pierre! and we all slugged Pierre for a while.
CARSON
Thats good. Being unbearable hardly ever leads to that kind of group
merriment. Its a more solitary activity. I dont actually know what it is to
be unbearable, but I do think that something of the effect I have on people
is to put everything on an edge where theyre both charmed by the person
or the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of
revelation thats almost happening, never quite totally happening.
INTERVIEWER
A kind of glare.
CARSON

Yes, a glare from behind the set where Im standing. So if Im a little

actor on stage, theres this terrible glare coming from behind me. And
people feel that. I dont feel it, but Im aware of it going past me, and I see
dismay on their faces mixed with this other thing. I think thats why
sometimes I am spooky to people. Because this glare is mixed with an
infantile charm that disarms. And they have to deal with both.
INTERVIEWER
But what is that glare?
CARSON
I dont know. Its just absolute dread. Its bumping up against the fact
that you die alone. You think about that from time to time all through life,
and it continues to make no sense against all the little efforts you make to
be happy and have friends and pass the time.
INTERVIEWER
Does everybody carry that glare around with them? Is it just more
evident behind you?
CARSON
I think everybody can have access to it, only they mask it in different
ways. I have fewer ways to mask it for some reason.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think youve had it all along? What was your childhood like? I
know you moved around a lot.
CARSON
My father was a banker, and all bankers are itinerant in the Canadian
system because its their policy to move managers every three years. To
give them experience with different communities and kinds of banking.
Its hard on the family, good for the bank.
INTERVIEWER
So you were in a new school every three years?

CARSON
Pretty much, yes. Which I do believe added to my survival skills. I
remember thinking one day as we were pulling out of the driveway, as I
was waving good-bye to my best friends, whom I would never see again, I
remember thinking, Well the next time I go somewhere Im just not going
to make friends; theres really no future in it. So there was a sense of
closing in, closing gates.
INTERVIEWER
You didnt make any new friends in the next town?
CARSON
I did, but a little more gingerly as time went on. At least half of your
mind is always thinking, Ill be leaving; this wont last. Its a good
Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is,
Im just sad.
INTERVIEWER
You would be well on the road to enlightenment if you were a
Buddhist.
CARSON
Instead, Ive avoided enlightenment resolutely.
INTERVIEWER
I want to talk a little bit about ancient Greece. You first started
studying Greek in high school?
CARSON
Yes. Grade thirteen.
INTERVIEWER
Was it immediately apparent that it would change your life?
CARSON

Yes, immediately. Mrs. Cowan started to teach me Greekshe was our

Latin teacher in high school, in Port Hopebut she also knew Greek, so
she offered to teach me because she found out I was interested in it. We
did it on our lunch hour.
INTERVIEWER
There wasnt a Greek class?
CARSON
No. No one was interested except me. We read Sappho together, and it
was simply revolutionary. I dont know every language in the world
maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differentlybut
theres something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than
any modern language. So that when youre reading it, youre down in the
roots of where words work, whereas in English were at the top of the tree,
in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation.
And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always
welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of people say the ancient Greeks are really our contemporaries.
Do you agree?
CARSON
I dont feel much direct relevance of ancient things to modern things.
It was the temper of the times, in the seventies and eighties when I was
getting my degree and teaching, to claim that the project of being a
classicist was to find relevance in antiquity and invent courses that
convinced students you could learn everything you needed to know about
modern life from studying the ancient Greeks. Well, this is bizarre, to say
the least. Whats entrancing about the Greeks is that you get little
glimpses of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness, in this huge
landscape of strange convictions about the world and reactions to life that
make no sense at all.
INTERVIEWER
So theres this dense otherness that you just want to find out about.
Whether its relevant is beside the point.

CARSON
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too,
understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a
principlethe principle of being up against something so other that it
bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in
yourself; theres a connection to yourself as another. Its what they
call ecstasy. The Greeks invented this concept, but they also embody it for
us, which may just be our utilitarian approach to them. But who can say.
We are always going to be looking at the Greeks and figuring out who they
are in relation to what we are. We cant get out and be in a third place and
judge both of us.
INTERVIEWER
From a nice objective place?
CARSON
There is no objective place.
INTERVIEWER
Most people are not aware that youre a visual artist as well as a verbal
artist. You make booksa single book per person. I remember once we
were going through the Ontario countryside, and everything was white,
and at one point you pointed off in the distance and said, I used to live
there. I think it was Port Hope? I looked out and thought, Nobody used
to live there. There was just nothing there. Then you handed me this white
book that youd made for your brother Michael after he died.
CARSON
When I go on the train from here to Toronto I always dread passing
Port Hope because it was a place my family lived for six, seven years, and
my parents for about fifteen years and my brother intermittently, so the
book, because its about him, is connected to that place. But its a place
where everyones life fell apart. Thats too strong. It was a place where we
all, my brother and I, met the end of our adolescence. So thats a serious
order.
INTERVIEWER

So you wrote the book as a way of mourning your brother?

CARSON
Yes, I wrote the book because when my brother died I hadnt seen him
for twenty-two years. He was a mystery to me. He died suddenly in
another country, and I had a need to gather up the shards of his story and
make it into something containable. So its a lament in the sense of an
attempt to contain a person after he is no longer reachable.
INTERVIEWER
And it was based on a classical lament, wasnt it?
CARSON
Its based on a poem of Catullus, the Roman poet, first century b.c.,
whose brother died in Troy when Catullus was living in Italy. Catullus
traveled to Troy, in Asia Minor, and buried him and wrote a poem about
him, which has the refrain in it, ave atque vale (good- bye and farewell).
In my book I printed out the text of the poem, and then took it apart. I
just read an article in which T. S. Eliot is quoted as saying, Poetry is
punctuation. It was followed by a quote from Jacques Lacan: The reason
we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom,
which I thought was totally cool. So in this book, I dismantled the Catullus
poem, one word per page, and I put the Latin word and its lexical
definition on the left-hand side, and then on the right-hand side a
fragment of a memory of my brothers life that related to the left-hand
side of the page. Where the lexical entry didnt relate, I changed it. So I
smuggled in stuff that is somewhat inauthentic. But it makes the left and
the right cohere, so that the whole thing tells the story of the translation of
the poem, and also dismantles my memory of my brothers life.
INTERVIEWER
You also used family photosbut mostly just the backgrounds. Why?
CARSON
I found that the fronts of most of our family photos look completely
banal, but the backgrounds were dreadful, terrifying, and full of content.
So I cut out the backgrounds, especially the parts where shadows from the

people in the front fell into the back in mysterious ways. The backgrounds
are full of truth.
I also used bits of text from Michaels letters, actual pieces of the
letters, some of my mothers answers to his letters, paint, plastic, staples
and other decorative items on the right-hand side. I also tried to give the
book, on the left-hand side, a patina of age because its supposed to be
an old Roman poemby soaking the pages in tea, which added a
mysterious sepia overtone.
INTERVIEWER
I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and
battered.
CARSON
In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a
poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea
stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. Its an historical
attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage, and I
admire thatthe layers of time you have when looking at sheets of
papyrus that were produced in the third century b.c. and then copied and
then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then
discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different
gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and
photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and
more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.
INTERVIEWER
Did making the book help you to understand your brother?
CARSON
No. I dont think it had any effect whatsoever on my understanding.
Another failure of the personal, I guess. I finally decided that
understanding isnt what grief is about. Or laments. Theyre just about
making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos youre left with when
someone dies. You want to make that good. And for me, making it good
means making it into an object thats exciting and beautiful to look at.
INTERVIEWER

Its interesting that you said object. Because your poems feel more
like objects than poems. They feel constructed, like a painting.
CARSON
Yes, that you travel inside of. I think thats what poems are supposed
to do, and I think its what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk
about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in
reality, on the reader. Some people think that means the poet takes a
snapshot of an event, and on the page you have a perfect record. But I
dont think thats right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the
mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter
into that action. His mind repeats that action and travels again through
the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an
activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end youre different than
you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
INTERVIEWER
So its an action for both the writer and the reader.
CARSON
Yes, exactly, and they share it artificially. The writer did it a long time
ago, but you still feel when youre in it that youre moving with somebody
elses mind through an action.
INTERVIEWER
Can you remember when you first felt compelled to commit that action
when you first started writing?
CARSON
I remember one day in grade two when we had to draw pictures of a
barnyard, and the teacher saying we could put a story on it if we wanted
to, to explain our barnyard. That was quite a breakthrough moment.
Putting the story as well as the picture together. My first book of
poems, Short Talks, was initially a set of drawings with just titles. Then I
expanded the titles a bit and then gradually realized nobody was
interested in the drawings, so I just took the titles off and then they were
pellets of a lecture.

INTERVIEWER
So the trout poem originally had drawings of trout in it?
CARSON
The trout poem has a picture of a fisherman. I have the manuscript at
home, with all the drawings. No one ever liked my drawings. I dont think
I was that good. Maybe I could have been good if I drew as much as I
wrote, but its scarier to draw. Its more revealing. You cant disguise
yourself in drawing.
INTERVIEWER
I always assumed that because writing was your main thing, you did
drawing as a kind of relaxation.
CARSON
No, I dont.
INTERVIEWER
The writings a relaxation?
CARSON
It is. Its play by comparison. Drawing is quite, quite naked.
Horrifyingly naked. But Ive always felt that if I could have forced myself
to draw every day Id be a better person. That it would pull me into an
honesty and diligence about honesty that I otherwise slack off from. I also
get very happy when Im drawingeven when I was working on Michaels
book, which was a completely melancholy subject. I felt so happy, just
fulfilled.
INTERVIEWER
And you never feel that when youre writing?
CARSON

No, rarely. Maybe for a second, or a moment here or there, but not in
any sustained way. It doesnt gather up my being the way making an
object does.
INTERVIEWER
So why write at all?
CARSON
I write to find out what I think about something.
INTERVIEWER
Could you talk about how you go about it?
CARSON
I work at three different desks, with a different project open on each,
lets say, so one is academic, one writerly, and one art. I go at these
erratically, sometimes to all three desks within an hour. They crosspollinate one another.
INTERVIEWER
So its not so much a routine as a system.
CARSON
Thats an interesting distinction. I would say that theres a routine in
that each morning I get up and go for a walk, come back, make my tea and
breakfast. Then I read for an hourIm reading Proust right now, Un
Amour de Swann, with my dictionary. Then I move to the desks. So its a
routine at first but after that, its just a fluid system.
INTERVIEWER
What about the process of inspirationwhat sorts of things propel you
toward writing?
CARSON

Particular images begin the thinking or the work. For example, The
Glass Essay began with staring at a frozen ditch near my mothers house,
which I think actually occurs in the poem somewhere. So some
phenomenological thing gives rise to the idea.
INTERVIEWER
Do sound, smell, something you overheard on the bus also come into
play?
CARSON
Yes, phrases on the bus, or phrases in dreams. Sometimes I dream a
sentence and write it down. Its usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems
a key to another world.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to work by linking things that nobody else in the world
would really link or even think of linking.
CARSON
The things you think of to link are not in your control. Its just who you
are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the
nature of your mind. Individuality resides in the way links are made.
INTERVIEWER
For Economy of the Unlost, what first prompted you to link Simonides
an epitaph writer who was also the first poet to get paidto Paul Celan,
whos however many centuries later?
CARSON
You know, I could list things I saw but thats not why I put them
together, that would be an afterthought. I put them together by accident.
And thats fine, Im happy to do things by accident. But whats interesting
to me is once the accident has happened, once I happen to have
Simonides and Paul Celan on my desk together, what do I do with the
link? What I do with it depends on all the thoughts Ive had in my life up
to that point and who I am at that point. It could be Simonides and celery,
it doesnt matter; it only matters insofar as Im going to make a work of

art out of it. It seems totally arbitrary on the one hand and on the other,
totally particular about who I am as a thinker.
INTERVIEWER
So you familiarize yourself with one work and then the other until
these initially inchoate connections start to appear?
CARSON
Yes, exactly. I have a sense of following, like a hound dog with my nose
to the ground, but looking not just for a track of scent, but for a track of
shapes. I think of ideas as having shapes and when I sense that two
different texts or writers have the same shapes in them, I know I can bring
them together.
INTERVIEWER
Once youve made those connections, how do you decide whether
something will be poetry or prose?
CARSON
Thats impossible to say. I wouldnt call that a decisionits more like
smelling ones way.
INTERVIEWER
Autobiography of Red initially smelled like prose?
CARSON
I typed out some early portion of it as prose, but it just sounded stupid
all tangled in on itself. I think I sent it to Ben Sonnenberghe
ran Grand Street thenand he said I should throw it out.
INTERVIEWER
In your books, the persona is sometimes a gay man or a gay boy.
Like Autobiography of Red, where Geryon falls in love with Heracles. I
wonder if you could talk a little bit about your life as a gay man.
CARSON

Its been a somewhat checkered career. I was never totally successful. I

think it started in high school, when I developed a fascination with Oscar
Wilde. Some of my friends shared this fascination so we used to dress like
Oscar Wilde and memorize his aphorisms and construct conversations in
the lunchroom, as if we were Oscar Wilde and his friends.
I cant exactly remember why I fixated on Oscar Wilde, but I did feel
that it gave me an education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of
irony toward myself that was useful in later lifean ongoing carapace of
irony that I think lots of gay men develop in order to get through their
social and personal lives, and which I found useful for myself, too.
INTERVIEWER
Theres also the persona in The Anthropology of Water
in Plainwater.
CARSON
Oh, you think thats a man?
INTERVIEWER
You identify yourself as a man at one point.
CARSON
Thats the other thing about being a gay man. Model yourself on Oscar
Wilde and you just lie all the time.
INTERVIEWER
Anthropology of Water presents a pilgrimage to Santiago de
Compostela. You actually made that pilgrimage, didnt you?
CARSON
I did walk across Spain. Its 380 miles and it takes six weeks. I wore
Saucony running shoes that were ten years oldthe worlds best running
shoes. I went with my friend who in the book I called El Cid.
INTERVIEWER

Did you know you wanted to turn this experience into a book?
CARSON
I was writing in little books all the way along of an evening. About the
same subjects from the beginningthe walking itself, the concept of
penance, and my relation to the man I was with. Hes emblematic of the
kind of men who show up in my life.
INTERVIEWER
Like the self-possessed, opinionated men in a lot of your work?
CARSON
Yes, the man with the secret self. The unreachable self.
INTERVIEWER
When I was reading Anthropology of Water, I thought it was about
youyour trip with El Cid to Compostelaat least until you suddenly say
something that indicates youre a young man.
CARSON
I see. Yes, that may be true. I havent read that for a while. Im sure it
is true. I guess Ive never felt entirely female, but then probably lots of
people dont. But I think that at different times in my life I located myself
in different places on the gender spectrum, and for many years,
throughout my thirties, which is when I made that pilgrimage, I didnt
have any connection to the female gender. I wouldnt say I exactly felt like
a man, but when youre talking about yourself you only have these two
options. Theres no word for the floating gender in which we would all
like to rest. The neuter gender comes up in the unbearable poem, but that
doesnt really capture it because you dont feel neuter, you feel just wrong.
Wrong vis-a-vis the gender youre supposed to be, wrong vis-a-vis the
other one, and so what are you?
Historically we use man for people of any gender because men win. So
its useful to do that when cornered.
INTERVIEWER

You didnt have much interest in feminism when you first came to
Montreal. But then you joined a group of women who got together and
read. What shifted?
CARSON
Did I do that? That was brave of me.
INTERVIEWER
At first you were skeptical, even hostile, because the other women
were quite feminist. But then something happened and next I knew, you
were writing about women and dirt.
CARSON
Oh, yes. Yes, true, there was some kind of a sequence there. Well, lets
see, how does that seem to me now? I think that for a long time, I was just
a solipsist. Its not really that I wasnt a feminist, or didnt understand
feminismI didnt understand masculinism either but that I just didnt
understand being human. Its a problem of extended adolescence: You
dont know how to be yourself as a part of a category, so you just have to
be yourself as a completely strange individual and fight off any attempt
others make to define you. I think most people go through that by the
time theyre seventeen, but for me it extended to about forty. Until
recently, I didnt have friends I could relax around and be just as weird as
I wanted to be. Now I dopeople who dont leave the relationship as a
result of me being weird. And my experience with men is that if they dont
like you, they leave.
INTERVIEWER
Is that what you meant when you told me you think of yourself as evil?
CARSON
That may be another, more melodramatic way to describe
this. Evil and good are terms I use from time to time, when Im trying to
shock myself into some better thinking.
INTERVIEWER

In Autobiography of Red, theres the sense that Geryon is evil, a

monster. This is his own sense of self, it doesnt come from anybody else.
The same seems true of your conception of yourself. I wonder where that
comes from. Part of the answer is obviously explored in Dirt and Desire.
Theres this idea of women as being
CARSON
Polluted.
INTERVIEWER
Polluted, uncontainable, they flow all over everything, they have holes,
you always have to keep them in or theyll just flood.
CARSON
Leak all over.
INTERVIEWER
Thats the historical answer, but is there a personal answer, as well?
CARSON
I dont know. I was drawn to the Geryon story because of his
monstrosity, although its something of a clich to say that we all think
were monsters. But it does have to do with gender, though I dont know
what it is about growing up female that makes one think: monster.
INTERVIEWER
Can we discuss Sapphos Fragment 31? In Eros the Bittersweet you
use it as an illustration of Eross lack. And then when you come back to it
in Decreation its an almost completely new reading of the poem in
spiritual terms.
CARSON
Oh, thats perplexing. Lets see. The difference between the two
readings derives from ignoring or taking into account the final verse of the
poem in the manuscript that we have. Its a completely puzzling half-verse
having to do with daring and poverty, and when I decided to try to make

sense of it in Decreation the only way I could do so was in spiritual terms.

The poem up until that point is concerned with an erotic triangle, but then
in this half-verse it goes to a new place, which I chose to understand as a
place facing God. I dont know where spiritual reality goes for Sappho
the poem doesnt go on after that half of a versebut I was trying,
in Decreation, to interpret it as a space of poverty in the mystical sense of
the annihilation of the self.
Fragment 31
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughingoh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and deador almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
INTERVIEWER
In the poem, does the ecstasy arise from self-annihilation?
CARSON
Yes. In the poem Sappho doesnt use the word ecstasy, but she talks
about herself standing outside herself and observing her own condition
which constitutes ecstasy, but which also constitutes what many mystics
strive to achieve in canceling their selfhood so that they can be empty

vessels for God. I dont think Sappho has that idea as suchits an
anachronism to ascribe it to herbut I do think there is a deep spiritual
(not just ornamental) substance to Sapphos descriptions of gods and our
relation to gods that ought to be taken into account when reading her
poetry. Its an aspect of that otherness of the Greeks we discussed earlier.
They were intensely religious people, had hundreds of gods, religious
ideas filled their lives.
INTERVIEWER
In Decreation, theres also an idea of babbling into the void, because
its the only way you can talk to God, or hope to reach him. Standing there
and just spewing it out.
CARSON
No, I wouldnt say spewing or babbling. In Sapphos poem, her
addresses to gods are orderly, perfect poetic products, but the wayand
this is the magic of fragmentsthe way that poem breaks off leads into a
thought that cant ever be apprehended. There is the space where a
thought would be, but which you cant get hold of. I love that space. Its
the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the
thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldnt be as good as the
suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out
could be so arresting, so spooky.
INTERVIEWER
In Decreation, you describe the characters Sappho, Marguerite Porete,
and Simone Weil as writers whose work is an act of expression of the self,
self-advertising, but you also note that theyre all trying to flee the self.
This is a conundrum that comes up in Economy of the Unlost. At one
point you say, Theres too much self in my writing. Is the range of the
work that you dopoetry, essays, opera, academic work, teachinga way
of trying to punch windows in the walls of the self?
CARSON
No. I would say its more like a way to avoid having a self by moving
from one definition of it to another. To avoid being captured in one
persona by doing a lot of different things.
INTERVIEWER

You often collaborate with other artists

CARSON
Decreation has been done in a lot of different versions installation,
performance, and as a pedagogical toolin New York, Michigan, San
Francisco, Potsdam, Montreal, England, and Michigan again.
INTERVIEWER
Youve also made books with other people.
CARSON
One with California artist Kim Ono, which is a book of part of the
libretto for Decreation. And also, more recently, New York artist Roni
Horn asked me to collaborate on a book with three other peopleLouise
Bourgeois, Hlene Cixous, and John Waters.
INTERVIEWER
How do these collaborations work for you?
CARSON
It works for me insofar as I can stand out of the center of whatever the
work is. So Im not organizing or directing or the fulcrum of it.
INTERVIEWER
Does that let you see the work in a different way?
CARSON
It allows me not to be anxious, which allows for invention. Its a looser
place than the center.
INTERVIEWER
As if you have to come upon your own work by surprise?
CARSON

Right. I have to smuggle myself into it.

INTERVIEWER
A couple of years ago you put on a theatrical production
of Decreation using college students. Why did you choose to work with
complete amateurs?
CARSON
Its intoxicating to introduce people to utterly strange things. I
suppose I wouldnt have gone into teaching if I didnt like that in general.
INTERVIEWER
What effect does teaching have on your creative work?
CARSON
It gives me a structure of life and people to talk to, thus contributing to
sanity.
INTERVIEWER
In Economy of the Unlost you suggest that academic work is, at its
best, selfless. But then you retreat from that position and admit that your
best academic work tends to come from the closed aesthetic room of the
self.
CARSON
I was taught that objective reportage of academic questions is the ideal
form for scholarship to take, but in pursuing scholarship myself I never
found that possible. I could never think without thinking about myself
thinking. And Im not sure if thats a casualty of being me or of being
human, so I decided to assume the latter. So my scholarship, such as it is,
is intensely subjective. But because I am aware of this as a problem, I
make an attempt to continually bridge the gap between that subjective self
and the reader. Although its a private vision, it also brings the reader into
its vision from time to time.
INTERVIEWER

Is Catholicism a way out of self for you?

CARSON
No, quite the reverse. I dont think Im ever so resigned to myself as
when Im in church trying to understand why Im in church. Sitting there
thinking about my mother and all the times we sat together in church. The
only good memory I have of it is leaning up against her fake-fur coat
during Mass. I remember the smell of that coat, how comforting that was
on a cold winter day. But, no, its not a way out of self at all.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as being particularly devout?
CARSON
No. I think of myself as being particularly baffledon the one hand, by
the whole question of God and the relation of humans to God, but on the
other hand, possibly because of lots of empty spaces in my life, I am open
to exploring what that might mean. I dont go to church with any
expectation of fulfillment or illumination. I just go because I have gone,
and my mother went and her mother went. A kind of thinking takes place
there that doesnt take place anywhere else. No matter how unattractive
the serviceand nowadays the Mass is rather unattractive in its modern
translationno matter how brainless the sermon, there is a space in
which nothing else is happening so that thinking about God or about the
question of God can happen. But nothing changes, I dont become wise
about this, I dont become ethically better or more interesting. Im just the
same person.
INTERVIEWER
So theres not really a doctrinaire side to it.
CARSON
I wouldnt say the doctrinaire side of Catholicism, for example, makes
much sense to me in its details or its history. So, no, I dont look to
Catholic thinking as a guide to how to live my life. I do think its some
aspect of being human to engage the question of gods. But its an
historical accident that I was brought up Catholic by my mother and that

she was by her mother. This tradition that carries us is just an accidental
vessel. I could have been a Muslim and been equally confused, Im sure.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God?
CARSON
No. But thats not bad. I think in the last few years, since Ive been
working on Decreation and reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone
Weil, Ive come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human
is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God
were available, but God isnt. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because
nothing else is going to happen.
INTERVIEWER
Hes not available because he chooses to remove himself or hes not
available because he doesnt exist?
CARSON
Neither. Hes not available because hes not a being of a kind that
would fit into our availability. Not knowable, as the mystics would say.
And knowing is what a worshiper wants to get from Godthe sense of
being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing and being known. Its what
anybody wants from any relationship of love, and the relationship with
God is supposed to be one of love. But I dont think any kind of knowing is
ever going to materialize between humans and gods.
INTERVIEWER
Is it stymied because of the nature of the beast?
CARSON
Because of the difference of the two orders. If God were knowable, why
would we believe in him?
INTERVIEWER

So hes like the ancient Greeks, the unknowable other, whose

presence is fascinating and in some way illuminating, but not really
understandable?
CARSON
Yes. Not an available instrument of anything we need or do. Which
isnt the same as saying not existing.
INTERVIEWER
I know youve been working on and off on the sublime. It combines
Antonioni and the actress Monica Vitti?
CARSON
Some parts of it did. But I think Ive given up on the sublime. Some
time ago I decided to try to understand it. For some reason, I felt that
Monica Vitti embodied the sublime, especially in Red Desert. So I
studied Red Desert and wrote some stuff about it and worked my way into
the theory of sublime. Various peoples versions of itEdmund Burke,
Kant, Antonioni himself. But its too big a topic for me so I wrote around
in it for a while and then stepped out to see if there was any kind of thread
there that I could develop and get ahold of, but its defeated me.
INTERVIEWER
I think particularly of that poem when Antonioni goes to the
madhouse.
CARSON
Yes, a true story. He went to film in a madhouse. It was his first
attempt to make a movie. He had the inmates perform for him.
INTERVIEWER
Did he tell the inmates what to do?
CARSON
He didnt get that far. He went to the room where the inmates were
brought. He set them up in some formation and turned on the lights that

were necessary for filming, and the inmates went nuts. Because of the
lights, or so the doctors at the scene conjectured.
INTERVIEWER
Your conjecture is that the inmates start rolling around on the floor as
a ruse because they discover that they can kiss each other under the guise
of being mad.
CARSON
Its a complicated ruse. I think they have a general group ruse in any
situation that suggests danger or novelty. So they hit the floor and start
rolling, and then some of them who happen to have affections for one
another also use it as an occasion for kissing. Thats kind of incidental.
Not the main motive of the rolling. In the conventional descriptions of the
sublime, like Kants, theres usually a trigger from the phenomenal world,
a thunderstorm or a cliff or a vast starry nightvertigo of the infinite
from which the self recoils in horror or dread. Dread followed by a
recovery of the feeling of mastery, a soaring sensation of, Look at this
incredible dread, and how I rise above it with my amazing human mind!
INTERVIEWER
I remember, and it wasnt that long ago, when you couldnt get people
to take your writing seriously. You used to say, Im going to be famous
fifteen minutes after Im dead. Thats all shifted in the last several years,
and I wonder what kind of difference thats made, both personally and
professionally.
CARSON
Doesnt make a lot of difference. Its nice to be met at airports, Ill say
that. It hasnt made much difference inside the writing, either, except that
I feel somewhat freer to do anything I want, which is both bad and good.
Good in the sense that its an exploratory space, bad in the sense that Im
not sure anybody really thinks about judging me the same way as before.
There isnt a blank space in which the judgment happens, theres a readymade space, a judgment already there that you either live up to or dont.
Its already altered by the time you enter.
INTERVIEWER

Your work used to be met with complete bewilderment: But this isnt
poetry, this is clearly prose. This is in paragraphs, I can tell the difference
between prose and poetry. The responses were completely dismissive.
CARSON
Yes, and since then theres been what people call a paradigm shift,
which means now I cant do anything wrong, but which really means
people are offering equally blind judgments of the work. I dont know why
that happens. I guess people are just afraid to think. They like to have a
category thats ready so they can say: Okay, now we know this is good, we
can enjoy it.
INTERVIEWER
Did winning the MacArthur have a similar kind of effect? I know it
didnt lead to a more lavish lifestyle.
CARSON
How do you mean? I think I bought some socks. Socks and a new
pillowcase. Also, they let me in the bank at any hour now. Even after the
door is barred they rush up and usher me to the back room. I find that
charming. Otherwise not much difference.
INTERVIEWER
You have an interesting theory about money.
CARSON
Its not that interesting. Its just the inverse of the usual theory, which
is that all money, indeed all numbers in life, should get bigger. But it
doesnt make sense that they should get biggerwhy bigger? If you just
switch it around and think all numbers should get smaller, it makes life
better.
INTERVIEWER
What did your dad think about this attitude?
CARSON

Dad didnt take this view, I have to say.

INTERVIEWER
What was his attitude to money?
CARSON
Complicated. I dont think that I grasped it. I only know that whenever
we had conversations about economic affairs, we would end up sitting at
the table, surrounded by napkins covered with calculations. It was a
situation of total dismay for us both.
INTERVIEWER
Has coming from Canada formed you in some way as a writer?
CARSON
No, I dont think so. I dont know if Id be any different if Id been born
somewhere else. When I go to America I feel different but not in a
paraphrasable way, and when I come back here I feel a sense of relief,
perhaps just because its nice not to be conspicuous. And one can certainly
be inconspicuous here. I do feel that I miss the rocks and the air, and the
smell that the world has in Canada. But I dont feel formed by it.
INTERVIEWER
Are there contemporary writers who feed you in a certain way? Does
the anxiety of influence make you anxious?
CARSON
It makes me anxious to the extent that if I read somebody and I think,
Wow, Id really like to do that, I stop reading them because I dont want to
be an imitator. I have a monkey side; I could easily just imitate, which
becomes parodic. Parodic because I really dont want to become that
person and the only relationship you can have to someone you want to
imitate and not become is parody. But I do like, for example, Mavis
Gallant, and I try not to read Mavis Gallant when Im also writing because
Id just seep into her. So while I dont have a sense of trying to craft a
voice, I do have a sense of trying to avoid blending in with anyone elses.

INTERVIEWER
I end up putting you and Alice Munro together. In each of you theres
an attachment to the physical world and the details of life almost like
you are reveling in themwhether theyre bad, good, painful, or whatever
else. Does that seem right to you?
CARSON
I recognize that. Reveling is a good word for it. But she and I are very
different. What we have in common is perhaps an attitude that however
bad life is, whats important is to make something interesting out of it.
And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff,
snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes
your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling
that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making
that into something on the page.
INTERVIEWER
And it goes on for everyone.
CARSON
It goes on for everyone, you can always communicate that. And for me,
even when I read George Eliot, I read her for the descriptions of weather.
Perhaps thats the wrong way to read George Eliot, but how comforting,
the way she describes light moving over trees and lying on a bench and
somebodys foot there.
INTERVIEWER
But you quote Eliot saying that attempts at description are stupid. Did
she really say that?
CARSON
She did say that. But she keeps on trying to do it. She does limit it,
though. I think she has a much greater capacity for description than she
allows herself. The weather is usually just a dab at the beginning of each
chapter. Then she goes onto metaphysical dialogues where people discuss
the meaning of life. But the weather is always there at the beginning, and
it is undeniable. She just gets it. She describes clouds moving over the sun

at eleven oclock in the morning on a path in an oak forest and its just
exactly how that would be. I admire that more than any other aspect of
writing.
INTERVIEWER
Shes good at evening, too. Its like she describes the weather in the
morning when the chapter starts and dusk when it ends.
CARSON
Yes, and thats the reason why I find Chinese and Japanese poetry
satisfying. Because it seems to have the same aim. In fact, its their whole
mechanism of insight into reality, to capture something of the
phenomenal moment and then let that exude a meaning larger than the
moment. I think thats some kind of final achievement in writing. Which
in my practice gets all messed up with also trying to describe my mother
or my socks or my love life, but I think if I were a better person, I could
get all that out of there and just describe the weather, the snow or the
moment of light and it would be a better work of art.
INTERVIEWER
I think you did it in an e-mail you sent me on the anniversary of your
mothers death. You said, I miss her like an old sock.
CARSON
One sock, you always need the other sock. Knowing when to stop,
thats the lesson of that e-mail. Knowing when to stop is what makes a
good piece of writing.
INTERVIEWER
That seems a good place to end. Unless theres anything else youd like
to add?
CARSON
Id like to add a piece of wisdom from Gertrude Stein: Act so there is
no use in a center. Thats what I try to teach my students.

New Yorker:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/red-doc-by-annecarson.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FCarson%2C
%20Anne&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream
&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=c
ollection
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutablebrilliance-of-anne-carson.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic
%2FCarson%2C
%20Anne&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream
&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=c
ollection
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Ratliff-t.html?
rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FCarson%2C
%20Anne&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream
&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=c
ollection
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/books/books-of-the-timesbeauty-is-truth-and-sometimes-betrayal.html?rref=collection
%2Ftimestopic%2FCarson%2C
%20Anne&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream
&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=c
ollection
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/12/the-unfolding

Poetry
Men in the Off Hours
Anne Carson
Alfred A. Knopf, $24 (cloth)
by John DAgata
It was Hegel who called this "the age of prose"--very unhappily, too.
Prose, after all, is where memoirs live--along with political speeches,
how-to books, committee-meeting minutes. Prose is the place of
pedestrian thought, of walking thought, as Socrates would say--thought
without the benefit of wings. It is, wrote Samuel Johnson, in the first

English dictionary, a "plain, simple, matter-of-fact speech, and hence a

dull or commonplace expression, quality, spirit, etc. It is the opposite
of Poetry." A century later Ibsen quipped that "Prose is for ideas. Verse
for visions." And even yesterday, on the radio, I heard Mario Cuomo
bemoan the tedium of this years political campaigns by pleading with
the candidates: "You must campaign in poetry! Then you can govern in
prose!"
Anne Carsons new book, Men in the Off Hours, is trying its darndest to
be poetry. Its got the line breaks, and the allusions, and the snap-fast
turns of Pound. But its also got some squishy parts: typographical
gimmicks, versified prosiness, the occasional clever one-liner converted
into epigrammatical couplets. Ultimately, however, Men in the Off
Hours is a fascinating read, especially considering Anne Carsons past
as a classicist who wrote essays, but even more so in light of the future
role as a poet that her formidably large audience (her previous
collection, Autobiography of Red, sold more than 25,000 copies in the
United States alone) has been hoping that she would unconditionally
embrace. For in the fourteen years since the publication of her first
book, Eros the Bittersweet, Carson has pounced onto the American
literary scene from the bona fide obscurity of classical scholarship to
the A-list of best-selling contemporary poets. Shes won a Lannan
Literary award, a Guggenheim, and the darlingship of the New Yorkers
poetry staff--and all, at the time of those kudos, with only a book-and-ahalf of poetry to her name: Plainwater(1995), a collection of
approximately one hundred pages of poetry and one hundred pages of
essays; and Glass, Irony and God (also 1995), another mix of poetry
and essays, which most readers likely only remember for its long,
memoiristic "The Glass Essay."
But then, in 1998, came Autobiography of Red, a heavily narrative
"novel in verse" that no critic to date has managed to explain in terms
of poetry, but that nonetheless secured Carsons place in the
contemporary pantheon of American poetry. Consider, for example, the
comment made in the New Republic that Carsons loose-limbed formal
strategy of alternating long and short lines in the book was "too much
like tennis with the net down." Consider, too, Bernard Knoxs response
to that criticism. He argued in the New York Review of Books that
Carsons problematic lines in Autobiography of Red could be considered
formally close to the dactylic rhythms of Homeric hexameter and
therefore an entirely appropriate English free-verse version of the
elaborate triadic arrangement of strophe, antistrophe, and epode in the
original Greek text on which Carsons story was based. And yet, even
Knox eventually threw up his hands in his review, admitting that "for

the most part the diction is that of prose," and wondering aloud, "Was
the decision to tell the story in verse justified? Why did Carson not
leave it in prose, as she did The Anthropology of Water, the long
account of her pilgrimage to Compostela in Plainwater?"
Indeed.
After all, Anne Carson was once an essayist. In 1986, when Eros the
Bittersweet was published, it first stunned the classics community as a
work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as
an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by
Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into
the 1990s, reissued as "literature"and redesigned for an entirely new
audience, it finally stunned the poets. After all, as far back as 1984,
essayists like Annie Dillard, Susan Sontag, and Harold Bloom were
praising Carson for her innovative work in the essay. Indeed, "Kinds of
Water" and "Short Talks," two examples of Carsons earliest and best
work, appeared in the Best American Essay anthologies, of 1988 and
1992 respectively. Yet, interestingly, when the original publishers of
these two essays were credited in Plainwaters acknowledgements,
someone in error, or with a knack for marketing, changed the Best
American Essay citation to Best American Poetry.
Essays are a hard sell in America. Recently, Publishers
Weekly estimated that essay collections both under-sell and undernumber the poetry collections published and sold annually in the United
States--an interesting statistic considering how loud the howling gets
each April when National Poetry Month organizers plead with Americans
to help save the genre. Over the past few decades the essay has
become a kind of literary third wheel, the ugly stepsister to poetry and
fiction. These days American essayists find themselves vying for
national literary awards in categories called "Criticism," "Biography,"
and "General Nonfiction"--venues in which theyre pitched against
autobiographies, scientific studies, and collections of literary criticism.
Even Poets and Writers, Inc., the national organization dedicated to
"connecting the literary community," has this footnote in its application
for inclusion in its Directory of American Writers:
To be eligible for listing you must have at least 12 publishing credits.
THESE HOWEVER DO NOT COUNT TOWARD POINTS FOR LISTING: selfpublished work; ... writing for children under the age of 12; ... any work
of nonfiction, including essays, criticism, and creative nonfiction [my
emphasis].

Who could blame Carson, therefore, for wanting to turn magically into a
poet? "Nothing to me is more interesting than the spaces between
languages," Carson mentioned recently in a lecture in San Francisco.
And, ultimately, Men in the Off Hours is just that: a very long lay-over in
the gulf between scholarship and art; a documentary about one writers
transformation from ugly duckling essayist to beautiful poet swan; a
book, in the end, not of poetry per se, but of translation--between
languages, between identities, and ultimately between genres.
"There are three things I like about Alkmans poem," Carson writes in
"Essay on What I Think About Most," explaining the formal cavorting in
a seventh-century Spartan fragment:
First that it is small,
light
and more than perfectly economical.
Second that it seems to suggest colors like pale green
without ever naming them.
Third that it manages to put into play
some major metaphysical questions
(like Who made the world)
without overt analysis.
You notice the verb "made" in the first verse
has no subject: [?]
It is very unusual in Greek
for a verb to have no subject, in fact
it is a grammatical mistake.
It goes on, detailing how Alkman managed to create interesting verse
by toying with the assumptions of his lyric-listening audience. In the
case at hand, he has intentionally misstated a simple grammatical
equation in one of his metaphors, therefore drawing attention to it, and
thus ultimately succeeding at performing the lyrics duty: drawing its
audience into participation with the poem and its lyric activity.
But "Essay on What I Think About Most," the poem written by
Carson about Alkmans poem, begs the question: does it succeed? As a
lyric, as an invitation for lyric activity, to what extent does it welcome
our participation in its "overt analysis"? In other words, how prosaic,
rhetorical, or argumentative can a poem be before it becomes
something else altogether, before it reverts to prose, to essay?
Some history: The word prose came into English use by way of the
Latin prosus, the Vulgates paired-down simplification of prorsus, itself

the contracted form of proversus, "to move forward," as in

Ciceros prosa oratio, "speech going straight ahead without turns."
Notice, however, that the Latin root of prose has in it the word versus,
which comes from the Greek verso, the little mechanism on a plow that
allows a farmer to manually turn a furrow--or, for our purposes, a "line."
In Latin, verso became versus and its verb form vertere, meaning "to
turn"--hence the English vertex, vertigo, and even the word conversant,
"one capable of spinning an interesting tale." Verse, in other words, is
etymologically both the root of prose as well as its direct opposite in
meaning. No wonder this scholar of classical texts is blurring genre
distinctions.
Take, for example, one of the most obvious occurrences of genreshifting in Carsons new book. "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as
Catherine Deneuve" casts Deneuve as a classics professor infatuated
with a female student in a Greek seminar she is teaching. Yet this
"essay"--transcribed entirely in prose in Men in the Off Hours--originally
appeared in lines in a thirty-page spread in Seneca Review three years
ago.
Note a section entitled "Shame" in the original version of the work:
Shame too
is a relation.
The fact that the girl has been absent from the seminar
for a week now
is a rusty edge
that the woman collides with repeatedly as she sits in her
Monday office
paging through
lecture notes and looking out on snowstreaked slate roofs.
A flag shreds itself
in the icy wind.
Telephone rings. Jagged pause. Girls voice,
Which she has
never heard before
on the telephone, is surprisingly dark and a little wild.
Animal lopes through her
and turns at the wall.

Claws rake it. Not coming to the seminar today. Thought you
should know.
Girl stops.
She waits. And then, Do you care?with a torn laugh.
The same section in Men in the Off Hoursis re-titled "tlphones":
Shame is a rusty edge that Deneuve sits on as she pages through
lecture notes in her Monday office. Outside a flag shreds itself in the icy
wind. Telephone rings. Jagged pause. Girls voice, which she has never
heard before on the telephone, is animal. Claws lope through her and
turn at the wall. Not coming to seminar today. Thought you should
know. Girl stops. Deneuve waits. And then, Do you care? with a laugh-Previously, Deneuve had been merely referred to subtly in the subtitle
of the work; now, however, she takes center-stage, replacing the more
generically mysterious "woman" from the earlier version, and adding to
this meditation on desire the same sexual baggage Deneuve carries
with her from role to role in her movies. She becomes, so to speak,
"stock footage," and the work as a whole is much more cinematic, a
quality it shares with a large portion of the books imaginary scenarios
with writers, painters, and mythical figures on the sets of TV talk shows,
commercials, and films.
Yet, formally speaking, is there something missing in this de-versed
version of "Irony is Not Enough"? Or, in truth, were there never really
lines in the first place? In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I
accepted this "poem" as an "essay" for Seneca Reviewand so I felt
obliged to ask Carson about the works latest transformation. Carson
replied that she felt the work needed to feel more claustrophobic and
that its earlier incarnation, in lines, was much too airy, surrounded as it
was by lots of white space. Whenever a writer mentions typography as
playing a crucial formal role in the creation of his or her work, some
readers may feel the urge to roll their eyes. But bear in mind, once
again, that Carson is a scholar of Greek. And Greek is a language
unbound by syntax. It does not require its words to follow a prescribed
sentence pattern to convey meaning. It is, literally, a sculptural
language. And sculpture, I think, is a useful metaphor to have in mind
while reading Men in the Off Hours. From its shifts in syntax in the plain,
spear-headed sentence sounds of "New Rule" or the dizzying wound-up
clatter of "Why Did I Awake"; to the near-concrete poems of "Hopper:
Confessions" or the tiny "Epitaphs" strewn throughout the book like
little tombstones carved in soap; to the rhetorical essays complete with

footnotes or the essays that read like poems, Carsons Men in the Off
Hoursmakes it clear that those two separate desks at which Carson
often claims to work--one for "creative" work and the other for
"critical"--are getting very close.
Take, for example, the series of versions, adaptations, and out-right
appropriations of the work, lives, and legends of Catullus, Artaud,
Tolstoy, and Sappho that Men in the Off Hours offers up at its core. In
essence, the whole middle hundred pages of the book could be
considered a meditation on translation: its virtues, vices, and ultimate
potential for duplicating the kind of lyric experience that readers have
come to expect in poetry, and thus the kind of thing Carson is prone to
try to complicate. At the same lecture mentioned earlier, on translation,
a young man stood up to ask Carson about the long-awaited translation
of Sophokless Elektra that she had supposedly been working on for
Oxford University Press. Carson responded by saying that she ran into
some problems during the project and ultimately was forced to
abandon it altogether.
The young man asked, "What kinds of problems?"
Carson responded, "Translation problems."
Young man: "Like?"
At which point Carson produced a handout for the audience, detailing
the dozen or more words for the kinds of screams attributed to Elektra
in the play. These, along with the half-dozen or so other screams that
each character in the play is assigned, made Carson feel that trying to
render such precision from Greek into a language whose standard form
of exclamation is the all-encompassing "Oh!" would be a task more
difficult than interesting.
And so, in Men in the Off Hours,we get the alternative. In a section of
the book titled "Catullus: Carmina,"a title often attributed to Catulluss
collected works, Carson strolls through the ancient Roman poets bestknown and most-loved work, slowly transforming, and then unhinging,
each poems presumed meaning:
On her lap one of the matted terriers.
She was combing around its genitals.
It grinned I grinned back.
Its the one she calls Little Bottleafter Deng Xiaoping.

This is by no means a faithful translation of Catulluss famous "My

Ladys Pet," although it is presented, under the title Passer Deliciae
Meae Puellae, as something that should provoke us to at least think of
Catullus as we read it. A rough, literal translation of Catullus original is
this:
Thrush, my ladys pet,
with whom she plays while she holds you in her lap
or gives you her finger to peck
and provokes you to bite sharply
when she, my shining lady love,
has a mind for some sweet play, hoping,
I think, that when the sharp smart of love dissolves
she will find relief in her pain, but
oh that I might play with you as she does
and lighten the gloomy cares of my heart!
Catullus wrote about desire and sex and the sticky, dirty gossip of lateRepublican Rome. He was a contemporary of Cicero, Caesar, and
Lucretius, and was regarded by all three of them as a young turk, a
rebel credited only after his death with single-handedly snapping off
Latin poetrys chains to war, law, history, and the gods, and paving the
way for the first truly original Latin poets just a generation down the
road: Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. Because of this reputation, poets ever
since have borrowed Catullus simple, colloquial verse as a runway for
their own flights of fancy. For example, e. e. cumings:
little bird, her darling
sometimes when she plays with you
she suddenly holds you tight to her breast
or sticks out a finger--oo, you little rascal
you peck, go on do it again, harder, oo
--and hes off. Now consider Byron:
My darlings canary, her plaything, her pet, With whom all her troubles
she loves to forget,
When my sweetheart has mind to indulge in sweet play,
And so for a moment her passion allay,
She lets you for warmth in her soft bosom linger,
And smiles when you peck at the tip of her finger
--and so on. Carsons indulgences with Catullus join a long line of
inventions. Here the scholar in Carson intends to advance the

conversation about translation and appropriation and the contract of

artistic license between critic and poet. Carson the artist, on the other
hand, is exploring the outer limits of lyric possibility. By titling each of
her riffs on Catullus after the actual first lines of his poems, and then by
translating those first lines--quite literally, in most cases--Carson invites
readers to participate in the very act of translation, inviting us to
notice, figure out, or simply wonder where, to what extent, and why she
has deviated from the original Latin. Its a kind of lyricism that succeeds
in ways her more straightforward poems, such as "Essay on What I
Think About Most," do not.
Yet, in the end, even these "false translations" arent all that exciting.
Theyre clever, and theyre fun, and theyre another brilliant showcase
of Carsons utterly original experience of the world, but they fall short
of rising to the full potential urgency of this book. Men in the Off
Hours is reminiscent, conceptually, of the recent three-volume
"account" of the Iliad by Christopher Logue, a cinematic, thoroughly
modern work of translation; of Robert Lowells Imitations, a tiny book
that reveled in literary appropriation; or even of Christopher Marlowes
translation of Ovid and Petrarchs imaginary "Letters to Classical
Authors." But the similarity Men in the Off Hours shares with these
books stops, I think, at its conceit--for Marlowes translation, for
example, is still widely considered one of the best English versions of
Ovids work precisely because it moves beyond conceit, beyond form. It
is eager to identify with its subject even as it takes great liberties in
content and form.
At the tail end of Men in the Off Hours, Carson offers a sweet, brief, lyric
essay entitled "Appendix to Ordinary Time," which announces the
recent death of her mother, and which enacts, in a formal experiment
that is at once heartbreaking and chillingly ingenious, this books
promise, and its problem:
My mother died the autumn I was writing this. And Now I have no one, I
thought. "Exposed on a high ledge in full light," says Virginia Woolf on
one of her tingling days (March 1, 1937). I was turning over the pages
of her diaries, still piled on my desk the day after the funeral, looking
for comfort I suppose--why are these pages comforting? They led her,
after all, to the River Ouse.
One reading of this passage could logically cast Carsons mother as its
subject; the other reading would obviously place Woolf in the light. "I
was turning over the pages of her diaries, still piled on my desk the day
after the funeral" is grammatically ambiguous--the pronoun vague--

and so for a brief moment the two women linger in a parallel present
tense, neither of them gone, both clutched in Carsons mind. "Lost, yet
still there," as she describes the sensation later in the essay. What
Carson finally discovers she loves about Woolfs unedited notebooks
and diaries is the existence of crossed-out lines, because "Crossouts
are something you rarely see in published texts," she writes. "They are
like death."
But a simple line of poetry, fully realized, fully felt, and free of the
visual tricks that merely play with form, is also like death--the breath,
the mind, the prosa oratio, as Cicero would say, cut off mid-stream,
mid-thought, waiting for the little versoto kick in, and turn.
John DAgatas

first collection, Halls of Fame,will be published this year.

http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.3/dagata.html

Anne Carson
and the Sublime
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera by Anne Carson. Vintage, 2006.

Anne Carson is widely considered an avant-garde writer because of

her formal experiments and generic innovations. The label clearly makes
some sense, at least superficially: think of her genre-bending first book of
prose poems entitled Short Talks, for example, or the arbitrarily
punctuated syntax in her early sequence The Life of Towns. But when we
realize the formal method in the latter is evidently borrowed from Gertrude
Steins She Bowed to Her Brother (1934), it seems more accurate to
speak of its place in a certain kind of formal tradition. It is a modernist
tradition, to be sure, and no one would deny that Carson feels modern.
But it is clear to me that she is also a thoroughly traditional writer.
Carson has been for many years a professor of classics, she is a
superb translator from ancient Greek, and in her own writing she returns
again and again to the ancient roots, the classical and biblical origins of

Western literature. These obsessions, self-consciously combined with her

more fashionable interest in the new traditions of certain great innovators
of the twentieth century like Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude
Stein, enable her, at her best, to be truly original. Merely to rank her with
the triumphant march of the avant-garde, in Zbigniew Herberts sardonic
phrasecultural amnesiacs endlessly shooting at the easy target of
noveltyis to miss completely much of what is most interesting and
valuable in her work. In fact, Carson has always been a writer in the
Romantic tradition of the sublime, a tradition stretching back through
Longinus to Sappho, Homer, and the Bible. And never more so than in
her recent book, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera.
The book explores, from a wide variety of perspectives, the theme
of the sublime annihilation or decreation of the self. Carson borrows the
term decreation from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil,
for whom the purpose of such an act was to get out of the way of God, to
let Gods will prevail over ones one. Any student of religions will
recognize this as a very old idea. But one way of understanding Carsons
focus on this theme is to think of her place in literary history: as a selfconsciously post-confessional poet, she is concerned with finding ways to
displace the self from the centre of the work. Not, mind you, in order to
replace it with the cold, inhuman babble of Language, but rather to make
way for spiritual matters . And this, as I say, places her squarely in the
Romantic tradition of the sublime. Not I, writes D.H. Lawrence, in his
Song of the Man Who Has Come Through: Not I, not I, but the wind that
blows through me. The main difference is that where English Romantics
like Shelley and Lawrence speak of wind, Carson often speaks of the
still more traditional God.
As its subtitle indicates, Decreation is not simply a collection of lyric
poems, but rather a book of new writing in a wide variety of genres.
Besides thirty-four short lyrics, four essays and an opera libretto, the book
includes a screenplay, the text of an oratorio, a cinematic shot list, a
longer ekphrastic poem, and something that reads like a series of study
questions, with answers. But the books intellectual centers of gravity are
its four essays, each of which takes a different perspective on sublime
experience; and the subject of each essay is further explored in one or

more other works that surround, or rather orbit, it in the book, like moons
around a planet in the solar system of the sublime. For example, the
essay entitled Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus
and Antonioni, is followed by a group of lyric poems called Sublimes, and
then by another sequence of poems on sublime subjects
called Gnosticisms. Similarly, the essay entitled Decreation: How Women
Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God is followed by
a libretto, Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts, whose main characters
include Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil. The effect is rather like
reading Dantes Vita Nuova, or Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell, or
Yeatss A Vision together with his poems of the same period; prose and
verse illuminate one another, often brilliantly, from different perspectives.
The essays themselves are erudite personal essays in the tradition
of Montaigne, and, at the same time, incisive works of thematic literary
criticism: they consist of surprising, associative arguments, supported by
deft and wide-ranging quotation, acute readings of particular works of
literature, and occasional incandescent descriptions of Carsons
childhood memories. Although Carson keeps her personal feelings on a
tight leash, one always senses from the passion of the writing that the
subjects of these essays are of urgent spiritual and aesthetic significance
to her.
The first essay in the book, Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of
Sleep), is concerned with the therapeutic consolation of the uncanny, the
sublime, or the supernatural, and especially with the power to be gained
from the extraction of some secret, hidden content from sleep. By
extension, it is also about gaining access to what is real, to Kants thingin-itself, which is likewise secret or hidden. Carson clearly owes much to
Freud herewhose book The Uncanny is one of the great contributions
to the theory of the sublimenot to mention the whole Romantic tradition
of the interior quest romance, but this is not a purely intellectual exercise
for her. As an example from her own life of a supremely consoling
contact with the uncanny secret content of sleep, she describes the
following childhood experience:
My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in
the house where we lived when I was three

or four years of age. I dreamed I was

asleep in the house in an upper room. That
I awoke and came downstairs and stood in
the living room. The lights were on in the
living room, although it was hushed and
empty. The usual dark green sofa and
chairs stood along the usual pale green
walls. It was the same old living room as
ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of
place. And yet it was utterly, certainly,
different. Inside its usual appearance the
living room was as changed as if it had
gone mad.
After giving an incisive and surprising interpretation of this dream-vision
(I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living
room sleeping), Carson goes on to explain why she finds it so consoling,
tracing her theme dazzlingly through the works and ideas of Plato,
Aristotle, ancient Greek inscriptions, Kant, Keats, Lacan, Tom Stoppard,
and, especially, Homer, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bishop, elucidating
certain works of these authors in ways that have the power to change
ones reading of them forever.
The second essay, already mentioned, entitled Foam (Essay with
Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni, is about the
exciting, dangerous and sublime act of . . . quotation. As she puts it,
the Sublime is a documentary technique. After quoting Longinus
discussion, in On the Sublime, of a passage from the Greek orator
Demosthenes, Carson invites us to feel the power of quotation as
something extraordinary:
Longinus point is that, by brutal
juxtaposition of coordinate nouns or noun
clauses, Demosthenes transposes violence
of fists into violence of syntax. His facts spill
over the frame of their original context and
pummel the judges minds. Watch this
spillage, which moves from the man who

hits, to the words of Demosthenes

describing him, to the judges hearing these
words, to Longinus analyzing the whole
process, to me recalling Longinus
discussion of it and finally to you reading
my account. The passionate moment
echoes from soul to soul.
Carson is a classical scholar with the soul of a Romantic, and she writes
with the passion of a master teacher, inciting, inflaming her students to
experience the text with both heart and mind. (No surprise, then, to find
Carson has dedicated her book to her actual students.) As this example
demonstrates, Carson is a critic with a poets passion for technique, a
quality she shares with the best poet-critics of our time. This is not her
only theme here: the essay is also about the psychology, the joy, and the
structure of the sublime (Threat provides the Sublime with its essential
structure, the alternation of danger and salvation, she writes, recalling
William Blakes pithier sentence, Fear and Hope areVision), and, as
well, the guiltiness or uncleanness of the sublime soul, who knows how to
value the passionate moment, but for whom sublime threats may come
from within as well as without. But readers familiar with Carsons previous
work will certainly recognize this essay as an apologia for one of her
recurring stances in her writing, both prose and verse: that of the
passionate professor of classics.
Lest we forget that the sublime is a concept that was applied in the
eighteenth century especially to certain aesthetic experiences of nature,
Carsons third essay, Totality: The Colour of Eclipse, considers the
sublime experience of the total eclipse of the sun. She describes it as
follows: You are now inside the moons shadow, which is a hundred miles
wide and moves at two thousand miles an hour. The sensation is
stupendous. Carson takes her literary examples this time from
Archilochus, Pindar, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard.
Surprisingly, she finds the experience is often associated in these writers
with copulation, marriage, questions and doubts about marriage, and,
less surprisingly, with a feeling of wrongness; in a metaphor borrowed
from her own essay in praise of sleep, she compares seeing an eclipse to

waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the
back side of your mind. Taken by itself, this is the slightest of the four
essays; however, when read together with the other three its images and
ideas help to link all four in marvelously suggestive ways. For instance,
although she never makes the link explicitly, the image of a total eclipse of
the sun is perhaps her most powerful metaphor for her central notion of
decreation, which may be understood as a kind of eclipse or annihilation
of the self.
Which brings me to the last and longest essay, the four-part
Decreation: How Women like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone
Weil Tell God, which, even more than the other three essays, is the
intellectual heartland of the book. She begins with a stunningly original
and profound reading of Sapphos famous fragment 31, the poem spoken
by a jealous lover, beginning He seems to me equal to gods that man . . .
. I urge you to read her analysis for yourself; Ill just say that ultimately
she reads the poem as an ecstatic lyric about the theology of love, one
which asks a profound spiritual question: What is it that love dares the
self to do? According to Carson, the answer in the poem is all is to be
dared . . . Love dares the self to leave the self behind, Carson, whose
brilliant translations of Sapphos collected fragments, If Not, Winter, was
published in 2002, and whose first book, Eros the Bittersweet, contained
much passionate and insightful discussion of this ancient poet, deserves
her growing reputation as one of the most exciting guides to Sapphos
work.
Part two of the same essay considers the work of a thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century French mystic named Marguerite Porete, whose Mirror
of Simple SoulsCarson describes as being a book about the absolute
daring of love, or more straightforwardly, a theological treatise and . . .
handbook for people seeking God. Poretes central doctrine, as Carson
describes it, is that the soul can proceed through seven different stages
of love, beginning with . . . boiling desire, until she achieves an ecstasy
in which the soul is carried outside her own Being and leaves herself
behind. Like Sappho, she describes this experience in terms of a love
triangle, although in her case the triangle consists of God the Spouse and
the two parts of her divided self; as Carson explains, she projects

jealousy as a test of her ability to de-centre herself, to move out of the

way, to clear her own heart and her own will off the path that leads to
God.
In part three of the essay, Carson considers the work of Simone
Weil, who also wanted to get herself out of the way in order to arrive at
God. Weil called her program for doing this decreation, to undo the
creature in us. She too imagines a love triangle, this time involving God,
herself, and all of creation: she is the third wheel between two lovers, God
and the earth, and wants to disappear; as she says, If only I could see a
landscape the way it is when I am not there. The implication is that this
would give her access to reality, to Kants thing-in-itself. Moreover, Porete
and Weil agree that such a sublime experience of self-annihilation would
be one of tremendous joy.
Carson does an important service in this essay by restoring three
important women to the Romantic tradition of the sublime, a tradition
often thought of as dominated by men, and by reminding us that this
tradition is not confined to recent centuries, but is rather a mode of writing
that has had adherents in every age; her essay is a subtle but powerful
rejoinder to glib critics who dismiss this tradition as outdated or inherently
male. In this way, Carson is making a tradition for herself, and clearing a
space for her own work as a poet. It occurs to me, moreover, that we can
locate a central aspect of Carsons elusive Canadianness in this project:
her concern with the reform of this European tradition contrasts strikingly
with, for example, the ultra-American Walt Whitmans ostensible rejection
of it; in other words, she adopts a rebellious, reformist Canadian attitude
toward tradition very different from Whitmans revolutionary American
one. Of course, one might argue that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot did much
the same thing in their criticism, clearing a space for their own work by
recovering European traditions that had been half-forgotten; and yet they
were precisely the two American modernist poets who strove most
ardently to leave America behind.
The fourth part of this essay is especially interesting. There is a
contradiction in Sappho, Porete, and Weil, Carson argues, that arises
from the fact that they are writers: they create a big, loud, shiny centre of
self from which the writing is given voice and yet they claim to be intent

on annihilating this self while continuing to write. To resolve this

contradiction, each one feels moved to create a kind of dream of
distance in which the self is displaced from the center of the work and the
teller disappears into the telling. Here we have Carson the postconfessional poet, wondering how writers in her chosen tradition have
managed to displace the self from the center of their work. In this fourth
part of her essay, then, Carson goes on to describe and think about the
dream of distance each of these writers creates.
She reminds us that Simone Weil arranged for her own
disappearance on several levels, including self-starvation; and this was
related to the fact that Weils economic and spiritual diagnosis of the
human condition was this: Mans great affliction, she wrote, is that
looking and eating are two different operations. Therefore her dream of
distance is precisely a resolution of this affliction: Eternal beatitude is a
state where to look is to eat. Because food reminds us so powerfully of
our physicality, she creates in her mind a dream of distance where food
can be enjoyed perhaps from across the room merely by looking at it . . .
where the lover can stay, at the same time, near to and far from the object
of her love. But as Carson reminds us, eternal beatitude is not the only
state where to look is to eat. The written page can also reify this paradox
for us. A writer may tell what is near and far at once. Certainly this is true
of Carsons own writing; while she gives us just one personal story in this
essay devoted to the works of others(I remember a little book of The
Lives of the Saints that was given to me about age five. In this book the
various flowers composing the crowns of the martyrs were so lusciously
rendered in words and paint that I had to be restrained from eating the
pages)we are, nevertheless, always aware of her fervent personal
stake in what she is writing. That is to say, she may be discussing figures
distant from her in time and place, but in these essays she almost always
seems to be writing about herself as a writer, and, moreover, whispering
her discourse urgently in our ears.
In Marguerite Porete the dream of distance seems to involve time
as much as space, and moreover, for her the writers dream of distance
becomes an epithet of God. She calls God the divine Lover who feeds
her soul with the food of truth, and, more to the point, the excellent

FarNear. In an act that Porete describes as both a kind of copulation and

a kind of feeding, God ravishes the soul in the moment of its
annihilation, and fills it, through an aperture, with a glimpse of its eternal
glory. God must come Near to perform this act, but remains Far in
time apparently because he only gives a glimpse; that is, eternity will
have to wait. By contrast, Carson points out, Simone Weil considered
prayer to be primarily an experience of spatial contradiction; nevertheless,
its effect for her was similarly ecstatic.
And finally, this brings Carson back to Sappho, whose prayer to
Aphrodite, fragment 2, she reads as another dream of distance. The
poem is a calling hymn, an invocation to God to come from where she is
to where we are; as Carson says, such a hymn typically names both
places, and then the invocation decreates the difference between them,
an impossible motion possible only in writing. Moreover, Carsons
analysis of exactly how Sappho does this with her syntax is, as usual,
superb.
All four of these essays are, as I say, ultimately about decreation,
about displacing the self to make way for the sublime. The subjects of the
first two, sleep and quotation, are nothing if not ways of getting the self
out of the way, and the subject of the third, the total eclipse of the sun by
the moon, is the books great sublime natural metaphor for this act. The
fourth essay, besides performing the important literary-historical services I
have described above, illuminates the spiritual motivation for, and
aesthetic consolation of, sublime writing in ways that have seldom been
rivaled. After reading them three or four times, I believe these essays
contain some of the most original and insightful critical writing about the
sublime since Freud.
What remains is to consider how well Carson puts her theory into
practice. What I find, among other things, is that her theory teaches us
how to read her poetry. When one re-reads the entire book after finishing
her essays, the structure of the book as a whole becomes immediately
clear. On the level of genre, the structure is this: the first hundred pages
contain all the poems and the first two essays; this is followed by three
experiments in other genres, namely the oratorio, the Q&A, and the
screenplay; then the book finishes with the last two essays and the opera,

and a brief cinematic shot list for coda. But on a spiritual and aesthetic
level, the books structure is this: like Sappho, Porete, and Weil, Carson
begins by consenting to loves absolute dare and, in search of a sublime
experience of decreation, progressively displaces herself from the centre
of the writing, using every technique of depersonalization at her disposal,
from quotation, imitation, parody, and critical analysis of others, to various
kinds of dramatic technique, including experiments with screenplay and
libretto. One is reminded of T. S. Eliots desire to escape from
personality, and, accordingly, his deployment of some of these same
methods, especially quotation, parody, criticism, dramatic poetry, and,
ultimately, poetic drama.
However, as Carson puts it, to undo self one must move through
self, the self being the parchment on which God writes his lessons, as
Marguerite Porete says. This is why Carson opens her book with a series
of personal lyrics. Her subject is her response to the illness of her aging
mother, whom she calls the love of my life. This is the love that ignites
and instigates the books burning spiritual quest for decreation. The first
item in the book is Sleepchains, a small, beautiful lyric about setting out
on such a quest, which I quote here in its entirety:
Who can sleep when she
Hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
Fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
All the links
Rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Notice how Carson begins her book, like her literary heroines Sappho,
Porete, and Weil, with a dream of distance, and one, moreover, which
includes its opposite, a dream of nearness: her anxious insomnia,
hundreds of miles away from her sick mother, is interruptedan
interruption enacted in the syntax, which falls silent at the end of the first
lineby the physical sensation of some vast breath, the breath of God,
one supposes, fan[ning] the restless decks of her mother imagined as
a ship, as if the mother were not far away at all, but indeed very near. And

yet the breath and the rattling it produces serve by the end of the poem to
call the speaker to travel, to close the distance between them, to begin
the journey toward her mother-love and God, and this presupposes the
great distance between them described in the first line of the poem.
Nevertheless, whereas at the beginning of the poem the speaker uses
two pronouns to indicate herself and her mother, I and she, by the end
they are united by us and we. The mother and the vast breath are
FarNear indeed. If the compound title of this poem reminds us of Paul
Celan, it is no accident; such serious playing with spiritual paradoxes of
nearness and distance, presence and absence, is central to the work of
that European master, about whom Carson has written well and at length
in her book Economy of the Unlost. But that is not all; the poems image
of a vast breath moving over the ocean also echoes the beginning of the
book of Genesis, in fact the very passage that Longinus quotes from that
source as a supreme example of the sublime style. Such are the
pleasures of reading Carson at her best.
The poems that make up the rest of the opening sequence,
entitled Stops, are, unfortunately, not always up to this standard. Of the
fourteen lyrics in this part, I count just four or five that are as good as
anything Carson has done in this mode, including, besides Sleepchains,
the following poems: That Strength, Nothing For It, and Her Beckett.
The others are decidedly less successful, though some of them are better
than others. Here is one of the lesser poems, though not the worst,
entitled Becketts Theory of Comedy. It is the last one in the sequence:
Picking gooseberries, she said.
O is shown moving to the window.
Should traps be not available.
Or they kneel throughout the play.
That lifelong adorer!
Same old coat.
No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Tomorrow noon?
Goes back up the path, no sign of you.
[Pause.]

It isnt that this is incomprehensible; the lines read like spliced passages
from a Beckett playthey may in fact be quotations from his plays, I
havent checkedand the point is clearly that the authors life with and
without her mother resembles such a play. (Anne Carson herself is clearly
That lifelong adorer!) But the literary game here feels too clever, too
derivative, too dependent on stylistic imitation to have much emotional
impact, at least on this reader. It leaps ahead in its technique to a kind of
false decreation of the self, without really moving through the self. By
contrast, consider the moving poem entitled Nothing For It, which reads
like a later episode of the spiritual quest romance begun in Sleepchains.
Again, I quote it in full:
Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around the
rose.
Lo how
before a great snow,
before the gliding emptiness of the night coming on us,
our lanterns throw
shapes of old companions
and
a cold pause after.
What knife skinned off
that hour.
Sank the buoys.
Blows on what was our house.
Nothing for it just row.
I admire Carsons economy of language here, the surprises that result
from her syntactical elisions and interruptions, her rhymes, her sharp
enjambments, and especially her vivid and suggestive images. But what I
admire most is the poems emotional force, its feeling of balancing on the
edge of despair and stoical perseverance. The wind which in
Sleepchains is a gentle vast breath, has now become an annihilating
glassy wind, a knife that skinned off ] / that hour and Sank the
buoys and now Blows on what was our house; and yet the speaker is
determined to go on. One is reminded of Becketts line: I cant go on. Ill
go on. And how much more emotionally powerful this remembrance of

Beckett is than the explicit imitation of the playwrights language in

Becketts Theory of Comedy. Having said this, I must say I find the form
of this poem, with its centered lines a la Microsoft Word, and its
melodramatic seventh line and, to be more or less arbitrary, and that is
disappointing in a poem that is otherwise so good.
The next sequence of lyrics, Sublimes, suffers from a similar
unevenness. I count just three poems out of twelve as first-rate, namely
And Reason Remains Undaunted, Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions, and,
with some hesitation, Guillermos High Symphony. And Reason
Remains Undaunted begins casually with a conventionally
Wordsworthian search for the sublime in nature, but then veers off
surprisingly into a wild series of adjectives and adjectival phrases to
describe the many methods of moving green, never to return to the
poems original walk; it is a brilliant specimen of the list or catalogue
poem, making full use of the catalogues disjunctive power, and, because
it consists of adjectives instead of the usual nouns, it feels utterly fresh.
Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions is a witty and sad poem about sex and
death: Who does not end up / a female impersonator? the poem asks
wryly, only to wipe the smile off our faces in the next lines: Drink all the
sex there is. / Still die. This poem is notable also for its summary of the
aesthetic impulse behind the quest for decreation and sublime
experience:
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
When she puts it this way she reminds us of T.S. Eliot again. But she also
raises the question of whether her personal poetry is in fact a failure.
My sense is that some is and some isnt. Certainly Carsons early
narrative poem from Glass, Irony and God, The Glass Essay, which is
one of Carsons most personal poems, and, as it happens, a poem about
her relationship with her mother, is one of her very best. But restricting the
question to the poems in the present volume, the picture is mixed. When
her personal poetry is not successful it is generally because it overpowers
the limits of the lyric in the name of formal or rhetorical experimentation.

Carsons continued playing around in this sequence with poems that

blend lines from different voices, including quotations from other writers
a technique she has used many times beforefits intellectually into her
program of displacing the self from the centre of her work, but just doesnt
seem to me, in her hands, to produce very good poems. Here is an
example, from a poem called Blended Text:
You have captured:
my heart:
heart is your love
with one glance:
with one bead:
the kings of royalty

pinned upon
the wall of my
as one
as an exile of

And so on. That this clich-ridden jumble is bad poetry I take to be selfevident, and so the less said about it the better. One has to wonder about
any experimental technique that produces phrases as inane as the
kings of royalty. Flannery OConnor once wrote that a writer is free to try
and get away with whatever he wants, but that it had been her experience
that there wasnt much one could get away with. The sooner Carson
abandons this sort of thing, the better, though I wont hold my breath.
The third sequence in the book, Gnosticisms, is, on the whole,
much more successful. Take for example this fierce little ars poetica about
writing the sublime called Gnosticism III, quoted here in its entirety:
First line has to make your brain race thats how Homer does
it,
thats how Frank OHara does it, why
at such a pace
Muses
slam through the housethere goes one (fainting) up the
rungs
of your strange BULLFIGHT, buttered
almost in a nearness
to skyblue
Thy pangPollock yourself!
Just to hang on to life is why

I find this exhilarating, both in the way the poem follows its own advice
with onrushing syntax and headlong lineation, and in the way it deploys
mythic imagery in contemporary language in a way that reminds me of
certain poems by another Canadian poet, P.K. Page. And here is its
companion poem, Gnosticism VI, about reading the sublime:
Walking the wild mountain in a storm I saw the great trees
throw their arms.
Ruin! they cried and seemed aware
the sublime is called a science of anxiety.
What do men and women know of it?at first
not even realizing they were naked!
The language knew.
Watch naked (arumim) slide into cunning (arum) snake in
the next verse.
And suddenly a vacancy, a silence,
is somewhere inside the machine.
Veins pounding.
This, the culminating poem in the sequence and the last short lyric in the
book, is the most powerful depiction of an experience of decreation
among the books lyric poems. Notice how deftly Carson moves from a
sublime Romantic landscape in the first couplet to Freudian analysis in
the second, and then to Longinian quotation and explication of a biblical
text in the third and fourth. It is the latter, the act of reading, which triggers
the ecstatic moment of decreation, the displacement of the readers self,
and leaves behind a vacancy, a silence where the ghost used to be
inside the bodys machine. If only every short poem in Decreation were
this good.
At 245 pages, and with works in seven or eight distinct
genres, Decreation is an impossible book to do justice to in a review. I
regret that I must pass over Carsons screenplay on the subject of
Abelard and Heloise, her question-and-answer session on a film
production of Samuel Becketts silent play (or dance) called Quad, the
text of her oratorio in homage to Gertrude Stein, her cinematic shot list for
a silent film, and her decidedly anaphoric poem on a picture by Betty

Goodwin, all of which may be described as interesting experiments,

though some are more interesting than others. I want to turn instead,
however briefly, to the most ambitious work in the book, its grand finale,
the sixty-five-page opera libretto entitled Decreation: An Opera in Three
Parts.
The libretto has three parts unified by theme but otherwise distinct;
it may be best to think of it as a little trilogy. Part One dramatizes the story
of the god Hephaistos who discovers his wife Aphrodite in the act of
adultery with Ares, the god of war, and fails in his attempt to exact
revenge. Part Two deals with the trial of Marguerite Porete by the
Inquisition on charges of heresy, and her death by being burned at the
stake. And Part Three concerns the life, thought, and death of Simone
Weil.
I have not seen the opera performed, although the 1999 production
at the University of Michigan was apparently a success. But it must be
said that it helps tremendously to understand the libretto if one has read
the essay Decreation immediately beforehand, and indeed that essay
appears directly before the libretto in the book. I can only imagine how
mystified an audience might be without the benefit of this introduction.
This is not to say they would not enjoy the production, but simply that they
might well leave the theater scratching their heads about the relationship
among the operas three parts.
That said, the libretto is charming, moving, and profound. I was
surprised at how funny it is, even on the page, and a good production
would no doubt amplify this quality many times over. The scenes that deal
with the thought of Porete and Weil are not at all static or dry, as one
might fear, but superbly dramatized and emotionally engaging. And the
scenes of Hephaistoss failure, Poretes immolation, and Weils life-ending
stay in the hospital I found deeply affecting.
As a dramatic form, the libretto is this books apotheosis of decreation, a fully
realized dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the center of the
work and the teller disappears into the telling, to quote Carson again. The
unevenness of the lyrics at the beginning of the book, as I have said, arises from
their straining to transcend the limits of the short lyric in wayssuch as the use of

multiple voices and blended textsthat are far more appropriate for drama, and so
it is not surprising that this is the direction Carson is headed in as she comes to the
end of her book. As far as I know, this libretto is her first original published and
produced dramatic work, but I would not be surprised if Carson continues to write
in dramatic forms in the future. (She has already published translations of plays by
Sophocles and Euripides, in 2001 and 2006, respectively.) If she does, it would
make Decreation:Poetry, Essays, Opera an important turning-point in her career.
Actapotvol.34no.1Mxicoene./jun.2013
Varia

The Sacred Object: Anne Carson and Simone Weil

El objeto sagrado: Anne Carson y Simone Weil

Elizabeth Coles

Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico Instituto de Investigaciones

Filolgicas.1

Fecha
de
recepcin:
29
de
agosto
Fecha de aceptacin: 18 de septiembre de 2013

de

2013

Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between critical reading and the
critical object in the work of the contemporary Canadian poet and
essayist Anne Carson, principally the texts that emerge from her longstanding engagement with the writings of philosopher and Christian
mystic Simone Weil. My reading of Carson addresses the conflicting
desires of critical relationship that go confessed and unconfessed in her
work, and the forms of intimacy her responses are able to achieve with
the Weil oeuvre. Sharpened by their encounter with Weil's thinking and
with her faith, Carson's questions for criticism on its own objects and

their resistance to interpretation, on the criticism/literature distinction,

and on the vanity of criticism's aesthetics find articulation in various
genres of writing. Studying the complicity of each of these with Weil and
the capacity of each to radicalize her concerns, brings my paper toward
some conclusions of its own for literary criticism.
Keywords: Anne Carson, Simone Weil, interpretation, literary criticism,
contemporary poetry, theology, mysticism.

Resumen
Este artculo examina la relacin entre la lectura crtica y el objeto crtico
en la obra de la poeta y ensayista canadiense Anne Carson,
principalmente los textos que surgen de su largo acercamiento a los
escritos de la filsofa y mstica cristiana Simone Weil. Mi lectura de
Carson se centra en los deseos conflictuales de la relacin crtica que se
encuentran confesados y no confesados en su obra, y en las formas de
intimidad que sus respuestas logran con la obra de Weil. Agudizadas por
su encuentro con el pensamiento y la fe de Weil, las preguntas de
Carson para la crtica sobre sus propios objetos y la resistencia de
ellos a la interpretacin, sobre la distincin entre crtica y literatura, y
sobre la vanidad de la esttica de la crtica misma encuentran su
articulacin en varios gneros de la escritura: estudiando la complicidad
de cada uno de estos con Weil, y la capacidad de cada uno a radicalizar
sus cuestiones, llego a unas conclusions propias para la crtica literaria.
Palabras clave: Anne Carson, Simone Weil, interpretacin, crtica
literaria, poesa contempornea, teologa, misticismo.

Think of the Greek preposition . When

used with the accusative case, this preposition
means "toward, upon, against, with,
ready for, face to face, engaging, concerning,
touching, in reply to, in respect of, compared
with, according to, as accompaniment for."
It is the preposition chosen by John the Evangelist
to describe the relationship between
God and The Word in the first verse of the
first chapter of his Revelation:

"And The Word was with God" is how the

usual translation goes. What kind of withness
is it?
Anne Carson , Economy of the Unlost

The intimacy of God and Word is a conversation of one and a solitude of

two. Inside the full line from John 1:1 ("In the beginning was The Word,
and The Word was with God, and The Word was God"), "with" ripples out
in both directions like a question: what is this moment of recognition, a
flash of eye contact inside the monad of God and Word? "Face to face,
engaging, concerning, touching" and finally "withness" is how the
Canadian poet, critic and scholar Anne Carson describes the event. Yet
the question to which she leads us "what kind of withness is it?" is
not addressed to the theologian, the philosopher or even to the reader
of the critical work in which it appears Economy of the Unlost:
Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (1999).2 The question,
Carson hints earlier on in her short and casuistic preface, "Note on
Method", is for "academic writing":
There is too much self in my writing. Do you know the term Lukcs uses
to describe aesthetic structure? Eine fensterlose Monade. I do not want
to be a windowless monad my training and trainers opposed
subjectivity strongly, I have struggled since the beginning to drive my
thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people
converse logically and exchange judgments but I go blind out there.
So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening
landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of
everything I do not know. [...] Lukcs is prescribing a room for aesthetic
work; it would be a gesture of false consciousness to say academic
writing can take place there. And yet, you know as well as I, thought
finds itself in this room in its best moments locked inside its own
pressures. (Economy of the Unlost, vu).
The question "withness" is engaged to ask in Economy of the Unlost is
what kind of relationship academic writing assumes over, against and
with its objects of desire, a question Carson folds back onto the book
itself at the point of its own defining "with" Economy of the Unlost:
Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan. A critique of the finesses of
"thought", "subjectivity" and "aesthetic work" in the relationships of
academic writing spool out of Carson's reference to John the Evangelist.
In this paper I propose a deeper complicity in Carson between certain

problems of theology and certain problems of criticism as she sees and

perhaps also does not see them, a complicity staged in Carson's ongoing
poetic and critical reading of the French philosopher and Christian mystic
Simone Weil (1909-1943). The questions Carson asks of the practices of
criticism and academic writing are, like the questions I will be asking
here, sharpened and radicalized both by Carson's reading of Weil and by
the dilemmas of mystical thinking that shape them: dilemmas for the
writer and especially the critic, and for the objects of critical and
religious desire.
The paper is divided into three sections. The first outlines Carson's
critical response to Simone Weil in a reading of one of Carson's most
recent critical essays, "Decreation" (2005). This homage to Weil's
concerns, I suggest, finds itself curiously at home in Carson's wider
critical project. The second section of the paper explores Weil's own
thought on the question of interpretation as a relationship, and argues
for the coincidence of Weil and Carson on a point that has more to offer
critical practice than mystic theology. Weil's response to an absentobject
the Judeo-Christian God offers a way of thinking about what is at
stake in interpreting "present" ones in literary criticism and critical
aesthetics; her place in Carson's reflections on critical relationship also
begs the question of what God and mystic theology are doing in
contemporary, materialist and what we might call post-faith critical
thought. The final section considers what Carson's poetic response to
Weil achieves that her critical writing does not and perhaps cannot. At
the heart of both forms of response is an effort to know and preserve
literary objects of desire in the act of writing about them, a concern
shared by Weil's preoccupations with an object whose secrecy or
outright absence inspires comparable practices of desire and belief.

I
Carson is known perhaps first and foremost for her formal
experimentation. It is commonplace in Carson to find the functions of
poem and essay (as we might expect them) changing places: essays in
verse as well as academic prose, and poems doing the work of literary
criticism. "People make trouble out of that border [between poetry and
its interpretation]. I practically don't separate them", she confesses in
an interview: "I put scholarly projects and so-called creative projects
side-by-side in my workspace and I cross back and forth between them
or move sentences back and forth between them, and so cause them to

permeate one another" (Kevin McNeilly, "Gifts and Questions", 14).

Having said this, few commentaries on Carson's work go beyond
description of the fact of her formal or generic "hybridity". 3 In Carson's
relatively slim reception to date, it appears as though a poet who is also
a scholar makes only a formal gesture when she imports the rigours and
dilemmas of scholarship into a work of verse, or when a work of
scholarship swaps expository language for a language closer to its
critical object's as is so often the case in Carson. 4 On their own, the
formal qualities of this formal interpenetration tell us very little about
Carson's project as a critic and, for that matter, as a poet; yet they are
the vocabulary of a critical ethics at the heart of Carson, one that binds
her project to the worldly and otherworldly ethics of Simone Weil.
In Economy of the Unlost, the "withness" of Simonides of Keos and Paul
Celan and of Carson's own critical accompaniment of the pair is
presented as a matter of attention: "Attention is a task we share, you
and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for
this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep
each other from settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet
no conversation takes place" (Economy of the Unlost, viu). The
methodological announcement, ambivalently received in reviews of the
work, serves Carson's tentative definitions (and the book's less tentative
actions) of what criticism should be doing: keeping its object from
"settling".5 At stake, Carson announces, is the kind of contact criticism is
between the critic and the objects of her attention, and between those
objects as they meet and touch in the critical work. She writes of a fear
of insular and self-regarding subjectivity in criticism "Eine fensterlose
Monade. I do not want to be a windowless monad." yet in the space
Lukcs tells us is proper to aesthetic work (to poetry and not, we
imagine, to criticism in this case), Carson places her critical reading of
Celan and Simonides.6
At once abashed and luxuriant, Carson's confession invites us to believe
in her critical project as a deliberate and fully self-conscious form of
intimacy (both with and between Celan and Simonides), and suggests
this intimacy is not only a personal necessity but a matter of critical
quality of thought's "best moments". Carson's intimacy persuades at
the level of sound, symbol and rhythm as her readings of critical objects
momentarily take on their poetics, mimicking and extending their ways
of meaning.7 The same windowlessness (a form of intimacy and
enclosure critiqued inside Lukcs's materialism) is a proud feature of
Carson's readings of Simone Weil, the lyrist Sappho and the French

fourteenth-century mystic Marguerite Porete in "Decreation", an essay

whose leading concern is precisely this form of intimacy. Yet the essay,
Carson's most forceful theorization to date of "withness" and the
relationships of writing, inherits its strictures and arguments from
writers whose object of desire and interpretation is a divine one. 8
Carson's compendium of poetry, critical essays and opera libretti,
Decreation (of which "Decreation" is the title essay) is named after one
of Simone Weil's most conspicuous and least comprehensible terms,
"dcration". The closest we come to a definition of "dcration" in Weil
is:
[...] to make something created pass into the uncreated (faire passer du
cr dans l'incr). An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that
he may strip himself of it like Christ did of his real divinity. [...] We
participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves (Gravity
and Grace,32-33; La Pesanteur et la grace, 36).9
In the case of relationship to God, decreation asks for the undoing of the
subject because her presence to the object God is too substantial.
The problem of "too much self that Carson sets out in Economy of the
Unlost is one of Weil's constitutional concerns, a condition of Creation
(and creation) that can be reimbursed, as Weil has it. However, while in
Economy of the Unlost "too much self is a justification of the author's
methodology, in Decreation the problem of "too much self" is less an
indictment of Carson's own writing than a condition of writing per se.
Carson returns in Decreation to "withness" and, in doing so, returns the
problem to the theological strictures in which it is first planted in her
oeuvre: the "withness" of Word and God, and, more troublingly, the
intimacy between words, God and the writer (Economy of the Un-lost,
vu).10 The book's title essay, "Decreation: How Women like Sappho,
Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God", concerns itself with what
Carson calls the problem of "telling". This problem seems at first to be
strictly about praise: in Carson's first example, how can the lyric poet
Sappho praise Aphrodite without herself getting in the way of praise? In
Carson's second example, Marguerite Porete boasts the same
ambivalence to herself as the giver and obstructor of praise, and
consents to an ecstasy in which she separates from herself, permitting
her to be "with" God without the "with": "And so long as I was at ease
and I loved myself 'with' him I could not at all contain myself or have
calm.. loved myself so much along 'with' him that I could not answer
loyally", Carson quotes Porete, interpreting her "in bondage to

Marguerite rather than to God" (Decreation, 165-166).11 Love of the

divine object is obstructed by the natural self-love of subjectivity;
"withness" is a problem because it means two and not one, a subject
"with" an object. The scenario, Carson tells us, is also one of jealousy,
though not in any straightforward sense: each writer is jealous of that
presence that obstructs contact with the beloved object; in the cases of
Sappho, Porete and Weil, that presence is herself.
Carson's essay has four parts. The first three introduce the ecstasies of
Sappho, Porete and Weil, and the fourth unannounced from the
beginning considers the problems of writing and "telling" in the three
authors and elevates Carson's project to the same pitch. Writing, insofar
as it takes part in the "theology of love" Carson describes, is seen as a
point of radical tension with the ethics, desires and designs of that love
(Decreation,162). Writing is first announced as a problem in a strikingly
casuistic passage of Carson's essay:
Inasmuch as we are now entering upon the fourth part of a three-part
essay, we should brace ourselves for some inconsequentiality. I don't
feel the cause of this inconsequence is me. Rather it originates with the
three women we are studying and the cause of it is the fact that they
are writers. [...] How are we to square [their] dark ideas with the
brilliant as-sertiveness of the writerly project shared by all three of
them, the project of telling the world the truth about God, love and
reality? The answer is we can't. It's no accident that Marguerite Porete
calls her book a Mirror [The Mirror of Simple Souls]. To be a writer is to
construct a big, loud, shiny centre of self from which the writing is given
voice and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still
continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in
some important acts of subterfuge and contradiction (174).
"I don't feel the cause of this inconsequence is me" is an act of
subterfuge and contradiction all of its own. If inconsequence is a feature
of writing, Carson suggests, it is an inevitable one, yet the subterfuges
of Carson's argument are not perhaps so inevitable. Carson introduces
her presence by negating it, announcing the "big, loud, shiny centre of
self" in whose glass we see Carson herself reflected, then occluding it by
telling us that the inconsequence belongs to writing: the argument plays
the hand it describes as a de facto trick of description, while Carson's
own mirror trick exposes itself alongside those she points to, glinting
inside the writing of Weil, Porete and Sappho as each dodges her own
reflection in language.

Carson's turn in this dance of would-be self-withdrawal makes itself

visible in the essay's structure. Her readings of Sappho, Porete and Weil
are self-contained vignettes whose adjacency makes an argument: no
case is explicitly made for their relatedness; no critical rigour or
argumentative leads bind the three women together in the essay. As in
Economy of the Unlost, the argument is meant, we understand, to make
itself by virtue of the authors simply being together; the lines between
them (to quote another of Carson's methodological confessions, this
time preceding a set of poems) simply "draw themselves" (Carson,
Plain-water, 93). Self-withdrawal continues at the level of language. The
tone of the essay veers between understated, with a glaze of something
like objectivity, and conversational, nodding personably toward the "I" of
the critic. The strength and compulsion of Carson's "I", "me" and fantasy
interlocutor "you" drives the opening of the essay: "What if I were to
begin an essay on spiritual matters by citing a poem that will not at first
seem to you spiritual at all?" Invitations and remarks to this fantasy
interlocutor "we", "let's", "us", alongside confessions of limitation such
as "I don't want to give the impression I know what this verse is saying
or that I see where the poem is headed from here, I don't" suggest a
casualness of reading that is a designed exposure of casualness, nondomination and "decreation", not by eliminating the confessional "I" but
the sovereignty and implicit violence of its arguments.
While caught in precisely the problem it articulates, Carson's project of
intimacy in interpretation succeeds most clearly at the level of language.
As the section on Sappho comes to a close, Carson hones in on a logic
within Sappho and asks and answers her own questions inside its terms.
Inside the logic of "daring", taking its cue from the final broken lines of
Sappho's "Fragment 31" ("But all is to be dared, because even a person
of poverty"), Carson stretches the term to the outer edges of its
assumptions: "pan tolmaton: all is to be dared" [.] leads us back to
[Sappho's] ecstatic condition. For when an ecstatic is asked the
question, What is it that love dares the self to do? She will answer: Love
dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty" (Decreation,
162). A similar rhetorical intimacy is staged with Porete, as the figures
of her writing "jealousy", "divine pleasure without myself", "my sense
failed me", "being which is being" and "faint[ing] away" are knotted
into Carson's own leading figure, "jealousy is a dance in which everyone
moves". Carson is guided by the poetics of Porete: "And insofar as she
can annihilate all these her term she can resolve the three angles of
the dance of jealousy into a single nakedness and reduce her being from
three to two to one". She argues not by exposition but by extension of

poetic figures here, the intimacy of one language with another. The
politics of this kind of writing are finally difficult to gauge: its ecstasy is
the withdrawal of the author behind the vivid terms and logics of her
object something we might idealise by calling immanence or mystify
by calling "withness" but it is also the masking of a reading.
Carson makes the dilemma of the mystic the example par excellence of
the inherent and inherently problematic personality of writing, yet her
own gesture remains a problem. Marguerite Porete says: "For whoever
talks about God. must not doubt but must know without doubt. that he
has never felt the true kernel of divine Love which makes the soul
absolutely dazzled without being aware of it .and takes away absolutely
the practice of telling" (Decreation, 162). In writing about God, the
writer has to realize, Marguerite insists, that she is missing the point,
that her awareness of the object is dazzled by the figures and characters
of precisely that awareness, and not by the object: that the writer can
be dazzled by the sense of her own writing. An essay about the
forcefulness of subjectivity forces something through beneath its own
self-confession, something we might call its lingering desire for itself:
desire to say, to theorize, to collapse into the object it wishes to account
for. Contradiction and the negotiation of desire is certainly a key part of
the mystic's experience of writing about God, and one that Carson
inherits; yet in opening up questions of writing's place in the dilemma, it
serves the critic far more than it serves the mystic in this case, we'll
see, Simone Weil.
Turning to Weil, we see that while writing for Carson is so troublesome,
it is far less so for Weil: "In the operation of writing", Weil says, "the
hand which holds the pen and the body and soul attached to it are
things infinitely small in the order of nothingness" (Decreation, 174).
While Carson employs this quotation in an argument for the overimportance of the self in writing, Weil, we might say, accepts the lie of
writing because the liar the writer is herself of small importance. Yet
inside this acceptance is a second lie. The diminishing of the author is
also the diminishing of history, politics and subjectivity: both lies offer
us just as they offer Carson grounds for a confrontation of writing
and critical practice.

II
Weil's desire to know God beyond the subjective compound Weil-withGod takes its place in a lifelong negative theology theorized by Weil in

her private notebooks, her posthumously published lectures on

philosophy at a lyce in Le Puy, her lengthy correspondence with the
Catholic priest, Father Jean-Marie Perrin, and the handful of works
published in her lifetime. Carson quotes one of the most poignant
passages of Weil's notebooks on precisely this concern: "If only I knew
how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God
and the earth I tread, the sea I hear..." (Decreation, 168-169).12 Weil is
the "unwelcome third" ("le tiers importun") here: "placed between two
lovers", she "ought to go away so that they can really be together"
("avec deux fiancs et doit s'en aller afin qu'ils soient vraiment
ensemble", Gravity and Grace, 41). Her sensual apprehension of the
world ("the earth I tread, the sea I hear") senses the potential of a
union without herself. In Weil's ethics, self-withdrawal is a "tact[ful]"
gesture, and one of immense grace grace, Weil tells us that "fills
spaces, but cannot enter except where there is a void to receive it"
("comble, mais elle ne peut entrer que l o il y a un vide pour la
recevoir", La Pesanteur et la grace, 12). Culmination of the gesture of
self-withdrawal, "void" here means denuding oneself of the capacity to
imagine God, and for Weil this cull of imagination is crucial. 13 Relating to
God requires forms of subjectlessness and objectlessness, both of which
offer ways of thinking about critical reading.
Weil asks the reader of God precisely not to read Him: "Try to love
without imagining. To love the appearance in its nakedness and without
interpretation. What one loves then is truly God" ("Essayer d'aimer sans
imaginer. Aimer l'apparence nue et sans interprtation. Ce qu'on aime
alors est vraiment Dieu" (Gravity and Grace, 54; La Pesanteur et la
grce, 61). To love without imagining here is to love without desiring, for
to desire is to imagine the beloved and to seek an equivalent of his
image in a world where the beloved is not. Elsewhere in her notes, Weil
proposes the "extinction of desire (Buddhism) or detachment or
amor fati or desire for the absolute good these all amount to the
same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to
desire without any wishes. To detach our desire from all good things and
to wait" ("Dtacher notre dsir de tous les biens et attendre", Gravity
and Grace, 13; La Pesanteur et la grce, 15). Yet Weil''s case is not for
desirelessness but for objectless desire "to detach our desire", "to
desire in the void, to desire without any wishes". Her plea for objectlessness recalls what Sigmund Freud calls "evenly suspended attention",
desiring the analysand's content without wishing it to mean anything in
particular.14 "Wishes" here believe in and desire "finality of content", a
finality that is the very source of Weil's anxiety about desire: desire

makes the object something it is not; our tendencies to define, resolve

and fix the object of desire are more concerned with the satisfaction of
desire than with attention to its object.15
Weil takes the question of desire further still. The self-sensing quality of
desire that reads in the object the fulfillment of its own wish can even
create its own objects where originally there were none. This is of
course especially true in the case of an absent God, but its lessons invite
us to consider interpretation as relationship to something not entirely
present to the critic or to the language he uses to describe it; to
consider criticism as descriptions of a necessary estrangement from the
work. Weil warns us against interpreting the divine object for two
reasons: firstly, that to interpret (for Weil) is to interject deliberate
fantasy between oneself and one's object; and secondly, that this object
by default and by necessity, Weil will argue is absent. The
impoverishment of subjectivity and the absence of the object seem to be
conditional on each other for Weil: if we accept that God is absent to us,
we also accept the limitation on our subjectivity with regard to sensing
or interpreting Him; likewise, in accepting the limitation of subjectivity,
renouncing the "faux" or "falsity" of imagination, God's absence to the
world is a raw and vertiginous sensation. In Attente de Dieu (Waiting on
God,1950), she describes "a kind of horror [that] submerges the whole
soul. During this absence there is nothing to love" (66). The twin voids
of subject and object match each other in Weil's theology. The question
arising out of this double impoverishment is how the object is sensed,
and sensed as other than oneself, given the flattening out of subjectivity
and the uncertain status of the object as object. So vehemently against
its interpretation, Weil seems to be saying that the divine object must
not be known, an unknowability that takes the question of its survival to
a new level. We should then ask why this unknowable object comes to
be prized over knowledge of it at all, and how, then, to write about it.
One of Weil's more curious notes on the subject goes as follows:
Attention is what seizes hold of reality, so that the greater the attention
on the part of the mind, the greater the amount of real being in the
object (Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2, 527).
(Ce qui aisait la realit est l'attention, de sorte que plus la pense est
attentive, plus l'objet en est plein d'tre)16
Attention is what makes an object real, she suggests: attention makes
an object an object in the first place. Weil seems to say that real being
or "plein d' tre" (an alternative translation might be "fullness of being")

is constituted at least in part in the subject's act of attending, a

proposition that casts the object's autonomous being into doubt. Weil's
syntax may be misleading here it should be remembered that the
quotation comes from a collection of personal notes, not a finished work
but she seems to be saying not that attention enables us to see more
"real being" in the object, rather that attention causes the object's being
to be. Invoking relation to God, Weil says that attention turns our
awareness "onto that which cannot be conceived": attention gives us
access to the inconceivable, but it also, if we follow what she says about
"plein d'tre", allows us to conceive the inconceivable out of nothing
(Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 1, 179).
Weil's equation of knowledge and fantasy leaves us in a difficult position.
Her critique of divine knowledge suggests that a better way to sense the
difference between ourselves and our obj ects of desire is to know
nothing, to feel the force of nothing instead of fantasy.17 Relationship is
pushed to its limits in Weil because she asks us to feel nothing not
something as resistance. The dangers of this position in disciplines
other than theology are, I think, too clear to need stating. 18 Moreover it
is difficult to see how Weil's ethics of interpretation translates into a
critical ethics without falling into the trap of reading the "nothing"
(objectlessness) of Weil's relationship with God as a cue to subjectivity
to romp wherever it pleases because it encounters no limit, senses itself
in "tension" with nothing. Yet Weil's position demands at least a brief
reflection on what this "nothing" might mean for interpretation in the
humanities: the value, perhaps, of recognizing what is not grasped, not
resolved, not wanted, not yet even read, in the object of interpretation.
Weil returns to the question of this not-yet-object, this time focusing on
the desires surrounding it:
Descend to the source of desires to wrench the energy from its object. It
is there that desires are true insofar as they are energy. It is the object
that is false. But there is an unspeakable wrench in the soul at the
separation of a desire and its object.
If we descend into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we
desire.
(Descendre la source des dsirs pour arracher l'nergie son objet.
C'est l que les dsirs sont vrais en tant qu'nergie. C'est l'objet qui est
faux. Mais arrachement indicible dans l'me la sparation d'un dsir et
de son objet.

Si l'on descend en soi-mme, on trouve qu'on possde exactement ce

qu'on dsire19 (La Pesanteur et la grce, 25).
The object of desire is a fantasy, says Weil, and one we possess because
it comes from ourselves. For Weil, it is the energy of desire that in its
imageless truth inhabits the world, while (the image of) the object has
no existence outside our own imagination. It is not desire's energy that
is autoerotic but the object of desire. At first glance, her final sentence
betrays the sense it inherits from the previous and seems to translate
as: we already possess this (false) object so have no need of another
(genuine) one. Yet for Weil's theology, possessing this "false" object
means radical incompletion. Having and knowing the object renders it
automatically false, whereas the energy of desire for unknown quantities
of the object is what is real for Weil. Desire for what in the work of art or
literature remains estranged from the work of criticism, the very aspects
that provoke desire because they remain apart from and irreducible to
that desire, is the mode of critical subjectivity Weil's theology invites us
to consider. 20
The above are examples of how, for Weil, interpretation can turn nothing
into something and something into something else. The question that
brings Weil's theorizations more sharply into dialogue with Carson's
project as a critic, however, is how these theorizations are written: in
the texture and textuality of nothingness or the fullness, resolution and
desire of which Weil and Carson both speak. In a typical passage from
Weil's unedited notebooks, we see just how casuistic and enclosed Weil's
logic can be:
God created me as a non-being which has the appearance of existing, in
order that through love I should renounce this apparent existence and
be annihilated by the plenitude of being [...] The 'I' belongs to nonbeing. But I have not the right to know this. If I knew it, where would be
the renunciation? I shall never know it (First and Last Notebooks, 9697).
Judging by the syntax alone, Weil seems to be thinking on the spot,
improvising a dialectical logic. Yet as Sharon Cameron notes in a
discussion of Weil's "impersonality", the "I" in this same passage has
been deprived of its particularity; it is positional rather than substantive,
far from the unguided and self-referring subject of improvisation. In her
finished works, Weil's near-constant use of the pronoun "soi" (third
person indefinite: an English equivalent is "one") marks a clear rejection
of autobiography in favour of abstraction (Dargan, Simone Weil:

Thinking Poetically, 5). Alongside Weil's cold authorial "I" is the fate to
which she condemns it: an "I" deprived of the right to know that it is
not. Following these theorizations, we might ask whether Weil's writing
is a form of desire or possession or both, and to what extent, though
"the hand which holds the pen and the body and soul attached to it are
things infinitely small in the order of nothingness", the presence of
desire and/ or possession can be felt in the operations of Weil's writing.
Scholars tend to agree that Weil's writing is impersonal, and that this
impersonality is a form of decreation.21Joan Dargan speculates: "Perhaps
writing itself was for Weil a process of decreation the poetic
imagination employed in the service of an impulse toward the universal.
[...] it is exclusive rather than inclusive, insofar as the presence of the
speaker is concerned"(Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically, 5). This reading
gives Weil's philosophy the benefit of the doubt, lets it off the hook with
an argument for its internal coherence. Dargan suggests that although
Weil's writing excludes its speaker Weil herself it is impelled to
include on a universal level, to include all subjects (and by implication
none) by not distinguishing between subjects at all.
As a reader, however, Weil desires the particular the particularities of
history, of subjects and of the author. Writing in L'Enracinement (The
Need for Roots, 1949), she critiques the "so-called historical spirit [that]
does not pierce the paper to find flesh and blood; it consists in a
subordination of thought to the document" ("L'espirit dit historique ne
perce pas le papier pour trouver de la chair et du sang; il consiste en
une subordination de la pense au document", 283). 22 Another form of
sovereignty, "the document" is used here as a critique of the reader, the
"historical mind" who sees the text as a set of opaque facts, and as a
critique of the workings of ideology on the flesh and blood of history:
Weil instead asks us to "read between the lines to transport oneself
fully" (283-284). In this model the reader is in charge, and yet Weil's
desire for this "flesh and blood" of the writer or of the written alerts
us to a struggle inside the rigours of decreation. This struggle is
nowhere clearer than in the relationship between Weil's ethics and her
way of writing.
In a section of Gravity and Grace titled "Readings" by Thibon, Weil's
theory of reading is a vision of a universal right to interpret and be
interpreted particularly, the opposite of which is domination: "Every
being cries out silently to be read differently. We read, but also we are
read by others [...]. Forcing someone to read as we read him (slavery)"
(135). We might recall the way Carson's critical prose is guided by the

logic and the poetics of its objects, and both the casuistries and clear
successes of that gesture. Weil's theory of reading and the readability of
her own writing are inconsistent with one another in different way.
Arguing for Weil's commitment to "creative thought" and "the
discernment of the reader", Dargan is critical of the apparently unreader-friendly nature of Weil's prose: Weil's writing seems not allow in
its reading for the kinds of creative freedom it sets out in theory.
Dargan's problem with the Weil oeuvre is that the texts are
"uninhabitable and there is no room for argument [.] one assents or one
does not (Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically, 51)." In Weil's
unaccommodating style "it is impossible to stay in one's own terms"
(51). Her writing is so sure, so complete, that for all its sensitivity to
forms of domination, its demand for the undoing of the creature, Weil's
prose dominates its reader.
A more forceful and damning account of Weil's writing is the British
philosopher Gillian Rose's essay "Angry Angels: Simone Weil and
Emmanuel Levinas" (1993) in which she sets out Weil and Levinas's
critiques of the other's faith Christianity and Judaism (Judaism and
Modernity , 211-223). Reading Weil's notes on Israel in La Pesanteur et
la grce and her essay "Human Personality" (1943) alongside Levi-nas's
"Simone Weil Against the Bible" (1952), Rose explains that both
critiques propose something about the other faith that the critique itself
repeats: the "weak spot" shared by Levinas and Weil is the violence of
their critique of the violence of faith. For Rose, Weil misreads Judaism as
a faith of (and in) violence, projecting there her "confessional other";
Levinas's attack on Weil's Christianity projects a violence for which he
criticises her: both, argues Rose, "expose the intrinsic violence of the
sovereign individual towards herself, her others and towards God" (212)
Their accounts fail as ethics because both "claim [...] violently that
violence is cultivated elsewhere" (221).
Recalling Weil's own sensibilities, Rose proposes that "knowledge has
this structure of sovereign and solitary violence" (215). Yet placing this
Weilian understanding of knowledge and its discourses next to Weil's
own imperative not to know, we find ourselves at a loss: how might we
turn these lessons from Weil and her most erudite readers back onto the
question of critical interpretation without taking them where Carson
does in her essay on "Decreation" without turning the problem into
just another of thought's "best moments"? (Economy of the Unlost, vii).
For Rose, both Weil and Levinas are phenomenologists of this structure
of violence, of "the conflict of good and evil, of attention and force or of

substitution and possession" (Judaism and Modernity,219).23 Both

reproduce in their mode of address the violence they seek to expose in
the other, and yet:
Instead of confessing and configuring the paradox of authorship, each
accuses the other faith of not allowing for the ever-threatening
contamination of the Good by violence (212).
The "paradox of authorship" recalls the paradox or "problem of telling"
that Carson attends and succumbs to in "Decreation": that writing both
affirms and denies the author, and that her writing binds her to forms of
resolution and definition that can close down productive forms of tension
and meaning in the critical object.24The absence of what she calls a
"confession" in Weil is, for Rose, a clandestine form of violence; without
it, and without the "humour and irony" essential to such a confession,
the writer's careful and hermeneutically sensitive prose becomes a form
of domination. Recalling Lukcs's celebrated critique of description,
"Narrate or Describe?" (1936),25 Rose rebukes Weil's discourse for its
loftiness, its distance from "the world" and its failure to "suspend and
resume the ethical with its features of modern state and society"
(Judaism and Modernity,221).26 The abstraction and otherworldliness of
her ethics not only shuts down political or worldly dimensions but leaves
her highly conspicuous, unable to "pass unnoticed" in the text (222). 27
In "Our existence is made only out of [God's] waiting for our consent
not to exist" ("Notre existence n'est faite que de son attente, de notre
consentement ne pas exister" La Pesanteur et la grce, 36).28 Weil's
discourse is out of reach, the exclusiveness/ all-inclusiveness of the "soi"
or the universalising decree of the "notre" remain aloof to their own
fallibility. Weil's spirituality is, for her, "the representation of the law"
and her writing confirms it (Judaism and Modernity, 216).29 Whether
hers is an exposition or a domination of the dilemma of telling depends,
of course, on how we read Weil, on what we are able to do, finally,
inside the law of her writing.

III
How might Weil's writing be written about without replicating precisely
the tensions that produce this paradox of writing that preserves its
own cohort of violence while theorizing non-violence and nondomination? Rose has suggested that this "paradox of authorship" goes
unconfessed in Weil, and that confession of the acts and strictures of
writing might be a means of salvation from them. We saw in Carson's

"Decreation" that merely stating as fact what she calls the "subterfuge
and contradiction" of writing is not enough: that this form of naming
slips all too smoothly into the subterfuge it describes, without
interruption or to use another of Rose's terms "configuration" of its
basic paradoxes.
Following Carson's essay on "Decreation", her opera libretto of the same
name reprises the themes of the essay while taking these themes to
another level. At this level, Weil's questions about interpretation and
relationship are treated to a form of answer in the poetry of the libretto,
which works as an alternative critical response to the concerns of
Sappho, Porete and Weil. Like the essay, the three-part "Decreation"
libretto divides its attention between themes deriving from the three
authors. Moving between bathos and the high drama of a mystery play,
"Love's Forgery", based on the "jealous" scenario of Sappho's "Fragment
31", casts Hephaistos and Aphrodite (to whose cult of worship Sappho is
thought to have belonged) in a love triangle with Ares, the Greek god of
war; the second part, "Her Mirror of Simple Souls", stages the trial and
condemnation of Marguerite Porete by a chorus of papal inquisitors who
indict Porete in Latin and English; and the final part, "Fight Cherries",
dramatizes the final moments of Weil's life as a struggle with hunger
and desire, set out in dialogues between Weil and her parents.
Even as it stages the extremes of desire, religious ecstasy and death by
starvation, the opera is a work of supreme camp (titles of duets include
"Duet of the Sleeveless Sports Blouses avec Maman", "Parental
Interlude", "Aria of Last Cherries", to give an idea). Marguerite Porete
and Simone Weil, both of whom feature in the opera's dramatis
personae, deliver and distort tenets of their own work. In the
"Decreation" essay Marguerite Porete is quoted ("Jealous he is truly! He
shows it by his works which have stripped me of myself absolutely and
have placed me in divine pleasure without myself" (164), whereas in the
opera she is parodied:
M[arguerite Porete]: Jealous he is truly!
For he has parted me from myself
Absolutely
By a ravishing farness nearer than my own self!
[...]
M: Jealous he is truly!

For he has annihilated me

as myself
absolutely
and born me new as nothingness in no self!
(210-211)
Carson makes Marguerite Porete's points about the non-presence of God
in an unraveled and rebound version of her language. The effect
parodic or guided by the mystic's own poesis is the simultaneous
saying and unsaying of Porete's own discourse, a representation of the
hit and miss of critical response, and a movement in and out of the work
that tests and pushes the boundaries between criticism and its object.
The opera plays on a dialectic that belongs to critical reading: criticism
desires the work of art while manipulating and sampling that work to the
critic's advantage. Carson stages the desires and vanities of
interpretation in her experiments with original texts, accompanying
Porete, Sappho and Weil inside their own paradox of authorship the
paradox of their farness and nearness to the object of desire.
Carson works inside the paradox she defines for Weil in the "Decreation" essay: between desire for the object God and acceptance that
such an object is by nature astray. True to this paradox, the "Fight
Cherries" section of the libretto is reconstituted Weil ready for
consumption as Carson, pulling and teasing Weil's language into
parodies that confess themselves as somewhere between Weil and
Carson, between a resistant object and a response that gives form to it,
whatever subterfuge and contradiction that might involve. The libretto
tours the theoretical highlights of the Weil oeuvre: "Imagination which
fills up the void is essentially a liar"; "Grace can only enter where there
is void to receive it" and so on, in duets between Carson's characters
(226). Yet this saying is also the unsaying of Weil. Carson ties Weil's
terms in knots, undoes them, turns them through word games,
repetitions and rhetorical questions to the point of parody. Carson
quotes a short (fabricated) letter from Weil to her mother:
"Chre Maman I have bought two sleeveless sports / blouses Today a
street fight between Nazis and / Communists No I was not there! Please
send / me special post what I asked for last / letter (the Hegel) Kisses".
She proceeds to mix up the words until the coherence of the letter is
lost, but other, dormant forms of sense emerge: "Chre Maman I was
special there I / bought less Hegel Please Today have / Nazis send

blouses between sports / I asked what Communists kissed / me for (two

fight sleeves) / No not last posti".
By the end of the sequence, Carson's burlesque Weil announces to her
mother: "No special Maman sport to the last / fight two less / kiss
sleeves Today! / cher Hegel [...] I create myself by work. / Or else I
panic / that is to say, / chre Maman out of my way!" (233) Carson's
parodies and misquotations romp inside the law of Weil's rigid decrees,
testing that law, it seems, but also searching for something more
essentially Weilian (or Carsonian) in its destruction.
Yet the point of this pastiche is perhaps more complex. Carson tells us in
the prologue to "Fight Cherries" that Weil's letters home "are repetitions
of the one same glowingly factitious postcard that every good daughter
sends home": the mixing up and reconstitution of the letters represents
a very particular act of evasion and a very particular absence ofthe
object (Weil, Carson, Decreation, 223). In the context of Carson's
discourse on telling, the manipulation of this fictitious text and a
variety of other near-quotations in the final part speaks back to her
"De-creation" essay as a response to its central problem: how the
manifold attractions of writing can outdo the object of the writer's
attentions, a problem that becomes acute in the case of God for whom
the writing is up to a certain point a substitute. 30 In the opera, the
dialectic of two writings (Weil's and Carson's) is exposed by their
closeness and by parody of the source text, yet the absurdity of
Carson's burlesque interventions, the uses to which she puts Weil,
disband her own authority as a writer and throw the status of the twin
"Decreation" texts entirely askew. As the libretto uses and "comments"
on the material of the essay, the two texts unsettle each other and
disorient any reader who hopes to come away with a meaningful sense
of what criticism and literary work are doing there, and how separable
the two finally are.
Here, Carson is in fundamentally Weilian territory. Unlike the tensions,
ironies and confessions of Carson's, Weil's writing does not turn the
problem of her object's absence into its own feature. Yet the paradox of
authorship that makes the writer by default too present and too absent
is at the centre of her theology. For Weil, the "I" is at once nothing and
just too substantial, irrelevant and an obstruction to the object of her
attention. For Carson, this theology inspires a critical practice with wide
implications for criticism and interpretation: a critical practice that
confesses and plays with its own role in reading, and a critical reader

who senses, engages and believes in what evades her in the work, what
resists before the interpretation is cast.

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Decreacin. Poesa, ensayos, pera.

Anne Carson
Edicin bilinge
Traduccin de Jeannette L. Clariond
Vaso Roto
ISBN: 978-84-15168-43-0
359 pginas
Madrid, 2014
En La escuela de Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom repasa la poesa
norteamericana contempornea. Incluye poemas de los autores representados y
un breve ensayo sobre estos. El tono es todo lo objetivo y cientfico que permite el
anlisis de un objeto an vivo o reciente, por eso me sorprendi encontrar al
crtico rendido con Anne Carson:
como soy veinte aos mayor que ella, me entristece pensar que me ir de este
mundo sin llevarme conmigo la obra de toda una vida de esta singular poeta.
En Espaa ya se haban publicado dos libros suyos, que tendran que bastar para
centrar las miradas de los conocedores de la poesa y del pensamiento. La
belleza del marido (Lumen, 2003), traducido por Ana Becciu, es un tratado de las
emociones y las relaciones humanas en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, que va de
lo particular a lo universal, contando la ruptura de un matrimonio que naci roto.
En Decreacin hay un poema que trata de esto:
As
que
empezamos.
Yo no la conoca ella
no me conoca.
No se supone que es eso el matrimonio?
Recuerdo las rosas y los cisnes
y cmo nosotros

ms bien con torpeza

nos unimos
y luego nos separamos.
Yo le dara a eso un 6 sobre 10 dijo
mi
esposa
Afrodita
la
de corazn tierno.
Supongo que exagero
cuando digo
empezamos.
Hombres en sus horas libres (Pre-textos, 2007), traducido por Jordi Doce, es
uno de esos libros que no he podido soltar desde que cay en mis manos. Una
ventana viva abierta a la historia, no solo de la literatura: una mirada al tiempo, al
pasado, presente y futuro de nuestra civilizacin a travs de hechos que han
marcado a la autora y sus relaciones con sus seres ms cercanos. Aqu es ya
difcil determinar el gnero de los textos. Ensayos y narraciones, versos o prosas:
poesa. Habra que reconsiderar los gneros tradicionales.
Siete aos despus, un nuevo libro de Anne Carson. Se trata de este Decreacin.
Poesa, ensayos, pera. Hay poesa, ensayos y un libreto de pera con algunos
de los mejores poemas del libro, Est editado por Vaso Roto y traducido por
Jeannette L. Clariond. Los textos en verso estn tambin en ingls. Todo est
relacionado, claro. La traductora es tambin la responsable de la existencia del
libro de Bloom, La escuela de Wallace Stevens, adems de su traductora.
Clariond escribe:
Traducir a Anne Carson es siempre una delicia, un goce cuyo punto final se
desconoce.
Dira ms: no hay punto final, no al menos en la traduccin, sino en cada una de
las lecturas de las que se desprende ese goce compartido, que hace que el lector
se sienta algo ms que espectador de lo que le sucede al sujeto, convirtindose
en sujeto mismo del texto. Cada traduccin es reflejo del original y obra nueva. En
poesa, este axioma se multiplica. No es fcil traducir a Carson, poeta y filloga.
Mantener el carcter polismico y evocador de cada texto y buscar el sentido
preciso de cada reflexin es un esfuerzo reseable de la traductora que en
contadas ocasiones ha recurrido a la nota al pie de pgina. La intertextualidad
omnipresente en toda la obra de Carson se multiplica aqu. Desde fragmentos de
Safo, hasta referencias del siglo XX, estn dispersas por el libro. En la nota
biogrfica leemos:
Anne Carson / Naci en Canad y se gana la vida enseando griego antiguo.

Una nota escueta pero significativa. Sorprende su inters por quedarse al margen.
No hay pistas para entregarnos a la lectura de los textos que, en su mayor parte,
se refieren a sujetos diferentes de ella misma. Bloom citaba estas palabras de la
autora:
Hay demasiado de m en mi escritura.
Para preguntarse a continuacin:
No s qu hacer con esto. Es posible imaginar a Emily Bront, Emily Dickinson y
a Gertrude Stein diciendo: Hay demasiado de m en mi escritura?
Las referencias no son gratuitas. Bloom la sita a la altura de ellas. Carson quiere
mantenerse al margen de sus libros que, sin embargo, no son sino fragmentos de
ella misma. Pero ese deseo es imposible y contradictorio. La belleza del marido
es el ejemplo ms claro. Cuenta su vida sus razones- y lo cuenta todo. Hombres
en sus horas libres es semejante. Cada uno de estos libros es ella misma.
Decreacin da respuesta a estas dudas citando a Simone Weil:
En la operacin de escribir, la mano que sostiene la pluma y el cuerpo y el alma
unidos a ella son cosas infinitamente pequeas en el orden de la nada.
Qu es la decreacin? El concepto es acuado por Simone Weil en su ltima
etapa.
Participamos en la creacin del mundo decrendonos a nosotros mismos.
La aparente paradoja es coherente con lo que sabemos de ella. Al final de su vida
decide desaparecer. Y lo hace como mejor sabe: escribiendo. Una parte de su
obra es pstuma. Pretenda incluso que pasara a ser publicada como obra de otro.
Eligi el destino que durante siglos tuvo la obra de muchas mujeres: ser publicada
bajo un nombre masculino. En algunos poemas de La belleza del marido, leemos
que era habitual que Carson encontrara textos suyos como si fueran de su marido.
En su intento de desaparecer, Weil fue ms all. Eludi la vida permaneciendo en
Estados Unidos o Inglaterra durante la guerra y fue a Francia en condiciones
pauprrimas. De hecho, decidi dejar de amar y de comer, las dos actividades que
consideraba opuestas a su decisin de no ser. Por qu seguir escribiendo
entonces? Para ir sacando fuera de s lo que permaneca en su alma.
En el ensayo que da ttulo al libro aparecen otras dos mujeres: Safo y Marguerite
Porete, que hicieron acciones semejantes, con el mismo fin: desaparecer. Safo es,
en lo posible, conocida. Carson la conoce bien, ha traducido sus poemas al ingls.
Porete es francesa y muri en la hoguera, en 1310, tras un proceso inquisitorial
por haber escrito El espejo de las almas simples. Es un libro en el que tambin
aboga por renunciar a todo lo real para dejar su sitio a Dios. Todo lo que nos
cuenta Carson de ellas es apasionante. Pero por qu escoge a estas mujeres y
no a otras? Por qu no las ya citadas, Emily Bront y Emily Dickinson, que
tambin eligieron desaparecer? De ellas ya escribi en otros libros, pero tambin

lo haba hecho sobre Safo, a la que incluye. La clave que encuentro, la

reivindicacin del sexo, est en estos versos de La belleza del marido:
Leal a nada
mi marido. Entonces, por qu lo am desde mi juventud hasta la madurez
y la sentencia de divorcio lleg por correo?
La belleza. No es ningn secreto. No me avergenza decir que lo am por su
belleza.
Como volvera a amarlo
si lo tuviera cerca. La belleza convence. Sabes que la belleza hace posible el
sexo.
La belleza hace el sexo sexo.
T mejor que nadie entiendes esto calla, pasemos
al orden natural.
La cita que inicia el libro es reveladora sobre la estructura de este:
Amo esa suerte de andar potico, a saltos y a brincos.
A saltos y a brincos, pero manteniendo la unidad. Navegando entre sueos. El
primer poema se titula Cadena de sueos. La primera parte del libro, Paradas,
es una serie de poemas en los que aparece su madre, mayor y enferma. A veces,
regresiones al pasado que evocan momentos de la infancia; a veces, se vislumbra
el futuro y la muerte. Siempre momentos concretos que evocan una comunicacin
difcil. El enigma de los sueos es si forman parte del sujeto o si son ajenos a l.
Pero hay algo ms: lo que queda del sueo.no es lo que realmente soamos, es el
error. Recuerdo cuando Ada Salas escribe sobre un poema de Hombres en sus
horas libres. La idea de Salas, y de Carson, es que el error es el origen de la
metfora, del extraamiento. En el poema Oda al sueo, de Decreacin, Carson
evoca el poema de Elizabeth Bishop El hombre polilla (The Man-Moth):
De hecho, confiesa en una nota al pie de pgina, fue
un error de impresin por mamut.
Me duele saberlo.
Orificio de salida, dicen.
Mammoth por Man-Moth. No siempre el error es involuntario; sino inducido,
conduce al lector a ese suelo que nunca haba pisado o que le result inquietante,
porque lo percibe como diferente en un universo plano. Esto es lo Sublime, de, lo
que trata la segunda parte del libro: Espuma. Textos sobre cmo conciben lo
Sublime varios autores, que se reflejan en la tercera parte: Sublimes, una serie
de poemas que alcanzan un primer clmax del libro y recuerdan a los de Hombres
en sus horas libres. Aqu el error se produce con el anacronismo. Pregunta de
Kant sobre Monica Vitti es un ejemplo. Si pensamos en lo Sublime, se nos viene a
la cabeza Kant. Ya encontramos rfagas de decreacin y de la importancia del
sexo:

Mi poesa personal es un fracaso.

No quiero ser una persona.
Quiero ser insoportable.
De amante en amante, el verdor del amor.
Fresco, refrescante.
La tierra no engendra una planta semejante.
Quin no termina siendo
una impostora?
Bebe todo el sexo que hay.
Aun as, muere.
Tras estos versos hay una persona y una referencia. La persona: Anne Carson; la
referencia: Safo. El libro avanza a saltos y a brincos. Cada poema es una ola que
avanza y retrocede, pero no se pierde. Todo converge en un punto: la decreacin.
El siguiente paso es el conocimiento, los seis poemas de Gnosticismos son
momentos clave de su vida, sueos, fracasos y encuentros. El sueo es el impulso
que despierta la mente que crea no slo poesa, sino vida:
So
con una pgina de un libro que contena la palabra pjaro y
anot pjaro.
El pjaro brega,
Algunos de los mejores poemas estn incluidos en obras amplias, poco habituales
en nuestra poesa actual. Muchas armas. (Un oratorio para cinco voces) es un
ejemplo. Prosa potica, fragmentos arrojadizos, armas contra las armas. El arma
ms destructiva de la Historia ha sido la palabra. Quien tiene la palabra, tiene el
poder. Otro de esos textos es El guin de E y A, un dilogo entre Elosa y
Abelardo. Para Elosa, Abelardo es Dios y le lleva a romper todas las normas de
su tiempo: las humanas y las divinas. Hay algo de La belleza del marido en este
texto. Tambin ese concepto, la decreacin. Elosa sabe que se autoaniquila con
cada paso que da. Abelardo es la palabra, es el poder. Es consciente Elosa de
ello? No lo termina de entender ni confa en l, pero se entrega plenamente. l le
pide: Quiero que seas nada. Hay un momento en que ella le dice: Siempre
ganas, Abelardo; no es Dios quien gana, sino t.
En la escena 10 (de 11) llega el dilogo final, hay un momento en que l le dice:
Una persona tiene que aprender a caminar hacia atrs todo el tiempo.
Caminar hacia atrs es ir hacia la muerte como si uno no hubiera existido y as,
llegamos al clmax del libro: Decreacin: De cmo dicen Dios mujeres como Safo,
Marguerite Porete y Simone Weil. Ya he escrito sobre esto. Pero hay algunas
trampas. No es un subttulo correcto. No es el modo de decir Dios, sino de
alcanzar la plenitud. S, en algn caso Dios da esa plenitud, pero est el
contrapeso de Elosa o Safo o Carson. Ms trampas: leemos que el texto tiene

tres partes, una para cada una de las mujeres, pero hay una cuarta, una reflexin
sobre la plenitud y la escritura. Las tres historias son parte de la misma autora que
es la protagonista real del libro. Dira que este libro es la decreacin segn Anne
Carson. Hay demasiado de m en mi escritura. No es falsa modestia. Tras los
ensayos, est el libreto de una pera, con textos, poemas brillantes, que estn en
boca de las tres mujeres citadas, pero todo lo que dicen es parte del pensamiento
y de la experiencia de la autora. Otra cosa es impensable. Anne Carson no puede
quedar al margen de sus poemas. Y s, hay demasiado de ella misma en sus
poemas, por eso nos interesa tanto.
(Publicado en el nmero 61 de El Cuaderno)