Anne Carson

Anne Carson
The Glass Essayist

ELIZABETH SARAH COLES

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coles, Elizabeth Sarah, 1983– author.
Title: Anne Carson : the glass essayist / Elizabeth Sarah Coles.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023014225 (print) | LCCN 2023014226 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197680919 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197680926 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Carson, Anne, 1950—Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PS 3553 . A 7667 Z 66 2023 (print) | LCC PS 3553 . A 7667 (ebook) |
DDC 811/.54—dc23/eng/20230417
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014225
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023014226

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.001.0001

Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

For Amador & Amador Lucian
 Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
A Note on the Text  xi

Introduction  1

PA RT I . VA R IAT IO N S I N C R I T IC I SM

1. The Eros Variations  31

2. Criticism and the Gift: (Carson with Celan)  61

PA RT I I . G L A S S E S S AYS

3. On Not Being Emily Brontë  85

4. Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay”  100

PA RT I I I . SP E C U L AT I V E F O R M

5. Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance  125

6. Fake Women  146

PA RT I V. O P E N T R A N SL AT IO N

7. Grief Lessons: (Two Stories of Translation)  175

8. Sappho in the Open  202

Postscript: Short-​Talking  224

Notes  235
Bibliography  299
Index  319
 Acknowledgments

The story of this book condenses in my mind to a sequence of four or five frames.
I would like to name and thank the people whose presence, warmth, wisdom, or
example endures in and between them; those whose encouragement has kept
them moving; and those without whom there would be no book, and my own
story would tell quite differently.
I started writing about Carson more than a decade ago, and wouldn’t have
produced anything like this book without the support of Jacqueline Rose, to
whom I owe a pressing debt of gratitude. Jacqueline remains a model of intel-
lectual courage and charisma I never hoped to equal, but the influence of her
thinking leaves its mark throughout these pages. Her belief that I could write the
book has made its writing possible.
Others at Queen Mary, University of London, and at the Psychoanalysis,
History, and Political Life Forum, which Jacqueline co-​founded and which I later
co-​ran at the School of Advanced Study in Russell Square, I have been lucky
enough to call my colleagues and friends. The generosity and kindness of Shaul
Bar-​Haim, Shahidha Bari, Katie Fleming, Peter Howarth, Cora Kaplan, Daniel
Pick, Bill Schwarz, and Helen Tyson gave me ground to stand on. Peter in partic-
ular has supported this book’s evolution in very tangible ways, reading early draft
material and encouraging me to keep going when I was almost ready to bow out.
He put me in touch with two individuals to whom I’d also like to express my grat-
itude: David James, who pointed out the project’s virtues and shortcomings, and
suggested Oxford University Press as a potential home; and Reena Sastri, whose
friendship and correspondence with me on all things Carson has been a source
of insight and companionship. My thanks to two women, Beverley Clack and
Lisa Ruddick, for words of encouragement not forgotten.
Earlier still, before I’d ever read Carson or knew who she was; reading Virginia
Woolf ’s spring-​loaded prose and sublimely defensive “happening” words: I owe
a debt of gratitude to my teachers, mentors, and friends at St. Catharine’s College,
Newnham College, and the Faculty of English at Cambridge. To Elizabeth
Andrew, Colin Burrow, Alexander Dougherty, Caroline Gonda, Christos
Hadjiyiannis, Paul Hartle, Alison Hennegan, Mary Jacobus, David Nowell-​
Smith, and Dan Wakelin. To Marina Voikhanskaya, for her humor and intelli-
gence. To Yulia Yamineva, whose friendship is one of my greatest treasures. It’s
my pleasure to thank Loveday Why for sending me a copy of Decreation to review
x Acknowledgments

back in 2006, and Simon Jarvis for introducing his MPhil students to Economy of
the Unlost the same year.
Several fellowships and prizes have made it possible for me to read and write
for a living, and, almost two years ago, to return to full-​time academic work.
I would like to acknowledge the Isaac Newton Trust, University of Cambridge;
the Wood-​Whistler Medal and Scholarship, Newnham College, Cambridge;
the Arts and Humanities Research Council; la Coordinación de Humanidades,
UNAM; the Haas Library at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Javier and
Marta Villavecchia Fellowship; and, last but not least, the European Commission
Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, whose Marie Skłodoswka-​Curie
Actions fellowship has enabled me to write a significant portion of this book.
Especial thanks to Sonia Arribas for her support and encouragement during a
time of seismic change in my life, and to Miquel Bassols, Neus Carbonell, Antoni
Esquerra, Rosa Sellarès, and Mariona de Torres per la seva complicitat.
I would like to thank my generous and gifted editors at OUP, Hannah Doyle
and Brent Matheny, and the two anonymous readers who reviewed this manu-
script and gave me the courage to revise it. My wholehearted thanks also go to the
individuals and publishers who gave their permission to reproduce poems, prose
excerpts, and images without which this book would be much the poorer: to
Anne Carson, her agent, Nicole Aragi, and Brenda Leifso at Brick Books for per-
mission to reproduce three of the glorious “Short Talks”; to Little Brown Book
Group LLC and Penguin Random House for the use of two fragments of Sappho
in Carson’s translation, and to Penguin Random House for permission to repro-
duce a selection of material from Float; to Routledge and Rosemarie Waldrop for
an excerpt from her translation of Paul Celan’s correspondence, and to Suzanna
Tamminen at Wesleyan University Press for permission to reproduce a prose
poem from John Cage’s late “Composition in Retrospect.” To the Estate of Betty
Goodwin and to Gaétan Charbonneau for his kindness in providing me with
a digital reproduction of Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988), and to Terence
Byrnes, for generously allowing me to use his portrait of Carson on the cover of
this book.
My last and dearest thanks are to my son, Amador Lucian, whose arrival in
late 2020 lit the last stages of an early draft; and to his father, Amador, for living
with me, thinking with me, and for his courage. Love is untrammeled freedom.
This book is dedicated to them.
 A Note on the Text

I use no abbreviations or acronyms for the short titles of Carson’s published

works, so Eros the Bittersweet, not Eros or EB. The spellings I use for Greek words
in Latin script are Carson’s, so Kreon, not Creon. All translations from the Greek
and Latin are Carson’s unless otherwise stated. Greek words appear in Latin
script throughout, except where Carson does not transliterate, so “If not, winter”
/​δ]ὲ μή, χείμων[.
 Introduction

Anne Carson studies a canvas by the American-​born painter, Cy Twombly, on

which the name “CATULLUS” is scrawled with a trained insouciance. Twombly’s
all-​caps Latin is “gauche,” Carson recalls from Roland Barthes’s famous reading.1
His “graffiti”—​“VIRGIL,” “LEDA,” “CASSANDRA”—​claims the canvas surface,
not in the name of these paramours, but of the here-​and-​now of their coming to
mind.2 What Twombly’s declarations perform, and what captures Carson’s at-
tention, is a “visible action” of line that “scratches out from idleness,” in Barthes’s
words, “as if it were a matter of making time itself visible.”3 The time that shows
up in Twombly is a present tense exposed, almost embarrassed, by the strength of
its claim: that nothing—​no Catullus—​exists beyond its impressions. “Everything
lives in the present,” Carson quotes Twombly: “it’s the only time it can live.”4
A similar claim might be made in the name of Carson (b. 1950), the poet, clas-
sicist, translator, and performer known, in the very simplest terms, for making
the ancient “live in the present.” In more intrepid terms—​those of the British
painter and video artist, Tacita Dean—​for “ripping” the classics “out of the past,
shocking them back to life as if with electrical voltage, bringing the monsters
of Greek myth to walk among us, slouch, punch, kiss, go back to bed, kill.”5
Twombly’s claim goes further—​but then so does Carson, whose work has made a
discipline of foiling expectations, categories, and constraints. The ancients share
their now-​time in Carson with whatever happens to be lying beside them on
her desk: with “whatever I bump into” in a library or etymological dictionary,
in Hegel, in Woolf, in Brecht’s FBI file, or the annals of her own intimate his-
tory.6 This is Carson’s “everything” and it matches Twombly’s in its performance
of philia and affinities, and its exposure of an active working present. “All time is
now,” says Carson in conversation with Dean. Anachronism? “There’s no such
thing.”7
In the prismatic present tense that Anne Carson’s readers now take for
granted, Paul Celan’s lines sharpen those of Simonides of Keos (and vice versa),
with each poet “placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus.”8
Immanuel Kant and Monica Vitti, or Euripides’s Helen and Hollywood’s Marilyn,
speak to—​or speak for—​one another, “and yet no conversation takes place.”9
Augustine, from whom Carson and Twombly draw their philosophy of time,
“wanders across the back” of Edward Hopper’s sultry interiors and the result is
“Hopper: Confessions,” ten short verse mise-​en-​scènes shot, as it were, at Carson’s

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0001
2 Introduction

worktable. These wild-​card comparative readings, whose studied errancy is al-

most unanimously acclaimed, are where her project turns out to be easiest to
come to grips with.10 How exactly that project is performed (per formam) is an-
other matter. For just as there’s “no such thing” as anachronism, so for Carson
there’s “no such thing” as form and genre beyond the needs and conditions
thrown up by her source texts and collaborators. These makeshift constraints
are made-​to-​measure, and recognizable forms are broken or repurposed to
meet their demands. (Harold Bloom, a known admirer of Carson, described
“the breaking of form” as the condition for its revelation as “a place of inven-
tion”.)11 When Carson does invoke formal categories, which is often, it is as a set
of terms—​“talk,” “lecture,” “essay,” “fictional essay”—​that stage their greater or
lesser misalignment with the forms on the page, a greater or lesser indistinction
between source text and commentary, commentary and adaptation, litera-
ture and criticism. Descriptors that seem to hold for one work evaporate like a
mirage facing another. Terms and categories, in or out of her outré nomencla-
ture, question as much as they affirm. This irrepressible staging of invention is
a problem for some readers. The formal and thematic cabaret of Men in the Off
Hours (2000) for one reviewer “begs the question: what now? What lands left to
conquer?”12 There is surely “a limit,” sighs a more skeptical reader of Float (2016),
“to pretending there’s no limit.”13
We would be right to wonder what a writer who “takes risks, subverts lit-
erary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations” or who “takes risks,
gambles with exposure” can hope to expose once her risk-​taking has become
de rigueur; or how a programmatic irreverence can sustain its own promise of
danger.14 Yet to understand Carson’s project as experiment for experiment’s sake,
its rationale the shock of the new, is, I suggest, to miss the point. In the poet-​
critic Charles Bernstein’s much-​cited declaration that “poetry is aversion of con-
formity in the pursuit of new forms,” it is a pun that tells us how aversion is itself
a version of conformity: that to be averse—​or to “subvert literary convention”—​is
a form of passionate attachment to the refused antecedent, where “new forms”
are bound to sound out the old.15 Anne Carson is a writer who not only has no
problem with such attachment to literary history, but who actively cultivates and
seeks it out. A classicist by training, many of her best-​known works derive explic-
itly from the literatures of antiquity: her versions of the Antigone (2012, 2015),
her triple-​author Oresteia (2009), and her single-​author devotion to Euripides,
the essay-​elegy Nox (2010), and verse-​novel Autobiography of Red (1998), or
the spare lyricism of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002). Beyond her
translations and adaptations, go in search of novelty in Carson and you will al-
most always find highly original ways of being derivative: reproducing, riffing
on, or otherwise preserving what she calls the “facts” of “the texts I deal with.”16
Carson’s handling of her source texts rarely coincides with what we have come to
 Introduction 3

expect from scholars. Yet this book makes the case for Carson’s writing as an ex-
traordinary experimental mode of scholarship, a project that rehearses scholarly
methods while slipping their strictures of form and emotion. What transcends
formal categories in her work, and what frees us from their bind as we read her,
is Carson’s unresting attention to the work of others, set to form in a decades-​
long reckoning with the tasks, modes, and moods of the scholar and close reader.
And Carson, it is argued here, is one of the most creative and exacting readers
writing now.
Understanding her work as primarily responsive, her experiments in compo-
sition as lessons in interpretive attention and textuality, invites us to read Carson
more or less as she reads herself. Which is to say—​though taking Carson at her
word is a complex business—​that it allows us to see her many modes of written
creation and, more recently, live performance, as part of a single continuous
inquiry sustaining no working distinction between the academic and the non-​
academic. So Carson tells Kevin McNeilly, who puts it to her in an interview that
“some would say the academy is not the place for poetry, that it thrives outside
its interpretation”: “I practically don’t separate them,” says Carson; “I put schol-
arly 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.”17 Her mode of exchange
between these inseparables has clearly paid off. The Beauty of the Husband: A
Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), an essay in verse whose inquiry into truth
begins with its own unblushing formal anomaly, won Carson the T. S. Eliot Prize
in the year of its publication.18 The imperatively titled “Possessive Used as Drink
(Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets,” staged in collaboration
with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, joins a long list of experimental
lectures and opera libretti performed across and beyond North America, where
the bestselling Autobiography of Red earned Carson an early cult following.19
Arguing for a project or vision behind what can seem a scattershot relation-
ship to form and genre is something existing scholarship on Carson, which now
includes two multi-​author collections of essays, has neither sought nor been able
to do.20 Yet to affirm Carson the reader, indivisible from Carson the writer, is
only the beginning of the story.
Beyond her sheer breadth of range, something that complicates any critical
approach to Carson—​and this book is no exception—​is how much and how
shrewdly Carson reads herself. From mock-​scholarly prefaces and “Notes on
Method,” to lectures that compare their “perilous” composition to involuntary
discomposures of the mind, Carson builds self-​reading into her writing, telling
us what she’s doing and performing it in one or several iterations, anticipating
qualms, and theorizing her (and our) emotions as she goes. So exposed is this
apparatus of commentary that in several works the performance of method and
4 Introduction

working emotion becomes the focus and foreground, not just the backstory, of
her reading of a source text. Even where these exposures of thought saturate
or subsume their sources, producing a an autofictional approach to John Keats
in The Beauty of the Husband, a tendentious, citation-​rich glossary of Catullus
101 in Nox, or the translation-​commentary of Euripides’s Herakles titled H of H
Playbook (2021)—​recently dubbed a “performance of thought”—​, they do not
compel our assent or agreement. What they do is splay out a reading in which the
facts of a source text move among and exchange valency with other facts, textual
or (auto)biographical: from the life of Carson’s late, long-​estranged brother, or
her “story of a marriage” and the wider philosophical inquiry to which its break-
down gives rise in The Beauty of the Husband. The zoom-​in on Carson in these
texts, the fact that it is so clearly Carson who is speaking, puts in shot an errant
reflective throughline—​a person—​whose effect as a reader addressing herself
to readers is (to tilt Neil Hertz’s phrase) the pathos of certain agency.21 Carson’s
readings move us, in part, because they address us in situ, as though the thinking
is still happening, caught up at the scene of composition. Whatever her prefatory
notes, drafts, and interpolated commentary represent—​too much self, too much
scholarship, or “sleight of hand,” the choice is ours—​a reader, agile, spontaneous,
and self-​examining, is exposed to view.22
The trace of Carson the scholar and teacher is unmistakable across her
experiments in form, including—​ and perhaps especially—​ in readings that
square even less with what we might expect from, say, an essay or a translation.
In another much-​quoted interview, Carson describes poems as “an action of the
mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that
action . . . [you] feel when you’re in it that you’re moving with somebody else’s
mind through [the] action.”23 It is an idea of mimesis as a “captured,” capturing
performance that recurs across her work, from early scholarly essays that read
for and begin to reprise the “sensible forms” of prosody, to the recent “interactive
lectures” that revive the micro-​essays of Short Talks (1992) as thirteen-​second
vocal happenings.24 Carson takes this deceptively simple idea to great lengths.
A performative, iconic quality observed in the syntax of Simonides (“mimesis
in its most radical mechanism”) or in Sappho (“lyric mimesis,” in an early essay
on Aristotle’s Poetics) is made available in Carson’s own compositions as a strong
mode of response to other writing, recruiting structure, citational poetics,
meter, and mise-​en-​page in the performance of a style of thought or argument,
sometimes—​as in The Albertine Workout (2014), the Denkbild-​styled Short Talks,
or her lecture in sonnet form—​in lieu of an argument explicitly being made. In
an early conversation with John D’Agata, Carson called this mimetic shorthand a
“painting notion,” “painting with thoughts and facts,” designed to preserve “just
the facts” with no story to put them into order.25 She speaks often of her schol-
arly training and invokes its moods, methods, and apparatus across much of her
 Introduction 5

work. Yet Carson pushes against the descriptive and expository métier of schol-
arship in pursuit of documentation, formal immediacy, variation, unexpected-
ness, and emotive effect—​and the effect is often captivating.
The recruitment of “non-​ academic” form for scholarship and scholarly
paratext for narrative or verse work—​Carson, we have seen, has no truck with
these distinctions—​has strong consequences for us as readers, and this book
is interested in how, even perhaps why, these consequences are afforded. From
the book’s opening chapter, which reads her dazzling essay Eros the Bittersweet
(1986) alongside several later works reprising its questions, we will see form
take a decisive role in the way argument happens and the way source texts are
presented. Though some of these works appear to have been composed to free
the play of Carson’s material, opening thought to unforeseen destinies, the struc-
ture or syntactic pattern of others is not only compelling, ostentatious as form,
but compels: reprising an action of mind or an action of text in her source, these
performative forms would have us go through the motions again ourselves, per-
haps without even realizing it (the reader, Carson says, “has to enter into that
action”).26 Performative form, a “strong form” in Bloom’s terms, works against
what Carson calls “the boredom of a story” and against the ennui and expository
force of academic essays; but the breaking of scholarly form doesn’t always mean
greater freedom—​our freedom—​to think and feel. Form carries the weight of
expectation at the crossing of critical scholarship, literature, and translation. The
variety of arrangements produced in their exchange—​from structural imitations
of sources to variable structures of reading—​matters for each of these disciplines,
whose undisciplining by Carson is also an inquiry into how she (and how her
reader) reads.
Just as Carson’s form is complex in its relation to the conventions of schol-
arly writing, so her commentary and exposures of method, I have begun to sug-
gest, offer something trickier and more provocative than a set of instructions
for readers. For all her deliberateness and self-​explanation, Carson is not Susan
Sontag’s “overcooperative” author, whose inbuilt critical presentations (in
Sontag’s example of Thomas Mann) pander to the reader, or, in Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s words, “demand the least” from him.27 Instead, Carson’s critical
presentations are uncertain in status: they can hover between reflection and
reckoning; autofiction, send-​up, and sabotage; a way of blindsiding scholars
or beating critics at their own game. We are granted an arresting degree of ac-
cess to how Carson works, thinks, and feels around her sources, but the same
transparency—​not the usual transparency and accountability of scholars—​can
disorient. Her cleverness, and her constant courting of ours, can be “overpow-
ering.”28 If anything, this book argues, Carson’s apparatus of reflection invites
a complicity that her tic for addressing us directly merely makes explicit.
Christopher Ricks has described “a contractual model in literary understanding”
6 Introduction

that invites us to accept fictions, incongruities, and factual inaccuracies as part

of the work of literature.29 Carson offers us another version of the contract. Her
reckoning with scholarship not only happens in our midst—​talks to us of its
troubles, plays openly with its forms—​but recruits us as an accomplice. There
is an “understanding,” and it is that we will suspend our disbelief when Carson
interviews Stesichoros, speaks as Euripides, has fiction slip her reading of Keats,
or theorizes her writing for us: not at the expense of doubt, but on the under-
standing that there is nothing like doubt, error, staged fiction, and incongruity,
nothing so inviting as direct address and assumed complicity, to throw our own
thinking into relief. Whether or not we enter into this understanding—​as Carson
herself would say—​depends on us.
Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist is a portrait of a singularly polyphonic reader of
literature, whose polyphony or “hybridity” is no restive postmodern symptom.30
Nor does the book understand Carson’s complex mediating transparency—​“I
am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you”; “There is too much self in my
writing”; “I am to imitate a mirror like that of water”—​as a post-​authorial perfor-
mance, swapping the “I” of authorship for designed exposures of its fabrication
or failure.31 Across its eight chapters and postscript, in close readings and wider-​
angle commentary, this book suggests we understand Carson’s performance of
scholarship as uniquely personal and dexterous in its handling of personality,
as well as significant beyond her own much-​vaunted singularity of style. Carson
has found a way to exercise an essentially speculative distinction between crit-
ical scholarship and literature, and by doing so, to turn what it is we need both of
these to be into an object of thought. It is this speculation, high on erudition, that
has made Carson not only a writer of extraordinarily widespread appeal and ac-
claim, but a particular penchant of academic critics, owing, perhaps, to her status
as a striking limit-​case in the contemporary academy.
In the more than forty years since her doctorate, Carson has combined
teaching posts at Princeton, McGill, Michigan, and Cornell with residencies
at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Bard College, and the “Library of Water” at
Stykkishólmur in Iceland; single-​author essays, translations, verse and perfor-
mance works with high-​profile commissions and intermedia collaborations.
Pipped to the Oxford Professor of Poetry Chair by (scholar and non-​poet) Ricks
in 2004, Carson’s 2018 Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, put a li-
censed exchange of action between literary creation and criticism, as between
cultural and occupational performance, center stage. Such exchanges have long
been par for the course in her writing, where the demands of academic schol-
arship are set to “literary” compositional rigors, and offset by reactions and
moods unsanctioned, if not effectively outlawed, by the profession. Rather than
erased in the exchange, these demands—​together with the “I” who parses them
and bears their weight—​come under the most sustained and expansive scrutiny.
 Introduction 7

Carson’s exercise of this “I,” an “I” who has already processed our most sophis-
ticated postmodern objections, is one of the boldest throughlines of her writing
career. Examining her project, its speculations with form and bold exchanges of
action, this book makes a broader case for the importance of reading Carson—​
and reading her as a reader of literature—​now.

*
This book was written at a moment of some creative dissent in the Anglophone
academy around the moods and methods of literary scholarship, and the
distinctions these enable or disable between critical attention and literary crea-
tion, between criticism and other interpretive forms and media, and between the
academic and non-​academic (the “lyric” or even belletrist) essay. A mainstay of
the discussion concerns the methodologies and emotions associated with “cri-
tique,” the dominant oppositional reading style that is the subject of acclaimed
work by Rita Felski, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her remarkable essay on “para-
noid reading,” and other scholars in their wake.32 Critical writing suffers from a
“frame lock” as well as a “tone jam,” observes Charles Bernstein.33 It culls rather
than cultivates surprise, says Sedgwick.34 (Carson suggests that a similar con-
viction about academic lectures spurred her to write Short Talks while teaching
at Princeton.)35 The glaring exception from most of these conversations is form.
Bar a handful of high-​profile outliers—​scholar-​poets whose work is marked ex-
perimental and returned undercover to “literature”—​the scholarly or critical-​
interpretive essay suffers from a form lock.
Anne Carson’s “Every Exit Is an Entrance: A Praise of Sleep,” a short essay
from the multiform concept volume Decreation: Poetry, Essays Opera (2005),
was anthologized in a collection that sought to ask the form question in the field
of the critical essay. Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide (2014) places
Carson alongside Barthes, John Cage, and Jacques Derrida—​all of whom she
cites in her writing—​and alongside other authors (Geoff Dyer, Kevin Kopelson,
Sedgwick) with whom her “creative-​critical” approaches share little more in
common than a knack for creative resignification.36 An introduction to the
anthology traces a lineage for “creative criticism” back to the freeform mod-
ernist essays of H. D., Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Laura Riding, for
which the editors owe a significant debt to Lisa Samuels’s 2001 genealogy
of “the Other Criticism”: defiant, formally driven interpretive writing from
Pound and Riding through Georges Bataille, Charles Olson, Angela Carter,
and the American scholar-​poets, Bernstein and Susan Howe.37 A range of re-
cent alt-​critical examples might also be cited here, from “slow burn” collective
readings of Elena Ferrante in epistolary form, to the theoretical and ekphrastic
poem-​essays of Ann Lauterbach.38 Bernstein, whose “thought opera” on Walter
Benjamin premiered in 2005, and Howe, whose “anarcho-​scholasticism” and
8 Introduction

form-​sensile critical testimonies presage the author of Nox, Men in the Off Hours,
and “The Glass Essay,” are perhaps Carson’s truest peers in the unlocking of form
for scholarship.39 Comparison might be drawn, too, with the “lyric philosophy”
of Canadian scholar-​poet Jan Zwicky, whose compositions amplify the formal
arrangements and philosophical complexities of her principal source and emo-
tive event, Ludwig Wittgenstein.40 Like Howe, like Bernstein, and like Carson,
there is something non-​negotiable in Zwicky’s citational poetics, as though the
end of paraphrase—​the start of an art of copying down—​is where close reading
comes into its own.
Arguments for “the essay as form” and a “search for style” have a stronger, less
timid, and better known history in European philosophy, where what Sontag
calls “the specter of banished ‘content’ ” has been kept more successfully at bay.41
The years of Carson’s doctoral research (“Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” University of
Toronto, 1981) are the Anglo-​American advent of French post-​structuralism
and écriture, of Jacques Derrida’s seminal, mimetic reading of Plato’s Phaedrus—​
the dialogue at the heart of Carson’s thesis and, later, Eros the Bittersweet—​and
Barthes’s famous formal “simulation” of a lover’s discourse, perhaps the closest
kin to Carson’s essay on desire.42 (Carson praises Barthes’s “golden persuasions”
in her essay on Twombly and quotes him in numerous other works.)43 These
are also the late summit years of Language poetry, Howe, Bernstein, and Bruce
Andrews’s materialist arts of sound. In 1994, the period of Short Talks and
“The Glass Essay,” after Eros the Bittersweet and before Men in the Off Hours, a
conference in Miami titled “Reinventing the Poet-​Critic” set out to address
“experiments in criticism that explode conventional genres and categories,” de-
fining its aims against the complaint that “even as we redefine the objects and
goals of scholarship, our essays and books, considered as writing, are often as
boring and predictable as ever.”44 Bernstein, one of the conference keynotes,
would later speak of “criticism’s blindness to the meaning of its forms.”45 The
poet and essayist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, another of the keynotes, would go on
to scour the recent history of experimental essays on the trail of a certain reck-
lessness of form, where the “essay” is easily misrecognized but where its brief of
“writing-​as-​reading” comes into the sharpest focus.46
We will recognize this brief, and these misrecognitions of the essay,
throughout the pages of this book. “Essay,” less a strict purview than a soft pretext
for my inquiry, is a term Carson herself handles breezily. Under its loose-​drawn
aegis are Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (a subtitle removed from later editions);
a roughly lineated “Essay on What I Think About Most,” paired in Men in the
Off Hours with an elliptical redraft, “Essay on Error,” alongside “Irony Is Not
Enough: Essay on my Life as Catherine Deneuve” and “Dirt and Desire: Essay
on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.” There is the extended
scholarly essay, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul
 Introduction 9

Celan) (1999); “Decreation: How Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil
Tell God,” reprised as “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts,” and other “essays”
glossed in the subtitle of Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, including “Foam
(Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni.” There is
Short Talks, whose prose poems Carson has called both “essays” and “lectures”;
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos; scripts for perfor-
mance pieces, including “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” “Cassandra
Float Can,” and “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures”; and a handful of more
conventional lectures, referred to in their published versions in the journal
Critical Inquiry as “essays.”47 Several of these titles do strong performative work,
which is to say they make the essay an “essay” simply by calling it one, where
otherwise it might be taken for erudite narrative fiction, say, or a philosophical
poem with footnotes. A lecture in sonnet form, similarly, pulls the expectational
weight of a lecture—​as Cage’s intermedia masterpiece, “Lecture on the Weather,”
did several decades earlier—​because the title awakens such expectations even
as it obliges us to revise them.48 Many works that do not announce themselves
as essays or lectures exercise a similarly imperative appeal. The imperative voice
that Elaine Scarry suggests is “the voice under which we compose” when we de-
scribe (“Imagine this. Now. Do it. Fast”) is given an edge in Carson by her tic for
deixis and direction (“Let’s look at this,” or “drop the sound. Listen to the differ-
ence /​Shatter”).49 Yet the imperative gets softened, even sabotaged, by Carson’s
repertoire of scholarly paratexts and paraphernalia, whose mimicry of critical
apparatus exposes its fantasies, processes, and contingencies, and is usually on
the verge of sending itself up.
An early example of this is Carson’s Introduction to the poem sequence, “The
Life of Towns,” which tells us, with ironic self-​regard, what a scholar is and how
this particular scholar has already managed to wrongfoot “you,” the reader:

A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines
become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it’s not so.
I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the myste-
rious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves.
Before there were any edges or angles or virtue—​who was there to ask the
questions? Well, let’s not get carried away with exegesis. A scholar is someone
who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.50

What category of statement is this, whose address assumes an intimacy its irony
bleaches out? Are we being taught a lesson, or asked to go along with our own
duping? What is our position on this scholar—​a “painter of writing,” to borrow
Barthes’s term for Twombly—​who both theorizes her work and curtails its ex-
egesis, and whose confident exposure of operations tells us these operations
10 Introduction

happen all by themselves?51 Carson’s work is full of scenic events like this
one: performances of intent that invite us to cede to their artifice “just for the
thrill”; prefaces, appendices, glossaries, botched quotations, lesson plans, and
fake testimony that take the expectation they rouse of security and, more or less
explicitly, dash it.52 The Carson paratext is a romp through scholarly form that
builds misadventure into the work of commentary, but which understands our
awareness of erring, like our awareness of mistakes or of being duped, as an unri-
valed source of insight and invention.
Invention here is our prerogative as well as Carson’s. For we, it turns out, are
one of her main motives in the unlocking of scholarly form: “If I’m totally pro-
fessional and locked in to my credentials as a professional, I can’t let you have
a thought about what I am telling you,” remarks Carson; “It’s not teaching, it’s
closing off teaching.”53 In the same set of remarks, it also turns out that “being
an amateur”—​(from the Latin amare, amator), for whom to love your objects is
to play rough with them—​might actually make you a better teacher. In any case,
the separation of “amateur” or “belletrist” from professional reading has, in Eric
Hayot’s words, “made the literary academy increasingly self-​absorbed and thus
increasingly irrelevant.”54
Interviewing Carson back in 1997, D’Agata asked her what she thought of the
essay form. Carson, at this point in their conversation, has already declared form
to be “a rough approximation of what the facts are doing,” a remark that delegates
to form the tasks of proximity—​as in likeness, mimesis—​and interpretation.
When D’Agata speaks about form in Carson’s “very formal” oeuvre, he confesses
he’s “not sure”—​not ever sure, the suggestion is—​“what the form is” or “where it
comes from.” Carson affirms: “that’s because it arises out of the thing itself.”55 By
this account, then, we have form that is not just approximate to facts but wholly
contingent on them: form whose entire raison d’être is response. Essays, it seems,
are a way of formalizing the arrangement; but the arrangement doesn’t exactly
stop there:

When you write an essay, you’re giving a gift, it seems to me. You’re giving this
grace, as the ancients would say. A gift shouldn’t turn back into the self and stop
there. That’s why facts are so important, because a fact is something already
given. It’s a gift from the world or from wherever you found it. And then you
take that gift and you do something with it, and you give it again to the world or
to some person, and that keeps it going.56

More than asking what a form is in Carson, we might do better to ask where it
comes from, how it responds to a given set of “facts,” how and whom it addresses,
what or where are its destinies. To borrow Susan Howe’s words for her own,
in some ways comparable mode of response to other authors, the question for
 Introduction 11

Carson is “what form for the form”—​in what shape, measure, or metric the echo
of an original is sustained in her work, as tempo, unsettled structure, rhyme,
symbol, or copy, potentially (though not necessarily) including verbatim cita-
tion.57 This idea of form also sends us back to Oscar Wilde, an idol of Carson’s
youth and an inspiration behind her decision to study Greek, who wrote in “The
Critic as Artist” that the critic “exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from
that of the work itself,” his formal task indivisible from his interpretive one.58
Carson’s remarks about grace, gifts, and the essay, from which Chapter 2 of this
book takes its cue, imagine a form that keeps on forming—​a forma efformans, in
Coleridge’s term—​in the continued production of points of arrival: a form that
wants to be “found,” that lets us “have a thought” of our own about it, and that, to
do so, must expose its dependencies and its incompletion.59 Yet Howe’s protocol,
and Carson’s, I propose, is where the essay as such starts to disappear. In the tau-
tological fit between “form” and “form,” where the essay only exists as a counter-​
gift to given facts, there is no “essay form” to speak of (though there might be an
essay “as form”). Not just because it changes shape—​as Carson has said, her work
is continually altered “in performance or medium, making a book a dance, or a
dance a sculpture”60—​but because its definition, its defining condition of possi-
bility, is always elsewhere.
We can start to speak, then, of the Carson “essay”—​in scare quotes for the
moment—​ as transparent, prismatic, contourless, speculative, imitative, or
mirroring. An “open work” in the modernist sense (as the artist Kim Anno calls
“open reading” the effect she sought to create in collaboration with Carson): per-
forming its dependency on other works and its intent to go on meaning and
producing in the future; a form that foregrounds the interpretation—​hers as
well as ours—​without which, it is supposed, it would not exist.61 It is on these
grounds that Carson’s works that bear the term “essay” in their titles blend into
works that don’t, and into her translations, adaptations, fiction, ekphrases, and
verse compositions. Beyond the task of approximation, staging form as a find-
able measure of other finds, there is no rubric for Carson’s essaying with form
save the requirement to reflect on it: a doubling expressed as commentary, aca-
demic paratext, rehearsal (drafts, iterations, “cuts,” “workouts”), and exposures
of the kinds I have tried to sketch out here. A reading that begins as a prose
essay, thinking of the essays of Decreation, gets redrafted as an ode, rhapsody,
or libretto to perform its dependency on the facts and to “keep [attention] from
settling.”62 Close readings and critical reflections pass their prerogatives to auto-
biography, fiction, verse, or the protagonists of Greek tragic drama (“The Glass
Essay,” The Beauty of the Husband, Autobiography of Red, Antigonick, H of H
Playbook). The “Note on Method” heading Economy of the Unlost begins with
a line from Hölderlin’s river poem, “The Rhine,” that reflects on the essay in its
wake: Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas—​“Yet each of us has his measure.”63 Carson’s
12 Introduction

measure, unmeasured and unmeasurable by most standards, is set by the texts

and collaborators she works with. Measuring facts is what her essaying does
best, as well as what defines it, perhaps, as essay (from exagiare, to weigh): the
“weighing,” in Brian Dillon’s words, “of something outside of itself.”64
There is, of course, the essay whose title this book explicitly calls upon. “The
Glass Essay,” the long opening verse composition of Glass, Irony and God (1995)
and the focus of Chapter 3, is a reading of the life and work of Emily Brontë in
situ—​embedded, that is, in site-​specific, real-​time reflections on the story of a
broken love affair.65 Ian Rae has described “The Glass Essay” as an attempt “to
create a broader interpretative context, one capable of mirroring the speaker’s
mental and emotional states, out of fragments of biography, theology, and lit-
erary analysis.”66 In this seamless, edgeless essay, everything comes to bear on
Brontë, and vice versa. Every fact, every conversation, every moment’s reflec-
tive underside, is fair game. “Fishing up facts of the landscape from notes or
memory,” a working method claimed for Economy of the Unlost, is given a rich
narrative mise-​en-​scène in “The Glass Essay,” as textual finds and inquiries occur
while the narrator is out “stumping over the mud flats” or “strid[ing] over the
moor,” bruised and brooding on her reclusive source and alter ego.67 With the
reading wide open to recollection and landscape, it is its situation in place and
time, the facts of its source text just some among the other facts that surround
them. The reading as such is almost completely transparent. The essay as essay, a
tautology of the kind Carson is so good at exposing, almost isn’t there at all.
I began this Introduction with Twombly’s scribbled shout-​out to Catullus
that, in Carson’s words (in which Barthes’s words show through), “mingle[s]‌
together exposure and erasure” of the author’s hand.68 Exposure and erasure—​
both gestures toward transparency and both with their quotient of threat—​are
methods and moods to be found in greater or lesser degrees of tension throughout
Carson’s writing. Like Twombly’s self-​effacing line, Carson’s exposure/​erasure of
the essay on Brontë is “a matter of making time itself visible”: the time of thinking
and walking and talking in which the reading errs and evolves. (“I want to make
you see time” is an admission of The Beauty of the Husband, another kind of
“glass essay” on another nineteenth-​century poet, and the subject of Chapter 4 of
this book.) Carson’s Emily Brontë—​like Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1989)—​is
also the object of a recovery, a commitment to the suppressed errancies of hand-
written textuality and to what Howe, in her errant scholarly monograph, imag-
ines as the mirroring of her source: “A poet is a mirror, a transcriber” (a premise
unsettled in Carson’s express commitment “to imitate a mirror like that of water”
at the start of Short Talks).69 Brontë is Carson’s looking glass, as Carson is offered
as hers, and it is in this putatively uncritical exchange that the speculative activity
in all reading appears on the scene. It is here in “The Glass Essay” that reader
and source, Carson and Brontë, start—​though they will not continue—​to tell the
 Introduction 13

same story. Carson’s early confession in the work, “I feel I am turning into Emily
Brontë,” exposes an erasure of boundary—​one of the first taboos of academic
criticism—​that the essay’s formal equivocations perform from the first.
Anne Carson’s insertion of herself in the dilemmas, lives, and literatures of
her objects, from Brontë to Catherine Deneuve, Euripides to Simone Weil, is an
admission of the unsanctioned emotional life of scholarship, where boredom can
be potent (“I will do anything to avoid boredom”) and identifications delirious
(“Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve”).70 Mirroring, pastiche, even imper-
sonation, far from lapses in critical attention, are, more often than not, rehearsals
of a critical difference. For all their baffling ironies and the riot they run with
scholarly procedure, these maneuvers, and the kinds of experience they express,
are not perhaps the outliers they might seem in the study of literature. At the end
of an early essay, Barthes sketches a short vignette about criticism and literary
interpretation. “In adding his language to that of the author and his symbols
to those of the work,” he says, “[the critical reader] reproduces yet again, like a
sign which is lifted out and varied, the sign of the works themselves.”71 This may
not be an action we either recognize or aspire to if we write academic prose or
teach literature for a living; then again, it might be just what we long to do with
literature’s singularities, after hours in the company of the texts we deal with. The
lifting and variation of signs is the soft power that criticism shares with literature,
and Carson, this book hopes to show, has fixed this soft power, its allure, and its
negotiations with form, at the center of her work.
Carson, it bears restating, is in good company in these negotiations—​
alongside Bernstein on Benjamin, Howe on Dickinson, Zwicky on Wittgenstein.
We find variation and identification, too, as the operative modes of authors
known primarily for their critical or theoretical writing: Barthes, of course, but
also Hélène Cixous in her readings of Clarice Lispector, Julia Kristeva in her ex-
traordinary autofictional novel-​essay on Teresa of Ávila, and Carol Mavor in the
luxurious mimetic prose of Reading Boyishly.72 “The Glass Essay” itself has given
rise to at least one mimetic variation: “A Glass Essay,” a recent piece by American
scholar Sarah Chihaya, varies Carson’s verse essay by reflecting on what it means
to feel she is “turning into” Anne Carson.73 D’Agata reminds Carson that “people
still call ‘The Glass Essay,’ for example, brilliant literary criticism and a brilliant
poem, together in one form, in one consistent voice.”74 Where Carson’s scholar-​
narrator says “I am turning into Emily Brontë,” Barthes’s hypothetical reader-​
critic, whose first-​person voice fuses with the source text, declares in her own
“combined voice”: “I am literature” (je suis littérature), a protest against our
taboos and perhaps a cry of vindication, too.75 For “I,” the self-​effacing “I” of lit-
erary interpretation, is the sum of its encounters.
Some quick lifting and variation of Carson’s symbol, finally, lets us call upon
glass not just as the medium of mimesis and illusion, but as the medium that
14 Introduction

problematizes medium per se.76 Glass is the reluctant matter that, depending on
where we’re standing, either effaces or exposes its mediation—​another way of
saying that it keeps the idea of mediation open. As it moves in and out of per-
ceptibility, between exposure and erasure, it is and is not the same as the forms
it reveals, though expert at concealing its non-​identity. In fact, its easy exchange
of identity with the world of its surroundings has made glass the medium of
choice for the modern assault on art from within, from Marcel Duchamp’s The
Large Glass—​which makes a cameo in The Beauty of the Husband—​to the invis-
ible proscenium of performance art.77 Metaphors of glass plumb the paradoxes
of writing whose author seeks to pass unnoticed, or which stages its own lapses
of presence. For the Scottish poet W. S. Graham, the “white /​Crystal of Art” in
which the poet “could not speak” stifles this presence, like the “atmosphere of
glass” into which Carson and her mother fall in “The Glass Essay.”78 (For Carson,
on the contrary, exercising transparency, speaking in the decommissioned words
of others, sometimes makes it possible to speak.) For Howe, the poet’s words
“like the sun against glass, may recoil false meaning back on herself ”: to write is
to be dazzled by misrecognitions.79 In another poet, Joan Brossa, on the Catalan
avant-​garde, the poem can do performative contradiction just as well as its ana-
logue: “These lines were written /​to go as unnoticed as /​glass.”80

*
The strong emotional claims that share reading’s present tense, put so dis-
armingly to scrutiny in “The Glass Essay,” are first broached in the text that
inaugurates Anne Carson as a scholar of classics. “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” the
doctoral thesis whose title riffs on the opening of Catullus 85, is a theory of de-
sire and the lyric poem in the advent of writing. For the Carson of “Odi et Amo,”
written script changes minds. The lyric poems of Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon,
and Archilochos, dramas of desire under straits, were composed to be sung and
recited before audiences. The desire they stage is public insofar as it is proclaimed
audibly and circulates openly at the scene of their performance. Yet for Carson,
the arrival of semi-​literate and literate culture brings to these poems a new per-
formative dimension from which public desire is exempt. The transcribed poems
enclose the desire they mimic and the desire they awaken in new and compact
borders. The quiet concentration of reading sharpens sensory edges, heightens
the stakes of their breaching, and in this parsing of edges is the early rubric of
a “science of self.”81 For the celebrated classicist, Bruno Snell, “the discovery of
the mind” (and the “theory” of other minds) begins as a confrontation with bit-
tersweet erōs, “the love which has its course barred.”82 So writing begins as an
index of ethical value—​but it is first, and perhaps foremost, an inducement to
eros, a scene of self-​regard and self-​possession on which the arrival of “a sudden,
strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event.”83At the erotic
 Introduction 15

“crisis of contact” between lovers, transcription is the lyric poet’s accomplice, as

reading nurtures the very conditions of possibility for the love to which he pays
tribute: the love that assaults the senses and shakes the mind.
Carson’s thesis gets reworked five years later as Eros the Bittersweet, an essay
whose compositional and citational arrangements mark a shift from the thesis
and portfolio of academic articles she had already begun to compile. Its formal
rehearsals and central account of the complicities of writing and desire will re-
turn in various iterations across her work, the “Eros variations” of this book’s
opening chapter.
This is the scene Carson sets for eros:

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incur-
sion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality,
wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into
contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive
what you are, what you lack, what you could be.84

Carson’s story as a scholar begins with this uplit cautionary tale. The stakes of
the “incursion” are so high, she says, not just because of the contact they augur
with someone else, but because of the contact they compel with “you” yourself.
The rulebook of Carson’s “decorum” is written in real time, as relation and self-​
relation, then and now, suddenly and startlingly coincide. Elsewhere in Eros
the Bittersweet, as in the doctoral thesis, she describes a “voltage of decorum”
shocking between lovers and halting incursive eros in its tracks. Against the de-
sire to possess is a contrast sensation, aidōs, defined by Carson as “an instinctive
and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.”85 This bittersweet com-
promise, for Carson (on the trail of Snell), is what transforms erotic desire into
a crisis of personal sovereignty. Channeled in the erotic tableaux of Greek lyric,
amped up by the reading and speaking of written words in solitude, Carson’s
“voltage of decorum” carries down its currents a shiver of anxiety around the
phenomenon of literary mimesis. The mimēsis that proved so troubling to Plato,
moving mind and body undetected, finds concentrated expression in the tight
textual spaces of early love lyric, whose written marks electrify the edges of
readers. They transport us, but they also put us in our place.
Carson talks to McNeilly about her work in terms that bring aidōs to mind,
describing a “scholarly hesitation” in her contact with the classical canon.86
Awareness of incursive or possessive designs on the fragments of Sappho, for
instance, which have been filled out, bowdlerized, and versioned since Catullus,
leads her quite literally to stop at their edges—​to preserve those edges, as she does
in If Not, Winter—​as though a crisis of contact or drama of non-​identity were
the prized object of classical translation (and perhaps, in a way, all translation).
16 Introduction

Yet halting restraint is not how most readers would describe Carson’s handling
of the texts she deals with. Not least Tacita Dean, whose evocation of Carson’s
Ancient Greek archive and cast—​“shocking them back to life as if with electrical
voltage”—​ramps up Carson’s “voltage of decorum,” the boundary-​sensitivity of
aidōs, almost beyond recognition. Though the glossing of Catullus 101 in Nox
opens a thoroughgoing “hesitation” to scrutiny, poring over facts of the poem
and facts from her brother’s life, other works can look like reading on a rampage.
Antigonick, Autobiography of Red, H of H Playbook, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
(2019), a “Twelve-​Minute Prometheus (After Aiskhylos)” (2008), and “Oh What
a Night (Alkibiades)” (2020)—​an “unusual” version of Plato’s Symposium—​are
headlong incursions into source texts that shake up or shirk their philological
details; that redesign these texts as immanent commentaries, caricatured, short-
hand versions, or dramatizations of lives and scenarios millennia apart. Where
the materially compromised and textually conjectured classics might seem to
ask for more aidōs than, say, Proust’s À la recherche or Weil’s notebooks, Carson
submits her classical sources to form-​driven readings and imaginative revisions
no less intrepid than her responses to Proust or Weil, Marguerite Porete or Emily
Brontë. In each of these cases, there is no doubt that what we’re reading is a ver-
sion of the facts, and that this version is Anne Carson’s.
This book pays close attention to moments in Carson’s writing where
she confronts the sheer personality of her scholarship directly; where its
consequences are processed, as it were, so that we don’t have to. In the introduc-
tory notes to If Not, Winter, where Carson sets out the case for hesitation, she
describes her working method and its subtending “fantasy”:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the
plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words
and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way,
the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of
self) within which most translators labor.87

Carson is certainly not “most translators.” Yet the fantasy she professes to share
with them is one she will revisit across the contexts of translation, critical prose,
and freeform interpretive composition. Economy of the Unlost, the comparative
study derived from her Martin Classical Lectures, begins its “Note on Method”
with the declaration, “There is too much self in my writing,” but the “Note” pro-
ceeds almost immediately to a taut lyrical paean to thought’s “best moments,”
where introverted or “windowless” aesthetic work is set against scholarship’s
“landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and ex-
change judgements.”88 Fast-​forward several years and the problem of self—​now
the “brilliant assertiveness of the writerly project” with its “big, loud, shiny center
 Introduction 17

of self ”—​is the reflexive center of “Decreation: How Sappho, Marguerite Porete
and Simone Weil Tell God” (discussed here in Chapter 6), where the dilemma of
“too much self ” is pursued through three—​or four—​very different repertoires
for self-​undoing.
This inquiry into subjectivity, its exposure, and its derailing, continues to shape
her work. Speaking to Eleanor Wachtel in 2012, Carson describes an ongoing
struggle to “get every Me out of the way” (the expression is John Cage’s).89 The
most recent incarnation of this struggle is “The EgoCircus Collective,” an experi-
mental art and performance lab founded in 2020 by Carson and her husband, the
performance artist Robert Currie.90 The project bears the hallmarks of the Cage/​
Merce Cunningham creative duo, both of whom cultivated non-​intentional and
chance composition, and whom Carson has said “represent the ideal form” of
collaboration.91 The same struggle is, perhaps, the backstory to Carson works
whose composition hinders the assimilation of material: from essays in verse,
draft, or notational form, to fake paratexts, incomplete syntaxes, randomized
lineation, variable structures, and other constrained writing techniques pop-
ular in the mid-​century literary avant-​garde.92 Her play for alternatives to argu-
mentative synthesis and the rerouting of interpretive attention might be called
phenomenological in its pursuit of immediacy, the suspension of ego, and the ex-
posure of experiential or compositional time. (Carson’s affinities with phenom-
enology, implicit and explicit, crop up at several points in this book.) We might
simply call it experimental, taking up Cage’s definition of experiment as “an ac-
tion the outcome of which is not foreseen,” where the unforeseen shows up the
mind and exposes its judgments.93 In any case, a strong push-​pull between the
ideal of transparency—​the condition of medium or optic for another work—​and
the sheer textual conspicuousness of so many of Carson’s readings and versions,
tautens her writing voice against its own means, sending a vibration of hesitancy
across her full range of forms. Cage’s “every Me out of the way” couldn’t be more
apt in this regard as it recognizes, as Carson does, that authors obstruct their
work by overdetermining and overidentifying with its possibilities, seeing them-
selves (“every Me”) everywhere they look.
We can understand the transparency/​ exposure, fidelity/​ errancy, or even
aidōs/​eros push-​pull as the site of a struggle of competing virtues in Carson and
declare the matter more or less closed (arguments for verisimilitude, as for and
against authorial virtue, can often have that effect). Instead, I propose we ap-
proach Carson’s claims, and the “big, loud, shiny” non-​identity of many of her
responses to source texts, as a late polemical event in the history of literary im-
itation, in particular, the imitation of other authors (imitatio). For the little her
most vociferous critics have understood about Carson’s work, their objections
at least affirm that something—​if something scandalous—​is going on with re-
gard to imitation. An early critique attacks her “negative biomimicry” and her
18 Introduction

“lines conceptually downloaded” from other authors, objections that, in the era
of “uncreative writing,” “unoriginal genius,” and “the iterative turn,” look decid-
edly dated.94 Another reader is concerned by Carson’s “sleight of hand” and an
“artless grafting-​on of academic materials” that blurs the difference between real
literary scholarship and a literary simulacrum, critical writing and poems in crit-
ical drag.95 Derrida uses the expression “trompe-​l’oeil” (translated by Barbara
Johnson as “sleight-​of-​hand”) to gloss Plato’s theorization of mimēsis, not in re-
lation to the tragic poets, as in The Republic, but in relation to philosophy, in the
late dialogue The Sophist.96 Contra the bona fide philosopher, the sophist is “the
imitator of him who knows” or “mimic of the wise man” (mimētēs tou sophou),
a simulator and creator of effects, whose impostor knowledge threatens the real
thing with contamination.97 It also exposes the fact, for Derrida, that the con-
tamination has already taken place: that there is no non-​mimetic philosophy, no
truth content free of the shifting forms of the logos. The essay form, for Adorno,
likewise “salvages a moment of sophistry.”98 No wonder, then, that Carson’s uses
of literature, like her uses of scholarship, cause a certain unrest among readers
who would prefer to keep scholarship and literature apart.
Without realizing it, the author of the “biomimicry” attack alights on one of
the central complexities of imitation, a complexity whose history goes back al-
most as far as the concept itself. In his superb Imitating Authors (2019), Colin
Burrow argues that the elasticity and unruliness of imitatio—​how it blurs into
paraphrase, translation, adaptation, etc.—​is central to both the anxiety it arouses
and its historic appeal. (When Daphne Merkin called Carson “one of the great
pasticheurs,” she surely had this appeal in mind.)99 Not only has imitatio al-
ways confounded categories; its blurring action also makes literary and literary-​
critical history: “Imitating authors are also readers, who are observing features of
the texts they read, which are passed on through their texts to their own readers.
So imitatio can blend outwards into the history of reading.”100 The notion is so
obvious it almost passes unnoticed: that to imitate, parody, or reproduce the
form or idea of a source text, you first have to interpret it. The history of imitatio
is an alternative history of critical reading.
Reena Sastri, Robert Stanton, and Gillian Sze have produced bold and inter-
esting work on the ideas and iterations of “errancy” or “wild constancy” at work
in Carson.101 Sastri recognizes the simple but extraordinary fact that, in Carson,
fidelity to a source text is often indivisible from its creative estrangement. Yet how
can we speak of her errant readings as close or as mimetic—​reading Euripides’s
Helen through Marilyn Monroe, for example—​without capsizing the very idea
of imitation? How to vindicate imitation as an interpretive strategy, capable,
that is, of performing a critical difference? Burrow calls attention to a passage
in The Sophist that explains how even the most divergent adaptations, versions,
readings, or creative misreadings, in which a source’s lexical or contextual
 Introduction 19

particularities are trashed, can still be mimetically invested in their originals.102

Describing what he calls “formal imitation,” Burrow explains how the “idea” of
a work (“akin to a Platonic Form”), a pattern of symbolism, or an argumenta-
tive structure, can be reproduced without necessarily imitating any of its verbal
details.103 He cites the claim made by Gérard Genette that “it is impossible to
imitate a text . . . one can imitate only a style: that is to say, a genre,” a propo-
sition that resonates strongly with Carson’s claim to derivative form: form that
approximates without exactly reproducing a set of facts.104 Plato makes a distinc-
tion in The Sophist between eidōla (simulacra, copies, illusions; the popular sense
of imitation drawn from The Republic) and likeness produced “by following the
proportions of the original in length, breadth, and depth, and giving, besides,
the appropriate colours to each part,” which Plato includes in this late, revised
definition of mimēsis.105 Plato’s “proportions of the original”—​tou paradeigmatos
summetrias, “the proportions of the paradigm” is Burrow’s suggested gloss—​
permit a kind of likeness that retains the structural geometry of its source
without reproducing any of its details.106 What Guy Davenport called Carson’s
“mathematics of the emotions” in his preface to “The Glass Essay” brings this
way of likening to mind, a structural mimetic sensibility applied equally and in-
terchangeably to the facts of emotional life and the facts of texts.
All this talk of measure and proportion—​like Carson’s talk of “hesitation”—​
falls dissonant if we expect it to mean an orderly, transparent correspondence
between original and likeness. If anything, approximating its geometry gives
license to Carson to catastrophize her source, not only “ripping” it “out of the
past,” in Dean’s words, but subjecting it to exorbitant demands: making Monica
Vitti speak for Kant, or ventriloquizing Simone Weil, who sings alongside her
mother on the emotional life of nonagons in Decreation. Formal imitation can be
a form of “strong reading”—​“strong misreading” is Bloom’s more famous term—​,
which is to say that there is something necessarily “transgressive” and “aggres-
sive” in parsing Euripides’s Helen through a replacement cast and scenario from
the life of Monroe, camping up Simone Weil’s final struggles, or reading Brontë
by assimilation to Carson’s biography.107 Mimetic desire—​for René Girard “the
source of all disorder”108—​is what we saw Barthes ascribe to all critical attention,
whose disorderly energies are an important part of living and working with texts.
This is not Woolf ’s involuntary “shadow-​shape” that endures like an afterimage
of the books we have read, but the crafted and deliberate form (“something hard
and lasting”) she insists must be made from it.109 Even Adorno’s “exact fantasy,”
a mimetic critical attention that takes its proportions (its exactitude) from the
facts under scrutiny, prizes the element of fantasy and misrule at the same time
as it prizes a form of imitation.110
Whatever her interest in approximation, in proportionality in the sense
introduced in The Sophist, this is to say, all Carson’s readers know about
20 Introduction

disproportion in her writing. If you have read Autobiography of Red alongside

the fragments Carson reproduces from its source, the Geryoneis of Stesichoros,
you will know Carson’s verse novel is extravagant in its rendition, throwing
Stesichoros off course and off kilter; exorbitant (ex orbita) in the sense she
theorizes in another recent essay.111 Readers of The Beauty of the Husband will re-
call its outrageous autofictional confessions (“I broke the glass and jumped”) and
its account of a love that slips the equations set for it, first among which is Keats’s
“Beauty is truth.” (Reading against Keats, Carson’s narrator declares her intent
not “to produce /​a golden rule.”)112 Following on the trail of the far-​fetched, the
disproportionate, the camp, and the exorbitant takes us from adaptations such as
the “Decreation” libretto and mise-​en-​scènes such as the “TV Men” sequence or
“Hopper: Confessions,” to all manner of essays and lectures, cropped and verse-​
lineated or simply sprawling in their associative range. Our expectations are the
first line of assault in Carson’s readings. For her, “you don’t think when you’re
comfortable. You just doze off.”113
Staying with this willed discomfort for a moment. I suggested at the start of
this Introduction that there is something in the way Carson’s “mimesis” works, in
its most concentrated expressions, that might be called imperative; whose strong
performative effect, seeking to decompress thought and expose its workings,
might in fact compel us to think in particular ways. In the McNeilly interview,
Carson describes the mimetic action I introduced in the opening pages, calling it
first “imitation” and then “performance”:

Kevin McNeilly: Is it fair to say some of [your] poems are gestures at process or
at attempt?
Anne Carson: Well that’s what imitation is for the ancients. It’s simply a
mirroring of the activity of the thought that you had at the time that you had
it, and at attempt to make that activity happen again in the mind of the listener
of [sic] the reader. Probably that’s always what I’m trying to do.
KM: Is this why you say things like “irony is a verb” or “desire is a verb,” as op-
posed to the nominal. You point often towards process or to action or to
performance.
AC: Yes, performance, I think so. The ancient poets thought of the publication of
a poem as the time of saying it, and the time of saying it is also the time of it
being heard, and that’s the time when there’s an exchange of that action, that
verb, whatever the verb is that’s being described. The verb happens.114

“Desire is a verb”—​“Desire moves. Eros is a verb” are Carson’s actual words—​

because desire compels, moving transitively between individuals, but also be-
cause it does to us the way a performative utterance does. A verb that “happens”
is the kind of performance we take for granted in poems, yet it can be thrilling,
 Introduction 21

if perplexing, as an action of lectures, critical essays, or bespoke forms that share

their purpose. An instinct for the performative, traceable across so much of
Carson’s writing—​and to which the above remarks allude—​, is driven by pursuit
of the kind of “imitation” we have already seen her describe: an approximation
of what a given set of facts is “doing.” An interest in shorthand, the synthetic and
synchronic, the “economy” of gesture of Economy of the Unlost, drives Carson’s
“imitation” to what she has since described as “an art of pure shape”: an abstract,
suggestively visual mimesis charged with leaving an impression in the mind “no
matter what the words mean.” Whether, that is, these words are station names of
the London Underground, words from Donne’s “Woman’s Constancy,” or from
Bertolt Brecht’s FBI file, as they are in her consecutive translations of Ibykos frag-
ment 286 in Nay Rather (2013).115
Nonverbal or post-​verbal impressions in the mind are effects we more readily
ascribe to visual art, arts of sound, and the “visual performativity” of concrete
poems, which Johanna Drucker has so powerfully described.116 Carson’s “art of
pure shape,” though, discussed in the final chapter of this book, is the aspiration
behind a hypothetical “Essay on Translation,” which Carson claims to have spent
her life rewriting. This potential text, a version of which is performed in the lec-
ture that describes it, is an essay in pursuit of its own disappearance; it moves,
or wants to move, she says, through a reduction of continuous prose to broken
paragraphs, ending up a smattering of clipped lines and single words. Carson’s
claims for the compelling synchronic effect of “performance” recall her remarks
on the painter Francis Bacon’s relation to what he also calls “the facts.” “By “facts,”
Carson explains, “[Bacon] doesn’t mean to make a copy of the subject as a pho-
tograph would, but rather to create a sensible form that will translate directly to
your nervous system the same sensation as the subject.”117 This is the nervous jolt
that, for Carson, makes thinking happen. With Bacon as her exemplum, though,
we know we are on potentially uncomfortable terrain. “Mak[ing] activity happen
again in the mind of the reader” is no reasoned, or necessarily reasonable, trans-
action. It ups the voltage, so to speak, on an imperative latent to all description.118
Carson first theorizes this performative force in an early essay on Aristotle,
whose arguments subtend her reply to McNeilly more than a decade later. “ ‘Just
for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s Poetics” (1990) talks about “the thrill of
lyric mimesis,” where the emotions inspiring lyric song “happen again” for the
reader or listener in micro-​dramas of form, grammar, and meter.119 The reader
of lyric and the willing dupe of its metaphors, explains Carson, experiences
the movements of her own “emotive reasoning” (dianoia) in an exchange of
action with the subject of lyric song.120 It is interesting, as an aside, that the
catch-​all category of the “lyric” is now characterized by some of its principal
theorists as a reading effect, as though twentieth-​century literary criticism had
need of such an object—​a “lyric” voice “in solitary speech,” nonimperative and
22 Introduction

unperformed—​and invented it.121 Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric strikes on

a quality of performativity—​“the iterative and iterable performance of an event
in the lyric present”—​that is closer to Carson’s ideas and is especially suggestive
in relation to the iterative here-​and-​now of her scholarship, whose lyric “event”
is addressed to readers.122Carson’s essay on “lyric mimesis” offers arguments that
will later appear revamped in “Essay on What I Think About Most” and “Essay
on Error” (both in Men in the Off Hours) on metaphor as the careful production
of a felicitous mistake.123 The wrongness or disproportion of a metaphor throws
our fresh-​cut reasoning into relief, “translating to [our] nervous system” the very
sensation of thinking.
It is in this essay, too, that Carson’s identification of her work with visual art
acquires a makeshift philosophical history. For it is visual spectacle (opsis), for
Aristotle, that “captures the mind,” or, in the translation provided in Carson’s
essay, “kidnaps your soul” (psychagōgikon: root of the modern “psychagogy,” the
therapeutic influencing of behavior).124 Some of the strongest recent writing on
Carson goes on the trail of the visual and para-​literary in her work, pursuing
the Carson of collaborations (with Currie, and with visual artists such as Bianca
Stone and Roni Horn), as well as Carson the collage artist and ekphrasist, who
painted and drew before she wrote, and who declares in an early interview, “I
mostly think of my work as a painting.”125 Opsis is the lyric mode Northrop Frye
ascribes to the riddle, and it is easy to spot the occult logic and spectacular appeal
of riddles in works that avoid marking explicit argumentative lines; whose lines
of inquiry—​in Carson’s words—​seem to “paint themselves.”126 There is some-
thing sublimely unreasonable about this mode of emotional reasoning, especially
when we have been led by a text’s apparatus, descriptors, or sources to expect
a different approach, one more closely aligned to scholarship’s conventions of
transparency and exposition. Listening to Carson lecture or “short-​talk” on
Sylvia Plath or on Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Three Crosses, it is interesting to ask
ourselves if we are willing or unwilling hostages, accomplices in our own capture
of mind. For scholarship is no safe space in Carson. The self-​sensing and suspen-
sion of disbelief she courts in us invite us to wonder whether these are not always
our endgames when we read; not just poetry, drama, and narrative fiction, but
critical and philosophical essays, too.
It comes as little surprise, finally, to find Anne Carson at ease with this partic-
ular soft power of writing, whether that writing is filed under scholarship, crit-
icism, or literature. She names as much as a special prerogative of the essay: “an
essay is a broaching, an interference, a disruption, a breaking in of me upon
you—​your mind a quiet lake, me jumping into it.”127 There is nothing ambig-
uous about this record of activity, which has the essay commit the incursions and
crises of eros with impunity. Such effects are, of course, speculations by Carson
about what she would like her essays to do to us. Their actual effects—​compelling,
 Introduction 23

disrupting, thrilling, or nonplussing—​depend on our disposition and on the

disposition of our categories (poem, essay, talk, etc.). Her activity in the essay
that ventures the above reflection is, we will see, precisely that: speculation. The
“mirroring” and “performance” of speculative activity, an exposure of thought
almost, it seems, as it happens.
“Criticism is speculative,” writes Simon Jarvis—​in whose seminars I first read
Carson—​“where speculation is opposed to certain knowledge.”128 Cross back to
DuPlessis and we find her affirming that “an essay, like a theory, can be described
as a speculative performance” and “[e]‌ssay is the play of speculation.”129 If
Carson’s performance of her scholarship asks us to go along with its ventures
or suspend our disbelief—​and if in the end we do so—​, it is because, in place of
other guarantees, other forms of transparency and accountability, she offers a
subject on whom we can rely to process the work’s complexities; even where—​
and perhaps because—​that subject has put herself in doubt, as the fictional es-
sayist of The Beauty of the Husband does, or as the translator-​mourner in Nox
does. This belief-​effect (which Raoul Eshelman has called “performatism”) is a
rebuff to certain trends in postmodern authorship, for which staged failures of
presence are obligatory.130 Carson’s newness consists, in part, in the story she
tells of her work, a story of what a scholar, a poet, and a translator is, and of what
this particular scholar feels about and wants from the texts and images she han-
dles. Form, for this extraordinary writer and performer, is not only a measure
of what happens, but a measure of what matters. If the “crisis of contact” with
literature is a means of sudden and startling self-​perception, it is also a means of
presenting us with its sharpest limits. The sensible, thinkable “edges” of self are
where speculation and literature begin.

*
This book approaches Carson through variations and overlaps of the following
four modes: academic criticism, the poem-​essay, the multiform concept volume,
and translation, ending with a postscript on Carson’s lectures and the interac-
tive, live-​performative turn of her recent work. Throughout the book, atten-
tion is paid to individual compositions—​poems, essays, lectures—​as well as to
whole collections and other multi-​work publications, with the aim of showing,
in the latter case, how Carson’s readings of a single set of source texts or a single
unifying idea produce variable structures or a range of different formal rigors.
Consistent with Carson’s “very formal” oeuvre (D’Agata), the book seeks to pay
her writing the very closest formal attention: to read Carson with and against
her own inset commentary and, in some cases, through the optics of her schol-
arly essays, approaching her, as far as possible, on her own terms. These opening
pages have placed Carson’s writing in a specific moment in time, in the company
of other experimental and post-​critical scholars working new kinds of relation
24 Introduction

between their scholarship and its source texts and readers. The chapters to follow
focus principally on the affiliations Carson performs herself, and on the terms
she sets—​terms we can take or leave, but which either way bear scrutiny—​for
understanding her work.
Part I explores variations on the function and forms of academic literary crit-
icism in Carson’s work, focusing on the two major examples of her published
scholarly writing: Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and Economy of the Unlost (1999).
These opening chapters address Carson’s engagement with the concepts of
erōs and xenia or gift exchange, arguing for her respective readings of Plato,
Simonides of Keos, and Paul Celan as grounding and anticipating the inter-
pretive modes of later compositions. These early works show Carson’s scholar-
ship taking a crucial turn toward performance in the imitation of an original
action or paradigm, which is reproduced in the form, structure, or stylistics of
the reading. Chapter 1 examines a series of variations on Carson’s early reading
of desire in Eros the Bittersweet, tracing its most striking formal and theoretical
legacies in the light-​footed literary-​critical sketch, The Albertine Workout (2014),
and in “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of
15 Sonnets” from the performance-​oriented pamphlet series, Float (2016). This
short history of the theory of eros in Carson—​and of a distinctive approach to in-
terpretive form—​shows how the relationship between writing and desire in her
early work becomes the framework for a longer-​term inquiry into the emotions
of reading literature.
Following this opening chapter is a study of the interpretive “conversation”
or “exchange” at the center of Carson’s acclaimed (though not uncontroversial)
comparative critical essay, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos
with Paul Celan). Out of the Simonides/​Celan constellation comes an inquiry
into what is at risk for the poet writing poetry, but also, in Carson’s strong con-
fessional identification with Celan, for the poet reading poetry and writing criti-
cism. The chapter close-​reads Carson’s richly imitative prosody in an essay whose
interpretations are voiced, the chapter argues, in a parallel exchange of poetic
“gifts” between Carson and Celan. An adapted version of her Martin Classical
Lectures, Carson’s extended essay is a complex case of performed reading, fusing
personal aesthetic declaration, direct reader address, a reciprocal critical style,
and one of the most striking confessions of what is at stake for Carson herself in
the psychic economies of poetry.
The chapters of Part II examine the lyric voice in Carson’s readings more
closely. These chapters approach two less formally conventional examples of her
self-​described “essays”—​“The Glass Essay” and The Beauty of the Husband—​with
an eye for how the two works use autobiography, autofiction, and the lives and
writing of Emily Brontë and John Keats to stage the compelling power games
 Introduction 25

of interpretation and romantic love. Reading her use of two very different lit-
erary oeuvres, these chapters explore the formal, citational, and affective bonds
these hybrid “essays” form with their source texts. In its first-​person narration
of a strong identification with Brontë, Chapter 3 argues, “The Glass Essay”
introduces a form of transparency that surfaces in later works such as The Beauty
of the Husband, Decreation, and Nox that reproduce the processes, sites, and
emotions of their composition. Parsing Brontë’s biography and close-​reading her
oeuvre, the narrator’s strong critique of Brontë’s reception and editorial regular-
ization doubles as a story of the narrator’s own, personal vindication. Bronte’s
story of subjection and liberty serves as her confessional double, the reading and
its emotional valence are seamless; but close-​reading Brontë is also where the
narrator finds her resistant to assimilation. This inquiry into equivalences of lit-
erature and personal need is a study, too, of their refusal to coincide.
Chapter 4 reads The Beauty of the Husband, the subtitled “fictional essay” whose
blurb describes it as “an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and the story
of a marriage”: a philosophically minded verse narrative studded with fragments
of Keats marginalia, yet not in any direct sense “about” Keats. Like “The Glass
Essay,” in this “essay,” the reading of Keats collapses into its autofictional back-
story; fragments from Keats, and a host of inconsistently attributed quotations
from other authors, exchange valence with the “facts” of Carson’s story in a con-
tinuous, “horizontal” lyric texture.131 Like “The Glass Essay,” too, the reading is
transparently personal. Yet the question of fiction (mimesis, sophistry, infidelity,
lie), unsteadying the personal story, performs a critical response to “Keats’s idea
that beauty is truth” aslant. The chapter makes the case for an extreme form of
lyric transparency, in which the reading of Keats is boundaryless, both nowhere
and everywhere to be found, and in which “story” and “essay” displace and ex-
pose one another’s purposes. The interweaving of textual fact, critical discourse,
and autobiography/​autofiction in both “The Glass Essay” and The Beauty of the
Husband produces a distinctive lyric style that skews, as it speaks directly to, our
expectations of what an essay and a reading should be. Both force (in us) the
question of their limits: the limits of “essays” and, at the heart of that lesser con-
cern, where receptiveness to other writing becomes its absorption.
Part III explores Carson’s engagement with the problem of “self ” in the essays
and iterative forms of Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. Reading close to the work
of the philosopher Simone Weil—​theorist of “decreation” or self-​undoing—​,
alongside Carson’s other interlocutors in the book, these two chapters con-
sider why the high-​stakes dilemmas of Christian mysticism interest Carson as
problems of knowledge, writing, and desire.132 Chapter 5 approaches a range of
individual poem sequences and prose narratives from Decreation, exploring how
Carson’s set of intimate scripts for essaying and embodying Weil’s concept also
26 Introduction

places a limit on the idea that self-​undoing can be voluntary or performed. The
chapter shows, on the one hand, how the variorum or concept volume is a per-
formative form, a format that stages the displacement of its central event and that
studies the self-​shattering métier by miming its ideals and points of tension. On
the other, it is argued, Decreation structures in a crucial constraint on the possi-
bility of performative artifice: the possibility of a voluntarily “decreative” writing.
Chapter 6 is an inquiry into the idea of the “fake” that emerges in the title
essay, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone
Weil Tell God,” and its companion piece, the libretto “Decreation: An Opera
in Three Parts.” The chapter explores Carson’s striking gloss of the term “fake
woman” (pseudo-​mulier), which reorients it from a term of indictment—​in the
inquisitorial case against fourteenth-​century mystic, Marguerite Porete—​to a
descriptor of radical psychological insight. The chapter compares the two in-
terpretive forms—​essay and opera—​directly. Where the essay presents Carson’s
source material verbatim, arguing for the contradictions of decreative writing,
the libretto reprises the same material aslant, in a riotous critical remix. Weil’s as-
piration to “undoing the creature” is performed alongside the creatureliness and
contradiction that hamstrings it: the praise, masochism, and desire that make
Sappho, Porete, and Weil both so complex and so compelling as theorists of con-
tradiction. The chapter closes with a discussion of “fake women” from across the
Carson oeuvre. Splaying out the category of the “fake,” the chapter also confronts
one of the most well-​known critiques of Carson herself to date: the charge of im-
itator, phony, fraud.
The fourth part of the book addresses one of the most complex and rich
modes in Carson’s work, where classical philology meets experimental drama-
turgy and poetic form. Although the essays and verse discussed at earlier points
in the book draw heavily on Carson’s academic classicism, it is in her translations
and adaptations of classical source texts that the quality of her scholarship and
her creative originality have garnered the highest praise. These adaptations
and versions of myth, drama, lyric, and epic poetry are numerous and, bar a
small number of tonally orthodox translations of Greek tragic drama, most
bear Carson’s signature misalignments of tone, purpose, form, and of the clas-
sical unities (unity of action, time, and place). From the early poem sequence
“Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings” (1995) to “Twelve-​Minute Prometheus
(After Aiskhylos)” (2008), “Pinplay: A version of Euripides’s Bacchae” (2016),
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a “version” of Euripides’s Helen, and her recent trans-
lation of his Herakles, H of H Playbook,133 perhaps the best-​known of Carson’s
“versions” is the verse novel Autobiography of Red, and its jauntier sequel, Red
Doc> (2013), which adapt the myth of Herakles’s tenth labor as preserved in the
fragments of Stesichoros’s Geryoneis.134 The full catalogue of Carson’s classical
adaptations, unbinding myth from the textual and historical particularities of
 Introduction 27

its literary sources, unquestionably merits a study apart—​and one such study,
Laura Jansen’s impressive multi-​author volume Anne Carson/​Antiquity (2022),
arrived in the final stages of preparation of this book.135 The chapters in this last
section approach a selection of these works, whose tonal, formal, and contextual
anomaly not only “rip[s]‌” Carson’s sources “out of the past” but performs her
working present. Carson’s scholarship, self-​involved, self-​parodic, saturated in a
lifetime of reading, is at the forefront of this performance.
Chapter 7 approaches two of Carson’s most striking translation projects: Nox,
an elegy, multimodal prose commentary, and translation of Catullus 101; and
Antigonick, an illustrated, frenetic adaptation of Sophokles’s Antigone, of which a
more tonally orthodox Carson translation was staged to acclaim in 2015.136 The
subject matter of both source texts is grief and its afterlife following the loss of a
brother, yet in Carson’s versions, the texts become strikingly different expressions
of the dilemma of how to comprehend the lives and languages of others. Both
works tell stories—​apocryphal stories, critical histories, personal associations—​
to which the source text has been bound. Both open the translator’s artifice to
scrutiny by way of commentary, asides, interpolations, and the hand-​produced
documents of which both texts are facsimiles. Where Nox stages Carson’s work
of translation, its component parts and accrued reflections, Antigonick is a ver-
sion of the Greek drama radically capable of reading and scrutinizing itself. The
chapter considers the ways these works remain “open”: open to collaboration,
permeable to personal and critical histories, and refusing closure of both the
project of translation and the wounds of grief and tragic violence. The chapter
situates the confessional transparency of Carson’s translations in relation to her
scholarship’s wider self-​exposure.
The final chapter approaches Carson’s minimalist, textually driven, and ma-
terially committed translation of the fragments of Sappho, an oeuvre whose
textual history combines rigorous scholarship with fictional interpolation,
misquotation, and a good deal of erotic fantasy. The chapter asks what kind
of intervention—​and underlying it, what kind of reading—​Carson’s unclut-
tered, hands-​free edition is exactly, in view of her stated intent to reproduce the
“drama” of the papyrus fragment and to translate under the fantasy she calls
“transparency of self.”137 The chapter reads If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
as the unlikely work that perhaps best illustrates what form—​and especially
performative form—​is for Carson, as well as what is at stake in its effects. This
particular drama of form is not Sappho’s, yet nor exactly is it Carson’s. Carson’s
text reproduces Sappho’s extant material, but the textual imitation of materiality
produces an extreme, high-​voltage lyric form whose drastic spaces, stray words,
and hedged brackets still-​frame the solitary speech of reading them. The role of
negative form, of unmarked pages, is to capture what it is we want and need from
Sappho, amplifying our logic at the edge.
28 Introduction

The book ends with a reflection on the performance-​ orientation of

Carson’s most recent work and a brief history of her approach to the lecture
form: from Short Talks to the performance scripts of Float (2016) and more
recent collaborations such as “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” (2019).
“Lecturing is not easy for me,” Carson admitted in 2001: “A lecture is not a con-
versation, you don’t get to ask the other people in the room what they think until
the end, you have to expose yourself first.”138 The performance aesthetics of these
late works herald a decisive move away from literature (and its study) as the pri-
vate lyric experience Carson theorizes in Eros the Bittersweet—​and which so
many of her works chronicle and expose—​toward a public, collaborative, and
intermedia scene for the products of scholarship. At the same time, I offer, the
move toward multi-​sensory, site-​specific performance is anticipated in Carson
from the very beginning.
 PART I
VAR IAT ION S IN C R I T ICI SM
 1
The Eros Variations

To watch them fall fills you with an inexpressible odd longing.

Perhaps it is the longing for what Streb calls “a real move.”1

“Elizabeth Streb is a Brooklyn choreographer who teaches her dancers to fall

straight down from a height of thirty-​two feet, flat on their faces or flat on their
backs or sideways through the air as if flying,” explains Lecturer II in Carson’s
“Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” staged in 2010 in
collaboration with Streb and others.2 The dancers, Lecturer II tells us, “fall as
fast as stars and look like gods for an instant. They redeem the shame of falling,
an act we usually associate with being very young or very old or very lost or not
the master of oneself.”3 The art of falling—​“a motion lexicon that all humans rec-
ognize,” says Streb—​is a performance of contradiction.4 For the onlooker who
can’t quite believe his eyes (who is obliged to make his own leap of faith), this
controlled fall from a height is ever the analog to an accident: to that “real move”
we would postpone indefinitely and yet, Carson says, we also unspeakably long
for. Falling between accident and intent, control and release, the Streb dancer
embodies their split-​second convergence in a mistake that, finally, and to our
audible relief, turns out not to be one. The fall can be reprised an infinite number
of times—​fall again, fall better—​and each time, in a collective intake of breath,
the “real move” buzzes into earshot. Streb’s performative contradiction is so
shocking, so sharply honed, that no sooner have accident and intent converged
than we would force them apart midair, or cover our eyes until the dancer stands
again to her feet. An artful fall never quite escapes a brush with the real thing.
The scene with which I begin this chapter is the kind of scene that interests
Carson. In the words of her “Essay on What I Think About Most” (1999), a dis-
quisition on mistake in stanzas of unrhyming verse, the “wilful creation of error”
is the action of the “master contriver”—​the poet: “what Aristotle would call
an ‘imitator’ of reality.”5 Like the “true mistakes of poetry,” the matter Carson
confesses to “think about most,” Streb’s choreographed falls perform the con-
version of human error into an art form. Under the dancer’s regime, and by

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0002
32 Variations in Criticism

an extraordinary coup of artifice, the emotions of mistake—​shame, exposure,

thrill—​are handed to us, putting our own contradictions and “odd longings”
center stage.
In this regard, the controlled fall of the Streb dancer crystallizes certain things
germane to Carson’s project. Insofar as “Streb and her dancers imitate real falling
by falling according to plan,” the episode replicates a sense in Carson’s work
that imitation—​mimēsis, imitatio, but also parody, unattributed quotation, pas-
tiche, even the outrageously fictive or fake—​can be a strong form of reading, a
performance that reveals something raw and essential about an original set of
facts or experiences. It evokes, too, an equally pervasive sense in her work of
something ostensibly haphazard going very precisely to plan. While Float, the
collection of unnumbered pamphlets in which “Uncle Falling” appears, can be
read in any order—​“Reading can be freefall”—​Carson’s commentaries on this
and other serendipitous “accidents” lend her work a deliberate, self-​theorizing
quality, a redoubling of artifice that has become one of her signature modes.6
In “Uncle Falling,” a two-​voice “lyric lecture” on vulnerability complete with its
own tragic Chorus, a double first-​person fulfills the functions of autobiograph-
ical narrative and real-​time analysis: as the lecture moves through these modes,
we can feel we have been saved by such commentaries from precisely the kinds of
disorientation it describes. While Streb holds her audience in a ruthless present
tense, as much desired as desired to be over, the real-​time, performative aspects
of Carson’s writing can get weighed down by a sense that we are being micro-​
managed in our readings. Facing so self-​studying a work, one that names its
resonances and schedules its mischief, the critical reader of Carson can be left
chasing after something that has already occurred, something all but over before
it has really begun.7
This said, what the Streb scene far more vividly brings to life is an experience
Carson doesn’t talk about in her lecture: another kind of falling and another sce-
nario of risk whose exploration begins in the very earliest Carson texts. The “fall”
of falling in love is an untidy agon of contradictory and inexpressible longings,
channeled, for Carson, in the lover’s confrontation with time. The lover seeks
out the “present moment of desire” (Eros the Bittersweet, 126) and wants to stay
there, yet also wants the same moment over and done with. The longed-​for “real
move” of an erotic “crisis of contact” means high risk and mutual exposure,
where desire’s very expression threatens to drink it dry. What happens in this
amplified present tense must be brought to an end, in order, put simply, for it to
happen again. It is only to be expected, Carson says, that “Eros traditionally puts
the lover in the position of genuinely desiring both points at once” (126)—​the
“now” and the “then,” risk and its mitigation, the present indicative and the per-
fect tense.
This chapter follows Carson’s working of the contradictions of eros through
a series of examples ranging from 1986 to 2016. Each of these works, beginning
 The Eros Variations 33

with Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986), places high demands on itself as liter-
ature because each, in its way, asks how writing can sustain these contradictions
and how it might in fact be complicit in their power. Each deals with a differ-
ence already compromised between “real moves” and their imitation. Through
Eros the Bittersweet, her first full-​length book and a sharpened lyrical reworking
of her 1981 doctoral thesis, “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” Carson draws an inquiry
into what is at stake in the emotions of falling in love and the experiences of
writing about it.8 While her title plays on Sappho’s contradiction of “bittersweet”
or sweet-​bitter desire (glukupikron), it is Plato’s late dialogue, the Phaedrus, that
runs the full length of Carson’s disquisition on the paradoxes—​the now and then,
the odi et amo—​of erotic love. It is with Plato that Carson thinks through the
charged and complex relations between desire and writing, imitation and the
real, atemporality and sensible time, whose charge can be felt, and whose relation
traced, in Carson’s own approaches to writing.
Carson’s reading of Plato runs more or less as follows. Phaedrus, Socrates’s
dreamy young interlocutor, has fallen “in love with a written text” (122). What
charms Phaedrus about this erotikos logos, the transcript of a treatise on love by
the sophist Lysias, is the protection it promises against erotic risk. Lysias extols
the virtues of the lover not-​in-​love, a “nonlover” for whom, “having no special
commitment to pleasure in the present,” time affords no emotions of crisis. His
“particular vantage point on time” is what separates “all that a nonlover feels and
thinks and does from what a lover feels, thinks or does” (124). It is the nonlover
who, Carson says, “looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end”—​
the “then” at the expense of the “now” (124). Phaedrus, it turns out, is not only
in love with the idea of nonloving but with the writing that, in contrast to the
spoken word, sets it, too, outside time. (Phaedrus, says Socrates, asked for the
speech to be repeated over and over, until “in the end he secured the script.”)9 The
“nonlover” trope is deliberately perverse: “Lysias’ speech is designed to alarm
standard sentiment and displace preconceptions about love” (124), says Carson.
His godlike mastery of the erotic scenario “redeems the shame of falling,” but
redeems it that bit too much. For at the zero degree of shame is zero tension,
zero emotional strife, and no convergence of tenses, a timeless fait accompli
that is all but over before it has really begun. The “conventional lover,” on the
other hand, confronts his own sensitized time at every turn. His “Ice-​pleasure”—​
Carson on Sophokles’s metaphor, the “ice crystal in the hands”—​compels him
one way and the other, to hold on to the present and throw it over fast: “an affair
of the moment, transparently” (112, 113). His desire is braced by a “voltage of
decorum,” the aidōs or “shamefastness” that marks “the fact that two are not one”
(20, 21). “A Lysian theory of love” plants the lover outside love’s contradictions,
“violates these natural currents of physical and spiritual change that constitute
our human situation in time” (137). This against the risk-​prone lover of the lyric
poets: “Candidly, he wants to keep on desiring” (136).
34 Variations in Criticism

In an interview in 2000, Carson made the following observation: “our

subjects call us. Eros the Bittersweet was a book based on my PhD dissertation
(Ode [sic] et Amo Ergo Sum: Toronto, 1981) and I notice that PhD students fre-
quently choose a doctoral subject that isolates a main issue of their being.”10
Carson has drawn the issue of her thesis—​the complicities of writing and
erotic emotion—​through works as diverse as Eros the Bittersweet, the philo-
sophical verse essay The Beauty of the Husband (2001), the concept volume
Decreation (2005), her essay in blueprint form, The Albertine Workout (2014),
and the performance-​oriented pamphlets of Float (2016). In Carson’s reading,
artful writing can’t quite be kept apart from the emotional cache of eros.
Both Carson’s doctoral thesis and its reworking as Eros the Bittersweet offer
that the advent of literacy and its proliferation in early classical lyric culture,
when poetry began to be written down and read in private, has a marked set
of consequences for the felt experience of desire.11 Drawing on the work of
classicists Bruno Snell and Denys Page, Carson has it that the written word not
only records erotic experience, as a glance at the lyric poets might suggest, but
is also its active accomplice. Unlike her oral and semi-​literate counterparts,
the solitary reader must close off her nonvisual senses at the expense of the so-
cial world; the crisis of desire, when this reader puts down her Alkman or her
Sappho, then assaults those newly sensitized edges with increased force. Under
these conditions, the text of eros—​erotikos logos—​is a contract with her own
intimate life and an object of desire in its own right.12 Carson asks, after Plato,
how close writing can get to the “real moves” of desire. Her answer, caught up
in the taut mimetic structures of poems, is that writing is not quite the safe
space Phaedrus would wish it to be.
What I will be calling Carson’s eros variations are an inquiry that joins her
early essay to later compositions that rehearse its concerns. An inquiry into de-
sire and its structure of paradox, the texts that form these variations on a theme
also test one of its most compelling commitments—​to the written text as a player
in desire, and the idea consequent upon it that form matters for how desire moves
in the minds of readers.13 This is an inquiry that not only thinks in strong ways
about written form, that draws our attention to form and its lures, but whose
thinking on desire itself also happens through form. The chapter follows three
formally very different iterations of Carson’s early theory of desire, beginning
with Eros the Bittersweet, where the idea that writing channels the reasoning of
eros first appears. Then to The Albertine Workout (2014), Carson’s sketch for an
essay on Albertine Simonet, muse and captive of Marcel in Marcel Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu, and to conclude with a reading of “Possessive Used as
Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets” (2016), a per-
formance work published in Float alongside Carson’s lyric lecture on falling.
Each of these works is a variation on the essay or lecture forms. The first two
 The Eros Variations 35

are structured around readings of other works, while the third is a series of
reflections on spoken and written grammar, and the workings of the posses-
sive pronoun. All three talk about and respond formally to the notion that one
of the principal desires activated by language is the desire to possess or master.
“Mastery of this relation is part of the study of letters,” Carson has said of the en-
during perversity of our relation to the written word (121), and these three works
each find ways to capture, circumvent, or sabotage this default.
Carson’s approach to desire here, then, is also an approach to form. In these
three studies in the complexity of erotic relation, self-​relation, and possession,
Carson’s arguments are rehearsed in the formal organization of the work, with a
view to performing and eliciting a particular mode of thought in the real time of
reading or, in the case of the sonnet-​form lecture, in the time-​bound experience
of its staging. The shifts that occur between Eros the Bittersweet, The Albertine
Workout, and “Possessive Used as Drink (Me)” take us through various degrees
of performative form, pulling further by degrees from full-​bodied, referenced,
and indexed critical prose toward more haphazard forms of argument that
happen as an effect of form and/​or live performance. Carson has said, we saw,
that form “arises out of the thing itself ”; that, faced with a set of facts, “form is a
rough approximation of what the facts are doing.” When asked to explain what
she means by this, she adds: “when we say that form imitates reality or some-
thing like that it sounds like an image. I’m saying it’s more like a tempo being
covered, like a movement within an event or a thing.”14 Each of these eros vari-
ations makes an argument by tempo, the approximation of a movement, as well
as, or instead of, an exposition. In their pursuit of such effects, all three works ex-
press something essential about the emotional life of desire, and they infer some-
thing, in turn, about the emotional life of their readers or audience. While their
concerns derive from the “main issue” of Carson’s thesis, all three works err from
established modes of scholarly writing, modeling new acts of exchange between
the critical gesture and its objects of study.

Eros the Bittersweet

Five years after completing her doctoral thesis, Carson published Eros the
Bittersweet with Princeton University Press.15 In his praise for the book, the poet
and essayist Guy Davenport wrote that it showcases to readers a scholar “with a
mind as fresh as a spring meadow.”16 In the “Essay on What I think About Most,”
first published in Raritan in 1999, Carson reflects on the quality of “freshness.”
She begins her close-​reading inquiry into what she calls “true mistakes” with a
quotation from Aristotle on the three categories of words—​strange, ordinary,
and metaphorical: “Strange words simply puzzle us; /​ordinary words convey
36 Variations in Criticism

what we know already; /​it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something
new & fresh.”17 “In what,” she asks, “does the freshness of metaphor consist?”

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself

in the act of making a mistake.

He pictures the mind moving along a plane surface
of ordinary language
when suddenly
that surface breaks or complicates.
Unexpectedness emerges.18

The kind of language Carson “thinks about most,” and the kind of language she
argues is sought by the first lyric poets to express the innermost paradoxes of
desire, is a language that moves minds to feats of self-​awareness like this one.
Carson continues, paraphrasing the arguments of her early scholarly essay, “ ‘Just
for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s Poetics”: “Metaphors teach the mind //​
to enjoy error /​and to learn /​from the juxtaposition of what is and what is
not the case.”19 “Error. /​And its emotions” (the poem’s first lines) continue to
be a central concern of Carson’s, reappearing as recently as her 2021 essay on
“Stillness,” which reproduces verbatim lines from the “Essay on What I Think
About Most” and ponders “mistakes” that perform irreverent revelations, from
John Cage’s silences to Meister Eckhart’s syntactic inversions.20 It is here that
Carson describes the essay form as a performance of unexpectedness, in which
surfaces break and complicate: “an essay is a broaching, an interference, a disrup-
tion, a breaking in of me upon you—​your mind as a quiet lake, me jumping into
it.”21 If Eros the Bittersweet is a stage for Carson’s incipient freshness of mind, it is
perhaps because the disruptive function of metaphor is not only the object of a
scholarly exposition, but is structured into the form and argumentative texture
of the essay.
The early tonal crescendo of Eros the Bittersweet is a short, quotable buzz-​
phrase on the effects of desire: “Desire moves. Eros is a verb” (17). Eros is a force
of momentum that compels individuals, but the movement of its “volts,” for
Carson, discloses something else about eros: that erotic voltage runs its charge
through words, “replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language,” as
Carson argues Sappho does, and as Carson begins to do here in her elegant de-
ductive ruse.22 The appearance of the phrase is the first time we come across the
idea in the book that there is something about eros that requires its thinking and
description to move into the terrain of the counterfactual. Flaunting a category
mistake, Carson’s theatrical turn of phrase performs the kind of unexpectedness
 The Eros Variations 37

she ascribes to metaphor, but which, by this point in the essay, she has also
attributed to the “subterfuge” of desire. The verbality of eros is a “true mistake,” in
the terms of Carson’s “Essay on What I Think About Most,” to express what is and
what is not the case—​that eros is, and is not, a verb. Since the earliest surviving
Greek lyric, the principal source texts of Eros the Bittersweet, language has been
stretched and compressed under the demand to inspire and perform desire;
into neologism and coinages like Sappho’s glukupikron and through all available
densities of metaphor. One of the most memorable and outrageously kinetic of
the Ancient lyric similes quoted by Carson is this from Anakreon: “With his huge
hammer again Eros knocked me like a /​blacksmith /​and doused me in a wintry
ditch.”23 Hot and cold, Carson says, converge in a delighted masochistic blow.
It is a striking beginning for Carson’s theory of eros: that a study of the logical
scandals and grammatical acrobatics of lyric should follow suit with a counter-
factual move of its own. What interests Carson in the grammatical and syntactic
moves of lyric is a quality of performativity structured into them. She will call this
quality “lyric mimesis” in the essay “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” where she argues that
the smallest shifts in declension or tense, all the way to the boldest arrangements
of metaphor, are designed to mime (and to replicate in the reader) the high-​line
reasoning of erotic love.24 Her own slightly dazzling instance—​“eros is a verb”—​
is no exception. Where the doctoral thesis shares much in common with its
sharper, snazzier rewrite at the level of argument and philological detail, what
makes Carson’s scholarship in Eros the Bittersweet “fresh,” in Davenport’s words,
is its reliance on metaphor as a structural principle, a mimetic “form for the
form” of desire.25 Metaphor in Carson’s book—​metaphora, transferral or move-
ment from one place to another, a movement of reach—​is the epistemological
structure that not only best allows us to understand desire, but that most closely
mimics it.26
In his introductory remarks to Glass, Irony and God almost a decade later,
Davenport spoke of a “mathematics of the emotions” in Carson. Her writing,
he wrote, is structured around “daring equations and recurring sets and subsets
of images.”27 Carson’s early theory of eros takes the form of a Bilderreihen or
image sequence, a constellation of vivid tableaux, metaphors, and analogies,
among them the triangle, the ruse, the apple of Daphnis and Chloe, the Greek
alphabet, the ice-​crystal of Sophokles, gardens, wings, cicadas, and so on. The
triangle, a figure with iterations all over Carson’s writing, first appears in her
reading of Sappho’s fragment 31, one of the few near-​complete poems in the ex-
tant fragmenta.28 In fragment 31, which reappears in the title essay of Decreation
twenty years later, desire circulates through the angles of three pronouns—​“He,”
“you,” and “me.” The poem stages two parallel acts of attention: a listener (“He”)
who “listens close,” and an onlooker (“me”) who observes the listener and his
attentions to her beloved (“you”) at a distance at once grievous and delicious.
38 Variations in Criticism

He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking . . .

Carson uses these first lines of the fragment to consider what it might mean to
be a lover “equal to gods,” who seems—​perhaps as the Streb dancers look “like
gods for an instant”—​to be almost impervious to risk. Sappho’s lyric subject
knows this kind of risk only too well. In thrall to what she witnesses, erotic de-
lirium threatens her with annihilation: “for when I look at you, a moment, then
no speaking /​is left in me . . . /​. . . greener than grass /​I am and dead—​or almost /​
I seem to me.”29
The fragment traces out the familiar geometry of mimetic desire: “He” is the
kind of lover the poem’s “I” would like to be but isn’t; interceding between the
lover and her beloved, his desire (as René Girard would have it) is part of what
makes the beloved so desirable in the first place. For Girard, mimetic desire is
“the source of all disorder”—​not least the kind of sensory disorder experienced
in abundance by Sappho’s lover-​in-​waiting.30 “It is not a poem about the three
of them as individuals,” in Carson’s words, “but about the geometrical figure
formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception” (13).
This geometrical figure, the triangle, arcs and pulls into order the “lines of force”
that circulate in the disorderly forms of human eros.
The triangle, with its bold psychosexual trigonometry, is the first explicit in-
stance in the book of Carson’s “mathematics of the emotions.” Following on from
it is a series of single, clear-​cut, still-​frame metaphors that picture the complex
grammars of erotic desire in a sequence of interconnected, interchangeable
shapes. Eros the Bittersweet comprises thirty-​four short chapters—​the shortest
just a paragraph in length—​, each of which boasts an alluringly cryptic title
(“Ruse,” “Edge,” “Ice-​pleasure,” “Realist,” “Read Me the Bit Again”). The book
moves from one still-​frame to the other with little pause for recollection, sum-
mary, or what in academic parlance is sometimes called “signposting” for the
reader. Structured as an unbroken syntax of figures, none of which claims argu-
mentative predominance, Carson’s inquiry performs the circulation of eros, its
variable “lines of force” and its dance in which “desire moves,” in the real time of
reading. We are passed, as desire is parsed, through one figure after another, as
though what Carson wants is for desire to be simply “a mood of knowledge” (66).
A recent review of her writing claims, “you read her work with the prevailing
sense that you’re getting something and getting it fast.”31 Here, the prerogatives
of lyric exchange action with critical scholarship. Their shared métier: to make
desire “happen,” make it dance, in the tempo of thinking about it.32
 The Eros Variations 39

In her conversation with Kevin McNeilly, the term Carson uses to cover these
effects is “imitation,” and she defines it as “simply a mirroring of the activity of
the thought you had at the time you had it, and an attempt to make that activity
happen again in the mind of the listener [or] the reader . . . the verb, whatever
the verb is that’s being described. The verb happens.”33 While Carson’s com-
ment couldn’t be a more lucid justification for “eros is a verb,” it also indicates
an intention in her writing to exchange what we might call an author-​centered
argumentative form with a reader-​driven, performative one. John D’Agata has
described the essay form as the seat of “lyric” action: as “an art form that tracks
the evolution of consciousness as it rolls over the folds of a new idea, memory,
or emotion . . . capturing that activity of human thought in real time.”34 Yet
Carson’s essay seems to go one step further. Her figure sequence captures the ac-
tivity of thought, but it also scripts a kind of choreography for ours, compelling
us to “think” desire as we read. As another recent reader writes, “when we read
Carson, we do the thinking.”35
So far, so consistent with Carson’s claim to derive form from “what the facts
are doing.” An early reviewer described Eros the Bittersweet as “a literary em-
bodiment” of the structural metaphors of desire, recalling, the same reviewer
remarks, “the critical approaches introduced by Derrida’s seminal interpre-
tation of the Phaedrus in La Dissémination,” published in the English trans-
lation the year Carson’s doctoral thesis was submitted.36 There are certainly
affinities with Derrida, for whom writing—​the pharmakon, poison-​remedy of
philosophy—​is the true, disavowed object of desire in the Phaedrus. For philos-
ophy, he says, writing represents the “inexhaustible adversity of what funds it
and the infinite absence of what founds it.”37 (Unlike lyric poetry, philosophy
seldom acknowledges the lack that is its generative condition.) Derrida’s polem-
ical account, his translator Barbara Johnson observed, “mimes the movement of
desire rather than its fulfillment.”38 Yet the kind of “paraliterature” that results,
Gregory Ulmer has written, “enacts or performs (mimes) the compositional
structuration of the referent”—​the semiological unconscious of Plato’s text—​
with a view to exposing as unviable its founding opposition between philosophy
and sophistry, or metaphysics and writing.39 Derrida’s mimetic account mimes,
or performs, to critique. Carson’s account mimes—​“My Page makes love,” she
quotes Montaigne—​just for the thrill.40
In this, Carson’s paraliterary reading of eros is far closer to Roland Barthes,
whose Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments,
1978) makes an appearance in the chapter epigraph to “Now Then” (117),
and whose writing surfaces, cited or otherwise, across her work. Barthes’s fa-
mous account of desire is summoned by the structure and conceits of Eros the
Bittersweet. In its opening pages, Barthes lays claim to what he calls a “structural”
40 Variations in Criticism

portrait composed of “figures” (“the body’s gesture caught in action and not
contemplated in repose”), “non-​syntagmatic, non-​narrative,” to perform the
“amorous subject” as an effect of writing: “the description of the lover’s discourse
has been replaced by its simulation,” he announces.41 Like Carson’s—​thinking
of her breezy citations of Woolf, Sartre, Kierkegaard, rather than her readings
of Plato or the lyric poets—​, Barthes’s performative account is capricious in its
citational style, “not invoking guarantees, merely recalling, by a kind of salute
given in passing, what has seduced, convinced, or has momentarily given the
delight of understanding (of being understood?).”42 As well as the performance
of a speech act, miming how desire “sounds” as it leaves through other people’s
words (“So it is a lover who speaks and who says: . . . ”), Barthes’s text is a per-
formance of his thinking, full of “reminders of reading, of listening”; the kind
of remembrances scattered all across Carson’s writing—​in her translations, Nox,
Antigonick, H of H Playbook, and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, as across her essays
in prose and verse.43 The genre of these paraliterary readings was never an issue
for their authors. The writing, under the same laws as its object of study, was quite
simply that—​écriture; and écriture, as Anastasia-​Erasmia Peponi has suggested,
is in the air when Carson revises her thesis as the essay, Eros the Bittersweet.44
If Eros the Bittersweet is a “literary embodiment” of its object, it is one that not
only hopes to perform the duress of desire at the level of form, in the here and
now of its readings. Carson’s performative here-​and-​now participates in a logic
of desire that pitches it directly opposite the “then” of Plato’s “nonlover,” who is
happier to engage in describing—​defining, mastering—​desire than performing
and ceding to its strictures; which would mean, finally, being unable to pin it
down. What happens to the essay under the pressures of this formal imitation,
and in the case of so erratic and compelling an object, is perhaps the same that
happens to the subject of desire, whose story, Carson tells us at the end of Eros the
Bittersweet, only truly begins with the incursion of eros: “the biggest risk of your
life”—​forcing you “to come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and
startling way” (152–​153). Earlier in the book, Carson states directly that “[t]‌here
would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a
lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker” (70), a nod to Plato’s ar-
gument for philosophy in the Phaedrus, but also a reading of interpretation and
the interpretive impulse, one in which her own thinking emphatically includes
itself. As eros moves the mind to self-​awareness, Carson pursues the same move-
ment in writing.
Just what was Eros the Bittersweet for Carson? We have seen her suggest that
the thesis from which the book derives isolated a “main issue of [her] being.” In
the same interview with D’Agata, however, Carson also claims that, in terms of
what it achieved, Eros the Bittersweet was a one-​off. The 1986 essay on desire was,
she says, “possibly the last time I got those two impulses to move in the same
 The Eros Variations 41

stream—​the academic and the other [the ‘poetic’]. After that, I think I realized
I couldn’t do that again.”45 She goes on to say that “I can’t come back together to
replicate Eros [the Bittersweet].”46 For Carson, it seems, there is no reliable return
“again and again” to this particular text of desire, in which scholarship and poiesis
moved to the same rhythm, converged “in the same stream.” There was, she says,
a “clean” quality to the work that she feels is now irretrievable.
The second part of this chapter returns to the strategy of real-​time or perfor-
mative form that arises out of Eros the Bittersweet, and which Carson has con-
tinued to rehearse in later works engaging questions of desire, difference, and
mastery. Before moving on to these, I want to stay for a moment with the par-
ticular fate of Eros the Bittersweet, which for Carson remains a shining instance
of something—​the moving of scholarship and poiesis “in the same stream”—​to
which she still aspires in her writing.
One effect of the discourse of desire seems to be precisely the kind of irre-
trievability Carson spoke of in reference to Eros the Bittersweet: an acute sense
(shared with one-​to-​one expressions of desire) that no sooner is such a discourse
expressed than it has—​or we have—​shifted shape. In the Phaedrus, Socrates
talks about the presence of paradox and ambivalence in his characterization
of erotic love. Love, he suggests, is a naturally dialectical state, with knock-​on
effects for its description and definition: so it is, Phaedrus notes, that Socrates
ends up having to “describe [love] as a curse to lover and loved alike, and then to
turn round and assert that it is the greatest of blessings.”47 Socrates gets so caught
up in the description that an earlier theorization of love, which he outlined to
Phaedrus with the full force of conviction, slips into oblivion: “But tell me,” he
says, addressing his young interlocutor: “—​I’ve been so carried out of myself that
I’ve quite forgotten—​did I define love at the beginning of my speech?” Phaedrus’s
answer is yes: “in the most emphatic manner conceivable.”48 Socrates’s moment
of oblivion, in which he is “carried out of myself ” like Aristotle’s “kidnapped”
subject of opsis, or even like the ecstatic, self-​observing narrator of Sappho’s frag-
ment 31, recalls a similar moment in Longinus’s “On the Sublime.” Longinus,
too, finds himself possessed “by a spirit not [his] own” as he reverts to rhetor-
ical strategies—​among them the imitation of other writers—​in order to describe
the sublime. Carson will allude to something like this capture in “Foam (Essay
with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni” (2005), where she
describes the sublime as not just a sensation but a “documentary technique” that
mimics it, replicating the sensation as a feature of the text.49
The possession of an author by her object—​moving as desire moves, as
Barthes sought to do in the delirious “dramatic method” of A Lover’s Discourse—​
is one explanation of what happens to Carson in her essay on desire; an effect
that, depending on how we feel toward it, is either to its credit or its detriment
as an essay.50 Carson’s thesis has it, in D’Agata’s words, that “the real lover and
42 Variations in Criticism

recipient of . . . desire is language itself,” a romance that seems to give permis-

sion for Carson’s own text to get carried away.51 (It echoes Barthes’s sentiments,
too, that “intellectual effort should be directed toward a secondary sexuality, in
particular toward the sexuality of language”).52 In an emphatic critique of Eros
the Bittersweet a year after the book’s publication, and picking up on the image
of Kafka’s “spinning top” from Carson’s preface to the book, T .J Sienkewicz
remarked that “in her sheer joy of the spinning top she creates, [Carson] falls into
an illusion of fragmentary wholeness, a temporary delusion that the fragmentary
state of Greek lyric is structurally intentional.”53 Carson’s readings of Sappho in
Eros the Bittersweet center on an aesthetics of fragmentation that is, this book’s
final chapter suggests, the silver lining of the Sappho canon’s extreme material
impoverishment; an aesthetics, Carson has admitted, that has influenced her en-
tire approach to writing.54 It is an aesthetics that results (she acknowledges) from
historical accident, misquotation, and faulty preservation: material loss, here, as
for the Hellenophile poets of Imagism, equals poetic gain.55 A remark on Sappho
fragment 105a all but admits the contradictions of such a position: “the poem is
incomplete, perfectly”; imperfection as perfect serendipity, or even perfect form
(27). Sienkewicz is right to imply that Carson is more interested in the shimmer
of “fragmentary wholeness” than the extreme historical contingency of these
texts, perhaps allowing herself even to labor under a “temporary delusion.” The
thrill of the fragment’s accidental perfection is an emotion—​a “drama,” in If Not,
Winter—​that we almost expect in lyric poetry, but that, in Sienkewicz’s reading,
puts the integrity of scholarship at risk.
Carson is clear that some degree of rhetorical possession goes with the terri-
tory of eros. She devotes several chapters to the ways in which punning, doubling
language enters into the discourse of eros (“It seems impossible to talk about or
reason about erotic lack without falling into this punning language,” 33). Her own
“sheer joy” of reading and composition picks up harmonies with the Platonic
lover, for whom all signs, however arbitrary and contingent, point to the beloved
object. For this lover, there is no accident—​no fragment or parataxis—​that is not
somehow predestined in its address, a kind of perfect, poetic incompletion. In a
sense at which Derrida might have smiled, Carson’s theory of eros works under
the sway (“under the influence”) of its object, which is never quite divisible—​
Carson’s own essay seeks to show—​from the logic of writing. If Sienkewicz’s
suggestion is that it is writing that carries Carson away, writing that has made
her delirious, we might respond that this delirium—​the lucid performance of
desire—​is what makes her account so compelling. We might add, with Derrida,
that getting caught up in the logos—​Carson and us—​is what makes it seductive;
that an un-​deferred logos “would not seduce anyone.”56 Carson’s “temporary” de-
lusion lasts as long as it takes us, her readers, to do the thinking she wants us to
with regard to a fragment of verse. The synthetic effects she theorizes in relation
 The Eros Variations 43

to lyric poetry, which I talk about in Chapter 8 in her readings of Sappho, appeal
to just this kind of captive, here-​and-​now emotional reasoning, in which we see
ourselves thinking and hear ourselves parsing words.
If there is a risk to mimicking the analogical movements, repeated iterations,
and emotional reasoning of eros, it is perhaps because this reasoning cannot be
reconciled with the logic and rationale of historicist and materialist academic
scholarship, for which “now” and “then” are never simultaneous, and “perfect”
textual incompletion is inconceivable. As Carson says in Economy of the Unlost
of the “landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and
exchange judgments”: “I go blind out there.” Yet what threatens the argumenta-
tive integrity of Carson’s essay is to its advantage as a performance. The concerns
of Carson’s essay continue to crop up across her writing, and each time they do,
they produce consequent, performative forms to carry off, or carry away, her
thinking. The Albertine Workout, Carson’s blueprint for an essay on Albertine
Simonet, muse of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, matches its
arguments about possession, desire, and the desire to know, with a “form for the
form” for reading Proust.

The Albertine Workout

If Eros the Bittersweet teaches us one thing about eros—​eros the “verb”—​, it is
that it compels and requires continual movement, a requirement that jars with
the wish to hold time and the beloved in suspense. Formally committed to this
lesson, Carson’s book shows how desire gets libidinally tangled up in the sub-
stance of its expression (a fact Barthes’s “lover’s discourse” made the center of its
own mimetic confession). The suggestion is, in Eros the Bittersweet, that what we
cannot defy in time, we can somehow get to grips with in writing that rehearses
the erratic tempo of eros; a performative script in which “the verb happens.”
Eros the Bittersweet is a case of such writing entering and unsettling the do-
main of critical scholarship. Carson’s first book-​length essay is, we saw, the re-
sult of a confluence of two impulses conventionally kept apart: “the academic”
and “the poetic”; the stylistics and formal shape of their complicity constitutes
an imitative enactment of Carson’s theory of eros and a playful engagement with
the central concern of Plato’s Phaedrus. Yet a number of later works return to the
book’s arguments in new and more obviously experimental essay forms. These
iterations of the original theory plumb the principle Carson calls “exchange of
action”—​an exchange of the action of thinking from author to reader, from ex-
position to performance—​to produce new and less familiar “essay” forms.
In 2013, at a staged reading from “59 Paragraphs About Albertine,” a work un-
published at the time, Carson described her experience of reading Marcel Proust,
44 Variations in Criticism

in French, for thirty minutes at breakfast, every day for seven years—​“one of the
best seven years of my life,” she quips. She explains what happened next:

The interval of reading Proust is immediately followed by something else, that

I call the desert of After Proust. And it’s a space of life where all you want is for
Proust to go on. But there is no more. And so for a while you kind of make do
with other sorts of reading material—​biographies and literary studies of Proust,
and word indexes and books by other people who write similarly to Proust, and
it’s all futile, there is no more Proust and that’s that, and eventually you accept
this and settle back into the grey tedium of a life without Proust.57

Out of this scholarly ennui came a series of fifty-​nine sequentially numbered

paragraphs of varying length, published under the title “The Albertine Workout”
in 2014 in the London Review of Books with an extended pamphlet edition
published by New Directions less than a month later.58 In the extended version
of the work, the fifty-​nine numbered paragraphs are followed by a series of six-
teen allusively titled appendices numbered non-​sequentially: “appendix 4 on
Samuel Beckett” is immediately followed by “appendix 8 on capture myopathy,”
finishing with “appendix 59 on a bad photograph,” an arrangement that suggests
the remaining, hypothetical appendices (and the prose to which they refer?) are
missing in action. The paragraphs themselves, sometimes discontinuous, some-
times in an unbroken flow, turn on the subject of Proust’s Albertine Simonet,
the elusive and difficult love object of Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu.
The entries making up the main body of the work consist of stray concordance
data (e.g., “2. Albertine’s name occurs 2,363 times in Proust’s novel, more than
any other character”) interwoven with a fragmented account of Marcel’s sin-
gular fixation on Albertine, allusions to possible avenues of critical inquiry, and
a series of drily lyrical observations that quote or mimic Proust’s descriptions
of Albertine.59 In the appendices, by contrast, Carson’s associations to the data
and vignettes are allowed to bloom. Like the “bonsai-​shaped appendices” to her
doctoral thesis, into which, she says, “all of the imaginative sections [of her re-
search] had to be forced,” the rhizomatic appendices of The Albertine Workout
point down discontinuous lines of inquiry, offering associations and commen-
tary on the details and scattered images that piqued Carson in the course of her
reading.60
Carson’s notes form a cumulative picture: a kind of painting-​by-​numbers of
the central dilemma in which Albertine finds herself caught in La Prisonnière
(The Captive), volume five of À la recherche. Imprisoned by Marcel in his
home and at the mercy of his overactive erotic suspicions, Albertine’s story is
both a story of victimhood and the chronicle of a strange form of resistance to
Marcel’s banal possessiveness. Despite her imprisonment, Carson suggests in her
 The Eros Variations 45

numbered notes, Albertine is an object that continues to evade capture, her mind
and her desires ultimately impossible to pin down. Marcel’s is a “usual boundless
uncertainty” around what Albertine might be doing or thinking, “an uncertainty
too indeterminate to be painless” (relativement à ce que faisait Albertine . . . mon
infini doute habituel, trop indéterminé pour ne pas rester indolore . . .).61 In his
attempted total possession of Albertine, Marcel uncovers the tedium not only
of having what he wants, but of robbing himself—​by robbing Albertine—​of
new objects of scintillation, new material to master.62 In The Albertine Workout,
Marcel’s iconic ennui, along with the totalizing desire that produces it, is staged
as a commentary on another, parallel set of desires and their consequences. For
Carson’s broken narration of what happens in La Prisonnière is a designed ex-
posure of how and why she reads it in the form she does—​in a deliberately in-
complete, draft-​or blueprint-​form essay, whose structure performs the process,
rather than the finished article, of a critical reading.
Hermeneutic possessiveness is precisely what The Albertine Workout works
against in its sparse and erratic exercise. It is a reading that, while listing them
in an inconclusive collage arrangement, refuses to be drawn on the facts col-
lected in and around Proust’s novel. Rather, as Carson hints in her remarks on
the piece at its first public outing, The Albertine Workout takes its cue and its
raison d’être from the limits of its object: from the bare, incontrovertible fact that
“there is no more.” “The desert of After Proust” (a phrase that also makes an ap-
pearance in “appendix 15 (a) on adjectives”) is a state to which Carson’s exer-
cise both acquiesces, by listing the bare residual facts of the work, and resists,
by performing their unfinished interpretation. In the relation of the appendices
to this list, the desire for “more” is staged in the exposed movements of a mind
unmooring itself from the facts. As one reviewer of the Workout notes, in
Carson’s text, “an appendix pointing toward a text cannot match the text pre-
cisely, but can think around it, imprecisely.”63
The sometimes downright bizarre associations to Proust in the appendices re-
call the kind of discontinuous desire-​led inquiry undertaken and theorized by
Barthes, and which often, in his case, came to rest on the figure of Proust, too.
Indeed, Barthes—​whom Carson refers to in The Albertine Workout as “that late-​
born pre-​Socratic philosopher” and whose theory of the photographic image she
cites in the final appendix64—​said of his own encounters with Proust: “Proust
is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an authority, simply a cir-
cular memory.”65 Carson’s list-​plus-​appendix format allows her to formalize a
fresh, untheorized relation between the facts of Proust’s novel and the circula-
tion of memory and association around it; to set down anecdotally what she calls
the “sparks”—​what Barthes, in Le Neutre, calls scintillations—​lit in the course
of her research.66 Barthes’s course delivered at the Collège de France includes
notes for sessions on Proust, whose own blueprint form—​a form anticipating
46 Variations in Criticism

a future performance, as was explicit in his final course, The Preparation of the
Novel, whose “novel” was never written—​makes us think of Carson’s “workout”
as awaiting a similar realization: that its endgame, where the work “happens,”
is somewhere other than the text itself.67 To write up her notes in conventional
essay form would be, as it were, to end the affair, extinguishing its spark and
inducing an ennui worthy of Marcel himself.
A sketch for an essay suspended in time, then, whose completion remains
pending and possible, The Albertine Workout stages its own “mathematics of the
emotions” in response to an object that, for Carson, is always more than the sum
of its parts. Its spare list of facts and associations recalls the Bilderreihen or image
sequences that give Eros the Bittersweet its fragmented structure and that make de-
sire “happen” in the process of reading. The workout pulls on the aesthetics of the
fragment, whose allure derives from what is omitted from its clipped forms. These
forms are, as such, always provisional and always an invitation to the reader: Kim
Anno, who collaborated with Carson in the artist book edition of The Albertine
Workout, spoke of their desire to create “an open reading that readers and viewers
can make on their own.”68 The fragment “designates a presentation,” as Philippe
Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy have written, “that does not pretend to
be exhaustive” (“the empty place that a garland of fragments surrounds is a pre-
cise drawing of the contours of the work”).69 It is in this committed design not to
exhaust—​not to exhaust Proust, in this case—​that Carson’s work sets itself up as a
reading of Albertine that has learned the lesson that Marcel’s reading of her within
the novel has not. Carson’s elliptical statements perform her reading as “process”
as they gesture toward a possible whole that is at once desired and actively delayed.
Carson’s workout is, in this sense, less an effort to “work out who Albertine is” (as
one reader has argued70) than the contrary impulse: to hold her decipherment
and capture at bay, so to keep desire in circulation. Where it documents the pro-
found pleasure of la recherche—​the pursuit of something whose dimensions are
yet to be determined (the “empty place” the collection of notes “surrounds”), and
of course, the pleasures of scholarly research—​its inconclusive form passes that
pleasure on to the reader, so that it “happens again” in the action of reading.
In addition to its performative form, the workout’s comment on its own
strategy is explicit at several key points. Early on in the work, Carson explores a
possible interpretation of Albertine’s sexual enigma in the form of the so-​called
transposition theory—​the theory that the Albertine character is in fact a fe-
male version of Proust’s chauffer, Alfred Agostinelli, which, as Carson explains,
exhibits parallels between the circumstances of their deaths and the gifts given to
Agostinelli and Albertine by the two Marcels, author and protagonist.71 In entry
57, following a climactic exposition of the theory, Carson bluntly disqualifies it
by bringing its totalizing biographical scoop into symmetry with Marcel’s para-
noid reading of Albertine: “57. Granted the transposition theory is a graceless,
 The Eros Variations 47

intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism,” she says, though she admits,
continuing, that “in the case of Proust it is also irresistible” (p. 20). The analogical
relation between Albertine and Agostinelli is worked and unworked, tossed and
turned, all the way through the workout, as part of a wider to-​and-​fro in the work
between the consequences of a desire to comprehend Albertine: capture and
liberation, facts and the allure of possibility beyond them. The workout, finally,
works in pursuit of the “something that facts lack”—​words Carson uses in Nox
under the influence of a very different impulse. “Overtakelessness,” she writes
there, “is a word told to me by a philosopher once: das Unumgängliche—​that
which cannot be got round.”72 Rather than overtaking or closing down the ques-
tion of Albertine, Carson’s inquiry approaches what it is in her that fascinates
Marcel and eludes his own theories—​that which cannot be got round, which re-
mains indecipherable—​by performing its painstaking non-​decipherment.
While the transposition theory episode functions as a manifesto against over-​
possessive theorization, there is a playful ambivalence throughout the piece
toward interpretation and its double allure: the allure of possibility and of its
calculated constraint. Reflecting on the transposition theory, Carson tells her
readers that what interests her are the “spark[s]‌to be struck from rubbing Alfred
[Agostinelli] against Albertine, as it were” (57, p. 20). The last of these sparks to
be struck in the workout comes from the stanza by Mallarmé that Proust had
inscribed “on the fuselage of Alfred’s plane—​the same verse Marcel promises to
engrave on the prow of Albertine’s yacht,” Carson writes. The stanza consists of
four verses from the second poem of the tetrad “Plusieurs sonnets,” “Le vierge,
le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.” Carson explains in the entry preceding her repro-
duction of the fragment that the four verses are “about a swan that finds itself
frozen into the ice of a lake in winter.” “Magnificent,” Carson’s translation reads,
“but /​without hope of setting himself free /​for he sailed to sing /​of a region for
living /​when barren winter /​burned all around him with ennui.”

58.

Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.
(Mallarmé, “Le vierge, le vivace and [sic] le bel aujourd’hui”)

Mallarmé’s swan moves in these lines from an affirmation (c’est lui, “it is he”—​
Magnifique, Magnificent) to its near destitution (mais qui sans espoir, “but /​
without hope”). The change of condition staged here, from natural possibility
to its immobilization, evokes the captive Albertine, but also a form of paralysis
48 Variations in Criticism

closer to home for Carson the poet. For the swan’s capture pictures a resistance to
possibility within the poem, or even a warning of poetry’s failure—​Pour n’avoir
pas chanté, “for he failed to sing”—​while the poem continues to sound. This
freezing mid-​movement pictures the detention of meaning and a mind that has
ceased to move, unhappy result of a reading that seeks to hold the poem still in
time (a rush to the “then,” at the expense of the “now”). The detention of meaning
is a state the poem names stérile hiver, a barren winter and an ennui to match not
just Marcel’s—​stricken with boredom by the success of his capture—​but the te-
dium of completion that Carson’s exercise wards off.
Carson’s remarks on the Mallarmé fragment in the preceding entry present
it to us in an undeniably sad light: “What a weird and lonely shadow to cast on
these two love affairs [Marcel-​Albertine, Proust-​Agostinelli], the fictional and
the real; what a desperate analogy to offer of the lover’s final wintry paranoia of
possession” (57, p. 20). A wan shadow it casts, too, over the possibility of para-
noid reading, interpretation that seeks to possess its object by suspecting (and
proving) what it “really means.” “Paranoid reading,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
term for reading under the injunction of suspicion—​whose signature affects
are, in Lisa Ruddick’s words, “deadness and meanness”—​is the kind of criticism
whose verve for what the text “really means” leads it to immobilize a poem’s ac-
tion, along with the surprise and vertigo it can inspire (Sontag even speaks of
the work’s “freedom to ‘mean’ nothing”).73 Its affair with the text is always risk-​
averse because it seeks in the text that which is finally reducible to the reader’s
suspicions. Marcel, paranoid reader par excellence, refuses to recognize that
his version of the beloved object is one of many possible fictions. His capture
of Albertine, like the swan that becomes her motif, marks the hopeless sterility
of possession. And yet, the following and final entry in the workout, quoting
Marcel’s uncertain epiphany in La Prisonnière, acknowledges such possession
is always in any case a fantasy: “59. ‘Everything, indeed, is at least double,’ La
Prisonnière, p. 362,” a phrase echoed in Samuel Beckett’s remarks on the “double
sign” of Proustian action—​that which is always at least double what it seems.74
The double impulse of interpretive fascination—​toward possession on the
one hand and possibility on the other; captivation by theory and by what slips
its moorings—​is set up, then, to mirror the paradox of possessive desire at the
heart of À la recherche. One of the more significant achievements of The Albertine
Workout is the communication of such a reading without explicitly making the
case for it: the form of Carson’s essay, I have been suggesting, is a powerful inter-
pretive act, sustaining her argument by producing the coincidence of a dilemma
with a form for reading it. In no single sentence or entry does Carson tell us her
precise reading of the Albertine question; rather, she follows lines of inquiry that
replicate the outline of its central dilemma. Within Proust’s novel, for example,
 The Eros Variations 49

Marcel discovers that what he finds so troubling and, at the same time, so al-
luring in Albertine is the non-​reducibility of her actions to one or other pos-
sible reading of them, never more so than when she is asleep. Sleep is where
Albertine slips her bonds. Carson reports the following in some of the workout’s
most clipped and elliptical entries: “24. The state of Albertine that most pleases
Marcel is Albertine asleep.” “27. a) Sometimes in her sleep Albertine throws off
her kimono and lies naked. b) Sometimes then Marcel possesses her. c) Albertine
appears not to wake up.” The question Carson draws out of the conundrum of
Albertine’s sleep is what kind of control is being exercised here and by whom.
For in her sleep, Albertine is alluring for the same reason as she is, or seems to be,
non-​consenting: remaining asleep while “Marcel possesses her,” Albertine begins
to represent for Marcel the creeping presence of fiction, the slippery realm of
the “double sign”—​what Carson, in her entries, calls “the bluff.” Marcel, Carson
remarks, “appears to think he is the master of such moments,” and yet “he gets
himself tangled up in the wiles of the woman. On the other hand, who is bluffing
whom is hard to say.” The bluff is so difficult, to intractable, because it refuses
all efforts to trace out its edges (the same way Carson’s notational form in The
Albertine Workout avoids staking lines of argument, lapsing or ‘sleeping’ between
its numbered entries). Where its contours cannot be traced, the bluff becomes
the sign of impossible possession, the unmasterable because incomplete.
In his readings of À la recherche, René Girard remarked on the refusal of
Marcel’s mother to kiss him goodnight that such a refusal “is both the instigator
of desire and a relentless guardian forbidding its fulfillment.”75 Girard points to
the double role of what he calls “internal mediation,” by which Albertine, too,
both instigates and prohibits desire.76 Just as the “bluff ” of Albertine’s sleep both
instigates and prohibits Marcel’s “hermeneutic” desire, it is also the fiction that
cantilevers Proust’s novel off balance, undercutting the sovereignty of a single
narrative perspective. Mediator of another’s desire, the bluff—​whosever it is,
finally—​is at the heart of La Prisonnière. Several versions of Proust’s Albertine
in contemporary works of fiction, featuring more or less explicit iterations of the
sleep scenes, have sought to tease out the complexity of this “bluff.” In Jacqueline
Rose’s novel Albertine (2001), a psychoanalytic reading of Proust that puts the
fantasy life of the erotic object at its center, Albertine is awake during the episodes
of possession; it is Marcel who is the object of a sustained manipulation.77 In
Angela Carter’s so-​called theoretical fiction, The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman (1972), the “glass woman” Albertina, daughter of the novel’s in-
ternal weaver of fictions, the eponymous Doctor Hoffman, is a mirror for Carter’s
protagonist in ways that both excite and repel him—​much as Proust’s Marcel is
constituted, to his considerable frustration, by his own difficult object of de-
sire. Albertina is killed by Carter’s protagonist in an ironic victory of fact over
50 Variations in Criticism

psychic fiction, a fiction that, after the event, he continues to long for. Whether
intentionally or otherwise—​and like other metafictional “versions” such as Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992), and Jeanette
Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019)—​these novels have a mind for the theoretical
cultures of their time, composing their iterations of Albertine as works of fem-
inist literary revisionism and, in a roundabout way, as works of criticism.78 Yet
while these novels anticipate their own critical reception—​what Martin Paul Eve
calls a “literature against criticism”—​The Albertine Workout has an altogether
different relationship to critical culture: namely, Carson’s essay wants criticism
out of the way. It features an interpolated letter that Carson has Proust address
to Heraklitos—​“Dear Heraklitos, he wrote, theory is good but it doesn’t prevent
things from existing” (theory, this fiction suggests, is no antidote to the real).79
The work’s rebuff to possessive or paranoid interpretive theories such as the
transposition theory occurs most powerfully by way of its form. An essay in the
making, the work comments on how the critical essay can, as it were, go wrong,
falling into the trap of suspicion and possessive desire. In what it performs, it is a
cautionary tale of how not to read literature.
A wider question that emerges in this fascinating case of performative form
might be said to concern form itself. What does it mean to “give form” to a crit-
ical inquiry? How do formal constraints (sequential numbering, blooming
appendices, or the organized paragraphs of academic prose) translate, and trans-
late into, a set of emotional experiences derived from reading? Certainly, the
minimalism of Carson’s interpretive routine does its best to conceal her; yet the
essay-​in-​waiting is also one of her most theatrical forms, staging an appeal to
the very expectations that judge it incomplete. Carson asks us to do the thinking
work her reading of Proust tells us is best left unfixed. We have seen how Eros the
Bittersweet might “capture the mind” with its kaleidoscopic image repertoire and
pointillistic structure, in which the circulation and displacement of key images
translate, and translate into, the circulation of desire. In the final text studied in
this chapter, we will see the emotional intensities transacted by formal constraint
rise in temperature.80 We will also see the onus of theorizing possession passed
even more decisively to us, as we read (or listen to) the lecture in sonnet form.
The Albertine Workout draws most clearly on Eros the Bittersweet, finally,
when Carson names as “Marcel’s theory of desire” a theory that matches Carson’s
own almost exactly. Marcel’s theory, Carson says, “equates possession of another
person with erasure of the otherness of her mind, while at the same time pos-
iting otherness as what makes another person desirable” (entry 18). Later, we
read Marcel’s own words to this effect: “ ‘One only loves that which one does not
entirely possess,’ says Marcel” (entry 52). Another way the workout reprises Eros
the Bittersweet is in the reappearance of the trope of the “verb” and its place in
 The Eros Variations 51

grammars of desire. At first glance, the verb trope makes its first appearance by
omission, as part of Carson’s reflections on grammar and its relationship to the
different forms and degrees of possession. In “appendix 15 (a) on adjectives,”
Carson surmises that “Adjectives are the handles of Being. Nouns name the
world, adjectives let you get hold of the name and keep it from flying all over
your mind like a pre-​Socratic explanation of the cosmos”—​or like a swan,
or a poem, or like a beloved whose being won’t be fixed either. She continues
these reflections in “appendix 15 (b) on adjectives” by bringing our attention to
Barthes’s suggestion “viz. to craft a language with no adjectives at all, thereby to
outwit ‘the fascism of language’ and maintain ‘the utopia of suppressed meaning,’
as he [Barthes] deliriously put it.”81
Language with the capacity to free a captive, to dominate or abandon do-
minion over another language, to establish or cede sovereignty over another way
of speaking, has obvious resonances with Albertine and with Carson’s exercise
in keeping Proust going. Her reading is interested in “the utopia of suppressed
meaning” precisely because it is its suppression, its unavailability as representa-
tion, that goes on releasing ever more meaning into circulation—​a vital source
in “the desert of After Proust.” The adjective is also opposed implicitly to the ac-
tion of the verb, which makes an appearance in one of the final appendices—​“ap-
pendix 34 on getting rid of your slave,” where the verb, it turns out, is precisely
the grammar to undercut possessive desire. In the logic of Eros the Bittersweet
(“eros is a verb”), desire moves because its object claims his or her own volition.
In The Albertine Workout, the presence of the verb is a recognition of the other as
such. Withholding it means a refusal to recognize the other as agent of her own
desire, a refusal of erotic risk, and worse, it turns out. “Marcel’s ultimate reference
to Albertine on the last page of the novel [The Captive],” Carson explains, “is
a sentence without a main verb: Profound Albertine, whom I saw sleeping and
who was dead.”
Carson’s inquiry into the grammars of desire and possession can be traced
throughout her writing: whether in the form of circulating, interchangeable
pronouns, where desire refuses to settle in any one configuration (“pronouns do
the dance called washing” in The Beauty of the Husband); in the love triangles
of Carson’s autobiographical verse essays; or in the ecstatic delivery from self-​
relation explored in Decreation. In the work I turn to in the final part of this
chapter, Carson continues her long-​standing inquiry through a return to the
spoken word—​the orality privileged by Plato over writing as the “real” move in
the discourse of eros. It is a work in which the sonnet form, conventional seat of
the lyric voice and one of the most common forms of love poem, hosts an uncon-
ventional inquiry into the limits between beings, the contingencies and rules—​
physical, emotive, grammatical—​governing their difference.
52 Variations in Criticism

“Possessive Used as Drink (Me)”

In “Uncle Falling,” the lyric lecture with which I began this chapter, Lecturer II
offers some remarks on the lecture form:

The best connections are the ones that draw attention to their own frailty so
that at first you think: what a poor lecture this is—​the ideas go all over the place
and then later you think: but still, what a terrifically perilous activity it is. . . how
unprepared and unpreparable is the web of connections between any thought and
any thought.82

Those “unprepared” connections that “draw attention to their own frailty” might
be just what we find in the loose, non-​sequitur connections of The Albertine
Workout, the risk or “peril” being that we might just lose our thread. The single
remark—​“reading can be freefall”—​printed on the back cover of Float suggests
that, in the case of the lyric lecture, taking its place at random among Carson’s
unnumbered pamphlets, losing our thread is precisely the idea.
In 2006, following a commission from Harvard University, Carson performed
a lecture on the subject of pronouns.83 “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A
Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets” is, as its title suggests, a lecture
written in sonnet form, first performed with the on-​stage support of sound artist
Stephanie Rowden, video artist Sadie Wilcox, and three dancers from the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company, whose improvised choreography accompanied
Carson’s reading.84 The text of her “Lecture on Pronouns” is reproduced in Float
alongside “Uncle Falling” and other performance-​oriented prose and verse
works with similarly associative lines of inquiry, such as “Cassandra Float Can”
and “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent.” “Possessive Used as Drink (Me)”
is a series of sonnets and slight variations on the traditional fourteen-​line verse
form. The etymology of the word “sonnet” (sonetto, a diminutive deriving from
suono, a sound), rather than perhaps the stricter sense of orthodox sonnet linea-
tion, might be what inspired this particular lecture form, which appeals to sound
and cadence to draw out differences, as well as sliding elisions, between pronouns
and the possession they ascribe. As Carson’s offbeat title hints, the “Possessive
Used as Drink (Me)” proposes and performs the use of grammar as inebriant—​
or, in parentheses, as a muffled erotic imperative—​by which boundaries between
persons, possession and self-​possession, might be put to the test. “Washing the
pronouns in the water to remove the mud,” in the terms of one of the sonnets
(the “Sonnet of the Pronoun Event”), the sonnet sequence harnesses the aes-
thetics of live vocal performance to play with muddying and clarifying identities,
sovereignties, and ownership, in an inquiry that performs feats and failures of the
grammatical “possessive.”
 The Eros Variations 53

The tenth sonnet in the sequence, “Merce Sonnet,” a three-​column “blended

text” of the kind we also find in Decreation, offers an indication of where Carson
is going, not just with her pronouns but with the performance aesthetics of the
lecture. An inquiry “of pronoun /​the etymology,” the poem splays its meanings
out horizontally, across the three-​column lines: from “instead of ” and “earlier,
prior, before,” to another, more haphazard history:

Perhaps in this way came to us dancing—​

very early, starry, stumbling, chancing,
that first into hour of air blueblack and bold
before of our names the terrible gusto took hold.85

The pronoun, we hear across these horizontally plotted stanzas, both precedes
and replaces the name. It is a form of naming too early for the (“terrible”) speci-
ficity of the noun, and strongly affiliated to the contingent moves of “dancing”—​
“very early, starry, stumbling, chancing”—​as though the rhyme itself were
fumbled or happened upon by accident, a chance affinity between columns
of text as between bodies in motion. The sonnet alludes both in the title and
text to “Merce”—​the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham, from
whom the dance company that first performed Carson’s lecture takes its name.
Cunningham envisaged modern dance as an art that deals in contradiction,
whose forms of physical freedom embrace the possibility of total internal unfa-
miliarity, including acts of self-​sabotage and what Roger Copeland, in his study of
Cunningham, and remembering John Cage’s “chance operations,” calls “chance
procedures.”86 (Copeland quotes a remark from Marcel Duchamp, a strong in-
fluence on Cunningham, that appears as the epigraph to Carson’s “Sonnet
Isolate”: “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my
own taste”—​an argument for the pursuit of non-​self-​possession through delib-
erate self-​contradiction).87
The debut performance of Carson’s lecture featured unchoreographed contact
dance, accompanied by a live video recording of the dancers and live sound—​
both reading and song—​that weave in and around one another, undermining
and magnifying cadence and rhythm in the sonnets. This interdisciplinary op-
eratic event, in the sense theorized by Linda Hutcheon, brings scored sound and
movement to bear on a spoken libretto, much in the way Carson’s “Decreation”
libretto did several years earlier.88 If the lecture is, as Carson says in the lecture-​
essay on “Stillness,” “a broaching. An interference. A disruption. A breaking in
of me upon you,” then the intermedia lecture makes space for the breaking-​in
of chance and accident on the lecture form—​a move against the intensified pri-
vacy of the written interpretive event. In this inquiry into how relations move
in and among their grammatical names, Carson returns to the ruses of dance
54 Variations in Criticism

of Eros the Bittersweet. From the permutatory partnerships of the “dance called
Jealousy,” the bassa danza she cites in that essay, to the improvisatory contact of
the dance “before our names”: desire moves one toward and against another.89
Dance literalizes this movement and exposes our agendas for desire: to script its
moves or let them unspool.
While the vocal accompaniment to Carson’s recital is scored and
choreographed, the lecture is also open to the contingencies of performance, in-
cluding moments of improvisation and accident, risks that become points of fru-
ition in the course of the argument. Carson’s husband and collaborator Robert
Currie explains:

Just prior to the performance [of the sonnets] Merce Cunningham passed away
and of course all three dancers were from the Cunningham Company. There’s
this great moment during the Merce sonnet when Marcie [Munnerlyn] goes
back to the edge—​way upstage—​and she dances one of his solos completely out
of the score. It was simply beautiful.90

If dance expresses a contingent and versatile grammar of relations between dis-

tinct, visible bodies (“starry, stumbling, /​chancing”), the voice in its onstage ad-
dress opens the play of relations in ways that the “Merce Sonnet” anticipates. The
sonnet, read in private or addressed to a live audience, speaks to an “us” both par-
ticular and universal. Particular universality is a mode the poem locates before
the name (“before our names /​the terrible gusto /​took hold”); a pro-​nominal,
primordial chaos in which we stumble upon and fumble for our edges, moving in
an “air blueblack /​and bold.”
In contrast with naming, here, the pronoun is an open, non-​accusative form
of address, an embracing form with the potential to signify beyond particularity.
(As the recent practice of listing preferred pronouns has shown, pronoun iden-
tity can trump the particularities of biology.)91 When sounded and echoed, as
it is in Carson’s performance of other sonnets in the sequence, the pronoun is
set adrift from all singularity of reference. Where the speaking “I” is fixed to the
speaker onstage, “you” and “she/​he” or “thou” roam freely across multiple simul-
taneous possibilities of relation. Pronouns, Carson says at another point in the
lecture, are “a system that argues with its shadow /​like Venetian blinds,” so di-
alectical; a Platonic space for the contrary and counterfactual.92 In this crucial
sense, Carson makes the pronoun the defining moniker of theater: a compact
play of shadows in which identity flickers between beings, and in which no one
on stage is in full possession of themselves. It is a transitive address from fiction
to fiction, assumed identity to assumed identity. An address that assumes it does
not know to whom it is speaking.
As we saw in Eros the Bittersweet, the love triangle is the form in which the
circulation of desire and its relational possibilities is most clearly visible. If the
 The Eros Variations 55

pronoun is a grammar of difference, measuring off one being from another, it

is also a grammar for their exchangeability: “I” will be “you” to my interlocutor,
“I” will be “she” in the third point of a love triangle; one gives necessary contour
to the others, but their exchanges of valency allow for potent confusions. We see
this confusion staged in the subheadings of “The Glass Essay,” where “SHE” is
Carson’s mother and/​or Emily Brontë, one or other of “three silent women at
the kitchen table.” We see the pronoun as event in the love triangle of The Beauty
of the Husband, where “PRONOUNS DO THE DANCE CALLED WASHING”
and “her” is a word that bursts into flames.93
Carson’s long, languid “Drop’t Sonnet,” with a parenthetical annex that
falls diagonally across the page, describes what happens when a pronoun goes
missing—​when “language drops a distinction.” The “thinning” of grammatical
and vocal possibility thins conditions of possibility for relation. With the loss of a
grammatical distinction, a form of life and a vital expression of tension is lost: “a
lowering of arms, /​a thinning of air inside the whole system, /​a sadness in the
sparrows, a slipping away of prefixes and wisdom.” The sonnet then plunges diag-
onally into a parenthesis, a precipitance of synonyms and analogies running at 45
degrees across the page. The narrator talks about an emotional event for which
she struggles to find the words. By the end of this headlong verbal/​visual slide,
the poem arrives at the understanding that what was needed was a pronoun—​a
category of the possessive fallen into disuse. Something about the event—​

this
mineshaft,
cataract,
toboggan slide (waterslide, landslide), . . .

this
streaming
downspout
of voodoo pine—​
cried out to be addressed
as
thine).

The mise-​en-​page of Carson’s sonnet is a sensible form in its own right, miming
the synonymic rush and slide, and its abeyance once the pronoun is arrived at, in
the concrete visual image of the poem. In live recital, this fragment of “lecture”
is “published” (to borrow Carson’s term from the McNeilly interview) as the
lecturer’s voice mimics the plunge through associations to their arrival at earth
(“thine”). That “lyric mimesis”—​the performativity of poems—​is a function of
this lecture is pretty much beyond doubt.
56 Variations in Criticism

Carson’s “Lecture on Pronouns” begins with a sequence of three sonnets titled

“Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony,” the text of which was first published in the
London Review of Books in 2007.94 In the live performance of these poems, the
phenomenon of voice becomes the principal object of a question posed in Part
I of the “Triple Sonnet” regarding the classification of bodily effects as “alienable”
and “inalienable”—​as “a personal possession or as something you can sell.” The
question of what is “me” and “not me,” a distinction around which Part I assumes
a basic troublesomeness, finds its articulation in a lecture form premised on
sounds and images that perform the kinds of straying and convergence described
in the poem: whose nonlinear argument moves between incongruous scenarios
and never quite returns to itself. Most strikingly of all, the “Triple Sonnet” leads
its inquiry through the analogy of a toy pony, whose ontological status as “plush”
(imitation) and/​or “meat” (sentient, real) is tried and tested through the posses-
sive pronouns of “yours” and “his.” The first sonnet sets out the case for the fragile
intelligibility—​and often dramatic consequences—​of such distinctions: “Such
thinking,” Carson says, “will affect how a word like rape is defined” or “how you
feel in your mind /​when you address animals.” Some of these animals, the sonnet
ends, “depend on their owner to keep or dispose. But your pony you cannot sen-
sibly classify with those.”
In Parts II and III, by way of performance of the hypothesis of Part I, an
argument is made through the release of sound in euphonic internal rhyme,
harmonics and dissonance, forms of meaning that, in their live recital, per-
form without need of description, and almost, at moments in Part III, without
need for the words to mean. Instead, sound performs Carson’s argument as the
rhythmic circulation of metered breath and voice, turning on the variable dif-
ference between the “alienable” and “inalienable”—​in this case, between body
and breath. The “Triple Sonnet” is a live theory of possession that performs
its question without resolution. Its inquiry vacillates, instead, through
rhythmic song.

Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Part II95

Another thee.
A summer’s day.
Double vantage me.
Never to repay.
and Will in overplus.
Making addition thus—​
your pony is all these to you—​and more:
he can detect the smell of danger
 The Eros Variations 57

and will not take you through a door

if there is doom or pain there.
So at the end of his life if you want to sell him for meat
you’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet
at dawn his shaggy head,
at dawn his shaggy head.

Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Part III

A body in the dawn.

A body in the cold.
A body its breath.
Its breath a plume.
A dance a plume.
A dance not thou.
A thou, a thee.
Thou, breath.

There stands.
Breath, plume.
How cold is.
A dawn is.
How still stands.
Thy breath.

The “Triple Sonnet” casts its inquiry out wide, such that the question around
bodily parts and effects, and the “thinking that will affect how a word like rape is
defined”—​surely the sharpest way to ask about possession and self-​possession—​
shares its dilemma with the commodification of the animal and, in the final part,
the sublime duet of body and breath. “Your pony” is, in the first two sonnets,
an abstract figure for a relational other who is—​depending on the pronoun we
grant him—​either sovereign and autonomous, or a dispensable extension of the
“you” to whom Carson addresses her inquiry. Part II then establishes that if the
pony belongs to the possessive pronoun category “thee” (“thou”)—​”Another
thee,” linked by the arch rhyme to “Double vantage me” and given a reverb
echo, a double vision to match his shaky ontology, in the sung performance of
the sonnet—​then his commodification and sale will require a change in cat-
egory: “you’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet /​at dawn his
shaggy head.”
Part III is where this piece of verse thinking comes into its own. Even without
the winding, echoing vocals of Carson’s collaborative debut recital, as we read it
58 Variations in Criticism

on the page, the poem manages to approximate the circulation of breathing: “Its
breath a plume. A dance a plume,” making two full iambic breaths (inhale, exhale;
inhale, exhale). Body and breath begin in this poem as an equivalence, whose
statement of fact follows the same formula as the descriptions that precede it: “A
body in the dawn. /​A body in the cold. /​A body its breath.” The two then begin
to separate out as the statements of fact continue (“Its breath a plume. /​A dance a
plume”) until their difference is confirmed. The lines “A dance not thou. A thou,
a thee” mark the breath’s constitution as an entity in its own right in a dance of
distinctions and equivalences (“Thou, breath,” “Breath, plume”). This pronom-
inal dance was mirrored in the aesthetics of Carson’s debut performance of the
work, where the bodies moving onstage are echoed by a video projection that
stalks, shadows, and recapitulates their moves.
One of the most striking things about this last of the three sonnets is the ab-
sence of verbs, with one exception. All of the poem’s motility, the flux it performs
as rhythmic action, is tied to the verb “stands,” a verb whose subject, in both
instances in which it appears, is the breath: “There stands. /​Breath, plume” and
“How still stands /​Thy breath.” That the breath is the agent of this poem is clear,
both in the organization of meter in the sonnet and the “alienable/​inalienable”
inquiry it shares with the preceding two poems (when does the breath cease to
belong to the body?). It also shares affinities with The Albertine Workout, where
Carson ponders how a writer can “disenfranchise, disempower or delete his slave
grammatically by taking away the part of speech in which she acts as a subject
connected to a predicate” (“appendix 34 on getting rid of your slave”). Yet the
breath is agent of another exchange of action, too. The poem as a work of breath,
as pneuma, passes from the poet into circulation—​into language and into the
world, as Paul Celan imagined it—​, bringing with it its own natural quotient of
alienation. In the performance cited above, the circling vocal accompaniment
to Carson’s recital transforms her still, cropped syntax into truncated questions
or statements awaiting completion, iterated and changed as they pass from one
breath to another (“How cold is. A dawn is”: suspended affirmations awaiting a
verbal agent to bring them to life). Here, the verb “happens” only when the poem
is performed, the breath imitated in the tonalities of speaking voices.
By the final line of the “Triple Sonnet,” the breath returns and rests at its
source: the “plush pony” is once again in possession of his (“thy”) breath. The
agency of the breath, which moves between equivalence with physical being
and an analogy for it, becomes the third point of a triangle: the lines of this tri-
angle run from “you” to “your pony” to “its breath.” It is a movement we rehearse
when we read the poem aloud, as the meter reaches outward (exhales) and in-
ward (inhales) in an iambic flow. Where the first two parts of the “Triple Sonnet”
approach the relation between the possessive pronoun and ontology—​what
kind of object the pony is, or our bodily effects are—​the third sonnet reduces
 The Eros Variations 59

Carson’s inquiry to what she calls elsewhere in Float “an art of pure shape.”96
The third sonnet’s compact pneumatic dance performs the throes at the heart
of Carson’s inquiry, but it performs them in ways that the argumentative expo-
sition of a conventional lecture cannot. The sonnet in recital is an exquisite case
of what Jean-​Luc Nancy calls partage des voix: the sharing or splitting of voices,
where meaning is offered and abandoned (Le sens se donne, il s’abandonne) in
an exchange between description and sound, whose “dialogical rhapsody” takes
place in the dividing and joining of voices.97 In the sensible immediacy of this
rhapsody is the longed-​for “real move” of poems. Its descriptive imitation of the
breath is also, in recital, the real-​time lyric performance of the breath in motion,
where artful imitation and a “real move” become inseparable.
We have seen Carson say that oral and literate cultures think, express them-
selves, and fall in love differently. In Carson’s words in Eros the Bittersweet, “[in]
oral poetics, . . . Eros and the Muses clearly share an apparatus of sensual assault”
(50). She goes on to explain how the audience of an oral recitation is “as Herman
Fränkel puts it, “an open force field” into whom sounds are being breathed in a
continuous stream from the poet’s mouth” (50). Yet the written word is no such
“all-​pervasive sensual phenomenon.” Literacy, Carson says, “de-​sensorializes
words and reader” (50). If Eros and the Muses share an apparatus of sensual as-
sault, then this assault matters not just for poetry, but for philosophy too. In his
mythic hymn to Love, following his performance and recantation of a speech in
favor of the “nonlover,” Socrates (in Catherine Pickstock’s words) harnesses for
“the philosophic life” the madness (mania) of eros against what Pickstock calls
“purely ‘mortal’ and parsimonious modes of self-​control”: an erotikos logos contra
the “pharmako-​logos” of Derrida’s Plato.98 This mania is expressed—​happens—​
as the “sensual assault” of oral, as opposed to written, poetics; what Pickstock
calls the liturgical origins and “consummation” of philosophy. As Pickstock sees
it in her groundbreaking reading of the Phaedrus, Socrates’s critique of soph-
istry does not—​as Derrida claimed—​lead him to disavow the written word in
favor of the “metaphysical presence” of the spoken (“a supra-​linguistic philo-
sophical logos, independent of time and place”).99 He disavows it because this
philosophical logos, suspended in time—​where “a piece of ice melts forever”—​is
fundamentally not to be trusted. The spoken word is where breath and voice,
body and word, are staked in real time, time-​bound to a unique moment of ex-
change. Carson’s lecture in sonnet form harnesses this sensual apparatus to make
an argument that risks its own self-​control in favor of a live, formally and vo-
cally involved exchange of action, where whether and how argument “happens”
is contingent on the bodies of speaker, dancer, and audience.
The poet Jorie Graham has spoken of the “arguments” of poems as arguments
“that don’t want to make the reader ‘agree.’ They don’t want to move through
the head in that way. They want to go from body to body.”100 In its performative
60 Variations in Criticism

rendering of breath in movement, or of a dance of pronouns that displaces the

lyric “I” from its putative center, it is easy to see how Carson’s lecture on pronouns
moves “from body to body” in a mode of argument that abandons linear exposi-
tion and the production of agreement. It is a mode of argument that, like Carson’s
reading of Albertine, puts its own argumentative self-​possession at risk; a form
of reasoning that, like Eros the Bittersweet, hands itself over to the movements
and scintillations of desire, and, in doing so, hands the prerogatives of desiring
and thinking desire over to the reader. This sensual, non-​argumentative form of
argument sets the authority of the lecture and the essay off kilter, yet it remains
a powerful form of suggestion and persuasion. The intermedia performances in
which Carson is increasingly involved are where variations on her own earlier
writing—​iterations, remixes, and verbatim use of older material—​look and
sound like attempts to break out from the authority and imperativity of written
interpretive form. These performance pieces herald a move further away from
description and toward the kind of “sensible form” Carson attributes to the
paintings of Francis Bacon: form “that will translate directly to your nervous
system the same sensation as the subject”—​form in which an original sensa-
tion “happens” again and in which this reprised sensation persuades.101 What
is risked in the performative arguments is the sovereignty of criticism, ceded in
exchange for other soft powers.102 Reaching toward reader and audience in an
exchange of action, the performative argument is strong as form and weak as ex-
position, a play for more radically uncertain forms of thought.
 2
Criticism and the Gift
(Carson with Celan)

Poems are also gifts—​gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies.

—​Paul Celan*1

There is a kind of gift, says the Romanian-​born poet Paul Celan, that, once given,
is never the same again. The “poem” is, for Celan, a “unique instance of lan-
guage”: though it can be reproduced—​its gift offered—​any number of times, in
print or in recital, no moment of reading or sounding is equal to another. This
gift, the poem, is the sum of its iterative destinies, infinitesimal possibilities
addressing recipients beyond number, whose point of continuous arrival and
departure is the embodied human voice. It was in his public address on receipt
of the Georg Büchner Prize for literature (“The Meridian,” 1960), reflecting on
some of language’s darkest fates, that Celan declared this gift from voice to voice
to be nothing short of salvific. He spoke of poems as “detours from you to you”
and as “paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from
a voice to a listening you.”2 It is a strange kind of conversation to which Celan
alludes, one whose interlocutors do not share the same place and time but who
meet, as it were, on the unlit paths of sound. For Celan, this “encounter” was
not enough to redeem a language pushed to obscure, violent, and unrecogniz-
able ends. Yet something vital was salvaged, for him, in the simple act of po-
etic address: voices given, voices received, and voices returned, knit together in a
double-​blind exchange of gifts. An anonymous exchange of grace, and a form of
life difficult to extinguish.
In Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (1999),
Carson examines “what exactly is lost to us when words are wasted” and what
is preserved when words and breath are “saved” (3). The language of “losses,”
“waste,” and “saving,” ubiquitous in the book, accounts for the twists and turns
of what Carson calls poetic economy—​economy in the sense of a system of or-
ganization, a grammar of exchange between verbal facts and their consequences
as thought and sound, but also economy as a driven compactness of form. What
Carson shows as she reads Simonides of Keos—​Greek poet of the fifth century

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0003
62 Variations in Criticism

bc and the first to commerce with the poem in exchange for money—​with
twentieth-​century German-​speaking poet Celan is that the two share a com-
mitment, in response to wildly different demands, to sustaining multiple, some-
times contradictory meanings in the most economical of written forms. Both
poets, she argues, use negation to express possibility and its curtailment in the
same move. In Carson’s bold feat of comparative reading, “riddled with flaws
and insights” according to one critic, this commitment to poetic constraint
links together the origins of poetry as a written and commercial culture with
the extreme demands placed on the form by the atrocities of the twentieth cen-
tury.3 In both scenarios—​the poem in the Hellenic gift economy and the poem
after Auschwitz—​the formal and imaginative economy of poetry gives us “two
realities for the price of one,” making it both eminently marketable (value for
money) and the guarantor of an invaluable, unexchangeable singularity: a cur-
rency for guest-​friendship and encounter, and, at the same time, a vindication of
incommunicable inwardness.
It is surely because she is a poet—​and a poet who, regardless of formal or
disciplinary affiliation, seeks to “approximate what the facts are doing”—​that
Carson is not content to account for the poetic “gifts” of Simonides and Celan
without responding in kind. This chapter examines how Carson reads Simonides
and Celan, paying special attention to how her essay functions, not just as a me-
dium for what she calls their “conversation” and exchange, but as a return of such
“gifts.” In Carson’s book, the critical essay—​one of the many destinies of poems—​
is a form of reciprocal gift to the poems’ lexical and metrical facts. Prosody is the
principal currency for this exchange, as well, we will see, as the essay’s structure
of address, and the stakes of writing that Carson, in one of the more grandiose
moments of her reading, professes to share with Celan.4 The kinds of approxima-
tion and reciprocity we find in Economy of the Unlost are less formally decisive
than those of the verse essay/​long poem “The Glass Essay,” published four years
earlier, in which Carson’s exchange of emotive claims and registers with Emily
Brontë exposes the fantasy life of critical attention to her source. Yet Carson’s
response to Simonides and Celan not only participates in the same mimetic
compositional strategies—​“arising from the thing itself ” or approximating “the
facts”—​pursued throughout this book. What she tells us she is doing in Economy
of the Unlost, alongside her declared affinities as a poet with some of Celan’s
keenest hopes for language, gives us crucial insight into how and why her essay
responds in the ways it does to the “gifts” of poetry. The book’s added value (to
re-​angle one of Carson’s terms) is its modeling of how poetry can enrich the tra-
ditional close reading forms of the essay and the lecture.
Like Short Talks or “The Life of Towns” poem sequences before it, and like so
much of Carson’s writing in its wake, Economy of the Unlost begins with an inter-
vention of the kind that, in the early poem “Now What?” she calls scholia: prefa-
tory or appendix material whose traditional function is to tell us what is going on
 Criticism and the Gift 63

in the work it adjoins.5 With its paratactic jumps between Simonides and Celan
and a constellatory structure of sub-​headings, not unlike the chapters of Eros the
Bittersweet a decade earlier, Economy of the Unlost is an academic prose essay
and an unorthodox one for several reasons—​not least among them, the pairing
of two authors writing more than two millennia apart. This chapter will begin,
then, with the scholia Carson adds to her essay: the “Note on Method” in which
she introduces her singular work of reading, and the “Prologue: False Sail.”
The first words of Economy of the Unlost take the form of an epigraph from
Friedrich Hölderlin’s river poem, “The Rhine”: Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas—​“Yet
each of us has his measure.”6 The line looks forward to the contracted “measure”
of verse economy in both Simonides and Celan, but the measure alluded to in
the “Note on Method” also refers unequivocally to Carson’s own writing. In clas-
sicist Steven Willett’s remarks on the essay, the “Note on Method” tells us “that
Carson must go her own way according to her own individual standards.”7 What
she describes is a deliberate measuring off of her experience of and attention to
“facts,” whose names and activity are “noted down,” she tells us, and the com-
plementary act of excision she calls the “clearing” of “everything I do not know.”
This act of measuring is figured using an image from the Hungarian philosopher
and critic, György Lukács—​Eine fensterlose Monade (“a windowless monad”).8
Carson’s disquisition on the image begins with the strong, self-​exposing declara-
tion, “There is too much self in my writing,” and is followed by a halting stream
of caveats. She describes a long struggle to push her thought into “the landscape
of science and fact where other people converse logically”; for her, Carson says,
writing is a constant “dashing back and forth” between “that darkening land-
scape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do
not know.” She speaks of her task as copying the names and noting the activity of
all that remains in the “windowless room,” then she wonders how the “clearing”
actually happens:

Lukács says it begins with my intent to excise everything that is not accessible to
the immediate experience (Erlebbarkeit) of the self as self. Were this possible, it
would seal the room on its own boundaries like a cosmos. Lukács 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, fishing up facts of the landscape from notes or
memory as well as it may—​vibrating (as Mallarme would say) with their disap-
pearance. (vii)

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this extraordinary manifesto is

the distinction it entertains, and, in the end, bypasses, between academic and
64 Variations in Criticism

aesthetic work. It is one of the most striking achievements of Carson’s writing

that such a distinction—​between the academic and aesthetic as métiers with dis-
tinct sets of consequences for form—​is shown to be a false choice. Our implicit
agreement with Carson is taken for granted (“you know as well as I”) that, were
such a distinction meaningful to begin with, thought’s “best moments” occur
when it is disbanded. Carson’s wide-​open caesura, the line break left ajar after
“best moments—​,” seems almost to measure out in the mise-​en-​page the fleeting
contours of a “room” of our own, vibrating with possibility alongside Carson’s.
These “best moments” are what we find compressed in the lapidary micro-​
lectures of Short Talks, whose associative readings are cut loose from constraints
of historical fact; in the absence of facts, the edges of these moments—​whose
affiliation to “aesthetic work” is clearer and sharper than Economy of the Unlost—​
“shine,” in the words of one reviewer.9 Directly addressed to her readers, Carson’s
brief performative vignette not only makes us Carson’s accomplices in reading.
The “Note on Method,” locked in stylistic “pressures” of its own, introduces
Economy of the Unlost as a work cognizant from the start of the origins and po-
tential destinies of its own aesthetic gestures.
Striking, too, is the relationship Carson claims to “facts,” “activity,” and
“names.” For one, Carson reduces her entire critical agency to the actions of
“copy[ing] down the names of everything left in [the room] and not[ing] their
activity” or “fishing up facts of the landscape from notes or memory”; “once
cleared,” she tells us, the room for aesthetic work simply “writes itself.”10 The
act of copying down also has an important antecedent in Short Talks, a book
that begins with its own statement of intent and an admission that its work is
to “copy out everything that was said . . . things vast distances apart.”11 Second,
of equal importance to these “names and activity” is their arising out of what
Carson calls the “vibration” of their aftermath, trailing the “disappearance” of
thought’s “best moments.” Setting the scene for the essay that follows it, the “Note
on Method” declares absence, negativity, the invisible, and the immaterial as the
conditions of all poetic affirmation. The economical poems of Simonides and
Celan, Carson will argue, plumb the dialectical capacity of language to pull on
precisely this kind of felt vibration of absence, much in the way “unlost”—​Celan’s
unverloren—​marshals a vibration of “lost” (verloren). (Whether you call this
form of saying “a waste of words or an act of grace,” Carson says, “depends on
you,” 121.) Carson’s introduction to the work recalls Hans Georg Gadamer’s own
lyrical admission that in his readings of Celan, he took to the facts of the poems
“without any scholarly aid”: “I lay in a sand pit in the Dutch dunes and mulled the
verses over, ‘listening earnestly in the damp wind,’ until I thought I understood
them. Of course,” Gadamer continues, “it is an entirely different question to what
extent exegetical words can represent such an encounter without diminishing
it.”12 Carson’s “Note”—​and indeed, the entire essay—​could almost be seen to
 Criticism and the Gift 65

respond to Gadamer’s “different question” head-​on. For what she suggests she
will do in the essay is represent the “encounter,” not by exegetical words alone,
but by the same material and immaterial conditions of affirmation she ascribes to
the poetry—​naming activity and “vibrating” with the disappearance of thoughts
and verbal facts. Carson declares her essay to be conditioned by more or less the
same intuitive aesthetic “work” as her object of study, drawing on the generative
capacities of absence and memory.
The “Note on Method,” then, offers an argument for why we can read Economy
of the Unlost alongside less formally conventional Carson “essays” like The
Albertine Workout, whose form—​a drastic hermeneutic minimalism, we saw—​is
explicitly conditioned by the copying down of facts in list form and the noting
of their activity, afterimages, and lacunae in the appendices.13 Charting the dis-
appearance of facts and the intuition of “what goes beyond them” is the work of
Nox, Carson’s glossary-​translation and essay on Catullus poem 101, which stages
an “encounter” between two very different languages for loss in the work of two
very different elegies (“the last gift owed to death”).14 Carson’s reasoning around
the negative poetics of Simonides and Celan, along with the “copying” and
“noting” work of her readings in Economy of the Unlost, makes this an essay that
speaks amply to her wider concerns and compositional modes, as well as one that
dissuades us in no uncertain terms from drawing any meaningful division be-
tween Carson’s academic and aesthetic work. The close reading that follows this
manifesto, we will see, is an object lesson in literary-​critical “attention” unlocked
from the tonal constraints of academic prose, a form of attention mimicking the
kinds of affirmation it finds in poetry.
The “Note” is also, finally, where Carson sets out the rationale behind the “con-
versation” she stages between Celan and Simonides:

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. . . . Moving and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet
no conversation takes place. (viii)

It may or may not be a coincidence that Carson couches her approach in the essay
in such similar terms to those Celan uses to describe the “encounter” (Begegnung)
staged by poetry: a mysterious form of proximity, movement “from a voice to a
listening you,” but also movement from “soliloquy” to “conversation.” (Celan’s
preparatory notes for his speech sketch out the following scheme: “Direction
(wherefrom, whereto), language → soliloquy → conversation.”).15 “Celan’s
lyrics,” says John Felstiner, “seek ‘an addressable thou’ ”: sometimes address-
able because “thou” or “you” is a known individual, as in the indelibly poignant
“Epitaph for François,” or the “you” and “your God” in “Zurich, at the Stork,”
66 Variations in Criticism

dedicated to Nelly Sachs; at other times, because of an urgent, unshakeable faith

that someone—​“something indeterminable, present only because the speaker
calls it du”—​is there to receive it.16 In the poetic encounter Celan describes in
“The Meridian,” as in the critical encounter Carson stages in Economy of the
Unlost, voice approaches voice, but through no direct address; there is no audible
conversation, no face to face meeting, but an askance proximity or oblique inti-
macy. The gifts transferred in Celan’s conversation-​that-​is-​not-​one are, we saw,
“gifts to the attentive.” If for Celan, the conversation only happens because we
are attentive to it, for Carson, the inverse is true; attention, strong attention, is a
result of the conversation being staged. It is a strategy Carson will rehearse time
and again, in verse and prose alike: in reading Sappho with Marguerite Porete
and Simone Weil in Decreation, or Plato with Defoe in an early essay, with the
same aim of staging unexpected lines of convergence and auguring errant, un-
foreseen destinies.17
Yet Carson, as well as hosting one conversation, also invites another,
addressing her writing at several key moments in the book—​“you know as well
as I” is the first of these—​to a “you” of her own. In the example above, the same
attention that joins her to Simonides and to Celan, keeping them “from settling”
and keeping her attention strong, it is suggested, also joins her to her readers. The
intimations of the “Note on Method,” which assumes Carson’s own binding to a
community of recipients, readers, and addressees, ask us to suspend our disbelief
as we move through the essay, to ground our attention to its own professed “aes-
thetic work” in what we might call good faith. Regarding this kind of intangible
bond as a condition of possibility for critical reading, like the bond that joins
Simonides and Celan for the duration of the essay: to borrow from Carson’s store
of economic metaphors, we either buy it or we don’t. Yet the economy of atten-
tion Carson makes the case for here, grounded in the supposition of good faith,
echoes some of her early remarks on the essay form and the action of what she
calls “grace.” As poetry, for Celan, yields its gifts to the attentive, for Carson, the
essay is—​and invites—​a comparable offering: “When you write an essay, you’re
giving a gift, it seems to me. You’re giving this grace, as the ancients would say.
A gift shouldn’t turn back into the self and stop there . . . you take that gift and you
do something with it . . . and that keeps it going.”18
In her review of Economy of the Unlost for the Chicago Review, Danielle Allen
called Carson’s book “an act of grace.”19 In what follows, we will see how Economy
of the Unlost, an essay about the gratuitous “grace” of poetry in two very different
eras, enters into the texture of exchange by reciprocating certain material and
immaterial qualities of the poems Carson reads and passing them on, keeping
them going, in much the same way she sketches out her remarks on the essay
as gift. Her confessional “Note on Method” warns us that the book is an unor-
thodox one in the relation it embarks on with its objects. Although she responds
 Criticism and the Gift 67

to her two authors in different ways, we will see how her essay on the gifts that
poetry gives “for nothing” keeps those gifts in circulation in ways that suggest a
critical practice committed to the gift economy of poetry, a homage or courtesy
(what George Steiner calls “lexical cortesia”) paid to the objects and source texts
of criticism.20
Carson’s book begins by exploring the distinction between gift and commodity
economies, where the former trades in immediate equivalents, objects of com-
mensurable value, and the latter through the mediation of a currency, breaking
the through-​line of relation from “you to you.” A result, perhaps, of the hermetic
(“windowless”) relation she professed to sustain with her objects, the critical
economy of Carson’s reading is one in which the original “gift” is acknowledged,
preserved, and reflected back in her response. The Marxian arguments she sets
out in the book’s opening chapters would suggest, by extension, that to dispense
with the original gift by responding in an alien conceptual jargon—​reading, as
it were, for profit—​would count as alienated reading. For Carson, Simonides
changes the economy of poetry almost beyond recognition. The vocation of po-
etry has clearly proved a profitable one for Carson, yet the poetic economy of her
reading turns the pre-​Simonidean gift economy into a surprising expressional
possibility for the relationships of criticism.

Xenia and Critical Economy

Carson’s “you and I,” a gesture of complicity appearing at several points in the
book, is tied to a single, very specific moment of address. Like Celan’s descrip-
tion of the channeling of voice from “you to you,” delivered to an audience at
the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Carson’s address to “you” was
first written for a time-​bound occasion of public address. The text of Economy
of the Unlost is a revised and significantly expanded version of Carson’s Martin
Classical Lectures, delivered at Oberlin College in 1992.21 The Lectures in their
original form were titled “Greed: A Fractal Approach to Simonides,” a fact that
makes two things immediately clear to readers of Economy of the Unlost. First,
that the book’s argument about grace and salvation is teased out of an argument
about greed—​the famed “stinginess of Simonides,” as she puts it in c­ hapter 1
(“Alienation,” 10). Second, that Carson’s reading of Celan, in the context of the
book’s backstory, starts out life as a reading of Simonides.22 If one poet is placed
so that the other comes into focus, it is Simonides who, through Carson’s original
lectures, becomes the backcloth or sounding board for Celan. And if Carson’s
reading of Simonides was given voice, a voice addressed to a listening public, at
her Martin Classical Lectures, then it is curious that the palpable sense of voice in
the expanded text—​the distinctively rhythmic prosody of her prose writing—​is
68 Variations in Criticism

significantly heightened in her readings of Celan. Reading Celan, we will see,

Carson is more attuned not only to her own tonal poetics and vocal intonations,
but more involved in and directly responsive to Celan’s.
Carson’s discussion of the advent of money in the gift economy of the Ancient
Greek sixth century bc situates Simonides of Keos as the first “professional”
poet—​the first, that is, to charge money for his compositions. Simonides, Carson
tells us, knew his price only too well: a character in Aristophanes’s Peace exclaims
“That Simonides would put out to sea on a bathmat for profit!”—​just one ex-
ample of Simonides’s swift conversion into a comedy “stock type for avarice” fol-
lowing the poet’s death in around 468 bc.23 Carson grounds her presentation of
Simonides’s commodification of poetry in a Marxian disquisition on the “aliena-
tion” of objects, labor, social relations, and, in the new commerce of poetic com-
position, the gifts of poiesis: “To use Marx’s terms, a commodity is an alienable
object exchanged between two transactors enjoying a state of mutual indepen-
dence, while a gift is an inalienable object exchanged between two reciprocally
dependent transactors” (12). As Carson explains, objects in a gift economy are
a kind of “connective tissue” between these reciprocally dependent transactors.
The reciprocity of this connection, she says, is preserved in the “reversible ter-
minology” in the Ancient Greek: “in Greek the word xenos can mean either
guest or host, xenia either gifts given or gifts received” (18). The continuity of
the gift given in the gift received, the recognition of the one in the other, recalls
Carson’s understanding (with its ethical overtones) of the essay as gift. Carson
quotes Pierre Bourdieu on this form of mutual guarantee, which he calls “an act
of communication”:

“Considered as an act of communication,” says Pierre Bourdieu, “the gift is de-

fined by the counter-​gift in which it is completed and in which it realizes its full
significance.” Such an object carries the history of the giver into the life of the
receiver and continues it there. (18)24

In the typical xenia economy, the gift given accrues a directly commensurable
debt, producing a “connective tissue” of equity and identification between giver
and receiver. Gifts exchanged between giver and receiver, guest and host, Carson
says, create a direct equivalence expressed neatly in the reversible significance
of xenos, a word whose two complementary functions are expressed under the
same sign (as J. Hillis Miller famously explored in his defense of “the critic as
host”).25 Xenia, likewise, refers interchangeably to gifts given and gifts received—​
gifts that, though materially different, are effectively worth the same. In spite of
the required equivalence between parties in the xenia economy, the particularity
of the gift itself—​as Bourdieu’s description suggests—​is preserved: not only that;
it is “completed,” it “realizes its full significance,” in the counter-​gift. As an “act of
 Criticism and the Gift 69

communication”—​as a conversation, we might say—​the gift generates a refrain, a

thread of continuity that the introduction of legal tender abruptly snaps.
Further into the essay, Carson discusses the customary use of symbola, equal
halves of a single piece of bone cut in two and exchanged as a token between
friends in certain xenia relationships. Symbolizing the relationship of equity, the
symbolon allows the parties entering into the contract of xenia to renew and reca-
pitulate their obligation.26 “A gift” given under such a contract, Carson explains,
“is not a piece broken off from the interior life of the giver and lost into the ex-
change, but rather an extension of the interior of the giver, both in space and
time, into the interior of the receiver” (18). Symbol of this continuum—​and what
better than a piece of bone to signify the unspoken interior common to both
parties?—​the symbolon is by nature an incomplete object whose meaningfulness
is conditional on the participation of another. Carson describes the symbolon
in terms of what the exchanges under a monetary economy take away from
it: “money denies such extension, ruptures continuity and stalls objects at the
borders of themselves. Abstracted from space and time as bits of saleable value,
they become commodities and lose their life as objects” (18).
Where symbola express the direct commensurability of obligations and of
gifts—​where one is a direct recognition of the other, the sign of a direct, un-
mediated connection in which the object’s value and “life” are maintained—​
commodification is the process of substituting that value for another with little or
no essential relation to it (the interior “life” of bone for a beaten piece of metal).
The implication is, Carson argues, that what is extinguished along with this form
of life is “its power to connect the people who give and receive it: they become
like commodities themselves, fragments of value waiting for price and sale” (19).
While the bone symbolon is still a symbol, a mediating sign like the metal coin in
the monetary economy, its specificity of meaning travels directly between two—​
unlike the impersonal, universal grammar of coinage. Like two equal symbola, in
the xenia economy the gift is recognized and preserved in the counter-​gift as the
recognition of debt and bond; rather like the way language (langue), an objective
system of mediating signs, can in its mode of address (parole) preserve the inti-
macy of private conversation (and with it, in Carson’s words, the “non-​objective
life of objects”). It is tempting to imagine—​if again we suspend our disbelief—​
that words in the pre-​Simonidean gift economy were always such gifts.27 We have
only to think of Odysseus, whose way with words gets him payment in kind, in
the form of words of praise, fame, and feats of belief.28
Carson’s argument draws its notion of the gift and its reciprocity in the xenia
economy from Marcel Mauss’s seminal study, The Gift, and from later anthropo-
logical works by Pierre Bourdieu, M. M. Austin and Pierre Vidal-​Naquet, and
Ian Morris.29 The gift is a concept Jacques Derrida sought to destabilize in his
Carpenter Lectures, published as Given Time in 1992, by arguing that the gift is
70 Variations in Criticism

locked in an impossible bind: as the gift is pulled into a circuit of exchange and
restitution—​as it creates a debt—​it can no longer be understood as a gift. To be a
gift, that is, the given object must remain outside the order of the gift, for its rec-
ognition as such immediately creates the expectation of a counter-​gift and the
tension of indebtedness.30 The gift is destroyed, for Derrida, by the demand it
creates for reciprocity: as such, the genuine gift would require the giver to remain
anonymous, to give in the abstract with no hope of profit or direct return. Yet if
we think about the kinds of gift both Celan and Carson invoke in their remarks
on the poem and the essay, respectively—​gifts in the form of written words and
inner or spoken voice—​we can see how such gifts might be gratuitous in this ab-
solute and necessary sense. Directed to readers beyond number, the address of
these gifts is anonymous: the gifts of authorship, intimate but impersonal, bring
with them the “destruction of every voice, every point of origin,” in Barthes’s
well-​known expression.31 (On the gift, Barthes says “any ethic of purity requires
that we detach the gift from the hand which gives or receives it.”)32 To read is
to pick up the echo of an original, in an anonymous exchange with its author
and point of origin. Like the relationship Carson stages between Simonides and
Celan in her book, author and reader, likewise, have no claim on one another.
No actual “conversation” occurs; rather their “encounter” takes place by way of
a great, un-​chartable detour of voice from “you to you.” For Mauss, the lapse of
time between the gift and the counter-​gift was its fundamental structuring prin-
ciple; for Derrida, this delay or deferral is the condition of possibility for the gen-
uine gift—​the gift released from its bonds. A gift of language comes with this
delay inbuilt. This intimate, impersonal system of symbols makes for gifts un-
bound, addressed to particular and universal recipients at the very same time. As
Celan’s continuous “you to you” suggests, the impossibility of final, total direct
address makes the poem the gift that keeps on giving.
When the poem’s gift is received in a critical reading, what kind of relation—​
what kind of “economy”—​is set in motion? Carson explains that Marx compared
the monetary economy not to the function of language but to that of translated
language: “ideas which have first to be translated out of their mother tongue
into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchange-
able. . . . So the analogy lies not in language but in the foreign quality or strange-
ness (Fremdheit) of language” (28). Carson makes this the foundation of her
reading of Celan in Part I of Economy of the Unlost, a poet who, she says, echoing
John Felstiner’s reading, “uses language as if he were always translating” (28).33
Celan’s poetry, that is, assumes something is lost in the exchange and plumbs
it to express a loss inhering in all language. Translation is, of course, one of the
principal routes by which poems arrive at new and unforeseeable destinies,
together with a new strangeness in themselves; the distant closeness of the
translated poem to its original is a complex form of self-​relation that Carson’s
 Criticism and the Gift 71

own translations tense to its limits. In Carson’s version of events in the “Note on
Method,” her tendency is toward a hermetic, unmediated relation to her inter-
pretive objects, copying down names and noting their activity, where copying
down is a means of preserving the original terms, symbolon to symbolon, or, as
Barthes wrote of the critic’s task, orienting his language toward the language
of his object (“The symbol must go and seek the symbol”).34 Translating Celan’s
poems is one way in which his original prosodic gifts are returned. His assumed
German is given to Carson’s English; her English is, in turn, made to preserve the
powerful encounter with Celan’s German: a preservation and a form of reversi-
bility that Walter Benjamin called the task of the translator.35 In her commentary
on Celan’s poems, Carson seeks to achieve just such a preservation—​to extend
his poem’s gifts into those of her reading.
For both Simonides and Celan, as Carson sees it, the economy of a poem is
its capacity to produce and sustain an extraordinary surplus of meaning in the
shortest duration and out of the most reduced of material conditions. Where
Simonides’s poetic economy is a more literal measure of the space and time taken
up by a composition, Celan’s responds to drastic curtailment and immeasurable
loss as the measure against which words, even single letters, are weighed.36 The
surplus value of the poem—​its grace, so to speak—​is both “given” and “possible,”
radiating as possibility in excess of written grammars. Simonides and Celan
are thrifty poets, says Carson, because they squeeze more out of less. Where
Simonides mostly relies on syntax, parataxis, and the juxtaposition of scenarios
to sustain these excesses, limited by the constraints of lapidary space in the case
of his epitaphs, Celan’s more radical verbal thrift has consequences for the au-
tonomy and integrity of individual words. The most vivid moments of Carson’s
reading of Celan are counter-​gifts that, preserving the original, keep Celan’s gifts
in circulation. Out of an argument about poetic value and gift exchange comes a
critical practice that reads “with” Celan, responding to his prosody in kind.

Prosody as Conversation

The final lines of the “Note on Method” offer a theory of the encounter staged in
Carson’s essay:

Think of the Greek preposition πρὸϛ. When used with the accusative case, this
preposition means “toward, upon, against, with, ready for, face to face. . . .” It is
the preposition chosen by John the Evangelist to describe the relationship be-
tween God and The Word in the first verse of the first chapter of his Revelation:

πρὸϛ Θεόν
72 Variations in Criticism

“And The Word was with God” is how the usual translation goes. What kind of
withness is it? (viii)

The covenant between God and Word is evoked here as the most acute vibra-
tion of the preposition “with” in the mind of the author, who ends her impres-
sionistic “Note” with a fleeting image of wild horses daubing up the banks of a
train line. This particular vibration of “with,” together with the idiosyncratic var-
iant “withness,” is significant not just in the context of the “conversation” staged
in Economy of the Unlost but throughout Carson’s work.37 The Word with God
describes a relationship in which difference and identity—​the Word both with
God and was God—​are not paradoxical. Her exploration of “withness” has a cu-
rious history prior to its appearance here, including in the early poem “God’s
Christ Theory,” as André Furlani has shown.38 We can add to these iterations the
term’s later appearance in Decreation, where Carson riffs on Marguerite Porete’s
idiosyncratic use of the preposition “with” (discussed in Chapter 6 of this book),
and her recent “Short Talk on the Withness of the Body,” published in the Float
pamphlet series.39 Furlani notes the proximity of Carson’s “with” in Economy of
the Unlost to Celan’s Begegnung (encounter) and perhaps also, through Celan,
to Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-​With.40 Carson reads Simonides “with” Celan,
her book’s subtitle tells us. Yet in the many precarious forms of difference and
identity that emerge in her readings, scholarship, and translation, the fol-
lowing chapters propose that Carson seeks out other forms of writing “with” her
objects—​thinking of Emily Brontë in “The Glass Essay,” John Keats in The Beauty
of the Husband, or Catullus in Nox. So, if one aslant, ahistorical “conversation”
joins Simonides with Celan, “what kind of withness” (as Furlani has asked) joins
Celan and Carson?
Carson’s readings of Celan, I’d like to suggest, preserve and answer the
refrains of Celan’s contracted verse in remarkable ways. Amplifying the forms
she attends to in Celan, the surplus value of Carson’s prose—​its immaterial, par-
alinguistic qualities, with and against its verbal materiality, and its elaborate
symbolism—​responds to Celan as sound, image, and rhythm, radiating and
expanding beyond the syntactic measure of her sentences. In what Steven Willett
calls “a sort of metaphysical trial by poem,” Carson’s opening reading of Celan’s
“Matière de Bretagne” jettisons “the normal meanings of words,” Willett says, in
favor of intersecting allusions that respond to or play along with her principal
preoccupations in the essay: “what exactly is lost to us when words are wasted?
And where is the human store to which such words are gathered?” (3).41 Willett’s
is a fair judgment, assuming that what we—​and Carson—​are looking for in po-
etry, and looking to track down in poetry criticism, are “the normal meanings of
words.” If Carson’s readings invite us to suspend our disbelief (as her “Note on
 Criticism and the Gift 73

Method” seems to suggest), it is in order that we might credit that what interests
Carson is the “waste” product of words: the excess of “normal meanings”
gathered up and returned in the gifts of poems, redoubled in the symbolism and
stylistics of Carson’s reading.
Willett critiques Economy of the Unlost on several grounds, largely philolog-
ical, but he also nurses a particular dislike of Carson’s prose: “there is no thought
in this book to justify the prose,” he says, “which no one could confuse with
poetry.”42 The philological and biographical weaknesses Willett points out in
Carson’s essay would certainly weaken its case, were her case for poetic economy
built on an appeal to fact; were Economy of the Unlost a theory of the trafficking of
tangible elements in poetry and its material history. Yet as we saw in the “Note on
Method,” in place of facticity, Carson appeals instead to what “vibrat[es]” in the
absence or aftermath of facts. At key moments, such as the excerpt below, instead
of meticulous exposition of the poem’s philological facts, Carson’s impression-
istic prose daubs its colors and tonalities in a close reading that serves more to
echo and reproduce how she sees and hears a poem than to tell us what the poem
does and has done historically. Writing with Celan, Carson critical poetics pre-
serve the tonal, rhythmic, and syntactic afterimage of his writing, responding on
his poem’s terms and, as an excess function of criticism—​reading to “realize” his
original gifts.43 In this, we will now see, the prosody of the essay certainly can be
“confuse[d]‌with poetry.”
Celan’s “Matière de Bretagne” zooms in on the dénouement of the romance
of Tristan and Isolt (Carson’s spelling), the moment Carson calls the “false sail.”
In this classic Trauerspiel of signs, whose central trope is first employed by
Simonides of Keos, Carson tells us, there is an agreement between Tristan and
the ship’s helmsman about the color of the sails to be flown: white if the ship
carries Isolt (or, in a variant on the legend, “for Isolt prospering”) or black if it
sails empty (“a black sail for her catastrophe,” as Carson has it).44 In the event,
however, the color reported to Tristan by his jealous wife is the wrong one: this
“false sail” is “blacker than a mulberry” (7). As Carson points out, the question of
whether the catalyst twisting the tale toward tragedy is a deceitful act of telling,
or simply a case of the wrong sail flown, remains unresolved in the Old French
version of the romance, to which Celan’s title clearly alludes. Taking up the old
legend, Celan’s poem reroutes its signifiers, its symbolic matière, through the ter-
rain of a dream: “there is blood in the old French version but only dreamblood,”
says Carson, whose compound noun harmonizes and pays homage to Celan’s
signature contractions (Sprachgitter, Tausendwort, etc.) “As Tristan lies dying,
Isolt out at sea recalls dreaming that she held in her lap the head of a boar that
was staining her all over with its blood and making her robe red” (7). In an image
appearing in the first and penultimate stanzas, Celan charts the course of a
74 Variations in Criticism

“bloodsail” [Blutsegel], ineluctable in its rhythmic progress as in the destruction

it heralds. The poem’s opening stanza, reproduced below in Celan’s original and
Carson’s translation, pulls us into the whorl of the ship’s approach to land:45

MATIÈRE DE BRETAGNE MATIÈRE DE BRETAGNE

Ginsterlicht, gelb, die Hänge Gorselight, yellow, the slopes
eitern gen Himmel, der Dorn suppurate to heaven, the thorn
wirbt um die Wunde, es läutet pays court to the wound, there is ringing
darin, es ist Abend, das Nichts inside, it is evening, the nothing
rollt seine Meere zur Andacht, rolls its seas toward devotion,
das Blutsegel hält auf dich zu. the bloodsail is heading for you.

An earlier translation of this stanza by Michael Hamburger opens with the same
line in English, and his version of Celan’s inland call, es läutet /​darin (“bells ring
/​within”), holds phonetically close to it, and provides a more concrete reference
for the church where the “service” (Andacht, Carson’s less tangible “devotion”)
is being held.46 Yet what Carson’s translation preserves that Hamburger’s some-
times surprisingly dispenses with is the rhythmic progress that gives sensible
form to the ship’s approach. Hamburger’s “the thorn /​woos the wound” (der
Dorn /​wirbt um die Wunde), compared with Carson’s “the thorn /​pays court to
the wound,” drops the dactyl, the momentum that holds this, as well as earlier
and later lines in the poem, on the same impervious course of destiny. It is a
metrical stroke that cuts along some of the darkest moments in Celan’s verse,
thinking of the opening strains of the “Death Fugue” (“Todesfuge”): “Black milk
of daybreak we drink it at sundown . . . /​we drink and we drink it” (Schwarze
Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends . . . /​wir trinken und trinken).47 As we
move through the poem, the significance of the approaching sail finds itself “run
aground,” Celan’s poem suggests, in its own human consequences: “Dry, run
aground /​is the bed behind you, caught in rushes” (Trocken, verlandet /​das Bett
hinter dir, verschilft). Out of this stuck semaphore, Celan directs a single, repeated
question to the body and its labor to understand and be understood; in the third
stanza, “Did you know me, /​hands? . . . /​did you know me?” (Kanntet ihr mich,
/​ Hände? . . . /​kanntet ihr mich?). These are labors that pass, in Hamburger’s and
Carson’s translations, from one poet’s hands to another’s. The poem, as if regard-
less, labors its own ineluctable course, with Celan’s dactyls relentless on the trail
of human error (Trocken, verlandet /​das Bett hinter dir . . .).
Carson introduces the poem as a story of signification gone awry, a semaphore
lost in the translation of fact into apprehension. Beyond her translation of the
poem, responding to Celan, Carson also draws the poem’s errant semaphore into
her reading. Her remarks on the poem cling close to its verbal facts, its mythic
 Criticism and the Gift 75

and symbolic economies, but they also seem guided by those facts’ radiation
in rhythm and tonal color. Benjamin insisted that translation give voice “to the
intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony.”48 His observation,
too, that “a real translation is transparent, it does not cover the original, does not
block its light” offers us a way of thinking about Carson’s prose as a secondary
act of translation, with the same “transparency” she aspires to in If Not, Winter.49
For Celan’s prosody shines through in Carson’s close readings, which seek appar-
ently to harmonize with his original. Or, to extend Carson’s own metaphors in
the reading, her prose is stained through with the poem it presses against (“the
redness of [Celan’s] red sail stains fact deeply,” 9). Carrying the impression of
Celan, her writing reads like its translucent afterimage, whose sound vibrates
after the end of the poem. Reading the lines “But what sails toward devotion
is the Nothing” and “All these fluent traditions run aground . . . dry, stuck on
land, lodged in rushes, bushed up, jabbering mud” at the start of her response
to “Matière de Bretagne” (6), we might have to pinch ourselves to wake from
the poem’s own gorse-​lit dream. Carson’s reading also buoys on Celan’s meter,
along the iambs that pull against the central dactylic current, which she sends
pulsing out in her prose: “the poem has the rhythm of a bloodsail, sailing for-
ward in waves from gorselight to gorselight to you” (6).50 Rolling on the poem’s
metrical current, Carson’s prose recapitulates and halts at the composite nouns
“dreamblood” and “bloodsail,” performing a verbal coagulation after Celan’s
Blutsegel and the lambent Ginsterlicht (Gorselight), with which the difficult ebb
and flow of “Matière de Bretagne”—​the catching, jabbering, and eventual run-
ning aground of its symbols and refrains—​begins:

Hände, die dorn-​ Hands, the thorn-​

umworbene Wunde, es läutet, courted wound, there is ringing,
Hände, das Nichts, seine Meere, hands, the nothing, its seas,
Hände, im Ginsterlicht, das hands, in the gorselight, the
Blutsegel bloodsail
hält auf dich zu. is heading for you.

In a remarkably vivid sense, then, Celan’s poem seems to “happen again”

in the prosody of Carson’s close reading. It is a form of reading that asks us,
Carson’s readers, to stake a certain faith on its iterations of Celan, its econom-
ical harmonies, and its transparency: for the very closeness to Celan that allows
Carson to perform the sensations of his prosody in her own, is also where rec-
iprocity and performance come closest to imitation. To be sure, while a risky
move for most academic critics, echoing Celan is a seductive way for another
poet, a poet-​essayist, to read him. It also raises important questions about what
76 Variations in Criticism

these prosodic harmonies achieve that other forms of critical textuality ignore
or avoid outright: identification, sensual affect, self-​relation, but also a reck-
oning with their own authority, grandiosity, and desire. Celan’s poem ends up
appearing momentarily to read itself—​to read itself aloud, at any rate—​inside the
impressionistic echo of Carson’s writing. What are the desires moving this return
of the poem’s gifts? A desire to keep Celan going, as Carson wished to do with
Proust? A desire to participate more fully in—​rather than to record, comment
on, or even short-​circuit—​the “conversation” of reading? Carson’s sensible forms
make for a mode of reading that depends on the reader and his solitary sounding
of her prose; whose echo of Celan depends, like his original, on any number of
tonal, material, and psychic contingencies. Where a descriptive exposition of
Celan’s poem might aim to enumerate its gifts and track them to an acute tex-
tual point of origin, the harmonically close reading is, at the same time, perhaps,
intended to amplify an original sensation of the poem: its imitation crafted as a
performance in which the poem’s score is played (“happens again”) in a series of
variations on the original, in which the original continues to scan.
Inside Celan’s aural palette and still plumbing its dactyls, Carson remarks: “the
redness of [Celan’s] red sail stains fact deeply with the fixative of counterfact.
Redder than red, redder than the blood of a boar in a dream” (9). The reading’s
job here is to pull us back once more into the poem’s currents (as Carson hears
them at the time of her writing): to hold us in the red so that we see only red.
Carson’s symbolism of the “blood of a boar in a dream” is a symbolon to match
Celan’s Blutsegel, a gift that reciprocates the original and bears it toward new
destinies. A gift from “you to you,” and through another conversation in which
no conversation takes place, Celan’s poem is realized anew in a counter-​gift that
amplifies and spreads its color, pulsing to the rhythms of its source.
In the context of Carson’s writing to date, it might be reasonable to ask, fi-
nally, if this imitative counter-​song is a form of pastiche, or even, at moments,
a parody of Celan. (For Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Parody, neither form
requires an intent to ridicule; where pastiche seeks similarity of tone, form, and
genre, the critical métier of parody “allows for adaptation” and “transformation”
of its model).51 It is a question we might do better to leave open: better to enjoy
the tonal ambiguity of Carson’s relationship to Celan, which slides lyrically be-
tween intimate identification and critical distance. Hutcheon notes of parody
that the word’s etymology contains the same ambiguity. Parodia—​a compound
of para and odos—​is usually understood to mean “counter-​song,” yet Hutcheon
draws closer attention to the prefix para—​as Carson does to the preposition
πρὸϛ (pros) in the “Note on Method,” whose rich connotation covers the same
ground (“toward, upon, against, with . . .”). Para is “counter” or “against,” from
which derives the ironic, distancing capacity of the parody; but it is also “beside”
(“there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast”).52 Singing
 Criticism and the Gift 77

with Celan is, here, a way of singing against the current: singing, that is, with a
critical difference.

We, You, Us

Readers of her extraordinary essay will know that it is not only by extending his
poems’ tonal and metrical refrains that Carson writes with Celan. For all that
her register and stylistics lean into Celan’s, her thinking, too, circles inside and
mimics the logics she perceives in his writing, beginning with his rendition of
the “false sail” story. As Carson traces the structural geometries of “Matière de
Bretagne,” her reflections follow the contours of Celan’s “circle of great lyrical
beauty, lit by gorselight, around Nothingness” (8), around that vanishing point
where the poem meets its destinies in the life of “you,” the universal reader.
Carson moves through the poem’s “you” toward a “you” whom she addresses
directly, appropriating Celan’s abstract “you” as her own personal addressee.
Celan’s poem, she says, “gathers us into a movement—​toward you—​that sails to
the end. But you, by the time we reach you, are just folding yourself away into a
place we cannot go: sleep.” Celan’s “you” is elided into Carson’s, who, too, is no
sooner reached than folded into oblivion:

We travel toward your crisis, we arrive, yet we cannot construe it—​the terrible
thing is, after all (and most economically!) we are the false sail for which you
wait. (9)

The striking gesture here is Carson’s positioning of herself among the “us” and
“we” of Celan’s readers, who are also, in this case, her own readers. “You” (the
“you” of “Did you know me, /​hands?” but also the final line of “Matière de
Bretagne,” “you teach your hands /​to sleep”) remains impersonal, a figure for the
autonomous, unconscious course of writing, as well, perhaps, as its destiny in the
abstract—​a reader, “the” reader in waiting. At the same time, what begins to take
shape here is a clear identification of the author of Economy of the Unlost with
Celan, both of whom share this “you” as their delayed addressee. These rhetor-
ical moves—​which scan as both humbly confessional and high-​flown—​continue
a refrain that begins in the essay’s opening pages, where Carson throws down a
more direct comparison:

His biographers recount that when the poet Paul Celan was four years old, he
took a notion to make up his own fairy tales. He went about telling these new
versions to everyone in the house until his father advised him to cut it out. “If
you need stories the Old Testament is full of them.” To make up new stories,
78 Variations in Criticism

Celan’s father thought, is a waste of words. This father’s sentiments are not unu-
sual. My own father was inclined to make sceptical comments when he saw me
hunched at the kitchen table covering pages with small print. Perhaps poets are
ones who waste what their fathers would save. (3)

Were the “Note on Method” not a clear enough confession of a poet writing crit-
icism, these twin vignettes remind us in no uncertain terms that what we are
reading is the response of one poet to another: poets whose adult thrift and child-
hood excesses with words are exercised under the conviction that something—​
though things incomparably different—​ needs to be saved, salvaged, even
reinvented. On a superficial level, the gesture recalls what Carson does in “The
Glass Essay” in relation to Emily Brontë, comparing and contrasting anecdotes
from the two writers’ lives in a reading that is also, at the same time, a scholar’s
confession; or in relation to Weil in the title essay of Decreation, where Carson
recounts trying to eat the pages of her childhood copy of The Lives of the Saints.53
If we were to speak of what Carson and Celan share that Carson and Simonides
do not, beyond the obvious, more radical difference in historical contexts, per-
haps it would be useful to speak of a belief that the economy of poetry, its destiny
and ability to “save,” lies somewhere outside the poem. Where Simonides stakes
his poetry on the measurable material dimensions of its writing, Celan stakes his
on their vanishing point, measuring off the written to give voice to something
beyond it: in Carson’s words, to “measure out the area of the given and the pos-
sible” (118). The poem is saved, for Celan, by being realized—​its gifts continually
received—​elsewhere.
Returning to Steven Willett’s critique of what he calls the “slapdash” quality of
Carson’s comparative essay: where Carson shows inconsistent concern for tex-
tual evidence and historical fact, as Willett has argued, or where her readings
are arguably more “spurious” (his word) is, perhaps surprisingly, in relation to
Simonides.54 Carson the classicist is, Willett says, “much more careful about
hewing to biographical fact with Celan, who is too near us in time for the same
treatment [she gives Simonides].”55 He proposes that behind this imparity, and
behind Carson’s speculative readings of unreliable ancient testimonia, apocry-
phal stories, or philological ambiguity, is “a Foucauldian game [played] with her
readers: the poet as author is everything that the tradition says he is. We can, as
it were, roll all the disparate traditions, both the true and false, the probable and
improbable, into one lump and apply it en masse to the ancient poet.”56 As the
accrual and transfer of “both true and false, the probable and improbable,” the
Foucauldian function of tradition in Willett’s critique is temptingly close to that
of the gift economy, in which “grace” (the intangible “life” of tangible objects) is
accumulated and moved through words and deeds. Each act of “grace” carries
the residue of those before it, bearing with it both things present and things
 Criticism and the Gift 79

absent, facts and apocryphal stories. Carson pretty much spells out in the “Note
on Method” that her reading of Simonides with Celan will not only be about the
relation of facticity to the vibration felt in its absence—​about the negative dia-
lectics Celan’s unverloren was crafted to perform—​but that her inquiry will be
guided by “the immediate experience (Erlebbarkeit) of the self as self ” and cleared
“of what I do not know”: a manifesto for the subjective lyricism excoriated by
Willett in his opening remarks on Carson’s essay. This “immediate experience”
undoubtedly includes the excesses of autobiographical identification (“too much
self in my writing”) and the squaring of her own strictures as a poet with those
of Paul Celan, “poet of nothingness” after Mallarmé.57 The “Foucauldian game”
that Willett describes is precisely how Carson constructs and stages her own re-
lationship to tradition: the splaying of affiliations and identifications that makes
Carson, in a sense, everything she says she is—​both the true and the false. This
self-​situating performance, I suggested in the Introduction, is one we believe in
if and because we want to. Its implications for our task as her readers will be
followed through what remains of this book.
Carson’s performance of a mind “locked inside its own pressures,” its “best
moments” addressed to “a listening you” or a “you” whose voice it returns and
whose tradition it all but professes to continue, is a risky mode for the straight-​
up scholarly essay. That it keels to a “lyric” mode—​as per Culler’s “iterative and
iterable performance”—​almost doesn’t need stating.58 Yet Economy of the Unlost
models qualities of attention and transmission that have much to offer the pre-
vailing culture of academic writing, with its conventions of address, its sanctioned
emotional and “conversational” range, and its unofficial locks on style and form.
If Carson’s “aesthetic work” models the kind of poetic license only granted to
poets writing criticism, then it also holds a question mark over the kinds of textu-
ality and interpretive gesture functionally excluded from mainstream academic
criticism (tonally mimetic, passionately close readings; comparative formalism
against watertight literary historicism, not to speak of confessional “notes on
method”). The decision of Princeton University Press to publish the work, more
than a decade after publishing Eros the Bittersweet, suggests its editors chose to
take Carson at her word regarding the nature and aspirations of her essay:

writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening land-
scape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything
I do not know . . . 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—​

Carson’s gamble in Economy of the Unlost is to open a place for this precarious,
interim form of academic writing, a writing conscious of the “back and forth”
80 Variations in Criticism

between Erlebbarkeit and “the landscape of science and fact where other people
converse logically and exchange judgements.” Her poetic exchanges with Celan
perform the real-​time experience of one poet appraising and identifying with an-
other. Celan himself put poetry’s work–​–​intimate as well as historic–​–​to the test
like perhaps no other poet before him (his question, as Carson has it, is “do words
hold good?”). In working this question from the beginnings of poetry as written
medium to her own incomparably different present, and in staging this partic-
ular destiny of his poetic gift, Carson offers a window onto that “windowless
room.” Hers is a scholarly account whose confessional transparency—​in order
for the book to work—​we must take at its word.
Toward the end of the essay, finally, Carson explains the difference between
Celan and Simonides in terms of one key emotion.

We have seen Simonides estranged from his fellows on account of this con-
dition; we have seen him recognize, resent and negotiate his estrangement;
we have seen him transform it into a poetic method of luminous and precise
economy. We have not seen him despair. (121)

Simonides does not despair, Carson suggests, because in his poetic economy,
Simonides himself is not at stake. Writing does not put him on the line—​and
putting yourself on the line, she says of the xenia relationship, is the true meaning
of “piety” (20). She tells us at the top of the same page that “a poet’s despair is not
just personal; he despairs of the word and that implicates all our hopes. Every
time a poet writes a poem he is asking the question, Do words hold good? And
the answer has to be yes: it is the contrafactual condition on which a poet’s life
depends.” The cycle seems to be intractable: the word is at risk because the poet
despairs of it, and in turn, she claims, we ourselves are at risk because the word is.
But the book’s penultimate paragraph appears to throw us a lifeline:

Every praise poem is a presentiment of itself—​a neologism that throws itself

forward into song to whoever will complete it by seeing and hearing it, by
taking it into their mind or heart. A praise poet has to construct fast, in the
course of each song, this community that will receive the song. (133)

So the praise poem is not realized (“complete”) until it is seen, heard, and “taken
into” whosoever returns its compliment. It is only a praise poem, not a presen-
timent of one, when the community it anticipates receives its grace. Yet it is
also, emphatically, a community the poet has to “construct”: to pre-​empt and
play to in ways we will see Carson do throughout this book; to address as well as
hear in the textures of her song.59 Carson’s appraisal of Celan “with” Simonides
assumes and awaits a similar community, to seal its work of praise and keep in
 Criticism and the Gift 81

circulation what it has salvaged. Carson confesses to her readers elsewhere in the
book, “There is no evidence of salvation except a gold trace in the mind” (95).
Reading by gold trace, reading by echo, residue, and radiance, glinting off per-
sonal memory, is a response to texts that, however pleasingly economical, flaunts
its own absolute dependence on the reader. Like the true gift in Derrida’s con-
ception of it, criticism as counter-​gift gives over its own immaterial gifts without
knowing to whom they are passed on, or to what or whom exactly they are in-
debted. The gold trace spreads in the form of an incantation, a presentiment of
something to come.
 PART II
GL ASS E SS AYS
 3
On Not Being Emily Brontë

In his brief introduction to Glass, Irony and God, the poet and scholar Guy
Davenport relates how Carson’s 1995 collection first came into being. The
founding editor at New Directions, James Laughlin, “saw Anne Carson for what
she is: a real poet whose poems are unfailingly memorable,” Davenport tells us.
Memorable though the poems are, Davenport’s introduction to Carson’s book
only exists, it turns out, because “Laughlin thought ‘she needs explaining.’ ”*1
Though Davenport will disagree with this verdict—​“I don’t think she needs
explaining at all”—​he couldn’t have chosen a more suggestive opening appeal
than the question of explanation. Whether or not we think her work does need
explaining, we would be hard pushed to find a poet who explains herself more
often, with greater rigor, and with greater irony than Carson: a poet whose poems
hijack, and return transfigured, the expository purposes of the essay; whose
writing models a critical register seamlessly turned back on itself; and a poet, for
that matter, in whose work the power of what resists explanation—​“what facts
lack” or where language “goes dark”—​is a source of painstakingly declared in-
terest. Perhaps Laughlin felt that Carson’s explanations were part, too, of what
needed accounting for; that the relationship between poetry, scholarship, and
self-​reading in Carson, the concerted transparency that follows and frames her
complexity, was itself far from straightforward.
Glass, Irony and God opens with the acclaimed narrative poem, “The Glass
Essay,” whose thirty-​eight pages of unrhyming tercets and quatrains, divided
into irregular sections of between three and seventy-​six stanzas, interweave an
account of loneliness and loss with passages and vignettes from the life and work
of Emily Brontë. A winding lyric confession whose form and first-​person voice
bind it to poetry, “The Glass Essay” is also a reading of Brontë’s biography, her
writing, and her critical reception. It is an essay in the sense that D’Agata and Tall
say the so-​called “lyric essay,” for all its poetic “shapeliness,” bespeaks an “overt
desire to engage with facts”; in the case of “The Glass Essay,” to engage with the
verbal facts and anecdotes of the Brontë oeuvre.2 It also resonates with the way
in which Carson says The Beauty of the Husband is an essay: “a reflection on [the]
story” to which these facts are brought to bear.3 Carson’s poem-​essay, in this par-
ticular sense, tells two stories at once, conflated, says Davenport, “with Tolstoyan
skill”: the story of a love affair’s end and aftermath, where the narrator has trav-
eled to stay with her mother (who, like Haworth-​born Brontë, “lives on a moor

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0004
86 Glass Essays

in the north”); and the story woven out of her reflections on Brontë’s life and
writing—​Brontë, who is referred to and addressed in the poem as “Emily.”4
In “The Glass Essay,” critical, biographical, and autobiographical impulses pull
together in the transcribing of this unlikely accompaniment. As Carson explains
at the start of the poem-​essay, this is a reading arising from a deep personal iden-
tification, an involuntary analogy between Emily and the narrator that leads the
latter to announce: “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë” (1). Facts from Brontë’s
life and writing, recovered and pored over by the narrator, are summoned during
the work against a long-​standing tradition of reading Brontë as a case of cre-
ative subjection heedless of its scope, origins, and violence; an author stricken
by a poetic impulse that, in Carson’s paraphrase, “she could neither understand
nor control” (10).5 Weighing these facts against her own dilemmas of subjec-
tion, the narrator is interested in a Brontë in full possession of the “liberty”—​not
subjection—​she finds in writing: in Brontë’s case, a liberty won at the expense of
lived life. In their convergence and, more importantly, in their differences, the
stories of the two women’s authorships are, like those of Simonides and Celan
in Economy of the Unlost, “aligned and adverse,” the one sounding a sidelong
disquisition on the other.6 In its comparative-​confessional texture, “The Glass
Essay” anticipates later examples of Carson writing “with” other authors—​with
Virginia Woolf on the question of time, with Keats on beauty, and with Catullus
in the elegiac mode.7 Similitude (an analogy struck up between two often very
different authors or scenarios) does the work that verisimilitude seems unable
to do. As “The Glass Essay” glides its focus between the narrator and Emily, each
has the effect of rendering the other non-​identical with herself, exposing the
contradictions of one in the struggles of the other. A similitude, then, that places
a hovering interrogative around the possibility of verisimilitude at all.
What is perhaps most striking about “The Glass Essay,” read alongside The
Beauty of the Husband as I attempt in this part of the book, is the way it performs
and reflects on a critical reading of Brontë in what feels and sounds like real time.
As the narrator talks her way through facts—​intimate, textual, or paratextual—​
present-​tense autobiographical commentary binds critical commentary to a pre-
cise set of circumstances and exacting emotional demands. Carson’s reading of
Brontë occupies the full swell of the poem’s present tense, up to the point where,
in its final pages, something in or about Brontë refuses to be read. There is an
impasse at this sudden resistance to assimilation that brings the analogy—​and
the dramatic identification, “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë”—​to an ab-
rupt end. Though it begins with the two women converged, the poem pursues
precisely these qualities of resistance and liberty: first, in Brontë’s errors and or-
thographical liberties in the handwritten fascicles of her work, and in her robust
rejection of bodily and sexual life; then more fully in the question of Bronte’s rela-
tionship with the mysterious figure she addresses as “thou,” an interlocutor-​muse
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 87

the narrator describes as Brontë’s “true creation.” It is here, on the question of

“thou,” that the poem-​essay leads into some of the wider concerns of Glass, Irony
and God, anticipating those of Decreation a decade later: Where does self-​sensing
end and relationship begin? “What kind of withness” is compassion (a question
posed in the poem “God’s Christ Theory”)?8 These concerns gather in the earlier
volume around the status of mystical experience and its documents—​the “faked”
photographs of St. Teresa in “Teresa of God”—​and other dilemmas of faith, no-
menclature, and difference that mark the poems of the “Book of Isaiah” and “The
Truth About God.”9
What Carson, or her confessional narrator, seems to want from Brontë is not
a seamless literary analogy for her loneliness, but the thrill of resistance to such
a project that comes from relation to an object or source that is not her “true
creation”—​the sensation of addressing a woman, reading an oeuvre, whose in-
scrutability and failure to be grasped are apprehended in and alongside features
that can be seen and readily accounted for. Brontë’s resistance to the ways she
has been read—​what Carson’s poem fashions as her “liberty”—​takes different
forms in the poem. Among these are the idiosyncratic spellings, vocabulary, and
verbal marks customarily excised from published editions of Brontë’s writing or
dismissed in tendentious editorial annexes; her relationship to the unbridled and
unsignified forces of nature; and another, more difficult liberty of the imagina-
tion to conjure scenarios of violence or fantasies of intimacy, including the fan-
tasy of total subjection to “thou.” The tensile, explanatory lyric voice of Carson’s
poem-​essay expresses commitments to both intimacy and liberty in the relation-
ship of reading. Intimacy with Brontë and her story is found easily enough. It
is in not being able to read or follow Brontë—​in not becoming Emily—​that the
poem’s narrator finds her own, also difficult, forms of liberty. As the “glass” of
Carson’s title suggests, it is possible to perceive an object and feel accompanied
while being unable to grasp or hold it still. Transparency can mean the scru-
pulous revelation of failures of decipherment, being or reading “with” a work
without cleansing it of its troubles.
Moving through the chapter, I will be concerned with how Carson’s poem
conforms—​ or doesn’t—​ to the shape or ends we might associate with an
“essay”: an essay by a literary scholar, but a scholar who is, like the object of
her identification, a poet and a writer of fiction. Carson’s text, in which, for
John D’Agata, “literary criticism” and “poem” speak in “one consistent voice,”
performs an argument about Brontë that unfolds via coarse-​and fine-​grained
textual analysis, historical and biographical detail, and meta-​critical commen-
tary on the emotions of reading.10 At the same time, this argument exposes its
own intimate backstory in a way that binds it to the kinds of self-​centered per-
formance we normally associate with autobiography and, in particular, with the
lyric mode.11 “Time in its transparent loops . . . passes beneath me now” (8),
88 Glass Essays

the narrator explains, and the time of recollection is transparent to the time of
reading, the time of reading to the time of loving. Carson’s programmatic trans-
parency is exacting in its expression of what she reads, as well as how, when, and
where she is reading. Her attention to details of biography and text is where the
demands of scholarship and lyric, with its “intimate and interior space of retreat,”
most compellingly converge.12

“Whaching” and Reading Brontë

“The Glass Essay” is a portrait of the unlikely forms of companionship that

writing, in “the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour,” can offer. The loneli-
ness of Emily and its “rationale” in the address to her poems’ interlocutor, “thou,”
are explored in parallel to the loneliness of Carson’s “I,” whose interlocutor is
Emily herself. Carson’s poem-​essay is a testament to the complexity of literature
as an analogue and companion to individual life, but it is one that renders the
individual lyric voice an emotional impossibility. When the narrator asks about
Brontë’s “thou,” about “the messages that pass /​between Thou and Emily” (33),
she is also asking about the origins of literature: about Brontë’s writing and the
myth of muse-​given inspiration that surrounds it, and about the origins of this
particular work. At the start of “The Glass Essay,” the narrator’s and Bronte’s
“need,” the preconditions for their writing and inspiration, are collapsed in the
narrator’s first direct address to Emily: “what meat is it, Emily, we need?” (2).
Channeling Brontë’s strident, searching loneliness in her own, Carson’s narrator
parses these questions in Brontë’s terms and addresses Brontë in hers, pushing
the work’s rationale of loneliness and identification as far as it will go.
As “The Glass Essay” takes us from “three silent women at the kitchen table”—​
mother, narrator, Brontë—​to the hostile landscapes of tundra and moor, we
follow Brontë and the mystery of “the little raw soul [that] was caught by no one”
(6). Carson tells us: “She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage,
success, a /​salary /​or a fear of death,” and “spent /​most of the hours of her life
brushing the carpet, /​walking the moor, or whaching” (6). At several points, the
poem homes on the question of what exactly Emily was “whaching” (Brontë’s
idiosyncratic spelling of “watching”). “Whaching . . . taught Emily all she knew
about love and its necessities—​/​an angry education that shapes the way her
characters /​use one another” (10). Brontë’s lessons in “love and its necessities”
derive, in this account, from the rough uses of nature and from the elation of a
physis beyond her control. Those of the narrator, by contrast, are learned under
the strain of erotic necessity, the troubles of bios or the events of the body and
emotions, and the powerlessness of the mind to master them.
This early picture of Emily is where Carson begins to situate her reading.
On page four of the poem in the 1995 New Directions edition, in the section
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 89

titled “WHACHER,” Carson introduces us to “Emily’s habitual spelling of this

word,” one of a handful of distinctive Brontë errata listed in the index to the first
published edition of Brontë’s Poems.13 Carson accounts for the eye-​catching error
with a striking exemplum, arguing by “example” being a typical gesture of essays:

For example

in the first line of the poem printed Tell me, whether, is it winter?
in the Shakespeare Head edition.
But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.

She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

To be a whacher is not a choice.

There is nowhere to get away from it,
no ledge to climb up to—​. . . (4–​5)

This passage is a statement of commitment to Brontë’s singular vocation and a

scholar’s manifesto for reading and preserving her orthography. It introduces us
indirectly to the narrator’s own subjection to vision, whose description is almost
identical to this description of Brontë. Like Brontë, for whom “to be a whacher
is not a choice,” the narrator, too, is condemned to watch “the poor core of the
world, /​wide open” (4)—​glancing to the visionary “dark world and wide” of
John Milton—​in the form of the graphically violent visions she calls “Nudes.”14
Recounting a conversation on these visions with her psychotherapist, “Dr Haw,”
she recalls being asked: “When you see these horrible images why do you stay
with them? /​Why keep watching? Why not //​go away? I was amazed. /​Go away
where? I said” (18). The same idea is reprised shortly after, repeating the meta-
phor for Brontë’s predicament almost exactly: “I stopped telling my psychother-
apist about the Nudes /​when I realized I had no way to answer her question, //​
Why keep watching? /​Some people watch, that’s all I can say. /​There is nowhere
else to go, //​no ledge to climb up to” (19, italics mine). Watching is a condition
of subjection and an involuntary exposure, but it also models a form of trans-
parency between its fraught subject and the world. As the narrator tells us, for
Brontë, “the work” of whaching “has no name. /​It is transparent. /​Sometimes
she calls it Thou” (5). A nameless and transparent condition, “whaching” is a
90 Glass Essays

mode of extreme openness in which the subject finds herself seamlessly coex-
tensive with the objects she sets her mind to (“God and humans and moor wind
and open night,” etc.). Nameless and transparent, there is nothing in “whaching”
to distinguish or protect its subject from the assaults of vision. In the narrator’s
description, “the work of whaching” is sometimes called “Thou”: the whacher’s
transparency is such that she all but becomes someone else.
“The Glass Essay” threads much of its lyricism along the recurring motif
of transparency. “Time in its transparent loops” exposes the poem’s prismatic
order, one of the most intimate expressions of Carson’s dictum “all time is now.”15
Looped into its imagery are other examples, centering on glass as a medium in
which relation and its constraint, or sameness and difference, are worked out.
Carson’s narrator reflects on the ambience at her mother’s kitchen table: “it is as
if we [narrator, mother, and Emily] have all been lowered into an atmosphere of
glass. /​Now and then a remark trails through the glass” (2). Ian Rae has written
suggestively on the presence of a bilingual pun in the poem-​essay on the English
“glass” and its homophone, the French glace (ice), zooming in on the images of
black ice and frozen ground that Carson has said inspired early reflections to-
ward “The Glass Essay.”16 Images such as this one, “[t]‌he swamp water is frozen
solid. /​Bits of gold weed //​have etched themselves /​on the underside of the ice
like messages,” might, if we extend Rae’s reading, echo the remarks that “trail
through the glass” in their apprehension of a medium the narrator expects to
be readable—​or audible—​but which she finds to be illegible, isolating, or
opaque. Opacity is a recurrent quality in images of a natural world hostile to the
narrator’s efforts to read for “messages,” messages addressed to the erotic psycho-
drama surrounding the narrator’s former lover, “Law.” Theirs is an opacity that
offsets the poem-​essay’s frank, confessional register compellingly. Yet the lucid
and open observation of opacity also feels all of a piece with the experiences of
Emily. While “watching” makes an argument for the metaphysical origins of po-
etry, where transparency to the world means openness to the influence of “thou,”
“whaching” in its orthographically errant form does something quite different in
“The Glass Essay.”
What is so compelling about Carson’s sustained attention to Brontë’s ortho-
graphical error in the handwritten manuscript of the poems is how, in Carson’s
hands, it becomes the sign not of metaphysical influence but of a robust singu-
larity of authorship. Reading for this robust singularity and against the meta-
physical argument is, in simple terms, the broader critical function of Carson’s
“essay” as it moves through Brontë’s texts and paratexts. Where the textuality of
regulated typescript affirms the anonymity of writing, the unregulated ortho-
graphical error emerges as a vital and unextraordinary sign of individual life.17
This intimate trace of the subject also erases her as its point of origin. Its resist-
ance to editorial regularity becomes, for Carson’s narrator, a cipher for Bronte’s
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 91

simultaneous presence and personal unreadability. To come across “whacher”

for the first time is to come up against the familiar unfamiliarity of a foreign lan-
guage, whose half-​dark nouns float apart, their moorings in the syntax obscured.
Not a nonce word, as several readers have characterized it, “whacher” is an ex-
ample of what Charlotte Brontë called Emily’s “little failings,” as Carson’s nar-
rator drily recounts.18 Other such “failings” include Emily’s profanities—​“foul
language” whose uncensored reproduction in the published edition of the work
Charlotte Brontë vindicates in her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights. Carson
quotes Charlotte: “A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly /​from the
introduction into the pages of this work //​of words printed with all their letters,
/​which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final /​letter
only—​a blank /​line filling the interval” (20). Carson also highlights the “small
adjustments” made by Charlotte “to the text of Emily’s verse” and listed in the
annotations to the poems’ posthumous publication: “Prison for strongest [in
Emily’s hand] altered to lordly by Charlotte” (21).19 Such interventions substitute
Emily’s handpicked diction for one in line with Charlotte’s more amenable poetic
sensibility. In these and other instances in “The Glass Essay,” Carson is drawn
to the wayward sign, the recalcitrant sign—​the one, as it were, that got away.
Recalling her personal attachment to Virginia Woolf ’s cross-​outs in “Appendix
to Ordinary Time” (2000), here, the register that has been suppressed in the
making of the published version becomes a “language of the unsaid” (21) as well
as a cipher for death, “hid[ing] right inside every shining sentence we grasped
and had no grasp of ” (as in prison substituted by Emily for strongest, both sub-
dued in the end by Charlotte’s lordly; or the editorial suppression of whacher and
other idiosyncratic spellings).20 The recovery of such a language, and the liberty
it represents, becomes a proxy for the narrator’s own resistance, to the subjection
she describes to a grieved erotic “Law.” Her recollection, “Love is freedom, Law
was fond of saying,” works the complex dependencies of liberty and subjection
into a profoundly ironic syntactic arrangement (20).
It is also significant in the extract above that the first line of the poem Carson
reproduces is an editorial mistake, a misattribution, and a misreading of Brontë.
“Whether,” Carson signals, is a substitute for Brontë’s original “whacher,” yet
“whether” is itself an orthographical eccentricity—​ “whether,” instead, as
Carson says, of “actual weather” (4). This is a case of an error mobilized to
cover an error, and constitutes an imposition of poetical law on the part of a
well-​meaning editor. Carson’s keen interest in the minutiae of handwritten tex-
tuality and its editorial suppression becomes a language for the problems of
liberty and subjection. Her interest finds a strong parallel in the scholar-​poet
Susan Howe’s passionate commitment to recovering similar minutiae in the
fascicles of another Emily—​Emily Dickinson. In her writings on Dickinson,
beginning with her 1985 study, My Emily Dickinson, and continuing in The
92 Glass Essays

Birth-​mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993),

Howe refers to a similar editorial intervention in the marks, errata, and punc-
tuation of the original Dickinson fascicles as “Lawlessness seen as negligence
is at first feminized and then restricted or banished.”21 Howe sees the editorial
determination of official textuality as an assault on an entire order of residues of
the physical body and—​most importantly to Howe—​the voice, whose recovery
drives a significant part of her critical and poetic project. The understanding of
errata as “unconscious talking,” and often as stylistic choice, is at the center of
Howe’s commitment to the material singularity of Dickinson’s originals, and, in
common with Carson, lends to her recovery project an intimacy rarely seen in
scholarly work: in Howe’s words, “the heart may be sheltering in some random
mark of communication” that editors deem “textually irrelevant.”22 Resistance
to these editorial efforts in the case of the Emily Brontë oeuvre is infused in
Carson’s poem with the same kind of intimate hope, staged in the trials and
attachments of her narrator. Carson, too, makes a comparable case for revising
the received “ontology” of her own Emily’s texts.23 Yet Carson’s poem also
points, like Howe’s readings of Dickinson, to the importance of such resistance
in challenging a wider, remarkably persistent notion of female authorship—​one
that winds up defenestrating their difficulty, idiosyncrasy, or “lawlessness”—​in
the critical history of both Emilies.
In one of the most darkly humorous sections of “The Glass Essay,” Carson
marshals Charlotte Brontë as a critical interlocutor, suggesting Charlotte’s
reading of her sister’s work has roundly missed the point. Paraphrasing
Charlotte’s own preface to Wuthering Heights (which Carson describes as like
“someone carefully not looking at a scorpion /​crouched on the arm of the sofa”),
the poem-​essay parses a reading of Emily set deep into her work’s paratextual ap-
paratus from its earliest publication. We are told of “Emily’s total subjection //​to
a creative project she could neither understand nor control” (9–​10)—​an Emily,
Carson explains with mock high-​octane solemnity, “in the grip” (10). Carson’s
point in this section of “The Glass Essay” is that Emily has been subdued by a
myth of involuntary authorship: that for more than a century and a half, Emily
has been displaced from the center of her own work by a reading that casts her
as inspired and self-​justifies a series of dubious editorial interventions. Charlotte
Brontë speaks for this long century, for which Emily has served as a figure of
Romantic subjection to the muse. For Charlotte Brontë, Emily could neither
“understand nor control” what she was writing.24
This metaphysical reading, as well as its contrast with the narrator’s argu-
ment for Emily Brontë’s authorial liberty and self-​possession, matters in Carson’s
poem-​essay for two reasons. First, as an interpretation of textual and—​as the
narrator reads it—​spiritual intentionality: where the idea of Emily “in the grip”
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 93

seeks to defenestrate the author, Carson’s narrator seeks to affirm Emily Brontë’s
errant and erratic act of literary creation, including her own distinctive fantasy
of subjection, with which the condition of “whaching” is loaded. It is also signif-
icant because, from the narrator’s point of view, the question of Brontë’s agency
as a writer also intercedes in the all-​important question of “thou”—​specifically,
the fact that Brontë’s figure of influence and inspiration is gendered male.25 If the
suppression of her awkward handwritten textuality equates to a suppression of
liberty, then the question of “thou” concerns not only the suppression of the fem-
inine in Brontë’s critical legacy, but how she—​how the woman author in the age
of the male pseudonym—​interprets her own power.
Margaret Homans offers a compelling reading of Brontë’s poetry as “troubled
by the apparent otherness of her mind’s powers, which she imagines as a series of
masculine visitants who bring visionary experience to her.”26 Homans imagines
Brontë in an impasse of potency, caught between “visionary experience offered
by male figures” whose influence is necessarily exogenous, and an endogenous
poiesis, historically devalued, implies Homans, because its poiesis is governable
(hence subject to failures of governance like errata).27 Brontë’s work, Homans
suggests, honors two very different myths of poetry’s origin: involuntarism and
the masculine muse on the one hand, and on the other, the woman writer com-
mitted to the rendering of human necessity as literature. Brontë was, in a sense,
caught between these myths from the first: an avid writer and storyteller since
childhood, her authorial identity, we should remember, first presented itself
to the public under the sign of a man—​the pseudonym, Ellis Bell. Brontë her-
self seems undecided on the issue. Her poem “My Comforter” speaks of and to
“thou” but insists, in an audacious direct address, that “Thou hast but roused a
latent thought,” staking claim to a self-​originating poesis in a subtle affront to her
muse.28
“The Glass Essay,” I have suggested, reads against a tradition of reading Brontë
that more or less proposes casting aside what Brontë wrote to get at what she
meant. It is a tradition steeped in a form/​content opposition that reads Brontë’s
language as a stumbling block, claiming “real” meaning to be accessible by way of
biographical, historical, anecdotical, and paratextual means. We find this mode
of reading in Q. D. Leavis’s “A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights” (1969),
where Leavis separates the novel’s written form from its “real” content. She
speaks of “rhetorical excesses, obstacles to the real novel enacted so richly for
us to grasp in all its complexity.”29 In speaking of the “real” novel as something
other than the text Brontë wrote—​even imagining the novel as its own obstacle—​
Leavis seems to argue for a kind of Ur-​Wuthering Heights, a novel, or the conceit
of a novel, of which the Wuthering Heights we read today is an awkward itera-
tion or epilogue.30 Frank Kermode critiqued this assumption of a “real,” almost
94 Glass Essays

metaphysical anti-​text when, in The Classic, he outlined Leavis’s working con-

ceit: a “hierarchy of elements [created] by a peculiar archaeology of her own, for
there is no evidence that the novel existed in earlier forms which are supposed
to have left vestiges in the only text we have.”31 This metaphysical reading of
Brontë says the “real” poem, the “real” novel, is somewhere other than its written
marks, and somehow other than Brontë penned it to paper. So-​called obstacles
to meaning are precisely what Carson’s poem-​essay covets in Brontë, as residues
of the ultimate liberty of the little raw soul “caught by no one.” That is: at one and
the same time, Carson’s text seeks to catch the intimate singularity of Brontë as an
author and a woman in loneliness, and seeks the failure to be caught, the errancy,
and the freedom, that guarantee such singularity.

“My Own Nude”: The End of the Poem-​Essay

The relationship between the intractable whacher, the critical and editorial re-
jection of Brontë’s errors, and the intimate dilemmas chronicled by Carson’s
narrator, can help us to understand the need for “Emily” as a simile on the
point of collapse with the narrator’s experiences. Emily is, nonetheless, a dif-
ficult and recalcitrant object whose contradictions refuse to accommodate
this similitude, and whose “messages”—​not least her errata—​often prove il-
legible. Among the eye-​catching idiosyncratic spellings of the first published
edition of Brontë’s Poems are “buissy” (busy), “kichin” (kitchen, referenced on
page 15 of Carson’s poem), “majic” (magic) and “vally” (valley).32 While its
retention is a form of resistance to editorial normalization, I suggested, the
erratic spelling fuses semantic associations to the correctly spelled word with
semantic nonconformity and the material verve of a nonce word. Before we
translate whacher or buissy into their established forms, these words are en-
igmatic messages, objects we don’t quite know what to do with or where to
place but that, in their readiness to sound, act—​and act upon us—​in undeci-
pherable ways. Appropriable in ways “watcher” is not, the sounding capability
of whacher is plumbed by Carson when she says of Brontë, “Whacher is what
she was,” reprising the sibilance of whacher in “what she.” Knitting the two
trochees into a dactylic lilt, Carson lends her line a latent, nursery-​rhyme mu-
sicality. A sensible reciprocity mimics and entertains Brontë’s singular vocabu-
lary, arguing for it in ways an unlilted critical prose might advocate or explain,
but would itself be unqualified to perform.
As the narrative progresses, the immediate enigma of the Brontë errata
comes to occupy the same order as Carson’s many representations of natural
phenomena in the poem-​essay, the bleak, illegible physis in which Brontë sets
her novel, and through which Carson’s narrator strides in search of insight and
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 95

release. As the narrator wanders the moor, she comes across the resistance to de-
cipherment we encountered earlier on:

The swamp water is frozen solid.

Bits of gold weed

have etched themselves

on the underside of the ice like messages. (33)

Immediately following these lines, Carson quotes Brontë’s poem “I’ll Come
When Thou Art Saddest” in full, before announcing that “the messages that
pass /​between Thou and Emily” are “[v]‌ery hard to read” (33). The mirroring
of “messages”—​those the narrator observes and those exchanged between Thou
and Emily—​marks a convergence of purpose between Carson’s scholarship and
her intimate lyric response. Attention turns in both to the problem of loneliness.
In the union of Thou and Emily, Carson wonders, what does relationship sound
like—​what relationship is there to speak of—​if Thou is a “rationale” for the poet’s
loneliness? Her narrator wonders, in turn, what ice and moorland have to say
to her—​what relationship there can be—​under Law’s regime of meaning. The
assonantal rhyme of psychotherapist “Dr Haw” with “Law” (and, in a Canadian-​
accented reading, Rae suggests, a near rhyme with “Ma,” “Pa”) turns Carson’s
portrait of erotic enthrallment into a delirious family romance, in which the
lover’s desire sets the terms for relation with just about everyone.33 Yet what
Carson’s “I” finds in the unreadable, unaffiliated signs of nature, a physis uncon-
taminated by bios, is an irreducible nonsignifying force that refuses this symbolic
law and hampers the pursuit of “messages” by lover and scholar alike. It is here, in
the encounter with acknowledged illegibility, that the narrator begins to diverge
from Emily. Here she first glimpses a hard-​won liberty of her own.
The narrator/​Emily analogy reaches a crisis toward the end of the poem-​essay,
just after the narrator’s disquisition on the Thou/​Emily relationship. Carson has,
at this point, reproduced Brontë’s disquieting poem “I’ll Come When Thou Art
Saddest,” in which the lyric “I” (“I’ll come”) addresses a lowercase “thou” directly.
“I” instructs “thou” to “Listen! ’tis just the hour, /​The awful time for thee: /​Dost
thou not feel upon thy soul /​A flood of strange sensations roll /​Forerunners of
a sterner power, /​Heralds of me?” In this remarkable sequence, it is not the poet
who addresses her muse—​the traditional etiquette of the epic mode—​but vice
versa: this lyric subject ventriloquizes the muse and speaks, apparently, to her-
self, becoming a “thou” to his “Thou.” Carson reads this vignette as a reversal
of roles, in which we find Brontë “speaking not as the victim but to the victim”
(Carson’s emphasis). The narrator offers a reading of what happens in Brontë’s
poem when the poet, speaking as “Thou,” addresses herself to “thou”:
96 Glass Essays

It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou,

who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered.

It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion

of master and victim within one voice
is a rationale

for the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour. (34)

What is being watched here is a reversal of “roles,” says Carson; no power game,
we are told, but an effort to provoke pity in the poet “for this soul trapped in
glass, /​which is her true creation.” Carson’s lines describe a reversibility that
means two different things for Carson and Brontë. For Brontë, the reversal of
roles guarantees the reciprocity of the relationship with “Thou” and confirms His
reality. For Carson’s narrator, the same reversal is the symptom of nothing more
than a “collusion” of self with self in “one voice.” As the narrator reads it, Brontë’s
assumption of the voice of “Thou” to achieve self-​address is an uncomplicated
sublimation of her loneliness (“One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God,”
31). Yet God is a question the narrator puts off, turning her interest instead to
the dynamics of self-​relation in the poem: the “soul trapped in glass,” the self
addressed as if from without, is the poet’s “true creation.” This is a climactic mo-
ment in Carson’s poem-​essay. It produces a reckoning in the narrator regarding
her own collusion with Emily, as well as a louder reckoning with the larger, met-
aphysical other—​the Old Testament “Thou”—​who looms aloft the Brontë poem.
The work done by Carson’s versification, and in particular by rhyme, is central to
her exposition of the collusion, but also suggests how her poem’s narrator has,
perhaps, come to replicate the very rationale she describes. The realization comes
as a “shock.” In the lines where the Thou/​thou collusion is represented, sudden
metrical regularity around the repetition (“Thou move upon thou” and “reversed
the roles of thou and Thou”), together with the striking assonantal rhyme, “low
slow collusion,” perform the smooth coextension, the perfect immanence, of
subject and interlocutor, exposing the intimate mechanics of the “rationale.”
“But for myself,” the narrator abruptly announces, “I do not believe this, I am
not quenched—​/​with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter. /​I am my own
Nude” (35). It is an announcement that marks a conscious break with Emily
and an abrupt end to the analogy—​the “rationale” of “I am turning into Emily
Brontë”—​that up to now has sustained the poem and offered solace to its nar-
rator. The affirmation that will replace it—​“I am my own Nude”—​describes
the narrator’s confrontation with an uninvested, un-​artful loneliness. In the
final pages, having arrived at the limits of her literary-​critical imagination and
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 97

exhausted its emotional events, the narrator is left alone with what she calls the
“difficult sexual destiny” of “Nudes” for the first time in the work.
The final pages of “The Glass Essay” announce the need for a change in key,
following the exhaustion of its sometime rationale. “I want to speak more clearly,”
the narrator states: “Perhaps the Nudes are the best way” (35). The “Nudes” are
a series of thirteen inset allegorical visions in which the narrator imagines a
woman’s body subjected to sometimes grotesque, Boschian violence at the be-
hest of natural forces. The first four of these are recounted earlier in the poem in
the section titled “Liberty,” marking an early paratactic shift from the narrator’s
readings of Brontë’s poems, the accounts of her life, and the present-​tense auto-
biographical thread. In Nude #1, a woman stands alone on a hill, pitched against
the wind:

Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift
and blow away on the wind, leaving

an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle

calling mutely through lipless mouth. (9)

The imagery conjured by the “Nudes” is vivid and various, but what it invariably
stages is the female body or landscapes analogous with its interior. The female
subject of the “Nudes” ranges from cautious and inward in her activity to bat-
tered under assault by foreign objects and natural elements—​eviscerating winds,
thorns, “bluish black” pressures in space. The body in Nude #1 is reduced by such
an assault to a simple failed attempt to communicate, “calling mutely through
a lipless mouth.” Yet Carson summons the Nudes at the end of the poem-​essay
as a way of speaking “more clearly.” What can the body say that reminiscences
of words and transparencies of memory cannot? No analysis of these late listed
“Nudes” is offered. Nor is there any repeat of the work’s earlier strategies of col-
lage and embedding of registers, quotations, biography, and analysis.
What the final “Nudes” perform is the narrator’s gradual abandonment of the
poem-​essay, which up to this point has been a vehicle for analogy and identifica-
tion, critical reading and self-​reading. Carson’s relinquishment of commentary
on the images, with their vindication of a wordless affliction, seems to signal an
end to the devices and sublimations accrued around “Law” and to the unhappy
identification with Emily. The thirteen “Nudes” strip down the language of loss
and betrayal to simple physical gestures, a ritualistic simplicity remembering the
fourteen “Stations of the Cross.” In doing so they perform the denuding of the
poem-​essay, its resources and its scholarly apparatus. In this final change of tack,
what appeared earlier on to be the redemptive solace of scholarship is left oddly
98 Glass Essays

high and dry: a sort of anti-​poem is staged, after the registers and reflections that
sustained the work have been cut away. The final “Nudes” emerge into what the
narrator tells us is empty space: in spite of her hope “to trick myself into some in-
terior vision,” “I saw nothing . . . but still—​nothing. No nudes. /​No Thou” (37).
When they do return, the “nudes”—​now referenced in lowercase—​approach the
“meaningless legs” of Carson’s later poem, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (2005),
whose jaded subject longs for an unsignified body in place of one saturated with
erotic significance; for an end, too, to the performative sexuality that leads her
to ask, “who does not become a female impersonator?”34 In their vindication
of physis over bios, the final “nudes” imagine the unwriting of the body as the
seat of sexual history and biographical life, bound and shaped by inescapable
hungers: including, in this poem, a scholar’s compulsion to rationalize and close-​
read them.
The final “Nude,” which arrives unexpectedly, marks a decisive end to the
rule of “Law,” for Nude #13, she says, “arrived when I was not watching for it.” It
reprises Nude #1 and yet is “utterly different.” This Nude is a human body,

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off
the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind

was cleansing the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.

The body in this final scene walks away a “cleansed” cipher. In this last ritual
“station,” the exposed form high on the hill—​“the body of us all”—​is no longer
an object of masochistic identification (“it was not my body”): as the narrator
disentangles herself from Brontë and the drama of “thou”—​a drama of sover-
eignty, muses, and literature—​this cleaner, clearer imagery cannot help but de-
liver the biblical “Thou,” whose exit from the world cleanses and purifies (“ ‘In
Thou they are quenched as a fire of thorns,’ says the psalmist,” 34). The scene
carries with it a surplus of meaning accumulated around the “Nudes” and marks
a poet’s disassociation from the poem-​essay. The reduction of its functions sig-
nals an end to “turning into Emily,” yet its gnostic ambivalence toward the body
is something the poem-​essay actually shares with Brontë’s poetry. A concordance
of Brontë’s poems counts only one occurrence of the word “body” in the form of
an injunction to relinquish it: “the heart is dead since infancy /​Unwept for let the
body go.”35 In poems such as the “Prisoner” fragment, Brontë seems to refuse the
 On Not Being Emily Brontë 99

material substance of poetry while continuing to mine its lyric capacities, using
her poems to sound a desire for silence.36
“The Glass Essay” is a scholar’s poem. Its chronicle of the consolations of lit-
erature and literary scholarship—​reading for our own emotions in the study of
another’s reading of hers—​ends with an eviscerated cache of imagery in which
emotion, sex, bios, are ritually cleansed.37 Yet Carson’s poem-​essay is all too
conscious—​her analogy with Brontë a fail-​safe expression—​of the limits of
poetry. For all that the “Nudes” “speak more clearly,” and for all that their ar-
chetypal ore—​“silver and necessary”—​plumbs the universally sexed phantasma-
goria of dreams, they speak as images in a poem, iterations of other images in
other poems, and iterations of Christian symbolism. At the end of this poem, an
odd reverberation of the different functions and needs brought together in the
work casts its final resolution into doubt, holding a question mark over what—​if
anything—​has been redeemed. Poetry has made a claim for its own abandon-
ment. Autobiography has made plain the attachments of scholarship, and, in
the end, close reading of her verse—​a key “essay” function here—​has allowed
Carson’s narrator to disentangle herself from Brontë, her proxy in the emotional
event called liberty.
The solace of “turning into Emily Brontë” is as urgent as it is unsettling. The
story of that solace brings the speculations and emotive demands of reading into
clear view, and in doing so, creates a curious side effect. It is easy to identify with
Carson, candid as she is with her emotions and emotional limits as a reader, but
the same candor—​we might call it presence or personality—​holds us back from
“turning into” Carson ourselves. This is the limit sought by the American scholar
Sarah Chihaya, whose recent response to Carson’s poem-​essay, titled “A Glass
Essay,” reads for what doesn’t submit to her identification with Carson.38 “The
Glass Essay” is an early window onto the “windowless room” of Carson’s work
with other authors and literatures: that sealed-​off consciousness where, she tells
us in Economy of the Unlost, thought’s “best moments” are to be had. Carson’s
poem-​essay is a reflection on its private conditions of possibility: what led
Carson to read Brontë, what drew her to—​and what she sought to salvage from—​
the errata, the destructiveness of eros in Brontë’s novel, the myths surrounding
her authorship. “Essay” is little more here than a reflective tense, holding facts,
examples, reflections, and memories in a running real-​time present. In this
present, there is no useful distinction to be made between the facts and fictions of
literature and the facts of autofiction and autobiography, a mode she will push to
extremes in the “fictional essay,” The Beauty of the Husband.
 4
Lyric Transparency and
the “Fictional Essay”

“I feel it’s a kind of fervour of mine,” Carson has said, “to get away from whatever
body of information I rest on when I give opinions. And I think poetic activity
is a method for doing that,” she continues: “—​you leap off the building when you
think poetically.”1 The products of Carson’s “fervour” are notorious: anachro-
nism, parody, improbability, and fiction are the “errancy” she gathers into a rogue
critical method, where “to get away from” information sets her against the grain
of historicism and the academic essay form.2 It is the same fervor Carson turns
back on herself as a matter of course, setting her writing on the trail of its own
implausibility. What she presents as a method for self-​estrangement (unsettling
the ground she “rests on”) is at its clearest and most complex when its disciplined
precarity is an approach to other works. One “body of information” preserved in
the contours of another can defamiliarize and renew both, as the Brontë oeuvre
offered Carson a language for writing her way out of a story gone stagnant, with
Brontë revised and recolored along the way. At other times, the “body of infor-
mation” appears to have vanished without a trace, her source texts transformed
almost beyond recognition.
Carson’s admission recalls a later mise-​en-​scène for her methods. It is the
scene with which I began Chapter 1, in which Carson compares the “perilous
activity” of freeform lecturing to the perilous choreography of Elizabeth Streb,
whose dancers fall “straight down from a height of thirty-​two feet,” looking, as
they leap, “like gods for an instant.”3 There, what interested Carson was an abrupt
disorganization of desire brought on by these two very different simulations of
accident, in which choreography and scholarship perform what the radical es-
trangement of their methods might look like. Here, though, talking about her
fervor to “get away,” Carson draws her own desire into view. A sudden, perverse
symmetry emerges between the forsaken “body of information” and the body
that “leap[s]‌off the building” in the name of poetic thinking. How are these
bodies—​textual facts and intimate history, knowledge and self-​knowledge—​
bound together in Carson’s activity? Does “thinking poetically” mean exposing
more than just “information” to danger?
Another admission replicates the mise-​en-​scène and gives us some leads.
Several pages into The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0005
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 101

(2001), a semi-​autobiographical narrative essay in irregularly lineated verse,

Carson’s narrator describes herself sitting “at a window (restaurant) high above
the street, /​married a little more than a year,” and the moment when her husband
(“with shy pride”) slips out a photograph of his mistress:

Quick work I said. Are you going to be arch he said.

I broke the glass and jumped.
Now of course you know

that isn’t the true story, what broke wasn’t glass, what fell to earth wasn’t body. (16)

No sooner is this fiction offered than it is exposed as such and withdrawn.

“I” glances in complicity at “you,” addressee of the palinode, who knows what
it is to think poetically and grasps how compelling its leaps can be. The nar-
rator then explains that “when I recall the conversation it’s what I see—​me
a fighter pilot /​bailing out over the channel. Me as kill.” The Beauty of the
Husband, a long-​form disquisition on “the true lies of poetry” (33), makes the
case early on for metaphors truer than the “true story” and, driving them, an
almost fatalistic compulsion to fiction: fatalistic because the narrator’s expo-
sure of her metaphors—​a favorite essayistic tic—​leaves her compromised by
the same “true lies,” the same fatal attractions, she excoriates in “the Husband.”
Her brief self-​exposure does a lot of work, for the betrayal of metaphor gives
away both her medium and its seductions; its confession and retraction—​its
transparency, its history—​is as much a part of the case being made for fiction
as the fiction itself. Throughout The Beauty of the Husband, the thinking and
feeling owed to metaphor, analogy, metonymy, the devices of poetry and fic-
tion, are confessed repeatedly and at length. Carson’s Fictional Essay offers
a dramatic emotional backstory for “the true lies of poetry” and for the sus-
tained scrutiny of poetics as a problem, seamless and simultaneous with its
performance.
The Beauty of the Husband tells the story of a marriage in the longue durée,
from adolescent love and serial infidelity to divorce and attempted reconcilia-
tion, drawn through philosophical asides, “reflections on [the] story,” and up-
percase title sequences addressed to the reader in the narrative present.4 In what
she calls “A SPIRIT OF UNASHAMED DIS-​/C ​ LOSURE” (123), the narrator
interprets the dilemmas of her story with the help of the ancients (Homer, Plato,
Parmenides) and the moderns (Keats, Barthes, Beckett, Proust). Chronicling her
“seduction” by a man’s “beauty” and way with words, a man who “liked writing,
disliked having to start /​each thought himself ” (9), the narrator’s most pressing
dilemma is her ongoing enthrallment to the capacity of words—​his and hers,
borrowed and original—​to “shine” (5), to “explode” (34), words that “showed up
102 Glass Essays

on all the walls of my life” (41). Critical comment on poetry and imitation, and
exposés of the husband’s uncreative writing (“Used my starts to various ends,”
9), are thrown into relief by real-​time interpolations to the “you”—​“fair reader”
(5)—​who is both witness and accomplice to her own composition. Who reads it
from without as she reads it from within.
We have seen how thinking in Carson is often inseparable from its lyric per-
formance. We have seen her languages of exposure range from autobiographical
asides, direct address, and scholarly statements of intent, to mimetic argumen-
tative structures, performative forms, and drafts that expose her thinking and
reading to scrutiny. In the concerted transparency of “The Glass Essay,” Carson’s
reading of Brontë happens in a raw dream sequence, confessional, time-​bound,
and site-​specific. In The Beauty of the Husband, which also claims the status of
an “essay,” the reading—​the critical essay—​is almost entirely eclipsed by the
confessional narrative. What the book’s blurb describes as “an essay on Keats’s
idea that beauty is truth, and . . . also the story of a marriage” is a provocation.
It provokes us immediately into querying its form, but it also tells us that the
functions of “story” and “essay”—​in a leap of poetic thinking—​are cotermi-
nous, their dimensions matched and their course intertwined. It is in Carson’s
self-​scrutinizing “story of a marriage” that the putative “essay on Keats’s idea
that beauty is truth” emerges as an analogy to the story, buoyed along by it, held
afloat by various means, but never broached directly. This is an essay caught in
dense textures of lyric performance that stand in for the analysis of Keats, yet are
dedicated in the uppercase “TO KEATS” in the work’s opening line. The essay
on Keats, the critical essay we might be expecting, remains a fiction of its own
making.
What, then, is the Beauty of the Husband? In formal terms, Carson’s Fictional
Essay in 29 Tangos is a series of twenty-​nine numbered verse compositions of
irregular lineation and length, followed by a final, unnumbered entry and a
list of “Notes.” Each composition begins with a sparsely punctuated uppercase
title sequence, which can be read continuously across the numbered entries,
and each is preceded, on an otherwise blank page, by a short fragment of verse,
errata, or marginalia from Keats. The book contains one near-​quotation and no
other mention of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in which “Keats’s idea that beauty
is truth” famously appears, though iterations of the poem’s scenes and figures
occur throughout, alongside scattered allusions to the poet and a small number
of marked quotations and unmarked paraphrases from other works, several
(not all) of which are referenced in Carson’s “Notes.” No direct commentary on
this material is offered. The material is recalled, rather, in the narrator’s account,
alongside other recollected readings, quotations, and inquiries, love scenes, let-
ters, close readings of letters, and staged compositions such as a series of inset
“elegiac couplets” recording her daily observation of a branch (123; 123–​125).
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 103

Addressed to “you,” this iterative performance brooks little or no distinction be-

tween the textual facts of quotation and paraphrase on the one hand, and the
textures of reflection and commentary on the other. Carson’s fictional essay is
transparent, indistinguishable from the rehearsals that give rise to it.
On the intimacy of writers and their texts, Rachel Blau DuPlessis quotes
Virginia Woolf ’s remark that she (Woolf) saw “no reason why one should not
write as one speaks, familiarly, colloquially.” “Letters, journals, voices are sources
for this element,” says DuPlessis, “expressing the porousness and nonhierarchic
stances of intimate conversation in both structure and function.”5 The Beauty of
the Husband swaps a surface/​depth hermeneutic for continuous lyric texture, in
which story, source material, commentary, and meta-​critical aside speak in the
same voice. In this, the work shows strong affinities with the “horizontal dis-
course” of Roland Barthes, whose interpretive figures in A Lover’s Discourse “al-
ways remain on the same level”—​“no transcendence, no deliverance, no novel
(though a great deal of the fictive)”—​and in which quotation and reference are
summoned and plundered as if from memory under the author’s “piratical law.”6
Barthes called his “horizontal discourse” the expression of a “ ‘dramatic’ method,”
reproducing the lyric discourse of “its fundamental person, the I, in order to
stage an utterance, not an analysis.”7 The digressive shape of Barthes’s utterance
offers a “simulation” of the lover’s discourse in lieu of description.8 Carson’s non-​
hierarchic “conversation” with the Keats oeuvre, fused with the discourse of a
searching former lover, rejects analysis of his work, reproducing instead events
of “primordial eros and strife” in the face of which it is “useless to interpose anal-
ysis or make contrafactual suggestions” (20, 49). If the lyric is “the iterative and
iterable performance of an event in the lyric present,” as Culler suggests it is, then
we might think of Carson’s “fictional essay” as an extreme form of lyric essay,
whose lyric present has become the main event.9 The intimate and continuous
disclosure of thoughts, memories, quotations, and feelings—​a full-​spectrum
lyric transparency—​has taken the place of analysis.
It is this transparency I will be trying to describe in what follows. Carson’s
transparency, distinct from the transparency of reference and process in the tra-
ditional scholarly essay, invites us to consider the performative textures of lyric
voice against what we might expect (or demand) from the “reading” voice of crit-
icism. Transparency is a method in Carson’s essay on “Keats’s idea that beauty
is truth,” but the method and its exposure form a targeted response to the “Ode
on a Grecian Urn.” Where Keats’s poem is a hymn to “quietness,” inscrutability,
and the “unheard,” Carson’s reading turns this principle on its head, countering
the urn’s “silence and slow time” with all-​out exposure and real-​time commen-
tary. The figure of glass—​“I broke the glass and jumped,” etc., but also Marcel
Duchamp’s The Large Glass (better known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even), which makes an appearance in Carson’s opening lines—​is the
104 Glass Essays

essay’s counterfactual proxy for Keats’s “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” object
of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Carson’s essay responds to an opaque metaphysics
of presence with self-​exposure and transparency, an account penetrated on all
sides by sources, intertexts, myths, and voices. Like the exposed metaphor early
on, its claim to “fiction” deliberately unsettles the text, for it also claims com-
plicity with the narrator’s principal object of suffering: the terrible beauty of im-
itation and lies.10
Drawn through this chapter is a series of questions around how it feels to read
a transparent, “horizontal” discourse of this kind. Carson’s fictional essay offers a
sustained confessional exposure that hijacks and reroutes the traditional expos-
itory functions of the literary-​critical essay. In place of a so-​called symptomatic
reading of Keats is the narrator’s own intimate symptomatology, in which Keats
is summoned as a series of reminiscences, confessional anecdotes, and a device
of lyric address—​“(IS IT YOU WHO /​TOLD ME KEATS WAS A DOCTOR?)”
(5). In place of the much-​scorned “paranoid reading” is the jealous close
reading of lovers—​what in her recent poem, “The Keats Headaches,” Carson
calls “oulipo jealousies”—​who steal and remix one another’s metaphors and
whose letters “pull libidinal devices into a new transparence” (37).11 What Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick called criticism’s “drama of exposure”—​revealing in the text
what the text doesn’t know about itself—​becomes, in Carson’s essay, an exercise
in designed and dramatic self-​exposure. The fictional essay is a case of extreme
meta-​critical consciousness, whose essaying is marked at the outset as a fabrica-
tion, and whose analytical sensitivity to its own moves (to borrow from Keats)
“tease[s]‌us out of thought.”12 Carson’s performance of the histories and fantasies
brought to bear on “Keats’s idea,” and into which Keats has been absorbed in
turn, I suggest, speaks to a wider fictional practice in her writing. Between
post-​critical sensibility and the anti-​art aesthetics of Dada, Carson’s pro-​fictive
scholarship has sought ways to “get away” from bodies of information—​listless
philological facts, established histories, canonical versions—​by making fantasy,
desire, and unashamed subjectivity into radical determinants of textual interpre-
tation. Her versions of the facts perform an imaginative life supremely capable of
remaking objects in its own image—​a long-​established function of poems, but
still a decidedly errant function of criticism and translation. Its example is a form
of attention that brooks radical estrangement, where the bearings of the “essay”
are thrown off course.

Dedication

The Beauty of the Husband opens in a strident, uppercase lyric mode with a dedi-
cation of the work and an exposure of its rationale that runs across the first three
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 105

title sequences. In the first of these, “YOU,” Carson’s reader, are addressed in a
barely punctuated live-​stream declaration that begins with the performative ut-
terance “I DEDICATE,” and invokes “YOU” as both a past-​tense interlocutor
and potential accomplice in the present:

I. I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO KEATS (IS IT YOU WHO

TOLD ME KEATS WAS A DOCTOR?) ON GROUNDS THAT
A DEDICATION HAS TO BE FLAWED IF A BOOK IS TO REMAIN
FREE AND FOR HIS GENERAL SURRENDER TO BEAUTY (5)

The declaration holds Carson’s book between the parameters of subjec-

tion (“SURRENDER”) and liberty (“IF A BOOK IS TO /​REMAIN FREE”),
parameters in which we saw Carson read Brontë in “The Glass Essay.” Carson
offers that the dedication to Keats is itself the flaw that, perhaps like the formal
anomaly of the subtitle, Fictional Essay, releases the book from the bondage of
conformity to its own apparent constraints—​as though the indeterminacy re-
garding how exactly the book is dedicated, devoted to, or about Keats, is what
guarantees its freedom to read Keats on new, or at least uncertain, terms.
The dedication continues to be theorized across the following two title
sequences, where a dedication, “AN ESSENTIALLY /​PUBLIC SURRENDER,”
“IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PER-​/​FORMED BEFORE WITNESSES” (9, title II.);

III. AND FINALLY A GOOD DEDICATION IS INDIRECT

(OVERHEARD, ETC.) AS IF VERDI’S “LA DONNA È
MOBILE” HAD BEEN A POEM SCRATCHED ON GLASS (15)

The dedication, it turns out, only takes effect before witnesses—​in this case,
before the “YOU,” whose complicity is rallied in support. Carson’s opening
argumentum reminds us, as several of the title sequences do, that the work’s
“DEDICATION” to Keats—​indeed, its relation to Keats at all—​is “INDIRECT,”
and little more than a declaration (as the Fictional Essay, the “essay on Keats’s
idea,” is an essay principally because it says so). In the narrator’s comprehen-
sive commentary, the reading of Keats is made by analogy, occurring elsewhere
than the site of its apprehension (“OVERHEARD, ETC.”). Carson’s final re-
mark here—​“AS IF VERDI’S ‘LA DONNA È /​MOBILE’ HAD BEEN A POEM
SCRATCHED ON GLASS”—​extends out of one of the book’s most striking
image sequences, the imagery of glass, though it plays, too, on the kinds of expo-
sure afforded by dedication. “Dedication [Dédicace],” observes Barthes, always
runs the risk of betraying “the delirium [délire]—​or the snare [leurre] in which
I am caught” at the moment of making it.13 Dédicace: from the Indo-​European
root deik, to show, becoming Latin dicare, to proclaim; its delirium [délire] can
106 Glass Essays

be all too readable [lire]. Its betrayal of emotion makes the dedication a perfor-
mative, “giving away” the subject and giving, therefore, something in excess of
what the dedication intends. (The later poem, “The Keats Headaches,” has no
such qualms about betraying feelings or being “given away”: “Would Keats have
liked me, I wonder?,” asks Carson’s narrator.)14
Dedication brings with it a crisis of dependency, an intimate as well as public
surrender that makes the dedication a question posed about freedom and
bondage in the use of language: the possibility (or impossibility) of dominion
over what we say and what is said to us. This is a question posed directly or indi-
rectly in almost all of Carson’s twenty-​nine tangos. In words she attributes to her
lyric “you,” and which recall the emotional mathematics of erōs and aidōs: “How
do people /​get power over one another? is an algebraic question” (38).15
Just how, then, is Carson’s fictional essay an inquiry into “Keats’s idea that
beauty is truth”? What is Keats in the work, beyond a framing device for another of
Carson’s eros variations, in which erotic dependency is a part of our negotiations
with the written and spoken word? And what is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
here, beyond a proverbial, barely legible “poem scratched on glass”? In addition
to the title sequences that invoke him (I quote from several others below), Keats
enters the essay’s field of vision in several remarks, recollections, and confessions
during the course of Carson’s story. The most dramatic of these, toward the end
of the work, is also the moment of most direct engagement with the “idea that
beauty is truth”:

. . . let’s just finish it.

Not because, like Persephone, I needed to cool my cheek on death.
Not, with Keats, to buy time.
Not, as the tango, out of sheer wantonness.
But oh it seemed sweet.

To say Beauty is Truth and stop.

Rather than to eat it.
Rather than to want to eat it. This was my pure early thought. (139)

This last of the 29 Tangos begins by explaining, in a shift to the third person,
that “[t]‌o get them out of her the wife tries making a list of words she never got
to say.” To “finish it,” as per her proposition above, is to say these words, to end
their circulation by giving them definite form. By this point, Persephone has al-
ready made an appearance in The Beauty of the Husband in a brief commentary
on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (41–​42). Condemned to live between the un-
derworld inhabited by her husband, Hades, and the upper world of her mother,
Demeter—​between “seduction” and “production,” as Carson characterizes her
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 107

own affiliations to husband and mother (37)—​Persephone crosses from the

signifying field of fertility and filiation to that of desire and death.16 “Not be-
cause, like Persephone . . .”: dipping into this story of eros and violence, the neg-
atively coupled simile draws to the surface the fatalism driving the narrator’s
seduction by the beauty of the husband. “Not, with Keats, to buy time. /​Not, as
the tango . . .”: her denials play with apophasis, the kind of saying that can only
get close to its motives by refusing their likeness. To synthesize her story and
the poetic and philosophical yield of decades, the narrator indexes some of the
work’s most memorable figures—​“Words, wheat, conditions, gold, more than
thirty years of it fizzing around in me—​.” She does so, she says, in order to “lay it
to rest,” a wish she will qualify in the lines that follow: “After all the heart is not
a small stone /​to be rolled this way and that. /​The mind is not a box /​to be shut
fast. /​And yet it is!” (140–​141)—​more saying by naysaying. These final lines ne-
gotiate the “[t]errible risks” (141) of emotion by organizing words and figures,
rolling them around, contradicting them, end-​stopping a sequence. It is a messy
affirmation, one that performs the ordeals of its pursuit, as though parsing words
and images always expressed a desire to exclude them.
“Finishing” the story of enthrallment to these words to “buy time” remembers
the urgent vocation of Keats’s last months of illness, in which finishing and not
finishing must both have seemed to him impossible. It picks up strongly on the
lyric consciousness of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” to which I turn in more detail
below, where the “heard melodies” of the writing—​its metered, sensible time—​
tense against what Keats calls the “those unheard”; the “slow time,” the “history
without footnotes” (in Cleanth Brooks’s terms), of the Grecian urn.17 The scenes
of love and sacrifice danced around its frieze—​Keats’s “Cold Pastoral”—​are
simulations, unconsummated approaches, tangos frozen in time: “Fair youth,
beneath the trees, thou canst not leave /​Thy song, nor ever can those trees be
bare; /​Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, /​Though winning near the goal.”18
To buy time, beat-​by-​beat or word-​by-​word, is to bring this song to life, but it is
also, eventually, to bring it to an end. The unconventional essay that emerges out
of the Keats/​Carson encounter sketches a panorama not dissimilar to Keats’s in
the “Ode”: some fictions are fatalistic, timeless, and disembodied—​made to “cool
my cheek on death” (Keats’s “Cold Pastoral”)—​and others are bound to the mo-
ment of their making, preserving the mania of metaphors that have composed
and undone a desiring life. Carson’s early reading of the Phaedrus in Eros the
Bittersweet flashes up once more here. Between words that pin desire down and
words that betray its delirium in real time is the difference—​or one way of meas-
uring it—​between death and life.
Carson’s final confession in the above—​“it seemed sweet. //​To say Beauty is
Truth and stop. /​Rather than to eat it. /​Rather than to want to eat it. This was
my pure early thought”—​is where essay and story, as it were, finally meet. At
108 Glass Essays

the famous final couplet of the “Ode” and the “idea” to which Carson’s essay is
dedicated:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—​that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.19

Carson’s “pure early thought”—​“to say Beauty is Truth and stop”—​echoes a part
of the sentiment of Keats’s final lines: that the equation “Beauty is truth” quenches
and consumes the desire “to know” anything beyond itself. Yet in its emphatic
quotation marks, Keats’s couplet proffers a metaphor (“Beauty is truth”) that it
claims to be reversible (“truth beauty”) as well as inexorable (“that is all /​Ye know
on earth”). In her interview with McNeilly, Carson calls the equation of beauty
and truth in Keats “a mistake,” and an axiom that falls on the modern ear “with a
tired thump”: “You can’t think into something you’ve heard that many times.”20
It is an act of language that, over the course of citations innumerable, has be-
come oddly transparent: “obvious yet invisible,” the literary cliché—​which the
Keats couplet has now become—​“works best” and “self-​perpetuates” (to borrow
Namwali Serpell’s words) when it “goes unnoticed.”21 It is not only overuse that
has taken the edge off Keats’s phrase, but something else, perhaps, in the aesthetic
drama circling inside that final couplet. For “Beauty is truth/​truth beauty” is a
metaphor that conceals or cancels out what, in the “Essay on What I Think About
Most,” Carson calls metaphor’s “error” and “mistakenness”: the fact that beauty is
not the same as truth, and vice versa. The full reversibility of Keats’s proposition
renders it symmetrical in a way that closes out all mediation, so that the second
iteration (“truth beauty”) can squeeze out the “is” of the first. (“The metaphorical
‘is’ signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like,’ ” Paul Ricoeur observes.)22 Its reversibility
makes Keats’s metaphor a tautology, collapsing the comparison and erasing its
essential flaw: beauty eats truth, truth eats beauty, the one is a devouring met-
onym for the other.23 Moreover, this totalized metaphor, Keats says, is “all /​Ye
know” and “all ye need to know.” Absolute fulfillment of the desire to know, be all
and end all of poetic thinking, it expresses a wish—​a wish Carson shares in the
above—​for the end of metaphor. Interesting in this regard is Carson’s descrip-
tion of her book as “an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth,” occluding the
second part of the formula, as her above confession suggests she wished to: “to
say Beauty is Truth and stop.”
Carson’s narrator has been snared, she suggests, because beauty and truth
do not fit together as cleanly as her “pure early thought” had envisaged. Truth
eats beauty, but it leaves unknown quantities behind, accruing in the “true lies
of poetry.” In her efforts “to eat beauty,” or “to want to eat it,” Carson’s narrator—​
“IMPURE AS I AM (FOODSTAINS AND SHAME AND /​ALL)” (139)—​
seeks this surplus “out there with purposiveness, with temples, with God,”
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 109

understanding only later, she says, that “the beautiful when I encountered it
would turn out to be /​prior—​inside my own heart, /​already eaten” (140). There
is an analogy here, surely, with the way Carson’s text has “eaten” and digested
the Keats oeuvre, which, like Emily Brontë in “The Glass Essay,” has become a
symptom of the narrator’s tribulations and her interlocutor in a “fictional” ar-
gument. Yet more interesting and urgent here are our feelings as readers on en-
gaging a work with such profound, intricately theorized ambivalence toward its
own medium. We will see Plato’s critique of writing and poetry in the Phaedrus
and The Republic make an explicit appearance in Carson’s thinking on poetic im-
itation in The Beauty of the Husband. At a certain point in the essay, the compul-
sive course of metaphor, analogy, and self-​reading is reined in by an anti-​poetic
sentiment of the kind we see more faintly outlined in “The Glass Essay” and ex-
plicitly formalized in Decreation. There, in the poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,”
the wish whose utterance both clinches and wishes away the essence of lyric is “I
want to have meaningless legs.” The poem continues:

My personal poetry is a failure.

I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling. . . .
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.24

To be “unbearable” is imagined as a full secession from meaning, the meaningful

body that mediates between lover and lover. The fatalism tingeing The Beauty of
the Husband, and the final scenes of “The Glass Essay,” could not be clearer in this
poem. For it doesn’t matter how much sex you “drink,” or how much beauty you
“eat” (“beauty,” she says in the first pages of the fictional essay, “makes sex sex,” 9).
“Personal” poetry cannot capture the immanence—​the “cool” inside “cooling”—​
her narrator wants from love.

For and Against Poetry

It is striking that the rich anti-​poetic lyric that emerges across several of Carson’s
“personal” poems and essays, and which she theorizes with the aid of Plato’s
Phaedrus, Simone Weil’s decreation theology, even Paul Celan’s drastic anti-​
metaphoric economy, has gone unnoticed by readers who use the term “anti-​
poetic” to Carson’s discredit.25 The resistance to poetry has a history as long as
the history of poetics, though the tensions such resistance generates in poems
110 Glass Essays

comes to a head in and after twentieth-​century modernism.26 Marianne Moore’s

“I too dislike it” and W. H. Auden’s more ambiguous “poetry makes nothing
happen” declare what in later poets—​Carson included—​seems a more compli-
cated reluctance. (In Carson, for example, the Dada-​esque remodeling of what a
“poem” or “essay” can look like rubs along with some of the most traditional po-
etic forms.) What I have been calling lyric transparency in Carson’s essay, a thor-
oughgoing exposure of device and the disappearance of the reading of Keats into
its intimate conditions of possibility, is by no means the only instance of this re-
luctance. “The Glass Essay” works something similar into its project for the essay,
as do Carson’s formal inquiries in Decreation and the early minimalism of Short
Talks. The “fiction” in “fictional essay” can be understood as all of a piece with the
ascetic drive of these compositions. Calling it “fictional” sets the extreme suscep-
tibility of her reading—​to emotion and to the art of lying—​against the rationale
“beauty is truth” with unsurpassable economy. Calling it a fictional essay also
makes Carson’s author-​narrator all the more compelling. For the confession of
unreliability, not a statement of scholarly integrity, is what makes this particular
reading believable. It is also, perhaps, just the kind of susceptibility we want from
a mimetically involved, creative-​critical, or post-​critical reading of Keats.
Following the subtitle, The Beauty of the Husband exposes its devices from the
opening page (“Fair reader I offer merely an analogy,” 5). Around two-​thirds of
the way through (“Tango XXIV”), the narrator pledges her commitment to an
event of overhaul (at the “edge” of transparency), set out in uppercase in the title
sequence: “AND KNEELING AT THE EDGE OF THE TRANS-​/​PARENT SEA
I SHALL SHAPE FOR MYSELF A NEW HEART /​FROM SALT AND MUD”
(111). “Easy to say Why not give up on this?,” she says of herself, a wife “in the
grip of being,” recalling Emily “in the grip” in “The Glass Essay”; but poring over
and paranoid-​reading the husband’s speech is a métier difficult to abandon. This
“NEW HEART” of unrefined, if not unsignified, material is of the order of the
“meaningless legs” of “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” a poem in the spirit of the late
ascetic turn in The Beauty of the Husband. “Not a bird not a breath in sight,” the
Tango concludes: no redemptive symbolism and no pneuma, the breath and life
of poems.
It seems important to say here—​though I hope it has so far come across—​that
Carson’s metafictional exposures are not strictly “outside” the fictions of the fic-
tional essay. That these exposures express ennui or profound disheartening in
the face of poetic artifice, the husband’s cryptic letters and beautiful lies, does
not set the lyric voice of The Beauty of the Husband above or beyond device, as an
essay in its documentary function might be styled. Rather, it sets device squarely
at the center of the dilemma. The work’s acutest moments of disclosure reach,
with some urgency, for poetic artifice. The title sequence immediately following
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 111

the staged rite above reads: “PROVIDED IN A SPIRIT OF UNASHAMED DIS-​/​

CLOSURE OR AS KEATS MIGHT SAY STITCHING THEIR /​THROATS TO
THE LEAVES SOMETHING TO MAKE TIME /​PASS” (123). The mood is am-
bivalent as the narrator, in the verse following the title, catches our eye: “You see
me, you see my life, see what I live on—​is that all I want? /​No. I want to make you
see time.” “KEATS,” too, we have seen, is “what I live on” and rehearsing his “idea”
in and through the events of a life makes us “see time” in the work. Carson has
said, in a recent essay, that Keats’s poem is “about the pathos of time.”27 Reading
Keats, reading Plato, Parmenides, lends relief to the real-​time narrative texture
(as “CATULLUS” “makes time itself visible” in Twombly). Autobiographical ex-
posure (“you see my life”) is a performance of affiliation (“see what I live on”),
and both are moved by a commitment they share with the spirit of critical in-
quiry. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, “making time appear” is part of the “mimesis”
due from criticism.28
Exposure and disclosure make us see the time of the lover, the time of a reader,
as it moves, and the time of lovers and readers, we saw in Eros the Bittersweet, is
sharpened by its sensible movement. An oblique allusion to Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale,” and one of precious few direct invocations of the poet, “AS KEATS
MIGHT SAY STITCHING THEIR /​THROATS TO THE LEAVES” displaces
the onus of disclosure onto Keats’s icon of lyric song, whose sounding is—​is
sutured to, coextends—​his natural habitat. Keats’s nightingale sings of leaves, not
scorned lovers: “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget /​What thou among the
leaves hast never known”; though it is his immanent song that Keats would im-
itate, carried aloft “on the viewless wings of Poesy.”29 Poetry “TO MAKE TIME
/​PASS” might seem to be the opposite of making us “see time.” Yet as the nar-
rator lists the elegiac couplets she composes, meditating daily on a branch, what
we see is time passing in figures, time metered out, in a sample of the “5820
elegiacs. /​Which occupy 53 wirebound notebooks” (125). This is poetry that
both makes time pass and makes us see it. Reproducing its present tense in ours,
Carson’s exercises in “lyric mimesis” perform her daily meditations in “the lyric
present”: “Brighter than Bite /​it bangs March Light too tight” (124).30 Tin-​bright
assonance, too-​tight rhyme, and bangy meter offer the narrator a song close
enough—​almost transparent—​to the leaves. Her elegiacs, in their bare, subject-
less testimony, seem to aspire, too, to the immanent poetry of the nightingale, in
whose pure sounding is the promise of lyric without an “I.”
In her reading of Plato in Eros the Bittersweet, Carson argued that where the
written word effaces the time and time-​bound crises of eros, playing games with
the temporality of reading, the spoken word plants you right there in the heat of its
circumstance. The Beauty of the Husband revives the dilemma of the Phaedrus in a
play on the difference between language that is “true” to those circumstances and
112 Glass Essays

language that errs and strays. Hence between two kinds of betrayal: betrayal as the
exposure of emotion, the kind of betrayal performed, for Barthes, by dedications;
and betrayal as the cumulative lie of infidelity. On the one hand is what Carson calls
the “enriched pattern” of “myth”: the “two-​faced proposition” that allows “its oper-
ator to say one thing and mean another,” “the true lies of poetry” (33); and on the
other, the voice as performative presence, language used “in the way that Homer
says the gods do” (33), contra the language of mortals. The Husband speaks in the
former key, where “not much” connects words and things. But he “flip[s]‌the switch
at will” (33), she says, between the mortal, shared meaning of words, and another
field of reference—​Elysian, celestial, unbound to time or place:

[I]‌went out to meet him

in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals

of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid

before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God. (23–​24)

These “drenched things and avowals” are the pure matter and gesture of
words: vowels still wet on the tongue, a language of promise that seems to re-
member the promise of the very first language.31 “The language for which we
have no words,” says Giorgio Agamben, to whom the unattributed inset quo-
tation “alone and first in mind” belongs, is the mother tongue (Agamben is
paraphrasing Dante, for whom the mother tongue is “the one and only thing
first in mind”).32 “The language for which we have no words, which doesn’t pre-
tend, like grammatical language, to be there before being, but is ‘alone and first
in mind’ is our language,” says Agamben: “that is, the language of poetry.”33 The
phenomenal force of this language can stupefy. It—​the language of Dante—​
emerges from the “old golds and lieblicher blues” of illuminated text and passes
quietly into a new, unpeopled stratum of sense: “like peacocks stepping out of
cages into an empty kitchen of God.”34
The husband’s language at first claims this primordial force, but with hind-
sight the narrator comes to shed her illusions—​“My husband lied about eve-
rything” (33)—​and to ally him with a disorienting metonymy; a language for
which we have all too many words. An “operator” of myth, he led “a double life”
(33), spoke a language “always double, triple, caught up in the infinite recession
of metalanguages” (so says Agamben of the grammatical language “that for-
ever presupposes words”).35 Agamben/​Dante’s embedding here is one of several
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 113

instances of critical and philosophical literatures consumed by the narrative,

with stray phrases appearing as recollections in passing, remains of “what has
seduced,” and symptoms of an exacting self-​analysis.36
The “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” too, is invoked indirectly—​“overheard”—​in this
account of the young narrator’s stupefied gaze. The lieblicher (sweeter) tones of
the language “alone and first in mind,” the language wandering its own celestial
vicinity, are those melodies Keats’s second stanza calls “unheard”; a primordial,
spectral language whose meaning stands outside of time:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, . . .

The “Bold Lover” traipsing the frieze of Keats’s urn is stranded in a representation
of love that binds him to the extemporal “nonlover” of the Phaedrus, the lover
not in love but love’s master. This nonlover’s discourse (the speech of Lysias), in
Carson’s reading, plays not to the urgent, “sensual ear” of the lover’s spoken word
but to a kind of screen-​grab to which he can return again and again—​or rather,
as for the “fair youth” of the frieze, which he “canst not leave,” doomed to love
unconsummated for eternity. The unheard melodies of this lieblicher language
are “no tone” tonalities stranded in the imagination—​and in words, before their
speaking—​, unmoored from the matter and melody of vocal music.
The “sweeter” melodies of verbal mimesis and their theorization in the
Phaedrus are summoned at several points in the fictional essay. The following
title sequence is Carson’s most explicit allusion to Plato, which she references in
the “Notes”:

XI. MAKE YOUR CUTS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LIVING JOINTS

OF THE FORM SAID SOCRATES TO PHAEDRUS WHEN THEY WERE
DISSECTING A SPEECH ABOUT LOVE.37

The sequence is immediately followed by the narrator’s first sight of her future
husband in a high school Latin class: “for some reason I turned in my seat /​and
there he was. /​You know how they say a Zen butcher makes one correct cut and
the whole ox /​falls apart /​like a puzzle. Yes a cliché //​and I do not apologize be-
cause as I say I was not to blame” (49). These two iterations of the “cut” combine
114 Glass Essays

to suggest that what Socrates’s incisions in the “speech about love” aspire to—​
to locate and coincide with the “living joints of the form,” exposing its rhetor-
ical anatomy—​is accomplished at the mere sight of the beloved, the unlocking
of a puzzle without the slightest cognitive effort (“Useless to interpose analysis /​
or make contrafactual suggestions”). The vignette is moving, her exposure is
moving, and it draws attention—​intentionally or otherwise—​to her sustained
rhetorical analysis of the husband’s dissimulating discourse of love, in lieu of
analysis of “Keats’s idea that beauty is truth” or even the recognition that it is
Keats’s (after it is Plato’s) idea.
Carson has described the fragments of quotation separating her twenty-​nine
compositions as pieces of “bad Keats,” interesting (“shiny”) because of their
aslant reflections on the principal story.38 These fragments of marginalia, errata,
and juvenilia derive mostly from the minor works Otho the Great: A Tragedy in
Five Acts, Keats’s only full-​length play, and The Cap and Bells; Or, The Jealousies,
a satirical fairy tale in Spenserian stanzas, first published under the ludic pseu-
donym Lucy Vaughan Lloyd of China Walk, Lambeth.39 The convoluted plots of
these works turn on the erratic course of a betrothal and/​or marriage, deceit, and
impersonation (starting with the authorial pseudonym, which Carson includes),
scorned lovers, the delirium inspired by letters, and, in The Jealousies, a magic
book.40 Other fragments come from the “Ode on Indolence,” marginal notes
to The Jealousies and on Keats’s copy of Paradise Lost, and finally, preceding the
husband’s closing interpolation, the phrase “O Isle spoilt by the Milatary [sic]”
with the attribution “[words found by John Keats scratched on the glass /​of his
lodgings at Newport on the night of April 15, 1817]” (143).41 This final fragment
plays on the husband’s penchant for war games (“Why play all night. /​The time
is real. It’s a game. /​It’s a real game,” 10) and the encroachment of their “real”
simulations on the narrator’s marriage.
The words found by Keats are ironic as they are serendipitous. Yet it is their
material circumstances that, like the annotations to Paradise Lost, interlace most
intriguingly with what Carson does in her fictional essay. These words, noted
in the margin of a book or found scratched on the window at an inn, attest to
the time-​bound affects and attention of a reader. They attest, too,—​or expose—​
the intimate speech of a writer writing unobserved, through whom the world
of his sources, and his geographical and physical circumstances, is momentarily
made visible. This is the “Emily” of Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (like the “Emily”
of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson), whose disposition and moods might be
overheard, less in the cadence of vowels than in the minor contingencies of an-
notation and transcription.42 Carson’s description of these minutiae is minimal,
but it is sufficient to suggest that, in Howe’s words, “the heart may be sheltering in
some random mark of communication”:43
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 115

a sort of delphic Abstraction a beautiful thing made more

beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist

JOHN KEATS,
note on his copy of Paradise Lost, I.321

[there is a faint mark after beautiful read by one editor as a dash,

by another as a slip of the pen, while a third does not print it] (103)

It is tempting to read intention into the content and placement of these

fragments; to embark on the kind of jealous, paranoid reading that is the be-
nighted task of Carson’s narrator, sifting through the Husband’s remarks,
gestures, “faint marks,” in search of signs meant for her. Yet the avid and
devouring hermeneutic of jealous lovers is not one that The Beauty of the
Husband recommends. On the one hand, the book provides precisely the
kind of backstory in which Carson seems interested in Keats—​the intimate
circumstances and contingencies that turn scratched marks into signs and
signs into wonders, as per the lover’s hungered reading. On the other, the Keats
fragments themselves are no clues to the “true” logic of Carson’s thinking.
Elements in a collage, the fragments’ relation to the “idea that beauty is truth”
is what we might call a relation of passive reading, in which they simply offset,
augment, or unsettle the equation of beauty and truth without any explana-
tion as to how this happens or any leads or remarks on the analogies they sug-
gest with Carson’s narrative. To go chasing after such signs in search of what
Barthes called “transcendence”—​the lover’s “horizontal” discourse promised
“no transcendence, no deliverance, no novel (though a great deal of the fic-
tive)”—​feels as fatalistic as Carson’s book suggests by example.
To the degree that the narrator mimics our critical scrutiny by reading the
essay’s vignettes and motifs from within, and in a reading style that might justly
be called paranoid, The Beauty of the Husband places our task as its interpreters
in an odd light. The work sets us up as its accomplice—​“Shall we sharpen our
eyes and circle closer to the beauty of the husband–​” (115)—​but the same “story
of a marriage” is a stark warning against suspicious hermeneutics and reading
for truth. It is, after all, our complicity in a “fictional” essay that is invited, and
as much as it asks us to sympathize with its analytical zeal, Carson’s essay also
cuts it aslant. A reading of autobiographical facts and autofictions is a proxy for
the very reading of Keats these facts and fictions have made possible—​a critique
of “beauty is truth” addressed from wife to husband. The narrator’s exacting at-
tention to her story and its literary and philosophical resonances matters for our
task, but not because it obliges us to out-​read her or beat her at her own game.
116 Glass Essays

Rather, her transparency invites us to look again at our position: at what it is we’re
accustomed to doing with literature that we can’t do—​or can’t do as exhaustively
as Carson does—​here. How it feels to be told a story, told what it means, given
analogies and even supporting quotations, by a single, self-​compromising narra-
tive persona.

World Not Art

Lyric transparency in The Beauty of the Husband exposes the “essay on Keats’s
idea” to some serious questions, beginning, I suggested, with the whereabouts
of the “essay” itself. A thoroughgoing disclosure of motive, emotion, readings,
and sources replaces that other expository work proper to an essay. Lyric trans-
parency renders the essay a fiction of its own making; expressed differently, its
confessional agenda seems to have made the entire, putative essay transparent.
For in the absence of the exposition we expect, Carson’s “INDIRECT” reading of
Keats can make us feel we are looking through it to the personal story and private
conditions of possibility from which it has arisen: that the essay has disappeared
into its generative occasion. The transparency of Carson’s fictional essay is ac-
knowledged in the declaration “You see me, you see my life, see what I live on,”
but it is also implicit in suggestions that what her narrator says is self-​evident,
guileless, a story we know almost better than she does (“You know I was mar-
ried years ago” . . . “You if anyone grasp this,” 9). Should we misrecognize it in the
telling, the narrator exposes her methods and tics along the way—​“Fair reader
I offer merely an analogy. //​A delay” (5).
This last confession, the work’s sixth and seventh lines following the opening
title sequence, is immediately followed by an illustrative quotation to explain
what Carson’s narrator means by “analogy”:

“Use delay instead of picture or painting–​

a delay in glass
as you would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver.”
So Duchamp
of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors . . .

What is being delayed?

Marriage I guess. (5)

Carson will revisit Duchamp in the work only by indirect allusion. Here, in
this striking opening vignette, the quotation and the artwork it describes seem
placed in order to expose the operations of her essay. Her quotation is one of
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 117

the most widely cited phrases from The Green Box, a sheaf of loose papers with
no determined order of reading, which Duchamp published as an accompa-
niment to The Bride Stripped Bare.44 When the artwork famously shatters and
Duchamp refuses to repair it, this is, he states, because he had always envisaged
the work as open to contingency, a fact he sought to reflect in The Green Box—​as
Carson seeks to in Float—​by establishing no order of reading.45 “Delay,” Carson’s
“analogy,” happens for Duchamp by a trick of form—​“a delay in glass /​as you
would say a poem in prose or a spittoon in silver”—​and in place of representa-
tion: “Use delay instead of picture or painting.” The trick of form is to expose the
viewer, his beliefs, customs, morals, and expectations, to his own scrutiny. This
is what “silver” does in Duchamp’s second example: its simultaneous proximity
and jarring mismatch with our idea of a spittoon makes us witness to our own
surprise and manages to illustrate what a spittoon is without illustration. Silver,
here, is an optic for the mind to observe its own activity. Glaring incongruity
in Duchamp’s famous “readymades,” where this viewer-​oriented, exposing func-
tion of art is most rigorously rehearsed, makes these works prime expressions of
the Aristotelian idea of metaphor as a poetic mistake—​the Carsonian reading
of “error”—​where the mind catches itself processing sense and cognitive disso-
nance in the same “aha!” moment.
“A poem in prose,” Duchamp’s first example, moves us closer to Carson and
to the “fictional essay” that has, at this point, only just begun. Carson is a master
of the literary “readymade,” with her found material and Duchampian tricks of
form. Like The Beauty of the Husband, many of her Short Talks are “about” their
professed subject matter in name only. Consecutive translations of Ibykos frag-
ment 286 in “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” use “the wrong words”
(readymade content from six restricted vocabularies) to throw its constative
structure into relief, as it is supposed Duchamp’s “prose” reveals the pure form of
his “poem.”46 Carson’s lecture in sonnet form, we saw, does something similar by
using verse to address, and derail, our expectations of the lecture, which is then
freed up for new imaginative work. Poems in prose are of course a common-
place, but Duchamp’s “delay” is simply about presenting one form in the guise of
another—​a lecture caught in the weft of verse, an essay parsed through the twists
and turns of a story. If prose is an instrument for asking the question of poetry,
then perhaps a story is well placed to inquire after an essay: where it comes from,
what drives it, what we expect from it, and where it takes its subject matter. The
Beauty of the Husband’s narrative verse opens up a rift between the text and its
designation, making the form itself an act of address: “Form is what is between
the thing and its name,” says Barthes: “form is what delays the name.”47
Is Carson’s fictional essay, then, “merely an analogy”—​a clever use of “delay”?
What does the Duchamp example suggest about the lyric transparency of
Carson’s essay? And what is delayed, finally, in a “delay in glass”? To respond to
118 Glass Essays

these questions, I turn once more to Keats, the dedicatee of Carson’s book, who is
mostly missing in action from the body of the text. Here is the opening stanza of
the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-​child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-​fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?48

Keats’s scene sets one imitation against another. On the one hand, the urn: the
“still unravished bride of quietness” and the pastoral love scene of its decora-
tive frieze. On the other, the “Ode” and its tradition: “our rhyme.” The urn has
the quiet composure of an “unravished bride.” The story told around its “leaf-​
ring’d legend” is all the more compelling, all the sweeter, Keats suggests, for
what it withholds. This is where the “Ode” itself comes in, and by singing of
the sweetness of the unsung, of melodies unheard and the delight of perpetual
delay, puts itself in an awkward position. The “Ode” is a hymn to elusiveness and
opacity of the kind the verse itself will not match, for Keats’s “Sylvan historian”
is as much a chronicler of fantasy and imaginative possibility as of irrecoverable
moments. The intactness of his “bride” is its—​the urn’s—​non-​penetration by
the circumstances of its making and refusal to divulge its meaning. The bride’s
eternal chastity is echoed in scenes from the frieze evoked in later stanzas: “Bold
Lover, never, never canst thou kiss” . . . “For ever wilt thou love and she be
fair!”. . . “Cold Pastoral!” The love frozen in its scenes is one that never can, and
never will, take breath. As Cleanth Brooks wrote of the “Ode,” “all human passion
does leave one cloyed; hence the superiority of art,” yet this superiority leaves us
cold and unconvinced: for, says Brooks, “the beauty portrayed is deathless because
it is lifeless.”49
We can contrast this immediately, as I sought to above, with the desire of
Carson’s narrator to “make you see time,” the streamed real-​time of recollection,
disclosure, address, and analysis. We can contrast Keats’s “Cold Pastoral” with
Carson’s hot bucolic scenes at the house of the Husband’s grandfather, where
the young couple crush grapes under their feet and lick off the juice. The un-
consummated love scenes of Keats’s poem return us indirectly to Plato and the
“nonlover” of the sophist Lysias, who would rather write a speech about love
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 119

than risk getting his hands dirty, freezing love out of time rather than live with
the threat of its ending. Carson summons Keats’s “unravished bride of quietness”
against her own “UNASHAMED” account of a bride given to speak (and appar-
ently loath to stop). Yet she also positions The Bride Stripped Bare from the start
as a strong formal counterpoint to the urn and as an optic through which the fic-
tional essay begins to expose its inner mechanics.
Also known as The Large Glass (Le grand verre), Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped
Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1915–​
1923) is a large-​format plate-​glass structure featuring several distinct scenes,
etched and painted onto the glass in oil and lead. An aluminum frame divides
the work horizontally, creating two sections: “The Bride’s Domain” occupies the
upper section; “The Bachelor Apparatus” the lower. The catalog of the Modern
Art collections of the Tate Gallery describes the work as “a diagram of an ironic
love-​making machine of extraordinary complexity in which the male and female
machines communicate only by means of two circulatory systems, and without
any point of contact.”50 The work was intended by Duchamp to be freestanding,
exhibited in the middle of the gallery space, where the glass becomes an optic
for its surroundings. What for Octavio Paz is “one of the most hermetic works of
this century” and “the very negation of the modern notion of [art]work” is also,
for Umberto Eco, the prototype of the open work of Modernist aesthetics.51 For
Eco, the “open work” calls on the viewer to make sense of a work whose formal
and symbolic boundaries are yet to be fixed, offering a free-​for-​all of possible
affinities.52 The open work is an artwork whose formal constraints potentially
include the place of its exhibition and/​or the circumstances surrounding its pro-
duction or selection: the objet trouvé or the readymade whose purpose is to con-
vert art into a performance, not of its manufacture—​its madeness—​, but of its
interpretability. The Bride Stripped Bare is a symbol machine that, at the same
time, for Paz, confronts us with the nihilistic destruction of the symbolic, a bride
ravished from below by “her bachelors,” and from without by the circumstances
(and viewers) of her exhibition.53 What is Duchamp’s “story of a marriage,” The
Bride Stripped Bare, doing on the first page of an essay on “Keats’s idea that beauty
is truth”?
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare offer
two radically different visions of the relation between art and the world. Where
Duchamp’s anti-​art would have world and interpretation supplant the work,
Keats’s hymn to the urn’s mysteries would have it remain just as it is, still quiet,
timeless, unassailed by critics and well-​meaning readers. The Bride Stripped
Bare is contingent in the extreme on the circumstances of its exhibition, whose
contours and colors determine its body, depth, and mood; the bride and bachelors
etched onto the plate glass incorporate the exhibition scene and metabolize
it—​destroy and remake it—​as though their union were meant to dramatize the
120 Glass Essays

insatiability of looking and to make this drama—​the viewer’s—​the object of the

work of art. Considered to mark the end of the autonomy of the work of art, The
Bride claims final indivisibility from its surroundings, swallowing time and place
into its formal parameters. Keats’s hermetic “bride,” on the other hand, keeps
her secrets. Her sealed lips are the source of a lyricism sweeter than lyric: “Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard /​Are sweeter.” (The “ditties of no tone,”
two lines down, might be those we imagine as we listen across time, as well as
those elements of verse we don’t “hear” but that speak to us all the same.) Where
one work’s drama of interpretability derives from its reticence, the other’s derives
from its transparency and radical permeability, which cedes the work’s meaning
(its consumption, its destruction) to the viewer.
Allusions to Duchamp and his glass crop up throughout Carson’s essay.
Her narrator, for example, calls the Husband “one of those ‘original machines’
that brings libidinal devices into a new transparence” (a listed reference to
Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault, on “original,” “desiring machines” of libidinal en-
ergy, but also invoking Duchamp’s machine célibataire, the “bachelor machine”
that courts and exposes the viewer’s desire).54 The work is also alluded to through
the Husband’s friend, partner in “war games” and colluder in “mysteries,” Ray
(Man Ray, collaborator in Duchamp’s optical experiments?): “his curiously crys-
talline little body /​did set up a wise and fleshy relation /​between world and
retina” (105). The relation between world and retina, and the effects produced
by artwork in the internal workings of the eye, were explicit preoccupations of
Duchamp’s and driving concerns behind the transparency and allegorized rela-
tion of The Bride Stripped Bare.55 Reflecting on her own writing at the top of the
same page, Carson’s narrator asks: “What can save these marks from themselves.
/​What if we drop a little more solvent /​on the seam //​between foreground and
background,” concerns proper to The Bride, whose seam between foreground
and background, work and world, is so difficult to pin down.
In a sense, then, what we might call Duchamp’s “fictional” artworks, heralding
the end of autonomous art and art created rather than “found,” are a sort of pro-
totype for Carson’s fictional essay. What Carson provides, I suggested at the start
of this chapter, is a detailed confessional backstory, a time-​bound world that the
essay’s transparency brings into the foreground: this is to say, the background
becomes the foreground; the world becomes the work, and the essay, invisible
as such, becomes a provocative fiction.56 Yet this, as Carson knows—​and as
Keats knew of his “rhyme”—​, catches her book in a quandary. As Jay Bernstein
has written of Duchampian “anti-​art”: “The anti-​art moment of modernist
works . . . enacts art’s desire to be world and not art; but only as art, as semblance,
can art evince that desire, perform it.”57 Only as a “fictional essay” can Carson’s
book perform a desire for transparency—​a desire to bring imitation and its anal-
ysis to an end.
 Lyric Transparency and the “Fictional Essay” 121

The desire “to be world and not art” runs through much of Carson’s writing.
Not just the claims of Decreation to a version of Simone Weil’s desire “to dis-
appear,” nor Carson’s declaration at the start of Economy of the Unlost—​“There
is too much self in my writing”—​but a claim made, rather, in the name of lit-
erary form. We can safely say, at least by most academic standards, that there is
“too much self ” in Carson’s translations and adaptations—​from Nox to H of H
Playbook—​as well as in her lectures, freeform essays, and other performances of
reading and thinking: “The Glass Essay,” The Albertine Workout, The Beauty of the
Husband, and so on. The claim made in the name of form is something different.
The above works, and not only these works, are examples of the personal, time-​
bound circumstances of Carson’s reading shaping or replacing a descriptive, crit-
ical account or faithful translation of the works she reads. Her experience of “the
facts” of these works, even where that takes her into fiction and fake source ma-
terial, is set firmly in the foreground. Brooks wrote of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” that its reticent object represented a case of “history without footnotes.”58
In certain of Carson’s readings, what we get are footnotes without history—​or
at least without chronology and “scientific fact”: supporting anecdotes, sources,
and quotations, reflections like those she lets bloom in the appendices of The
Albertine Workout, compressed into a single prismatic plane.
It might be possible, if not too far-​fetched, to consider this approach to form
as a “glass” mode after Duchamp’s The Large Glass. In Duchamp, the medium of
glass—​conspicuous if not “treacherous” in its transparency—​becomes a reflec-
tion on the mediating function, on its own status both as matter and threshold
for other matter (“apparition” and “apparatus,” in Angela Leighton’s terms for
the double capacity of form).59 The transparency of Carson’s writing to the per-
sonal history of her readings, and in her real-​time commentary, exposures of
intent, and interpolations to readers, brings the world and mind of Carson the
reader into the same discursive plane, wrought of the same vocal texture as the
works she reads. It is, in the most literal sense, a reflection of the fact of being
a threshold for other objects: for the words, texts, and facts she handles in her
readings of literature. But by the same token, Carson’s “glass” essayism draws at-
tention to its own form, facts, and objecthood, the new and irregular forms that
come into view by being sidetracked, displaced, and fictionalized in her hands.
Carson’s transparency is an appeal to pay renewed attention to form, in terms of
the thinking it is capable of performing, simulating, eliciting, and closing down.
“I broke the glass and jumped” was the true/​false confession with which this
chapter began. The fatalism of The Beauty of the Husband toward the never-​
ending story of metonymy, metaphor, and mimesis, we will find in a very different
emotional key in Decreation, the subject of the following part of this book. In one
of its early title sequences in The Beauty of the Husband, Carson refers to her
writing as “MY PROPAGANDA, ONE ONE ONE ONE /​ONEING ON YOUR
122 Glass Essays

FOREHEAD LIKE DROPS OF LUMI-​/​NOUS SIN” (23). Her propaganda against

Keats’s self-​effacing metaphor: beauty as fiction against “beauty is truth.”60 In this
performative declaration, the freshly coined verb, to “one” (“oneing”), does its
designated activity in four onomatopoeic nouns (or imperatives) and a gerund.
This new, readymade verb “happens.”61 “Propaganda” is a word Duchamp used
to describe the work of his readymades, which he envisaged as everyday objects
emptied of signification and leaving only an impression on the surface of the
mind. It is a vision of form we have seen Carson share in her aspiration to “sen-
sible form,” in the poetics of “Possessive Used as Drink (Me),” and a penchant in
her writing for the visually performative (opsis), “an art of pure shape.” Yet the
endless “secession from systems of meaning”—​Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s words
for the action of Duchampian, or Steinian, aesthetics—​has something death-​
driven about it.62 “A tango (like a marriage),” reads the blurb of The Beauty of the
Husband, “is something you have to dance to the end.” The abiding unease that
outlasts the final page of Carson’s essay is that the spin-​off from modernist and
postmodern secession from meaning, the endless irony of anti-​art and mise-​en-​
abyme fictional essays, is at least vertiginous, at most self-​destructive, as meaning
is consumed and exhausted in and by the work. Her 2005 volume, Decreation,
envisages radically different forms of transparency and “annihilation”—​ways to
“leap off the building” and take language down with you.
 PART III
SPE C U L AT IV E F OR M
 5
Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance

In “Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni,”

Carson compares the films of Michelangelo Antonioni to the “muddled,” “tau-
tological” prose of Longinus’s “On the Sublime” (Decreation, 45).1 His treatise
is a heady “aggregate of quotes,” Carson says, and she affirms that, as well as the
sensation of groundless awe with which it is usually associated, “the Sublime is
a documentary technique” (45).2 She explains the comparison with Antonioni.
The director, for example, places “a mirror in the middle of the scene so that you
glimpse a stray piece of world there. Or he likes to give you two successive shots of
the same portion of reality, first from close up, then a little further away, scarcely
different yet noticeably not the same” (49). Seeing in Antonioni is tautological,
doubled over on itself, as Longinus’s text redoubles the Sublime, says Carson,
by reproducing it as an effect of style. Something about this tautological vision
captures the death wish that gives sublime experience its intense, almost hor-
rific frisson. In Antonioni’s cinematic syntax this emerges in “a procedure, called
temps mort by French critics, whereby the camera is left running on a scene after
the actors think they have finished acting it” (49). Under sway of this procedure,
in Antonioni’s words, “the actors continue out of inertia into moments that seem
‘dead.’ The actor commits ‘errors.’ ”3 The actor, Carson adds, does “unscheduled
things” (49).
It is tempting to translate this double case of performative documentation—​
syntaxes that simulate psychic muddle and self-​estrangement—​into a case
for what Carson produces in her concept volume and multi-​form compen-
dium, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). Carson’s “documentary” of her
thinking around Simone Weil’s difficult concept, if that’s what Decreation is, does
“unscheduled things” with it, approaches the idea from a series of tautological
“shots,” lending the book an “aggregate” quality and the thinking it performs a
certain elegant discontinuity. Carson’s tic for self-​theorization and exposure,
we have seen, offers us several ways to take her at her word. If, in talking about
Longinus and Antonioni, she is also talking about herself, then the onus is on
us to resist the flattening-​out that this redoubling invites: to refuse to truncate
and simplify Carson’s project, first, by reducing it to a display of technique, and
second, by reducing it to what she says it is. If the consonance between what
Carson describes and what she does suggests some kind of “sleight of hand”
(Solway)—​a performance of cleverness, affiliations, and so on—​then it is worth

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0006
126 Speculative Form

asking, as this book seeks to do, about the compelling situation that puts us in as
her readers: how Carson anticipates or even short-​circuits our tasks and desires,
and what we want or need her writing (as literature and/​or as commentary) to be.
There certainly is strong consonance between Carson’s arguments on the
Sublime and the formal aesthetics of Decreation, and several readers have
emphasized the importance of “Foam” for grasping how Carson works.4 The
same might be said of other works in the volume, whose formal characteristics
and approach to questions of language, description, or “telling” offer to speak
for Decreation as a whole. (The book’s final piece, “Longing: A Documentary,”
includes the most compact autopoetic performance of the entire Carson
oeuvre: “Facts lack something, she thought”).5 Decreation certainly does work
over Weil’s theology of “decreation”—​”undoing the creature in us”—​and does
so at the level of form. Individual compositions rehearse what this “undoing”
might mean by performing or failing to perform it in writing, an effort in which
the multiform, iterative structure of the book as a whole is complicit. Yet we can’t
ultimately say Decreation is a case of performing the idea of “decreation” without
also saying it contemplates the end of such a performance—​the end of performa-
tive form.
A brief glance at the contents list tells us that what Decreation is, beyond
“Poetry, Essays, Opera,” is a series of variations on a theme. On the one hand,
Decreation presents the kind of material and compositional modes we have come
to expect in Carson: high-​contrast or “stereoscopic” juxtapositions; versions
and adaptations of other works; philosophical poem sequences; brilliant as-
sociative essays, and short, synthetic companion pieces in verse.6 To cite a few
examples: an essay on sleep in Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Homer, Plato,
and Hamlet, and an accompanying eighteen-​line “Ode to Sleep” (recalling John
Berryman’s eighteen-​line “Dream Songs”7); the staging of sublime anachronism
(e.g., “Kant’s Question About Monica Vitti”) in the “Sublimes” poem sequence;
the “Decreation” essay/​opera double act, the focus of the next chapter in this
book; and an essay on chromatic and tonal “wrongness” during an eclipse (seen
through “your spectroscope or bit of smoked glass,” 149) in the writing of Emily
Dickinson, Woolf, and Archilochos. “Drastic analogies abound in the literature
of totality” (150), Carson says in the essay on eclipse, and it is easy—​again—​to
see in her untimely combinations, as across the totality of the book, the staging
of drastic analogy, analogies in sequence, and what she calls “incongruous ideas”
set together in “a poetical kinde of a march, by friskes, skips and jumps” (so the
book’s epigraph from Florio’s Montaigne).8 If Carson is an analogist by technique
and sensibility, then Decreation is the work that both showcases the technique
in its maximum expression, as an inquiry conducted through iterative parallels,
and tells us it is not enough to understand it as form and technē alone, its stakes
confined to literary experimentation.
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 127

The “friskes, skips and jumps” of analogy have a special place in mystical
literatures—​and not just Weil’s, as the following chapter discusses—​because
there of all places, where the object of desire and attention is absent, straight-​
up description is out. In the literature of divine absence, as in the “literature of
totality,” all we have are likenesses to the possible, sensations that fix possibility
momentarily in the mind and body (and fixing her object is precisely what Weil
wants to avoid). Jessica Fisher quotes Carson’s remarks on “ecstasy” (ek-​stasis) for
the Ancient Greeks, one of Carson’s analogs for “decreation,” as “being up against
something so that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless,
you are still yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as other.”9 For Fisher, the
reckoning of Decreation with what Carson names “another human essence than
self ” is continuous with Carson’s early work on desire, in which the lover has the
beloved to come “up against” or “crash into,” in another of Carson’s metaphors.10
In Decreation, however, where Carson reads desire through Weil’s scenario, there
is an important difference. Where the lover’s “crisis of contact” derives from “the
fact that two are not one,” Weil’s dilemma is having no “contact”—​no palpable
“two”—​to speak of.11 Rather than “up against” divine love, Weil is up against her-
self, crashing into her own perception: “when I am in any place I disturb the si-
lence of heaven by the beating of my heart,” and “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.”12 “Another human essence than self ”—​whatever it is that survives
“undoing the creature”—​is, in Weil, less the product of an encounter than of the
desire for it, strong enough to move the “self ” to dare all in its pursuit.
Given the extreme emotional traction of these ideas in Carson’s book, and
given the radical un-​reason of “ecstasy” as a reckoning with self and God and
the tasks of writing, to speak of Decreation as the execution of a semiological
“strategy” or the expression of a cognitive “principle” can be jarring.13 The
“other” of Decreation—​what Carson calls “a connection to yourself as other,” but
what the authors she studies call “Sublime,” “FarNear,” “poverty,” “contradiction,”
“God”—​opens up deep psychic and emotional fault lines that a strictly formal
analysis offers to close up, reducing the drama of the “other” to a drama of lan-
guage and a literary exercise. Decreation, in this key sense, not only performs acts
of deliberate authorial displacement, but also accounts for and seeks to perform
a mind not entirely in control of itself: “The things you think of to link are not in
your control,” Carson has said: “It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But
how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind.”14
What follows is an argument about Decreation from two angles that seem,
at moments, to converge. On the one hand, Carson’s compendium performs
an inquiry around the concept of “decreation,” which is explored in various
nomenclatures and put through different rigors of reflection and composition.
The result is a sequential shifting of key and perspective, a displacement of the
128 Speculative Form

conceptual center that not only reproduces her working process but engages a
mimetic harmony with the self-​shattering métier of decreation. Carson’s book, if
we follow this line of reasoning, comes up with a more or less decreative account
of decreation—​a performance of self-​undoing by disoriented and decentered
inquiry. One of the things that most interests Carson about Weil’s “decreation,”
we will see in the next chapter, is the contradiction it entertains as a matter of
course: between Being and its apprehension, for example, or between the self as
part of Creation and as an obstruction to its enjoyment by God. Carson turns
Weil’s spirit of contradiction onto the question of how to write decreatively: “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 must involve the writer in some important acts of subter-
fuge and contradiction” (171). The erratic line of inquiry that emerges under
the title of Decreation links authors, concepts, compositions, and memories
in a paratactic organization; each association to the decreation idea bumps up
against the others, and a kind of “passive synthesis” (Edmund Husserl’s term)
is achieved.15 Yet where the conceptual through-​line is broken and incon-
sistent, the book’s lyric thread remains more or less intact. From the “I feel” of
the first poem, “Sleepchains,” to the self-​observing “she thought” of “Longing: A
Documentary,” Carson’s inquiry points toward a single speculative center, who
rehearses her placement and edges under constraints of thought, grammar, and
form. Decreation is the portrait of a mind “bumping into” an idea in its intertexts
and analogies, in her scholarly material as in her intimate life; a mind whose dis-
placement the book enacts by force of lyric testimony. This voluntary art of dis-
appearance, Carson knows, does not escape “subterfuge and contradiction”: the
“big, loud, shiny center of self ” floodlighting the mystic discourse of annihila-
tion (171).
On the other hand, perhaps this is to misconstrue the nature of what Carson
calls “links”—​the “friskes, skips and jumps” of her “poetical kinde of march.”
Chapter 4 began with a scene from The Beauty of the Husband in which Carson’s
narrator “jumped” from a building only to tell us the “jump” wasn’t real. To
confess the fiction seems to neutralize the risk. But elsewhere, we saw, Carson
is clear that her metaphorical jumps feel dangerous: “you leap off the building
when you think poetically.”16 What is it that threatens (and thrills) in this leaping
and jumping—​or in “bouncing,” “bumping,” or “crashing”—​from one place,
one source, one idea, to another? In this chapter’s close readings of individual
works in Decreation, we will see the dilemmas of decreation reproduced in and
across different compositional forms and from different angles of reckoning,
the tonal and conceptual “jumps” between them carried off by a through-​line of
lyric interest and a sustained emotional pitch—​at times ascribed to “I” or “she,”
at other times notorious for its staged impersonality. What we will also see, in the
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 129

discontinuity of her forms and analogies, is a broken expression of decreation that

thrives as much on the links Carson makes as on the gaps over which she jumps,
and that confronts the terror that gaps themselves can arouse. In the Beguine
mystic Marguerite Porete’s drastic analogies, where likenesses are drawn across
an immeasurable breach, Carson calls the effect a “thrill”—​a sublime vertigo as
meaning disappears into the gap and writing runs, as it were, on dead time. As
in the intimated death wish of her “leaps” of poetic thinking, or in what she calls
the “perilous activity” of associative linking, what Carson’s versions of decreation
stage, then, is less the desire to describe or perform decreation under controlled
conditions than a desire far more ambivalent: to succumb to undoing in un-
scheduled feats of thought and writing—​an involuntary art of disappearance.

Exit/​Entrance

Decreation begins with a series of fourteen short poems titled “Stops,” a group
of tentative elegies for Carson’s elderly mother—​mentioned or evoked in all of
them—​who has passed into an inscrutable (“shoutless,” “shipless”) final phase
of life (13, 3). Immediately following the poems is a short prose essay on sleep,
“Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” whose title riffs on, though does
not cite, a phrase from the German mystic Meister Eckhart: “God’s exit is his
entrance.”17 Carson considers sleep and its analogous states as forms of exit “in-
wards,” approaches onto the world “through self,” through the mind on “the
very inside of its definition,” a phrase from the essay “Decreation: How Women
Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God” (179). The text on
sleep moves nonchalantly, as so much of Carson’s writing does, between sources,
exempla, and facts, grasping at what piques her and reflecting—​in Adorno’s
words, quoted in a brief commentary on Carson’s essay—​“a childlike freedom
that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done.”18 In one
of the essay’s most memorable images, whose color palette streaks through the
book, a three-​or four-​year-​old Carson dreams of being asleep and waking on the
“sleep side” of her dream:

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 changed as if it had gone mad. . . . So,
as far as I can recall, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught
the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. . . . (20)
130 Speculative Form

The young Carson’s explanation that she had caught the paraphernalia of ordi-
nary life asleep parses Simone Weil’s “dream of distance” (“If only I could see
a landscape as it is when I am not there . . .”) in the natural theology of a child.
It is a dream drenched in philosophical history. Its central premise—​the non-​
instrumental life of everyday objects—​recalls Plato’s famous questions about
beds (Platonic “Form”) in Book Ten of The Republic, as well as some of the
most distinctive inquiry lines of phenomenology.19 The dreamscape has strong
resonances, too, with the gnostic fables of a dissenting material world invoked
by Carson in the “Gnosticism” poems later in the book (87–​93). The first essay
in Decreation, then, begins by essaying some of the book’s brightest associations
to decreation theology, including a complex affinity that emerges—​it is never
broached directly—​between phenomenological and mystical thinking.
At the same time, Carson’s anecdote tells a very ordinary tale of the eve-
ryday life of the mind, capable of wandering off from itself in fantasy, sleep, and
dreams. This “other” life, indivisible from “self,” is measureless and unplumbable
(unergründliche: Sigmund Freud’s term for the “navel” of the dream, its “point of
contact with the unknown”).20 The essay touches on a more extreme instance of
un-​dimensionable mental life in the ellipses cut from the above extract:

Later in life, when I was learning to reckon with my father, who was afflicted
with and eventually died of dementia, this dream recovered itself to me, I think
because it seemed to bespeak the situation of looking at a well-​known face,
whose appearance is exactly as it should be in every feature and detail, except
that it is also, somehow, deeply and glowingly strange. (20)

Madness and dementia—​ involuntary self-​ undoing—​ take their place in

Decreation alongside more romantic forms of ecstasy and inward exit. While the
“strange” familiarity Carson recalls is another analogy for decreation, alongside
the stray angles of Antonioni’s mirrors and unscheduled errors, there is some-
thing more deeply perturbing about the unwilled exile she describes: a “well-​
known face” locked out of its precincts, beyond the limits of philosophy and at
a stretch from the speculative angles of temps mort. The recollection of Carson’s
father reprises the story of his dementia told in “The Glass Essay,” and is echoed
again in descriptions of her father’s uncle Harry in “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric
Lectures with Shared Chorus,” where dementia takes its place among a different
series of analogies. There, alongside the controlled free-​fall of Streb dancers and
the “terrifically perilous activity” of associative lecturing, the “dark custom of
dementia” is read among kinds of “human falling”; her questions around a mind
“com[ing] apart” concern how to “deaden the blow” or at least “deaden the sound
of the blow.”21 There, too, Carson points to a problem that arises in Decreation, as
it does in a different form, we saw, in Eros the Bittersweet. “Streb and her dancers
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 131

imitate real falling by falling according to plan,” Carson says. Levering open the
difference between controlled and uncontrolled vulnerability, even between
the lover and nonlover in Plato’s Phaedrus, madness—​Plato’s mania—​is where
falling into gaps, or “undoing the creature,” is not a choice.
Dementia is the vanishing point of Carson’s essay on sleep. It points off at
an angle from the reflections that surround it—​on dreams to be analyzed on
waking, on sleep “as a blindness, which nonetheless looks back at us”—​as a case
of undoing in which there is no redoubling, no deliberation or reflexivity, and
no performance.22 Essayed here is a kind of decreation that doesn’t observe it-
self: whose fall from selfhood is headlong and uncontrolled, and whose ek-​stasis
is ecstatic without knowing it. Rather than mastering this radical contingency,
analogy and link-​making are simply the lightest and most pleasurable of its
symptoms. “What we call reasoning, an argument, a conversation,” Carson’s lec-
ture on falling ends by suggesting, does not reflect the robust force of the mind
but its precariousness and fragility: “what a terrifically perilous activity it is, this
activity of linking together all the threads of human sin that go into making what
we call sense. . . . How light, how loose, how unprepared and unpreparable is the
web of connections between any thought and any thought.”23
Carson’s reflections on sleep and the inscrutability of old age begin in the
opening poems of Decreation. The first poem, “Sleepchains” (3), imagines a
mother-​daughter bond unspooled across a distance.

Who can sleep when she—​

hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.24

Carson’s broken first line, left ajar at “she—​,” opens the poem with a sudden
shift of angle. At the line break, the poem’s lyric center slides out into an ec-
static proximity in distance, miles out at sea, to an improbable ship on a “shipless
ocean.” Both women, we understand, are awake (“who can sleep,” “her rest-
less decks”). Like a stray piece of world glimpsed in reflection, in what follows
this break, the poem’s inner mechanics are seen from without, redoubled
by an image that performs itself in the rattle of metrics and the sibilance and
clink of consonants: “Cicatrice by cicatrice, all the links rattle once.” Links in
the chain connecting “I” to the vanishing point at “she—​”: these are the invol-
untary thoughts and memories that keep “I” awake at night, but that suggest,
too, the waking, voluntary links made throughout the book between facts from
Carson’s life and her reading material. All these links—​from her “incongruous
ideas” and interlocutors to the wounds of her biography—​run together on a
single chain of thought: what moves one is replicated across the others. What
rattles “all the links” in the poem, as it happens, is a sublime sensation—​“that vast
132 Speculative Form

breath”—​streaming out the end of the second line. The heft of ocean breeze and
the suggestion of an oceanic Creator breath reaches (and rattles, unrests) both
women: as one pities the other’s loneliness, loneliness of the ocean, it is herself
she pities, herself who is moved.
“Sleepchains” could not be more intimate in its conjuring of what is phrased
later in the book as the departure of self from its own center. Its scene dramatizes
a concern that Carson first voices in the early poem “God’s Christ Theory” for
the “kind of withness” engendered by compassion (com-​passio or feeling-​
with).25 When she returns to “withness” in the “Decreation” essay (“Withness
is the problem,” 169), it has become an inquiry into what prevents her mystics
from being “with” God: in Carson’s summary, “I cannot go towards God in love
without bringing myself along. And so in the deepest possible sense I can never
be alone with God” (169). Decreation is full of iterations of this logic, from the
masochistic wish for total erotic intimacy in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” to
the gnostic readings of language in the “Gnosticisms” sequence. As well as re-
fracting her inquiry across multiple formal and contextual centers, another way
in which the book as a whole “reads” Weil’s decreation—​a reading in which the
“Decreation” opera plays a starring role—​is the return of so many of Carson’s
texts to situations that redress what the philosopher Gillian Rose called Weil’s
failure to “bring the sublime into the pedestrian,” scenes that humanize or even
banalize decreation, as the chapter to follow discusses.26 Carson’s versions of
decreation refuse to renege on the world of everyday objects and emotions, the
everyday travails of the body desirous, sleepy, and infirm, that Weil’s discourse of
desire and decreation would sublimate out of existence.
It is in the “Decreation” essay and opera libretto that Carson’s links and
analogies are anchored, finally, in a specific devotional and philosophical canon.
Weil’s concern is that desire gets estranged from its source by the “false” objects
it comes to rest on:

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.27

Weil’s solution to the problem of desire is to “empty” it: “to desire in the void, to
desire without any wishes . . . to wait.”28 Waiting (attendre) in Weil is an evenly
suspended attention, disposition without aim or argument. One of the most
striking poems in Decreation offers an exercise in precisely this form of sus-
pended reading, product of an interpretive desire “without any wishes.” In the
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 133

case of this poem, the object—​a sketch by the Canadian artist, Betty Goodwin,
reproduced in the book—​is present, and read without its reader settling on or
sealing any one line of inquiry.29 This poem asks, rather, about its own pres-
ence: the force, substance, and color of its attention.

The Color of Attention

Below are two short excerpts from “Seated Figure with Red Angle by Betty
Goodwin (1988),” an ekphrastic poem in response to a work by the Canadian
painter and printmaker, Betty Goodwin.30 Carson reproduces the work facing
the first page of the poem (Figure 1).

If red is the color of italics.

If italics are a lure of thought.

If Freud says the relation between a gaze and what one wishes to see involves
allure.
...
If there is no master of allure.

If conditionals are of two kinds allure and awake.

If no matter how you balance on the one you cannot see the other, cannot tap
the sleep spine, cannot read what word that was.31

Carson’s poem is a sequence of open-​ended inquiries. Its lines consist, gram-

matically speaking, of a series of conditionals (protasis) with no projected
consequence (apodosis), no “then” to their searching “if.” Reading these incon-
clusive stabs in the dark consecutively, each conditional qualifies the last, shifting
(sometimes abruptly) its angle of reflection. In the continual substitution of un-
finished propositions, what gradually accumulates, as though off-​camera or out
of earshot, is the vertigo of a subject whose thinking continually cedes its own
ground: “If objects are not solid. /​If objects are much too solid,” an example from
later in the poem. In their five pages or seventy-​two sentences of guesswork,
Carson’s lines approximate the evasive sfumato and awkward inwardness of
Goodwin’s drawing, caught between momentary definition and a reluctance to
define the figure. The body of the “Seated Figure” in Carson’s poem is insinuated
Figure 1 Betty Goodwin, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). Used with
permission.
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 135

in lines that equivocate, digress, and retire from definite contour, such that the
result, red-​hued, brittle, and ambiguous, describes a process of association to the
figure in lieu of the figure itself.
The poem’s opening sets an equally ambiguous tone, but its speculation
around the figure is distinctly uncomfortable, with images of coercion and vio-
lence emerging in the very first lines:

If body is always deep but deepest at its surface.

If conditionals are of two kinds factual and contrafactual.

If you’re pushing, pushing and then it begins to pull you.

If police in that city burnt off people’s hands with a blowtorch.

If darkly colored or reddish (bodies) swim there.

...

If the seated figure started out with an idea of interrogation. (97)

If the poem begins with an intention, it is perhaps to weigh its own iterative in-
quiry against the weight and proportions of this “other body,” the introverted
figure of Goodwin’s sketch. For even in these perturbing beginnings, it is unclear
whether what is being reproduced in the associative sequence of conditionals is
the thinking (the “idea of interrogation,” for example) of the narrator and viewer
of Goodwin’s Seated Figure, or the inferred thinking of the figure him/​herself
(“If the seated figure started out with an idea of interrogation,” shifting two
lines down to “If you had the idea of interrogation,” my italics). In any case, the
poem starts to look like an exercise in Carson’s performative form, mimicking
an uncertainty or undefinition that is both inferred in the mind of the figure
and experienced in the mind of the narrator/​viewer. A repeated push-​pull be-
tween conditionals “of two kinds factual and contrafactual” gives Carson’s lines
of inquiry their hesitant, discontinuous internal structure. (Later iterations of
this phrase describe as well as perform the difference: “If conditionals are of two
kinds allure and awake” and “If conditionals are of two kinds now it is night and
all cats are black” pitch the poem’s spare facts—​it is night, conditional thought
is alluring—​against counterfact or logical syllogism.) A similar, more obvious
structure of hesitation characterizes the move from line to line, as a proposition
is ventured, almost affirmed, and then modified or abandoned in the next non
sequitur.
136 Speculative Form

“Seated Figure with Red Angle” is a poem that holds its thinking work in sus-
pense as it moves, if not forward, then between disjunctive “ideas.” The poem’s
conditional syntax is a striking formal decision in a poem that presents, from its
title to its reflections on “the seated figure,” as ekphrastic. The practiced incon-
clusiveness of its phrases describe the Goodwin sketch without, as it were, actu-
ally describing it, venturing an action of interpretive approach without exactly
arriving at a reading. The non-​sequitur movement between associations performs
not only inconclusiveness but inconsequentiality, a quality Carson ascribes in
the “Decreation” essay to the logic of mystics, for whom inconsequence—​one
thing not leading to another, or, in Carson’s own essay structure, a three-​part
essay turning out to have four parts—​is a language of apophasis: the affirma-
tion of God through negation or, closer to Carson’s aesthetics, through deliberate
error. Carson’s poem isn’t quite a poetics of negation, nor do its associations to
the figure form a cumulative or aggregate picture of what the narrator thinks
about the figure (or thinks the figure might be thinking). Each line of approach
offers an angle or analogy that, over the course of the poem, produces a dispersed
subject of attention whose reflections arrive from a multiplicity of angles, as
per Antonioni’s redoubling cinematic vision. At the same time, though, each
of these analogies or approaches to the figure dissolves as the next is arrived at.
Something seems to fall away in the gaps between them—​as one line suggests ex-
plicitly: “If the feet cross in a way that sucks itself under, sucks analogies (Christ)
under” (98). It is the gaps that, sucking each analogy down, starting with the
blood of Christ at Goodwin’s “red angle,” perform the radical de-​authorization
that Carson seems, uncomfortably, to be after here.
Carson’s ekphrastic poem is attuned from the start to a certain violence
stalking its edges: the un-​primed shock of the “blowtorch” and a disquieting
proposition regarding the provenance of this gruesome imaginary (to whom
exactly “the idea of interrogation” and its associations belongs). Monique
Tschofen has written persuasively on the presence of torture, forced disap-
pearance, and state-​sponsored atrocity as themes in Goodwin’s work, which
Tschofen finds reflected in the poem’s more diffuse exploration of interro-
gation as a means of extracting knowledge and procuring certainty.32 Such
certainty—​and the force from which it is historically inseparable—​is refused by
the poem in its hesitant grammar and the continually displaced sovereignty of
its approaches to the artwork. Yet the poem does not entirely elude the violence
at the edge of its associations. Carson’s question of where the “idea” of violence
originates seems to recognize that there is something coercive about interpre-
tive projection per se, a sort of violence by association; an idea that is consonant
with Simone Weil’s thinking on interpretation and attention—​“try to love the
object naked and without interpretation. What you love then is truly God”—​
and even with Freud’s notion of evenly suspended attention: “If Freud says the
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 137

relation between a gaze and what one wishes to see involves allure,” above.33 The
poem’s impersonal, almost imperceptible narrator replicates the undefinition
of Goodwin’s figure—​both might be understood as notionally “decreated” or
undone—​but many of his/​her associations are to forms of violence: animal
experimentation, bomb, “how many were killed by David” and “how many
were killed by Saul,” an elusive “art pain,” and so on. In this, he/​she becomes
an anonymous, unconsenting accomplice to violence by the mere “perilous ac-
tivity” of analogy and association. In the above lines, just as conditionals can
be “factual and “contrafactual,” so the thinking they perform moves between
coercion and freedom, voluntary and involuntary (“If you’re pushing, pushing,
and then it begins to pull you”). The question of to whom the associative vio-
lence of the “blowtorch” belongs is a question that never goes away in the poem.
The narrator both exposes and sublimates its violence in his/​her associations to
the brief red intrusion in the image: the “red angle” of its title, to the left of the
seated figure.
To glance back briefly to Weil, for whom, we saw, “desires are true insofar
as they are energy. It is the object that is false.” One of the most striking things
about the Goodwin reproduction in Carson’s book—​as opposed to the original
Artforum publication of Carson’s poem—​is that it appears, as it does in the print
edition of this book, in black and white. The color red is present only by associa-
tion, with the poem’s rogue talk of red speaking only to the “red angle” of the title.
For the insinuated red of the poem as we read it, there is, in a peculiarly literal
sense, no object beyond the “true” desire for one. As the product of perception
mediated by imagination, the object “red,” in this case, is false.
In a book concerned with what Carson calls the “big, loud, shiny centre of
self from which . . . writing is given voice” and “the brilliant self-​assertiveness
of the writerly project” (171), “Seated Figure with Red Angle” is both an attempt
to reflect on this center of self as a point of origin for assertion/​coercion, and to
mitigate its force by suspending commentary at the edge of each syntactically
incomplete line. Weil’s “energy” of desire, we saw, is an energy that moves to-
ward objects without ever grasping or settling on one. It is pure approach: erōs
held in suspense by aidōs, the “voltage of decorum” that, for Carson, reins in
the desire to possess.34 Cropping her syntax at the hinge between “if ” (protasis)
and “then” (apodosis), Carson coins a grammar for pure interpretive energy in
the form of deliberately inconsequential, often counterintuitive perceptions.
Denying readers the extension (enjambment) of sense from one line to the next,
the docked syntax of “Seated Figure with Red Angle” encourages us to tarry in
the unfinished statement, inviting inquiry to accrue awkwardly inside each line,
or to flash up symmetries and recall between lines. A neat example from the
excerpts with which I began is what happens to the word “allure” under pressures
of Carson’s verse:
138 Speculative Form

If italics are a lure of thought

...

If there is no master of allure.

If conditionals are of two kinds allure and awake.

Tschofen has noted that “allure” picks up resonances from Husserl, who uses
the word to refer to “the particular pull that an object given to consciousness
exercises on the ego,” “relaxed when the ego turns toward it attentively.”35 For
Husserl, this pull can be weak: its “affective rays of force,” then—​as Carson all
but quotes—​“do not actually become an allure that awakens.”36 Where Carson’s
“italics” refer us to Goodwin’s title, and to the targeted lure of titles in general,
“allure” suggests a different kind of traction of objects on the mind. “Allure” has
“no master” to begin with, but under certain conditions—​certain kinds of condi-
tional, is Carson’s suggestion—​“allure . . . awakens” and “the self of the object”—​
not the associative subject—​is disclosed.37 This poem puts the conditions for
disclosure, for a Husserlian “passive synthesis” or “transcendental association”
on the part of the speaker, whose speculations snapped in half then reproduce
it in the reader.38 Reading closer to the words here, we hear how “a lure” picks
up the glint of its cognate “allure.” “Allure,” too, changes hue next to “awake,” the
noun disoriented by an unscheduled affinity with the adjective, the “factual”
tipped by the “contrafactual.” Carson reflects on the value of such disorientation
in the “Essay on Error” and “Essay on What I Think About Most” in terms of
the fresh, unexpected insights the sensation of momentary mistakenness brings
about.39 In the final chapter of this book, we will see Carson attribute her in-
terest in syntaxes with sensible effects, syntaxes that mime and induce distinc-
tive processes of thought, to her early encounters with the fragments of Ancient
Greek lyric. Producing a deliberately denatured syntax like that of “Seated Figure
with Red Angle,” in which sound and association accrue without direction,
compels in us the deconstructed perspective and decentered center of its subject.
The poem works in this way as a case of decreative writing, a deliberately perfor-
mative form.
I have so far suggested that Carson’s reading of decreation probes the limits of
this idea of form and the construal of mental life behind it, wondering whether
“undoing the creature” is an effect to be induced, an imperative of form, or some-
thing more improbable and difficult to master. For Carson, and for the women
mystics at the center of her book, “decreation” (or “ecstasy”) is at once a question
of will and its renunciation: a voluntary and involuntary disappearance of self.
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 139

Carson’s own take on this complexity comes through in the idea of “perilous”
link-​making and, above, transcendental association, but also, we saw, in the
drastic psychic undoing of madness and old age. In a lecture on “Chairs” given
at the University of Chicago in late 2019, Carson discussed her poem’s response
to the awkward posture and ambiguous mood of the seated figure, speculating
whether he/​she might have “forgotten to exhale, as people with dementia often
do.”40 What changes, finally, if we read the poem as performing an unscheduled
“undoing [of] the creature,” the solitary speech of a mind that does not know it is
“undone”?

If afterwards she would sit the way a very old person sits, with no pants on,
confused.

If you reach in, if you burrow, if you risk wiping in. (97)

...

If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful ideas.

If you reach instead the edge of the thinkable, which leaks.

If you stop the leaks with conditionals. (99)

The poem’s cropped lines plot out this “edge of the thinkable” and the leakage
the poem surmises might be stopped with conditionals. The poem, these lines
suggest, follows thoughts pushed to the edge of the thinkable, not by pursuing
their logic to its unsound end, but by having logic stopped dead in its tracks.
Carson’s conditionals do not set the limits of the thinkable—​their incompletion
is a refusal of precisely that—​but this “edge,” these “leaks” call us back to the gaps
between her inconsequent phrases, gaps down which meaning and possibility
pour and pool. Resisting definite contour, identifying with the openness of “if,”
Carson’s response to the Goodwin sketch continually cedes its own center, or—​
never far from this secession—​keeps losing its own mind.
The shattered pane through which we observe Carson’s image of an image—​
her disfiguration of a figure—​ventures an exercise in decreation with a differ-
ence.41 For this is no decreation in the abstract. Rather, the poem meets the
cooler, more aloof spirit of decreation theology by imagining “undoing” in re-
lation to ordinary mental confusion and its barely sublimated violence. We can
call it Weilian in its spirit of withdrawal, refusing to fix its object under a single
or direct gaze, or a form of looking without a gaze to speak of. The suggestions of
140 Speculative Form

torture also bring up resonances of Weil’s stunning essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem
of Force,” which describes a brutal form of creatural “undoing”—​the conversion
of person into thing—​under conditions of war.42 Thinking about how it invokes
and tries to sideline personhood, we might also observe that Carson’s poem is
also one of the most Carsonesque of the volume. The studied incongruities and
flatline tonality courted by the clipped lineation not only recall other poems by
its author—​“The Life of Towns” sequence is the most obvious example—​but
remember Carson’s distinctive modes of public recital. Assuming we’ve heard
her perform her work, we would be hard pressed to read this poem without
hearing Carson’s dry, wry recital monotone, a vocal style that cultivates counter-​
intuition, insouciance, and inconsequentiality. Carson’s is a voice that plays its
nonchalance off against a cultivated errancy, the far-​fetched logics of her forms,
conversations, and comparisons.43
The problem of performing subjective undoing, which begins in poems like
“Seated Figure with Red Angle” to look like a performative contradiction, is
picked up in several other works in the book that pitch the controlled abandon
of authorship against other forms of self-​undoing with higher personal stakes.
The following poem, one of the book’s most majestic, charges language—​and
specifically poetry—​with complicity in decreation’s problem of impossible inti-
macy: “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. . . .”

“It’s Good to Be Neuter”

When Simone Weil laments the impossibility of union with creation, she lays the
blame squarely at the door of bios. Bodies make claims, and bodies claim a singu-
larity that for Weil is simply incompatible with union:

If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in

any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart [or: “by my
breathing and the beating of my heart”].44

The body and its vital metrics—​breath and beating heart—​are expressions of
being that prove troublesome to Weil, and that find themselves translated, Carson
proposes, in the “big, loud, shiny centre of self from which writing is given voice”
(171). But the body, as Carson understands it, poses another problem. The body
is meaningful, signified; the body saturated, scripted, and mediated by words.
Carson’s poem, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” speaks from a desire to bypass the
body’s significance and to achieve an intimacy with the beloved that runs off-​
script. In spite of this wish, what the poet calls her “personal poetry” is named as
her proxy in a failure of relation.
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 141

My personal poetry is a failure.

I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.

Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.

Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.45

This is a poem—​these the third and fourth of its seven stanzas—​whose extraor-
dinary sensual presence and charisma is the not un-​ironic source of the poet’s
discontent. Unlike Auden’s more famous and ambiguous disqualification, for
this poet, “poetry”—​her own, accomplice of her personhood—​makes too much
happen. The poem is jaded with whatever success we, its readers, might admire
in it. Under sway of a desire for unmediated relation, any such success as po-
etry means “failure” as relation. To be moved by this poem, whose métier moves
against its own form of life, is almost to betray it on its own terms.
This counterfactual lover’s complaint, already compromised by its own
making, sends its song out in stanzas that drift to the right-​hand margin,
approaches to an object whose distance is at least partly guaranteed by the poem
as a source of “meaning,” “impersonation,” and “seduction.” The poem ends de-
spondent of its enterprise, and in the gestures, syntax, and sound of the final lines
(reproduced below), pares itself down to a diminished inventory of moves. What
we can’t miss about the poem’s mise-​en-​page is that each drift of the stanzas
rightward is pulled back to degree zero at the left-​hand margin, domain of the
following lines: “Then you die” /​“of dying” /​“Cool, cooling” /​“Still die” /​“Legs
die” /​“spin.” Each counter-​pull to the left resets the poem until its final rightward
drift, a thinner stream than the stanzas before:

some ballet term for it —​

fragment of foil, little
spin,
little drunk,
little do,
little oh,
alas.
142 Speculative Form

The degree zero of the poem’s stanzas, sexes, and seductions is death—​“die,”
“of dying,” “still die”—​though it imagines another form of reset beyond biolog-
ical death: a symbolic zero at which the meaningfulness of the body is stripped
back; “to be neuter,” “to have meaningless legs.” It is this form of neuter life, non-​
symbolic life, physis or life impersonal, that the poem’s lyric subject pursues.
The self-​defeating desire at the heart of “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” is sexual
as much as it is creative, and sex for the poet (or the poem’s poet persona) is what
drives the defeat home.46 “Drink all the sex there is. /​Still die”: all those drifts of
lover to lover, what this poet calls lovers’ and poets’ “little size of dying,” signal
the simple mortal facts of bodies, not the unsignified erotic immanence the poet
seems to crave.47 The poem’s final stanza is ambiguous in this regard. It stages
a series of involuntary gestures, signs of the body and its failure (“some ballet
term for it—​”: even uncoordinated movement, it turns out, is meaningful). The
poet seems then to search for this “ballet term” or otherwise define the body and
its movement: “fragment of foil, little /​spin, /​little drunk, /​little do, /​little oh, /​
alas.” But the effect of her series of descriptors—​all diminutives—​, each of which
carries an excess of potential meanings, is not what we might have expected.
Little spin: [a]‌little spin, a turn, or a bit of spin, a seduction, and picking up the
indictment of their relationship by Carson’s ex-​lover in “The Glass Essay”: “not
enough spin on it.”48 Little drunk: [a] little drunk, or little [has been] drunk. Little
do: [a] little do, a small affair, doing little, little ado. Little oh: a sigh, little “o” for a
“little death.” Their meaning short-​circuits in this surfeit. A fatigued language is
one that means out of control and so stops being meaningful: the opposite of the
limpid and unassuming “Lover to lover, the greenness of love.”
What does the poem offer against this tide of disappointment? First, an in-
tuition of what pure relation and total intimacy might sound like. The smooth
metric regularity of the wish “I want to have meaningless legs” reaches a kind of
rhythmic symmetry with Carson’s evocation, two stanzas down, of an intimacy
without caesura: “Lover to lover, the greenness of love.” A momentary plateau
in the poem, this dactylic line sounds out a euphony that catches in its refrain
other tonalities of “green”: the living room of “Every Exit Is an Entrance,” “sunk
in its greenness, breathing its own order”; Sappho’s image of ecstatic immanence,
“greener than grass I am and dead,” one of the centerpieces of the “Decreation”
essay; even Andrew Marvell’s vision, several centuries earlier, of another kind of
decreation: a drastic emptying of nature and a thought continuous with its im-
mediate surroundings—​“Annihilating all that’s made /​To a green thought in a
green shade.”49 The poem is decided its denial that this vivid, total intimacy is an-
ything more than a fantasy: “Lover to lover, the greenness of love. /​Cool, cooling.
//​Earth bears no such plant.” The imaginary of erotic immanence is performed
in a smooth, co-​extensive slide of “cool” into “cooling,” before a slapdown of
spondees—​“Earth bears no such plant”—​tells it like it is.
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 143

The vision of relationship and version of decreation offered in “Stanzas, Sexes,

Seductions” is one in which self-​undoing or mystical-​erotic annihilation is only
possible through union. Its suggestion is that more language, more failed “per-
sonal poetry,” only deepens the rift between lover and beloved. The very first line,
“It’s good to be neuter,” sets the poem in a place of equivocation between the
linguistic and the erotic, positing a grammar to navigate from logos to eros. On
the one hand, there is the neuter gender: “it” or “its,” the pronoun of things and
of “meaningless legs”; on the other, neuter sexuality, the unsexed or the (volun-
tarily or involuntarily) undefined. The thinker who navigates most fluidly be-
tween these fields of possibility is Barthes, an interlocutor to whom we have seen
Carson return, from Eros the Bittersweet to The Albertine Workout, where she
describes his commitment to a “third” language “in which we would all be ex-
empt from meaning” (“appendix 15 (b) on adjectives”). Barthes’s famous essay
on the “death of the author” includes the remark I quoted above: writing means
“the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral,
composite, oblique space where our subject slips away.”50 For Barthes, writing
undoes the creature who writes, but does so whether she likes it or not. The de-
struction of “every point of origin” is what guarantees the possibility of destina-
tion, insofar as writing, unbound from the author, can belong momentarily to
all readers. Writing, that free-​for-​all of meaning and desire, guarantees a strange
kind of universality at the expense of the lyric subject: a loss for the individual
voice—​the disappearance of individual desire—​is a gain for the desiring many.
The “neutral” space of writing and its claim to universality mean several dif-
ferent things in Barthes’s own work. His lecture course, The Neuter, defines its
approach to texts as “anecdotal,” guided by intuition and desire. The rationale of
The Neuter is the production and performance of a theory by freeform associative
linking, the disorderly pursuit of what “shines by bursts.”51 Decreation keeps its
own idea of the risks and attractions of the freeform close to the emotive surface
of the book. It is in association, incomplete approach, and iterative drafting that
an involuntary disappearance of the subject is imagined, even while the book’s
analogical links “show the nature” of the mind doing the thinking. Carson’s
chain of thought and testimony forms a lyric through-​line even in the absence
of personal pronouns—​or the presence of a neuter pronoun—​to own them. For
Barthes, “Neuter” is also androgyny. Neither sexlessness nor “meaningless legs,”
the grammatical neuter hints at another possibility—​what we might, glancing
up to “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” and anticipating this book’s next chapter, call
“impersonation”: the hypermobility of (sexual) identity and a thoroughgoing de-
fiance of difference.52
Carson’s inquiry into the neuter voice and the arts of authorial disappear-
ance does not end with Decreation. The struggle “to get every Me out of the
way,” a phrase she cites from John Cage, has taken Carson from the “scholarly
144 Speculative Form

hesitation” of her early research, through fragmentation, variation, and collabo-

ration, to the edges of “uncreative writing.”53 There is the “freefall” organization
of Float, which unlooses the writing from a predetermined order of reading, but
there are also her experiments in constrained writing techniques, aleatory po-
etics, and randomization software, used in “By Chance the Cycladic People” and
Red Doc> to produce chance lineation and formatting patterns.54 This “litera-
ture in the conditional mood” takes the conditional “If ” of “Seated Figure” and
turns it into a compositional mode, where “if ”—​chance, contingency, hasard—​
decides the formal arrangement of the words.55 “Uncreative writing,” as Kenneth
Goldsmith calls it, continues the inquiry into decreative writing, but without the
unapologetic sublime of decreation theology.56 “Unoriginal genius,” in Marjorie
Perloff ’s expression, asks about origins and about “I,” but its questions rebound
inside a drama of textual culture: language and literary form, intertextuality, cre-
ativity, and influence.57
Uncreativity plumbed to its extreme is not perhaps so far removed from
the promise of a “decreative” writing. If the uncreative author “bumps into” or
“bounces off ” an “other,” it is, in the first instance, the “other” of other texts,
whose otherness is defused in the act of appropriation, or the “other” of algo-
rithm, automation, and artificial intelligence. This post-​human “other,” as Colin
Burrow has shown, is adept at imitating authors and imitating authorship.58
Yet in its most acute incarnations, the questions of origin, creation, and differ-
ence raised by post-​human poetics—​where the machine definitively supplants
human authorship, or where lines of verse implanted and reproduced in a ge-
netic code generate new “uncreative” poems59—​share something in common
with Carson’s arts of disappearance in Decreation. They, too, run the blurred
line between the performance of controlled technique and an opening to ver-
tigo when we sense in the subjection of language to non-​human laws the anni-
hilation or radical exposure of human culture. These anxieties are channeled in
the “Gnosticisms” sequence in Decreation, which riffs on early Christian gnostic
fears of rebellion of the created world against God, and of art and names against
man.60 In the first of these poems, it is the word “bird” that rebels by performing
bird—​as Harold Bloom, in an essay on gnosticism, argued Blake’s loping verse
in “The Tyger” conjures and fears the phenomenality of the beast. Carson’s
dreamer-​narrator is decentered by the spectacle, “Astonishment inside me like a
separate person”: “For some people a bird sings, feathers shine,” she concludes: “I
just get this this” (87).61 Language in the “Gnosticisms” poems knows and acts
autonomously.62 “Bird” announces its own law and, by the end of the poem,
insubordinates the poet by the sheer force of its tautology. For this “bird” does
not sing, it birds. Her deictic “this” points only to “this.”
The questions of Decreation, finally, are questions Carson is still asking. In her
recent essay on “Stillness,” derived from the same lecture series as her lecture
 Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance 145

on “The Chair,” Carson asks how the “I” of Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “I
heard a Fly buzz—​when I died,” can embody the stillness (and hear the noise)
simultaneous with her own death.63 She talks about Virginia Woolf ’s last novel,
Between the Acts (1941), as the climax of Woolf ’s experiments with what Carson
calls “techniques of reticence.” These techniques, she says, are Woolf ’s attempts
to “draw back a little further from the authorial surface in each novel, replacing
the “damned egotistical self,” as she called it, with the pronoun “we,” or with phe-
nomena like furniture or moonlight, or with humanity as a whole.”64 Describing
the distinctive textuality of Between the Acts, Carson touches the question of
who it is that speaks (or who it is we hear) in the autonomous, “neuter” voice
of language: “there are voices, words, and phrases slipping in and out of dif-
ferent consciousnesses and behind them someone called ‘third voice’ or ‘an-
other voice’ or “that was nobody.’ ”65 Crashing into and bumping up against the
voices of other writers—​as Carson does in the “Decreation” opera to spectac-
ular effect—​or procuring this “other” voice under strict formal constraints, as
in “Seated Figure,” are just some of the ways in which Decreation rehearses its
fantasy of “nobody” speaking, its voluntary/​involuntary art of disappearance. Yet
the works that emerge from these ideas—​randomized formats or an increasing
preference for performance-​driven, collaborative working, getting the lyric “Me”
out of the way—​show Carson’s growing interest in what is produced (as she says
of Antonioni’s actors) “out of inertia”: in what happens by chance, and in the
shared, unmastered potential of live collaboration.
Analogy is often used to show an absence of contradiction. In traditions of
scriptural exegesis, an analogy can quash controversy around different ac-
counts of the same event, or procure agreement between texts of different origin.
Carson’s “friskes, skips and jumps,” in Decreation and elsewhere, invite another
understanding of analogy, one we can illustrate with the word’s etymology. Ana-​
logia is a traversal, a through-​movement, that posits a gap by traversing it in
words.66 Gillian Rose writes of an analogy of her own that “the ‘ana’ expresses
the gap, while the ‘logy,’ the logos, makes it possible to speak, to propose to raise
the difficulty of knowing or not knowing the relation.”67 All analogy gestures to
this difficult openness, exposing a leap whose landing may or may not be safe.
Bumping into the world, or into and between the work of other authors, can pro-
duce dizzying effects, as it so clearly does in Carson: voluntary can become invol-
untary, truth become fiction, the “fake” a discomfiting index of the real.
 6
Fake Women

“This,” Carson begins,” is an essay about three women and will have three
parts.”*1 The title essay of Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) begins on
a lie, confident of its invisibility until Carson announces, in the undeclared
fourth part of the work, the presence of “some inconsequentiality” (171). The
essay, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone
Weil Tell God,” approaches a wish Carson says joins the three women of its title
and places unreasonably high demands on their writing. Their wish is for an
intimacy that seems, on the face of it, to be not only unreasonable but impos-
sible: for nearness to God, or to a personification of divine love, whose price is
the annihilation of self. In the fourth part of this three-​part essay, inconsequen-
tiality (also called “subterfuge or contradiction”) is Carson’s theme. Any writer
intent on “annihilating” the “big, loud, shiny centre of self from which [her]
writing is given voice” cannot write, Carson argues, without performing a siz-
able contradiction (171). What’s more, in her three women’s reckoning with this
contradiction—​not just daring the self “to leave itself behind” (162), but daring
to examine what it means to express such a wish—​is a recognition that there is
something essentially performative about decreation: something that is “done,”
voluntarily or otherwise, and that language, written or spoken, must find a way
of doing too.
“Decreation is an undoing of the creature in us—​that creature enclosed in self
and defined by self. But to undo self,” Carson’s essay concludes, “one must move
through self, to the very inside of its definition” (179). What kind of writing
does a self on the “inside of its definition” produce? Not, it seems, a writing with
claims to true likeness, where the writer is truer to or more “like” herself, her
“telling” any closer to the sound or image of divine love. At the end of her essay
on decreation, rather than laying the question of self, telling, and writing to rest,
Carson explodes its possibilities. The decreative writer, she announces, is an
out and out “fake” (180). Sappho, Porete, and Weil are, all three of them, “fake
women.”
Carson’s surprising term is a translation of one of the accusations leveled at the
Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete at her trial and indictment for heresy in Paris
in 1309–​1310. Porete, a woman “filled with errors and heresies,” is condemned in
the proceedings of her trial as a pseudo-​mulier—​a sham, phony, or imitation of

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0007
 Fake Women 147

woman.2 The implication was, perhaps—​and if so, the judgment of her inquisitors
would prove surprisingly resilient—​that a woman (a “real” woman, at any rate)
could not have written a work of the theological complexity and imaginative
daring of Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, a text finally attributed to Porete in
1946, before which point it was assumed to be the work of an anonymous (male)
mystic.3 Carson’s first response to the “fake woman” indictment is a coolly non-
committal disqualification: “Society is all too eager to pass judgements on the
authenticity of women’s ways of being but these judgments can get crazy” (180).
Then, a paragraph down, she appropriates its terms:

Love is also a good place to situate our mistrust of fake women. What I like
best about the three women we’ve been studying is that they know what love is.
That is, they know love is the touchstone of a true or a false spirituality, that is
why they play with the figure of jealousy. As fake women, they have to inhabit
this figure gingerly, taking a position both near and far at once from the object
of their desire. The truth that they tell from this paradoxical position is also
fake. (180)

By the end of Carson’s essay, it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not we trust
these women or find their ways authentic. Love—​agapē, but also erōs, desire and
jealousy—​is where the paradox of true and false, near and far, is sustained as a
matter of urgency. Carson describes what her three women do here as “play[ing]
with” or “inhabit[ing] a “figure.” Theirs is no active hermeneutic, but a “position”
from which even “the truth that they tell” is undermined. This is “telling”—​and
writing—​with the potential to expose itself in scandalous ways, and whose self-​
exposure performs its integrity as a metaphysics of love. “Telling” from this po-
sition, Carson says, generates a “ripple of disbelief—​a sort of distortion in the
glass” (176), in which testimony and artifice move as one. What they say never
manages to remain identical with itself, never quite converges with its own
purposes.
Equivalences between the “fake” and the feminine, between “the wiles
of woman” and literary artifice, are at least as old as the theory of mimesis.4
This chapter does not seek to give an account of these equivalences, or to sit-
uate Carson’s reading in a history of reading women as imitators or imitation
as feminine. Nor am I interested in speculating about the femininity or female-
ness of Carson’s trio. (Weil, as numerous critics have noted, signed letters to her
parents as “your son, Simon”).5 What I do want to address here is how Carson
appropriates the pseudo of Porete’s indictment as a capacity for revelation and
dissent; as a name for women whose conversancy with paradox disorients but,
in disorientation, gifts us a language for the most intimate of contradictions: that
we are and are not what we think we are. In the words of Weil, for whom Being
148 Speculative Form

and personality are non-​identical, “I, too, am other than what I imagine myself
to be.”6
Carson’s “fake women,” who understand “I” as a fiction of its own making,
are women who, one way or another (as she says of Aeschylus’s Cassandra), ex-
pose “a site that has no business being underneath.”7 In the “Decreation” essay,
with which this chapter begins, Carson’s three interlocutors make a surprising
collective case for the “fake” and its unorthodox reckoning with self. Their “para-
doxical position” might condemn their writing to a certain logical inconsequen-
tiality, but from where each of them is standing, such inconsequentiality not
only comes with the territory of imagination, desire, and telling; it is, for Porete
and for Weil particularly, a continuous performance of “undoing the creature,”
presaged more than 700 years earlier in Porete’s “s’abandonne la creature” (un-
accented in the original).8 Where Porete and Weil seal their writing under the
covenant of non-​identity, where it is obliged to embody certain contradictions,
is not only where they are most interesting—​their thought its freest and most
liberatory—​but where the decreative text becomes a ritual text: the performance
of a rite.9
I focus here on Carson’s reading of Sappho, Porete, and Weil, beginning with
the essay, “Decreation: How Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell
God,” then crossing to Carson’s performance-​driven reworking of the essay’s
source material, “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts.” A “thought opera” in
an emerging tradition that includes Charles Bernstein’s libretto for the opera
Shadowtime, which reads and remixes the writings of Walter Benjamin, Carson’s
libretto employs a mix of citation, imitation, and invention to produce a critical
performance based on the essay’s arguments.10 The libretto is Carson’s imitation
of “what the facts are doing,” a “form for the form” for the paradoxical position
of her “fake women” and their own orientation toward performance, whose de-
fining action is saying—​or not quite saying—​“I.” The opera in three parts, which
does in fact turn out to have three, is composed of a series of fantastical scenarios
that dramatize the lines of inquiry of Carson’s essay, but, unlike the essay, the
opera’s interpretive work happens by divergence from her sources. The libretto’s
scenarios reproduce the dilemmas of Carson’s “fake women.” Yet the precise
fate of her source material—​which is, variously, reproduced verbatim, reprised
aslant, or transformed almost beyond recognition—​makes this compelling text
an active participant in Carson’s case for the “fake.”
The libretto is extraordinary in the “paradoxical position” it occupies vis-​
à-​vis Carson’s sources, and, as such, in the profound ways it comes to perform
some of her most searching questions around decreation. Reading near and far
from them at once—​the “distant closeness” she so often achieves—​, the libretto
iteration both is and is not faithful to its sources. It impersonates, quotes, and
ventriloquizes them, imitates their concepts, vocabularies, and deepest concerns;
 Fake Women 149

indeed, the versions of imitatio on display in Carson’s text make it a test case for
just how dizzyingly flexible literary imitation—​a form of “faking it”—​can be. As
Colin Burrow has written, imitatio is alluring precisely because of its complex
overlap with other practices and “rebellious doubles” such as “parody, forgery,
and mimicry,” as well as paraphrase and translation.11 Shifting between faithful
rendering and rebellious doubling, Carson’s imitatio of the three decreatives
amounts to a strong close reading of decreation that finds its form in the forms
and structural dilemmas of its sources. The problem of “telling God” is parsed in
a striking, sometimes shocking retelling.
This book has sought to map Carson’s preference for mimetic and performa-
tive reading styles: forms that imitate or reproduce the strictures, sensations, or
models apprehended in other works.12 The “Decreation” libretto and its scripted
aesthetics of performance reproduce the dilemmas of decreation as Carson reads
them. But they are also consonant with some of the most distinctive aspects of
the textuality of Christian mysticism, a textual history without which Weil’s
“decreation,” not to speak of Porete’s Mirror, is difficult to come to grips with.
The “mystic fable” described by Michel de Certeau is a discursive orientation
toward the fictive—​Certeau’s “fictions of the soul”—​, as well as toward perfor-
mative orality and song.13 What Alois M. Haas terms the Appellstruktur or dia-
logic structure of call and answer, speculative appeal and invocation, common in
Christian mystical texts and immediately obvious in Porete’s Mirror, is a struc-
ture that characterizes much of Carson’s libretto.14 It is a tradition of writing
whose textuality takes on a ritual function: Eucharistic in its staging of absence,
vocally driven in its forms—​sermons, poetic songs, or canticles—​and an invi-
tation to “go through” an experience, as well as, or in lieu of, its description.15
Weil’s writing has a complex relationship to this tradition. Sappho’s “kletic”
hymns and epithalamia share its spirit of invocation and erotic image repertoire
(thalamo: the nuptial bedchamber; epithalamion: literally, before the bed). Yet
Porete’s Mirror might be called exemplary.16 The performance-​orientation of The
Mirror of Simple Souls is a model for the “Decreation” libretto on several fronts.
Carson’s libretto form, as an imitation of “what the facts are doing,” seems to
emerge first and foremost from a reading of Porete.
To add one more reflective angle on the jeu de miroir of “telling,” I propose we
bring Carson herself into the picture—​Carson, whose essay on “How Women
Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God” leaves us in no
doubt as to whom it ventures as a likeness. It is perhaps unsurprising that the
accusations leveled against Porete at her trial—​pseudo-​mulier, a fake, a sham, an
impostor, “full of errors and heresies”—​map onto the most belligerent critiques
of Carson’s writing. Carson is, after all, an aficionado of the fake: of impersonating
authors (Euripides in Grief Lessons, Stesichoros in Autobiography of Red) and
adapting, imitating, or otherwise miming their writing; of “heresies” against the
150 Speculative Form

conventions and forms of academic scholarship; of error and mistake, not just
a poetics in Carson, but one of her most distinctive critical grammars. Carson’s
play with dissenting forms of likeness, including her writing’s frequent non-​
coincidence with either scholarly decorum or recognizable poetic constraints,
notoriously provoked the scorn of Canadian poet and literary hoaxer, David
Solway:

Carson may be our newest pedestalized inamorata but the fact is—​and I say this
unabashedly—​she is a phony, all sleight of hand, both as a scholar and a poet.17

Solway hoped to prove iconoclastic in his takedown of an idol of contemporary

Anglophone poetry. Especial indignation is reserved for Carson’s techniques of
quotation, imitation, and copying, modes of reproduction whose wider trend in
contemporary writing have been garlanded with the terms “uncreative,” “iter-
ative,” “citational poetics,” and “unoriginal genius.”18 As Ian Rae has discussed,
Solway coins a whole host of terms for the object of his tirade: lines “conceptually
downloaded from Akhmatova” (25, Solway’s emphasis), or ideas absorbed by
“negative biomimicry” (26).19 The crux of Solway’s argument, Rae summarizes,
“is that Carson ransacks the canon of Western poetry and is therefore a literary
impostor.”20
The consonance of this critique with historical anxieties around literary
imitation is also unsurprising. We saw in the Introduction how, for Jacques
Derrida, “sleight of hand” is the art of the imitator of philosophy, who invokes its
“monuments (hypomnēmata), inventories, archives, citations, copies, accounts,
tales, lists, notes, duplicates, chronicles, genealogies, references,” throwing
down the gauntlet to philosophy and its claims to “science.”21 (Speaking to John
D’Agata, Carson’s acknowledgment of her precarious knowledge of English
literature—​as opposed to literatures in Greek and Latin—​is disarming: “it’s fake.
Totally fake”).22 We might be surprised, though, to find a correlative to imitation
anxiety in Carson’s early essay on the “feminine” as a locus of contamination,
“Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity”
(1990), reprinted in Men in the Off Hours.23 Carson traces “the image of women
as a formless content” to Plato’s remarks on “the matter of creation” as a mother: a
receptacle “which is ‘shapeless, view-​less, all receiving,’ and which ‘takes its form
and activation from whatever shapes enter it.’ ”24 Carson’s own “genreless texts”
(in the words of a nonplussed reviewer) concentrate unease around a writing
whose form and activation absorbs the shapes of others; writing concerned with
the consequences and derivatives of whatever Carson is reading.
The term “fake women” resonates across Carson’s canon of iconic
women: Cassandra, Phaidra, St. Teresa of Ávila, and the hybrid Helen of Troy/​
Marilyn Monroe are my examples here, though others might be cited. What does
 Fake Women 151

their capacity for revelation and dissent suggest, I ask, about the difficult liberty
of Carson’s writing—​liberties taken with form, scholarship, translation, and au-
tobiography? For this liberty to “work” requires a certain suspension of disbelief.
In both Carson’s writing and the lives and work of her “fake women,” revelation
and dissent are accomplished, as it were, with our consent. We are asked to be-
come their accomplices and collaborators—​to allow ourselves, at least momen-
tarily, to be taken in.

Decreation as Performance

“Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell
God” and “Decreation (An Opera in Three Parts)” are among the final works
collected in Decreation. The titles of both texts and the tripartite structure they
announce immediately suggest a form of mirroring and rehearsal that is borne
out by their shared source material. The essay begins with Sappho fragment 31,
one of the feature lyrics of Eros the Bittersweet—​where Carson read the poem
as staging a “mise-​en-​scene,” a “geometrical figure” (the triangle), and “a dance
in which everyone moves.”25 Carson reprises her reading of the poem’s “geom-
etry” in the “Decreation” essay, and seems to stick to her convictions in Eros the
Bittersweet that “it is impossible to believe [Sappho] is representing herself as
an ordinary lover” and, more importantly, that the poem is “a disquisition on
seeming” (“He seems to me . . . I seem to me”).26 What changes as we move from
Eros the Bittersweet to Decreation is that “seeming” changes from a gloss for “the
lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself ” (“a single consciousness
represents itself ”), to a reading of the non-​identity of self with self, where “ec-
stasy” is “a spiritual event.”27 The “deeper spiritual question” Carson now finds
in fragment 31 hangs on her reading of the poem’s final line—​the first line of the
otherwise lost fifth stanza—​“But all is to be dared, because even a person of pov-
erty . . . ,” which encodes an act of “consent” to love’s impossible demand: “Love
dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.”28
Substitute “self ” for “soul” and this cursive last line—​Carson’s—​could be lifted
from The Mirror of Simple Souls, with its dramatic declarative style, or from the
drastic aphorisms of Weil’s notebooks. Part Two of Carson’s essay crosses into a
parallel between Sappho’s poem of daring and Porete’s late thirteenth-​century
allegorical dialogue—​full title, The Mirror of simple and annihilated souls and
those who only remain in will and desire of love—​in which the “annihilated
soul” (l’âme anéantie) is a soul “carried outside her own Being,” Carson says, by
the “absolute demand” of divine love (163).29 Carson quotes lengthy passages
from Porete’s devotional tract, attributed to her authorship by the Italian me-
dievalist Romana Guarnieri, who went on to establish what is now considered
152 Speculative Form

the authoritative text.30 Porete’s Mirror stages a debate between personifications

of Reason (Raison), Love (Amour), the Soul (Âme) and other minor characters,
around the nature and stages of love.
The book belongs to a genre of medieval miroir-​livres whose designation picks
up on St. Paul’s remarkable image in the first letter to the Corinthians: “For now
we see through a glass, darkly [or “through a mirror dimly”]; but then face to
face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”31 While
on earth, says St. Paul, we are condemned to see our own obscure (and inverse)
reflection in all things. “Then face to face” with God, he imagines, we will see
and know as God himself apprehends us. The looking “glass”/​“mirror” image
(esoptron in the Ancient Greek, speculum in the Latin) elegantly disqualifies
mortal perception, including self-​perception, as misleading. Yet the figure of
the mirror is also a way of confirming the text’s interest in itself and its fictions.
Carson quotes Porete: “for everything that one can tell of God or write, no less
than what one can think, of God who is more than words, is as much lying as it is
telling the truth.”32 Writing under the sign of the mirror, Porete instills in every
word of her tract an admission of its inaccuracy, making it mimesis and a cri-
tique of mimesis in the same gesture. Hers is a writing that, in the act of telling,
tells us it is not what it claims to be.
Porete’s Mirror celebrates its fiction as a robust affirmation of the truth of
which it falls short, much as, Carson writes, “she recognizes her poverty [of the
soul] as an amazing and inexpressible kind of repletion” (“absolute emptiness
which is also absolute fullness,” 164). “Dialectical but . . . not tragic,” says Carson,
Porete’s logical inversions are at no point explained by their author and not al-
ways explicable after the event. In fact, the refusal of explanation extends, with
tragic consequences, to the circumstances of Porete’s trial, at which she declined
to clarify her “errors and heresies” or to speak in her own defense. “How are
we then to understand the relationship between Marguerite and her Mirror,”
asks Manuela Ceballos, “when Marguerite’s own response to this demand was
silence?”33
The Mirror offers its logical inversions not as a topsy-​turvy scholastic treatise
but as acts of invocation and performances of desire. Carson reads the most bril-
liant of these by admitting her failure to read it:

Marguerite Porete invents a word: le Loingprès in her Old French, or Longe

Propinquus in the Latin translation: English might say “the FarNear.” . . . At the
end of her book she returns to the concept one last time, saying simply:
“His Farness is the more Near.”
I have no idea what this sentence means but it gives me a thrill. It fills me
with wonder. In itself the sentence is a small complete act of worship, like a
hymn or a prayer. (176–​177)
 Fake Women 153

Carson reads Porete’s phrase alongside Sappho’s “kletic” hymn—​“a calling hymn,
an invocation to God to come from where she [Aphrodite] is to where we are”
(178)—​whose function is to mime the difference between these places and
“decreate” (“not to destroy”) that difference by sustaining distance and proximity
in unison. On the trail of its incomprehensibility, Carson gestures toward the
place of Porete’s expression in a Christian literary tradition that spools out of the
Song of Songs’ complaint, “I sought him but I did not find him.”34 The song or
canticle of absence in this tradition cannot be constative—​cannot “tell God”—​
and so seeks, instead, to perform its desire. The furthest port of call from the
textual hermeneutic traditions of Judaism, the song’s simple address to God is an
act of worship; similes, likenesses that replace one another in sequence, form a
syntax that enacts its extreme longing. Where we have “no idea what [a]‌sentence
means”—​remember Carson’s wish to leave an impression in the mind “no matter
what the words mean”—​its cyclical appeal and yield of neologisms tell us that
“meaning,” at least of the kind we can reliably return to, is not where we should
be looking. Certeau’s fable mystique is a discourse bound to orality and fiction: its
interweave of sighs and cries (“a response in search of that to which it responds”),
its “turns” of language, and its “fictions of the soul” are ways of inventing a textual
corpus that wills its own sacrifice (le sacrifice du langage) from the start.35 Not
quite knowing what she means, feeling the “thrill” at the expense of the language,
is what Porete’s performance seems to be inviting. (“Thrill,” we have seen, is a
word with an interesting history in Carson, a gloss for words “imitating” expe-
rience without explaining it).36 “FarNear,” Porete’s sharpest “turn” of language,
is Carson’s “sensible form” in the most compact and economical of proportions.
A message is embodied in the thrill of its form, a communion performed at the
taste of the words.
In the longest of Carson’s quotations from the Mirror, she zooms in on “its
personnel,” the interlocutors who rotate and exchange their positions:

. . . and I pondered, as if God were asking me, how would I fare if I knew that he
preferred me to love another more than himself? And at this my sense failed me
and I knew not what to say. . . .37

Echoing the allegorical conversations of the Mirror, Porete performs an

Appellstruktur in miniature. In this imagined dialogue with God, says Carson,
Porete pictures herself in her own place, in God’s, and (as God sees her) in an-
other, second place of her own. Porete figures this triangle “consisting of God,
Marguerite and Marguerite” in tautologies—​“the brilliance of divine being, by
which I have being which is being”38—​and in a compelling use of quotation
marks around the word “with”: “And so long as I was at ease and loved myself
‘with’ him, I could not at all contain myself or have calm: I was held in bondage
154 Speculative Form

by which I could not move.”39 Her logic is complex and evasive. Porete cannot
contain herself in a single being—​cannot get “to the very inside of [her] defi-
nition”—​so long as she is held in bondage to herself, split by self-​love from a
true being equal and returnable to God. Carson speaks of Porete as her own con-
fessor in the Mirror, yet it is important to note that Porete’s “I” is not the lyric “I”
whose testimony and song derives from a single, personal center, but an allegor-
ical one, mouthpiece for “Simple Souls” in the plural and displaced across several
personifications. Who speaks of bondage in the above is “the Soul,” but it is Porete
who has wrought a form for decreative testimony, devotional confession through
the looking glass. Porete’s “fiction of the soul” is a mirror in which she who speaks
(or writes) does not coincide with herself and, in any case, finds her condition of
possibility in dialogue. Her quotation marks around “with,” which Carson reads,
stunningly, as the sign of a heartbeat or a quivering embodied breath, are also, in
this sense, something rather simpler. They lend her intimacy with God the status
of a citation, an ironic and irreverent proposition and a parody of genuine union.
(For Mihkail Bakhtin, Linda Hutcheon notes, the language of parody is always
placed in “cheerfully irreverent” quotation marks.)40
Porete’s dialogues, both those staged in the present tense and those fantasized
and recalled, presage what Niklaus Largier has called the “hermeneutic perfor-
mance” of the sermons of Meister Eckhart—​Porete’s contemporary and a po-
tential reader of the Mirror—​where a declarative “I,” staged in conversation,
exposes the conjury of thought in “real time” and involves the listener in the
interpretive process.41 Carson’s own modes of reading, this book has proposed,
tend toward the performative in similar ways: from artless self-​exposures,
deictic address, disclosures of process, and “arts of pure shape,” to writing in
“conversation” with other writers. Porete’s compressed logic—​the tautological
“being . . . being . . . being” or the “FarNear,” above—​is a rhetorical performance
that learns its arts from Plato and the Neoplatonists, but there is something spe-
cific in its compression that reminds us of Carson. Squeezing out the possibility
of paraphrase, Porete’s logic celebrates the single occasion of its expression, in
which meaning and form are indivisible. The form of its utterance is the sole, un-
disputed site of a “thrill” replacing comprehension.
I suggested at the start of this chapter that Porete’s Mirror occupies a spe-
cial place in relation to the “Decreation” opera libretto. Carson’s libretto has an
antecedent, a sort of proto-​version, in “The Mirror of Simple Souls: An Opera
Installation,” performed in New York in 2001, of which Porete’s Mirror was the
sole source text.42 Quite apart from the “Decreation” libretto’s play on the con-
ceit of the mirror, reflecting and distorting the material in the essay, Carson’s
choice of a performance-​oriented form for her reading—​in both the earlier and
later librettos—​might also lie with Porete. In ­chapter 58 of the Mirror, where the
dialectical compound Loingprès appears out of nowhere, Porete makes a sudden
appeal: “I pray you, understand these words divinely, hearers of this book!”
 Fake Women 155

(Entendez ces motz divinement, par amour, auditeurs de ce livre!).43 This direct ad-
dress tells us in no uncertain terms that Porete’s book was written with vocaliza-
tion and performance before an audience (auditeurs) in mind.44 Its sudden shift
into verse in Chapter 120—​including a striking mise-​en-​page resembling Carson’s
“Blended Text” in Decreation, its central mid-​line split cueing the locuteur to
perform an exaggerated pause—​would have registered as sound, rhyme, and
an unambiguous case of literary artifice, rather, perhaps, than truth-​telling or
sermonizing.45 What Carson adapts from Porete, marking a turning point in her
work more broadly (coinciding, too, with her creative partnership with Currie), is
a performance-​oriented form in which dialogue, dialectical compounds, shapely
tautologies, non sequiturs, and turns of language are apprehended in the instant
and without explanation. Porete also provides Carson with a profound justifi-
cation for imitatio—​for pastiche as well as parody—​as a means of performing,
amplifying, and sending up the dilemmas she encounters in her sources. Feats of
logic and language in the original cannot always be explained, admits Carson. But
sometimes, “approaching a mystery”—​she quotes Giorgio Agamben, at the end of
a recent essay—​“one can offer nothing but a parody.”46

Imitatio and Mirror

“Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts” mirrors the essay’s putative three parts
and the dilemmas shared by Carson’s three “fake women,” the last of whom—​
Simone Weil—​I turn to in a moment. A glance at the opera’s opening part
suggests this particular “distortion in the glass” has warped Carson’s source ma-
terial at times beyond recognition. Imitatio, Burrow reminds us, does not have
to mean direct verbal connection between the new text and its source: “It might
display instead deep analogies to its form, in a variety of senses ranging from
the ‘idea’ of the author imitated, through syntactic and rhetorical structures,
right down to the appearance of the poem on the page.”47 What plays out across
the three parts of the “Decreation” libretto is a form of imitatio that blends to-
gether different kinds of textual and authorial mirroring—​transcription, imper-
sonation, rhetorical and verbal pastiche, parody, analogy, and preserved “ideas”
or paradeigmata. The essay’s central ideas remain more or less intact, as do the
contradictions and inconsequentiality argued for in the essay’s final part. Were
their intactness achieved by simply rehashing her sources, either verbatim or in
paraphrase, the “Decreation” libretto would make for a decidedly un-​thrilling
read, and an even less thrilling live performance. It is in how Carson imitates
her “fake women” that the work becomes significant as the staging of reading
and misreading. The performative fakery of the Mirror, with its allegorical sung
dialogues, verse interludes, and calculated self-​exposures, ghosts the libretto as
an interlocutor, blueprint, and Ur-​text.
156 Speculative Form

Part One, “Love’s Forgery,” reprises Carson’s reading of Sappho fragment

31, with its triangular geometry of jealousy and extreme desire, which Carson
glosses in the essay in relation to Sappho’s cult-​worship of Aphrodite (162). In
the libretto, the same triangle goes full mythic. As described by Homer in Book
8 of The Odyssey, the love triangle in which Aphrodite is caught features her
husband, Hephaistos (Carson’s “god of the forge—​god of fire, art, craft, igneous
eruptions and technological cunning”) and her lover, Ares. A “Volcano Chorus”
of “7 female robots built by Hephaistos” provides accompaniment in the libretto
(187).48 This mythic iteration of the Sapphic triangle picks up Carson’s reading
in Eros the Bittersweet, which arrives by way of Plato’s Phaedrus. In the essay on
eros, we saw, it is the artifices of writing (poietic craft, forgery, mimesis) that
grant “nonlovers” the means to tame and instrumentalize erotic desire, and
to bypass the jealous dance of displacement that is its consequence. Reining
in or capturing desire—​producing, for Socrates, a failed erōs and a failed
philosophy—​is here the goal of Hephaistos, who hopes to catch Aphrodite
and Ares in the act of love and then force her compliance. Hephaistos forges
a net of fine chains to trap the lovers, while, in Carson’s version, the chorus of
automata cheers him on. Carson’s “New Chorus: Love Is Always New When It’s
You,” sung by Hephaistos and his robots as they install the trap, moves through
associations, synonyms, and analogies for Hephaistos’s coercive renewal of his
and Aphrodite’s love: “Newly caught. /​Newly watered. /​Neological. /​New-​
born, new-​flayed, newly enfranchised, anew, of late. /​Fresh curdled” (194). An
associative, synonymic displacement performs his fantasy of renewal, but gets
caught up in the net of signifiers and flounders as eros.49 Carson’s parody of the
Sapphic rationale of desire strays wide in all features save her poem’s triangular
geometry and love’s dare to the self to abandon its artifices (“how true love can /​
ever avail //​against forgery,” 204).
The trials of Hephaistos in “Love’s Forgery” are a pastiche of Sappho’s ecstatic
ordeal that opens Carson’s libretto on an unmistakable note of camp. The begin-
ning can feel disorienting after the solemnity of the “Decreation” essay, whose
weighty intonations include “undoing the creature,” the “metaphysics of love,”
“problems with eating,” and the indictment and trial of “fake woman” Porete. In
her “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag picks out as its essence “its love of the unnat-
ural: of artifice and exaggeration,” qualities it is easy to alight on in Carson’s op-
eratic pastiche: big, loud, shiny anachronisms of staging and tone—​“Aphrodite
waiting by a phone” and “Ares in the back of a taxi,” Ares singing “Easy Sugar”—​
or the conversion of philosophical hauteur into kitschy chorus lines and bur-
lesque stage directions (“the Chorus of the Void tapdance around [Weil]”).50 At
their most extreme, these conversions move the libretto into the impertinence
of parody—​parody, that is, whose tonalities do not belong where we find them.
In her reckoning with the analysis of camp “sensibility,” Sontag highlights the
importance of what she calls a “sharp conflict” in her own: “I am strongly drawn
 Fake Women 157

to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.”51 “To name a sensibility, to draw
its contours and to recount its history,” she proposes, “requires a deep sympathy
modified by revulsion.”52 Carson’s modes of imitatio in the “Decreation” libretto
require a similar modification—​sympathy/​revulsion, inspiration/​bathos—​in her
readers and/​or audience. In fact, the modification brings the concept and emo-
tional stakes of decreation into sharper relief, in the libretto’s final part especially.
There, dramatization of a sympathetic dilemma of passion, longing, and belief
in Weil resounds along the edge it shares with a blind self-​destructiveness, what
Sontag would read as Weil’s fanaticism.
The libretto’s second part, “Her Mirror of Simple Souls,” performs an alto-
gether different relationship to its principal source text and a different permu-
tation of imitatio. Arias sung by Porete begin and end this part, separated by
mock-​interrogative exchanges on Porete’s vulgate text with the Latin-​speaking
“Quidnunc Chorus,” and a Duet of Outer and Inner Space where Porete, in an
ingenious mise-​en-​scène, shares the stage with herself. Where Part One includes
no direct quotations from Sappho, Part Two features transcriptions of the Porete
material as it appears in the essay, as well as pastiches of ideas and phrases from
the Mirror that do not. Unlike Carson’s essay, the libretto contains neither notes
nor references, so to distinguish between verbatim quotation, paraphrase, and
pastiche in the Porete and Weil sections requires us to return to the essay and, in
some cases, to the sources themselves. That is, it requires a reader “in-​the-​know”
in order to function fully as pastiche or parody (Linda Hutcheon’s “imitation with
a critical difference,” which I return to below).53 On the immediate textual sur-
face of the libretto—​its citational poetics—​the question of fiction and mirroring
in Porete’s “problem of telling” manifests as a problem of how it is retold.
An example of the ambiguity around citation opens Carson’s “Chorus of the
33 Questions [recitative by the Quidnunc Chorus],” which bold-​types the let-
ters “J-​A-​L-​O-​U-​X” in errant acrostic mode: “Jesus should be put into a mortar
and pounded with a pestle /​so much that no one may any longer justly see or
taste the Person put there: do you say this?” (217). As far-​fetched as this material
might sound—​Carson makes no reference to it in the essay—​the metaphor is
genuine Porete.54 In the light of moments like these, the questioning of Carson’s
Quidnunc Chorus is aimed not just at Porete’s “fake” writings, but at Carson’s
“fake” adaptation and its fidelity or not to Porete (“do you [—​does she—​] say
this?”). Other phrases sung by the Chorus preserve stylistic dissonance from
The Mirror while summarizing its insights—​“Love liberates you from Reason,
/​ love releases you from Obedience, /​love replaces the Law,” and so on (217).
As Porete’s and Carson’s voices blend together and apart, the core insight of
“fake woman” Porete regarding the self ’s difference from itself, its hosting of a
mimēma of whom God is jealous, is played on and performed by the restaging
of her work. Porete’s “errors and heresies,” her willful falsifications, are suddenly
also Carson’s.
158 Speculative Form

Carson’s version of Porete’s life and writing is what we might call an “intimate”
reading in two connected senses. First, in the instances where imitatio moves
into actual citation: in the “Chorus of the 33 Questions” above; in the “Swimming
Aria,” which begins as a pastiche and then, part way through, picks up quotations
from Porete that are reproduced in Carson’s essay; or in the “Song of the Most
High Jealous One,” whose opening strophe is verbatim Porete, and whose later
riffs on darkness and nothingness pick up elements of the Mirror not quoted in
the essay.55 This mixture of true citation and fake version proves a faithful per-
formance of Porete’s idea of telling—​“as much lying as it is telling the truth.” The
“Duet of Outer and Inner Space [sung by Marguerite Outer, who wears head-
phones and listens to Marguerite Inner projected behind her on video]” stages a
different combination of verbatim quotation (Marguerite Inner’s long solo) and
interpolation (Marguerite Outer’s “[recitative whisper]: It makes me so nervous
to listen to it,” 221).56 The intermedia mise-​en-​scène enables Carson to mime
Porete’s split self in “sensible form,” reproducing the drama of “withness” that, in
The Mirror, is expressed as an effect of grammar. Here, the auditeurs of Porete’s
original performance scenario are herself.57
This pattern of far-​nearness makes the libretto an intimate record of some-
thing else too. The whole text offers a kind of screen-​grab of Carson’s reading
of decreation as a reckoning with writing. For all its deference to the imitated
source or exemplum, imitatio, Burrow suggests, is also the portrait of a reading, a
record of what the imitating author believes makes her exemplum worthy of im-
itation and/​or recognizable in the new text.58 It is nonetheless, and by the same
token, a performance of virtuosity by the imitator, as impersonator, composer
of dramatic verse, and/​or as close reader. Carson’s iteration of her three authors
is “fake” and knows it, but uses its likeness and non-​likeness to bring the emo-
tive rationales and rhetorical strategies of their work into new clarity. Many of
Carson’s works record her reading of “what the facts are doing” in similar ways,
raising questions about the difference between adaptation, imitation, parody, and
pastiche in her versions of other works, including two yet to be discussed in this
book: Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a version of Euripides’s Helen, and Antigonick,
a rendition of the Antigone. These versions see her develop a trademark tonality
of pastiche—​ironic, bathetic, untimely, artificial—​that, in her responses to other
works, risks becoming imitable itself.

Faking Weil

Porete’s performative and self-​ compromising position offers a model for

Carson’s experimental reading of her “fake women.” The earlier “opera instal-
lation” on The Mirror is not, however, the first time the themes and sources of
 Fake Women 159

“Decreation” make an appearance in Carson. We know that the history of Carson

reading Sappho goes back to her very earliest scholarly writing. Simone Weil,
too, has been a long-​standing interlocutor on the question of desire. Carson’s
1981 PhD thesis, “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” features a striking chapter epigraph
from Weil, whose terminology of “consent” and “distance” forms the axis of the
“Decreation” essay: “To soil is to modify, it is to touch. . . . To love purely is to con-
sent to distance.”59 In Eros the Bittersweet, the revamped thesis, Carson looks to
Weil for what she calls an “analog” of desire in hunger. Here is Weil:

All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person
I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me, he does not exist any
longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he
does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.60

Weil ventures an analogy that, following her death, would come to leave a per-
manent mark on her critical reception. Weil’s notes on desire and hunger are
copious and disorganized, but they are too easily given false coherence by their
elision with her own complex relationship with food, now commonly under-
stood, along with other elements of Weil’s life, as a kind of real-​time performance
of her philosophy.61 This trend in reading Weil begins in the wake of Simone
Pétrement’s monumental biography, but it is Sontag’s better-​known remarks that
popularized the elision of Weil’s philosophical commitments with her emotional
life. Sontag attacked a “fanatical asceticism” in Weil that made her life, in Sontag’s
words, “excruciatingly identical with her ideas.”62 What perturbs us about Weil,
says Sontag, is less her ideas—​which few readers “really share”—​than her fierce,
uncompromising consistency with them.63 Weil can be pitiless and unrelenting,
exacting in her diagnostics of the maladies of her times, and stringent in what
Sharon Cameron calls the “minimalist economy” of her philosophical writing
(a “performance of impersonality”).64 Yet to see the events of her life as the con-
summation of her thinking is to impoverish that thinking by literalizing it, an
oversimplification Weil herself would not have supported. A literal reading has
already dismissed decreation as a philosophy of masochism.
Carson talks about the consonance between Weil’s life and writing toward the
end of the “Decreation” essay, where she glosses Weil’s practical “arrange[ments]
for her own disappearance” (173) and “a problem with eating all her life” (175).
Carson’s Weil is not the fanatically consistent Weil of Susan Sontag; nor does she
argue for a philosophy of decreation completed by its biographical analogues.
What Carson finds in Weil is a theorist—​and, to a certain degree, a practitioner—​
of contradiction. In Part Three of the “Decreation” essay, Carson introduces Weil
as “a person who wanted to get herself out of the way” (167), picking up the reso-
nance of John Cage’s struggle “to get every Me out of the way” with which Carson
160 Speculative Form

says she identifies. As with Porete, however, getting self “out of the way” is no
mean feat. Nor is this complex desire, so simply expressed, the whole story. In
one of Carson’s first quotations, Weil refers to “the power to say ‘I’ ” as “what we
must yield up to God.” Carson continues the thought: “[Weil] feels herself to be
an obstacle to herself inwardly” (167). “Jealousy is a dance in which everybody
moves,” she says, returning to Porete’s tautological triangle, “because one of them
is always extra—​three people trying to sit on two chairs” (169). Decreation, as
Carson suggests, is not willed self-​destruction but a radical reconception of self
that begins with its exposure as a cover story for Being; a recognition that “I”
(or “Me”) thwarts and blocks access to itself. Self, in this model, is a conflict of
interest.
The paradox of the self that is not itself stalks Weil’s thinking. If “I” truly is
“other than what I imagine myself to be,” then self-​knowledge begins with the
knowledge of self-​difference: “ ‘know yourself ’ means,” she explains, “Do not
identify yourself with your thoughts.”65 Carson quotes expressions of longing
from Weil that call upon the promise of St. Paul that knowledge will one day be
possible without mediation, a mediation so intimate we might almost miss it: “If
only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any
place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart” (168–​169). When
Carson approaches the “subterfuge and contradiction” of decreative writing in the
essay’s fourth and final part, it is Weil she turns to for her theory: “Contradiction
alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our badness and
the sense of our badness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our badness.
It is true” (171).66 When Carson speaks of “being placed at the crossing point of
a contradiction, which is a painful place to be . . . but mystics love it” (175), “So
Simone Weil” is her end-​stop.
For Weil, contradiction—​and being contradictory—​is the touchstone of the
real. The contradictory in us, “our badness,” which “we do not invent,” is the foil
to all fantasies of self-​control, self-​knowledge, self-​invention, and possessive
love. In fact, Weil says elsewhere, “This need to be the creator of what we love
is a need to imitate God.”67 This Weil committed to contradiction, the Weil at
the center of Carson’s reading, might come as a surprise to readers who, in good
company, associate Weil’s philosophical writing with cold-​limbed axiomatic ab-
straction, the unfriendliness of what Carson calls her “punchy passages” (174);68
with a preference in the French for the impersonal soi (“one” or “oneself ”) over
the confessional hesitancy of je (“I”);69 and with an aggressive ideological purism
that fails as ethics when, in Gillian Rose’s words, it “claims . . . violently that vi-
olence is cultivated elsewhere.”70 There are striking exceptions to the pushy ax-
ioms of her theological prose. Weil’s essay on The Iliad (“The Iliad, or The Poem
of Force,” 1939) lends an astounding lyricism to describing the affliction of
 Fake Women 161

individuals dehumanized by force. The victims of force, she says, become a living
contradiction—​both person and thing—​whose soul is obliged to “imitate noth-
ingness.”71 In its unflinching revelation of force, The Iliad, she says, is “the purest
and loveliest of mirrors.”72 What emerges in many of Weil’s notes and letters is
an idea of thought and writing bound by obligation to reflect and reproduce the
humanity they encounter. Writing on the tasks of the historian, 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.”73 Her own
writing, she suggests, should and will be transformed by its readers. In a letter to
Gustave Thibon, which Carson quotes in the “Decreation” essay, Weil bequeaths
him her notebooks in the hope that they might “find a lodging beneath your pen,
whilst changing their form to reflect your likeness.”74 Valuing contradiction as
she does, it would come as no surprise to find Weil genuinely comfortable with
the emergence of contradiction in her own writing, owing to the close attention
of her readers: “attention fixed upon something reveals the contradiction in it,”
she writes: “a sort of unsticking process takes place.”75
Carson is precisely this kind of reader of Weil. The first iteration of her
response—​the “Decreation” essay—​concludes with the importance of con-
tradiction in Weil’s thinking. The second—​the libretto—​performs it under the
equivocal, rebellious sign of the mirror. In the final part of the libretto, “Fight
Cherries,” Carson turns her attention to the “subterfuge and contradiction” of
Weil’s letters to her parents. Carson’s dramatization makes these letters a means
of exposure: not only of what is disavowed in decreation and in the making of
decreation theology, but of the fact that both the theology and the filial relation-
ship are determined forms of psychic organization. For all that Weil is not what
she imagines herself to be, and for all that her philosophy declares itself against
imagination, Weil still has to deal with what others imagine her to be; with the
emotional demands of their imagination, and with the physical demands of a de-
sire that slips the net, exposing human contradictoriness outright.
That desire, here, is “hunger.” The “Argument” of Part Three sets out Weil’s di-
lemma as follows:

Simone Weil’s life was caught in the net of her parents’ care. . . . She took lunges
through the net—​into Descartes, into Plato, into trade unions and commu-
nism and Homer and theology and the arts of hunger. She did not want to be a
woman. She wanted to disappear. Certain aspects of the disappearance had to
be concealed from the parents so her many letters to them are repetitions of the
one same glowingly factitious postcard that every good daughter sends home—​
Dear people what splendid weather thanks for the chocolate I’m making lots of
friends here kisses to all—​meanwhile she was dying.76
162 Speculative Form

The six movements of “Fight Cherries” include duets between Weil and
Monsieur or Madame Weil, two solo arias, and a “Chocolate Chorus” in which
“Simone and the chorus measure hunger.” Several of these scripts suggest that
Weil not only took “lunges through the net” but that she also sought to reinforce
its weave. Her philosophy, in Carson’s reading, finds itself pulled out of shape by
human attachment and attachment to the world. The third movement, a “Duet
of the Sleeveless Sports Blouses,” stages Weil’s correspondence with her mother
on what Carson calls “the rules of life.” The duet performs, with a literalism both
satirical and elegant, what Carson describes above as “repetitions of the one same
glowingly factitious postcard.” It begins with a pastiched letter from Weil to her
mother that undergoes an “unsticking process” as its phrases and grammatical
parts are remixed to revelatory and comic effect:

Chère 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.
...

Chère Maman I asked Hegel to send

special post kisses what less.
sleeves I have Communists fight
blouses last! Please no sports
today I was bought (between
two and the Nazis)
...

Chère 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 post! . . .77

The fictional letter “cites” images from several of Weil’s actual letters to her
parents.78 The consecutive iterations give us Weil’s letters through the looking
glass. They turn phrasing whose original intention was to “conceal” into a means
of revelation. These performed “repetitions of the same one glowingly facti-
tious postcard” employ a technique of phrasal remix to explode Weil’s tightly
governed prose into a permutatory “potential literature.”79 Putting the same
 Fake Women 163

constrained vocabulary to new uses, Carson’s remixes release alternative logics

and associations inside the poise of Weil’s writing, from which even her corre-
spondence offers no let-​up. The move decreates Weil, displacing her from the
putative center of her writing and producing a hybrid text of ambiguous origin;
but it does something more than that, too. In an exchange in which Mme. Weil’s
lines consist mainly of injunctions and imperative prohibitions—​“Do not leave
your money lying by the bed /​Do not run on the mountains when they are icy.
/​Do not forget a card to us as soon as you arrive at the war”—​Carson’s itera-
tive pastiche makes of Weil’s concealment a fine-​grained form of dissent. For
though Carson de-​authorizes Weil, she also makes her speak out of turn. Where
Weil’s correspondence turns euphemism and concealment into arts of impov-
erishment, Carson makes her fake letter a free-​for-​all of meaning, possibility,
and contradiction. In the last of her remixes—​ending “Chère Maman out of my
way!”—​an unexpected, aggressive claim to selfhood is made.
Weil’s protection by her parents is met in her letters by reciprocal (and hos-
tile) protection of them by Weil. “The Weils themselves were perfectly aware
of their role,” writes Toril Moi: “ ‘If you ever have a daughter,’ Selma [Weil]
said to [the poet, Jean] Tortel, ‘pray to God she won’t be a saint.’ ” When people
expressed sympathy for her parents, Simone would reply: “Another member
of the Society for the Protection of my Parents!”80 Yet her correspondence, as
Carson reproduces it, might have us believe Weil was this Society’s most stalwart
member. What Carson performs in the remixed letter is the pull of loyalties to
her parents and to their idea of Weil, her self-​relation mediated by theirs.81 It
exposes the bind of decreation theology and its principal theorist to the world
and the most unassuming of its currencies. It shows up the loss of innocence of
objects (the “sleeveless sports blouses”), whose accumulation of meaning across
Carson’s verses involves them in an off-​scene drama of destructiveness, as “Nazis
send blouses between sports.” The effect is to humanize Weil and her prose. The
sublime hauteur and the relentless poise are gently, and with a self-​conscious ar-
tifice, exploded.
The libretto opens straight into Weil’s signature declaratives—​“Grace can
only enter where there is void to receive it”—​, reproduced verbatim alongside
imitation Weil lines in the “Duet of What Is a Question avec Papa.”82 It is here
that Carson begins her inquiry into just what decreation dispenses with to ac-
complish its program of self-​undoing (not only “What Is a Question,” then, but
what exactly is refused in order to answer it). In her critique of Weil, Gillian
Rose rebukes her discourse for its distance from the world, which it leaves “un-
touched supernaturally,” and its failure to “suspend and resume the ethical with
its features of modern state and society.”83 Weil fails, for Rose, to “bring the sub-
lime into the pedestrian,” and the consequence is a rejection of both the world
and the demands of political life.84 Carson parses Weil’s declaratives by forcing
164 Speculative Form

them into a parodied confrontation with this “pedestrian”—​the everyday mun-

danity of which M. Weil acts as spokesman:

M. Weil: What does she mean, void?

What about shoes and fruits and winecorks, many things exist,
they have colour and duration, they bear down on us.
What does she mean?
Simone: Winecorks are not a question.
Power is a question.
Not to exercise power is to endure the void. (225)

As in each of Weil’s responses to her father’s disavowed questions, the final line
of this fictive exchange is an actual quotation from Weil. Weil’s philosophy of
saying “no”—​Weil: “God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse
this authorization”—​is forced, in each, into negative dialectics.85 Carson renders
a broad spectrum of disavowals implicit in Weil’s refusal, from the haughty to the
ridiculous: “Neither Mme Trotsky nor Mme Weil is a question” . . . “Chairs are not
a question. /​Worldly need is a question” (226). These are strong interpolations.
Where the libretto includes verbatim and adapted quotations from Weil among
inventive variations and paraphrase (e.g., “like an unwelcome third between
two lovers” (235), adapting Weil’s “the unwelcome third [le tiers importun] who
is with two betrothed lovers”86), the question is again raised—​as it was in the
Porete iteration—​as to what kind of imitatio is being practiced and what exactly
is the point of its divergence. “Quotation,” notes Hutcheon, can be “a form of
parody”: exposing the source text not to ridicule but, by virtue of the new—​in
this case, irreverent—​context, to a critical distancing.87 Agent of this distance,
Carson interposes something between Weil and her readers. What kind of
“third” is Carson’s text between them? Or rather, who is it that speaks in this
“third” or “other” voice, not quite Weil and not quite Carson?88
Carson’s imitatio, whether she intends it to or not, parodies a certain pom-
posity in Weil’s attachment to the gravitas of decreation. For Hutcheon, parody
is “imitation with a critical difference,” or “repetition that includes difference”;
its “dialectical synthesis” of source and imitation shakes up meanings that have,
through familiarity or cliché, simply stopped meaning.89 Parody, Judith Butler
says in her essay “Merely Cultural,” expresses the refusal of subordination to a
unity that “domesticates difference”: parody, there, is a form of “resistance to
unity,” claiming the capacity not only to distinguish itself from a true, original
version, but to reveal the internal difference of the version being presented.90
Always provisional and ready to be replaced by the “true,” uncaricatured version,
parody expresses the desire for what Butler calls “an intimacy” with the position
or object being parodied:
 Fake Women 165

Parody requires a certain ability to identify, approximate, and draw near; it

engages an intimacy with the position it appropriates that troubles the voice,
the bearing, the performativity of the subject such that the audience or the
reader does not quite know where it is you stand.91

What Butler calls the “deconstructive play” of parody exposes the hidden or con-
tradictory desires of this original “position.” But it also appropriates and acquires
that position’s desirousness—​in the case of Weil, the desire to participate in
creation, not only by decreating herself, but by loving, desiring, and imagining
objects as they desire and are desired by others. Butler’s logic would suggest
that to get close to—​to close-​read—​this contrary position, you would do better
parodying it than trying to explain it. That an incongruent tone or untimely
context (Butler’s “destructive play”) can reveal more about an object than any
attempt to accurately pin it down. Parody’s distance from the original position—​
the longing inside parody, let’s say—​makes for new forms of intimacy and prox-
imity. Its “farness,” to borrow Porete, “is the more near.”

Fake Women

What Carson does with Weil in the “Decreation” libretto, then, is to “unstick”
her thinking from itself by performing more or less subtle estrangements of her
writing. Faking Weil, imitating, citing, and parodying her prose, reveals its ca-
pacity for internal non-​identity and dissent; but the appropriation, unsettling
as it is at moments, produces its own drama of ambivalence. Glancing back to
Butler, we are never quite sure where it is that Carson stands on Weil (and not
just on Weil, of course).
The libretto’s final scene stages Weil in the Kent sanatorium where she
passed the final weeks of her life. “Aria of Last Cherries” is, following the stage
directions, “sung by Simone Weil from a hospital bed, the Chorus of the Void
tapdance around her.” Weil’s philosophy of desire—​desire without an object, “de-
sire in the void”—​is adapted as a confessional psychodrama, with hunger playing
the part of desire.92 In Weil, the desire that knows what it wants is invariably a
fiction: “desires are true insofar as they are energy. It is the object that is false.”93
But Carson’s Weil is staged in extreme fear and tension around what Carson calls
“failing not in my life but in my death” (238). Failure in death, for Weil, is to die
on terms that are not her own.
There is, here, alongside the voluntary “death” of decreation, an involuntary
one stalking Weil’s pursuit by the Chorus, who taunt her with involuntary claims
of the body. In “Fight Cherries,” the choice of cherries as Weil’s provocateur picks
up on another of Weil’s “glowingly factitious” letters, sent to her parents from
166 Speculative Form

London, as well as hosting a deliberate sexual euphemism.94 A cover for the fan-
tasy of annihilation in union, desire in the void is suggested in Carson’s libretto
to be capable of changing places with the eroticism and corporeality it eschews:

Simone: . . . Take all my food away, I cannot lift the spoon.

I must finish this letter to my parents
about the blossoms here
in London all is joy and very happy! perfectly happy!
Also I must ask the chaplain of the Free French
whether, despite the fact that I—​
Chorus: Come cherries come.
Come close.
Come tingle.
Come tease a saint.
Come cherries
continue: we’ll discover where you sweat. (238–​239).

Carson’s scene remixes Weil with Thérèse of Lisieux who, dying and unable to
eat, was famously tormented by images of feasting. Toward the end of the aria,
Weil hesitates: “Perhaps I would like some cherries. /​There is nothing else
I want” (240). Imagination can be blindsided, the scene suggests, but the body
isn’t so easily quelled. In fact, hunger is where the voluntary—​decreation, and
Weil’s consistency with it here—​meets its limits. To quote Hephaistos in the
libretto’s opening “Hunger Tango,” “Hunger /​looks like me /​but it is not original
with me” (189): hunger is where the self meets its rebellious double face to face.
Hunger, too, by this account, is also a cipher for appropriative or “unoriginal”
poetics, the consumption of others’ writing that preserves origin along with its
devouring—​something we also see in The Beauty of the Husband. (In Economy
of the Unlost, Carson calls “Delay, disappointment and hunger” “experiences cat-
alytic for poets”).95 She remarks in the “Decreation” essay on Weil’s fantasy of “a
state in which to look is to eat.” Merely looking gets you what you want, she notes.
A devouring gaze—​like a text of desire, the erotikos logos of Plato’s Phaedrus—​
bypasses the claims of the body. It “need not end in perishing.”96
The actions that in her lifetime might all too perfectly have performed
decreation are, finally, where Weil’s position slips into contradiction. Her dis-
avowal of her own body ended up drawing even greater attention to her: Jean
Tortel described her as “a kind of bird without a body, withdrawn, in a huge
black cloak which she never took off and which flapped around her calves.”97
Likewise, her writing, whose conspicuousness and otherworldly abstraction,
for Rose, suspends it as ethics, betrays its paeans in its own philosophical hau-
teur. For all her desire to disappear, Weil seems to have been incapable, wrote her
 Fake Women 167

friend Gustave Thibon, of “pass[ing] unnoticed.”98 Yet tension and resistance in

Weil are not only where her writing is most interesting, as Cameron eloquently
argues, but where her project evinces the sharpest mix of emotional responses.99
This difficult mixture can be hard to swallow in Carson’s camped-​up rendition of
Weil’s final hours. We may indeed feel sympathy and revulsion at her portrait of
Weil’s self-​starvation, especially when starvation for Weil was inextricably linked
to those with whom she identified: the striking factory workers whose strife she
sought to reproduce in herself. It is impossible to feel at ease in the final scene of
“Fight Cherries.” Yet perhaps this unease is Carson’s point. Through parody and
the conflict of emotions it produces—​the internal dissent it throws into relief—​
we might just “get” decreation in all its troubled, humanized complexity.
Going on Carson’s “Decreation” essay and opera, “fake women” are women
who, under pressures of strife and longing, push their thinking to exalted, some-
times unpalatable extremes. Finding themselves on the edge of paradox, they
follow this “position” to its most radical consequences and stay there. The “truth”
produced at this outlier position, Carson explains, is “also fake.” Out of this self-​
compromising “truth” comes an unexpected case for the fake—​for miroir-​livres,
an ecstatic lyric “I,” or voluntarily de-​authorizing authorship—​that is also a jus-
tification for imitatio, pastiche, and parody; for preserving the contours and
contradictions of a source text by reproducing as well as transforming them. As
well as pulling the weight of paradox and contradiction, “fake women” pay the
price for the strong emotions—​the sympathy and the revulsion—​it can provoke.
We look to them for coherence, then critique them when it is missing, or else
slam them for fanaticism, for cohering that bit too much.
Decreation is where Carson brings together three such women and produces a
double act of form to express what the “fake” can do. Yet Decreation also lends its
reading to other “fake women” making cameos of various kinds in Carson’s work.
Beyond Decreation, Carson’s writing to date is full of revelatory misrecognitions
at the hands of women, from the Sappho of “TV Men” to Norma Jeane Baker of
Troy. Writing on Euripides’ Phaidra, whose story “came in as a free wave and
crashed on your beach,” Carson alludes to a complex set of relations between
the real, the fake, and the feminine that provoke sympathy and revulsion in the
Hippolytos.100 Phaidra’s outlaw love for Hippolytos exposes a desire that is, neces-
sarily, never identical with itself. Though not “fake,” Carson insists:

Truth is often, in some degree, economic. Which isn’t to say [Phaidra’s] passion
for Hippolytos was fake. Women learn to veil things. Who likes to look straight
at real passion? Looks can kill. I would call “feminine” this talent for veiling a
truth in a truth.101
...
168 Speculative Form

There was a shame in her but not the kind you wanted to see, not woman’s mod-
esty. . . “What do we desire when we desire other people? Not them. Something
else. Phaidra touched it. You hated her for that.102

Writing on Cassandra—​“nonlinear, nonnarrative and the most beautiful of

Priam’s daughters”—​Carson describes another gesture of unveiling, this time as-
sociated with the disclosure (alētheia) of prophecy:

Is it possible to believe something truly unbelievable? . . . Is there an edge of

light all around the dark mass of your life up to this moment? Can you see
the dark mass as a veil? Can you want it gone? Can you say flic flac it’s gone?
Cassandra can.
...
Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind, would
like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash
of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse and what
that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy.103

Cassandra is a prophet, purveyor of unbelievable news and circular reasoning,

and a translator, Carson says, of “some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a met-
rically perfect line of Greek tragic verse.” Cassandra’s imitation of this verse
enables the characters and audience to comprehend “Trojan emotion” (as rather
a lot like Greek emotion), but it also unveils “a site,” Carson says, “that has no
business being underneath.”104 Trojan emotion is made Greek by an act of trans-
lation, but “Greek metrics inside a Trojan silence” also sound out the psychic and
linguistic profile of conquest, revealing who speaks for whom and into whose
silence that speech encroaches. The power of “fake women,” a power that renders
them objects of both fascination and hatred, lies in their revelation of the un-
seeable and inaudible (Troy), their touching of the untouchable (Phaidra’s love),
and their inspiration of belief in the unbelievable (prophecy and mystic fable).
Belief—​or the radical suspension of disbelief—​is what the “fake” seems to de-
mand. In her remarks on Phaidra, incidentally, Carson is impersonating the
character’s author, Euripides, in a species of epilogue on “Why I Wrote Two Plays
About Phaidra,” signed “by Euripides.” Not a fake woman, then, but a fake male
tragedian speaking sympathetically about the wiles of woman.
Closer in sentiment to Carson’s “Decreation” trio is Teresa of Ávila, who
appears in “The Truth About God” sequence in Glass, Irony and God. A poem
about Teresa’s testimony, the truth or fiction of her sensations and stigmata,
“Teresa of God” ends with a different dilemma of testimony:

To her heart God sent an answer.

The autopsy after her death revealed it was indeed rent.
 Fake Women 169

Photographs of the event

had to be faked (with red thread and an old gold glove)
when the lens kept melting.105

Faking here is a mechanism that responds to the unbelievable, whose representa-

tion incapacitates (melts) the representational medium. This “fake woman,” who
lives in a “personal black cube” (or “interior castle,” in Teresa’s famous image),
forces her self inside its own definition. The morada or dwelling-​place she finds
there requires a whole repertoire of fictions, neologisms, and new names.106
Carson argues in the “Decreation” essay that “ecstasy” has a knock-​on effect on
writing that forces it into contradiction. (Julia Kristeva diagnoses Teresa in more
extreme terms: “Teresa’s ecstasy is no more or less than a writerly effect!”).107 The
anxieties aroused by “fake women” carry over onto the medium of testimony,
hyper-​charging questions of imitation, forgery, doctoring, fiction, and falsifi-
cation. Carson’s own reception, we saw, suggests similar anxieties might still be
at large.
This brief survey would not be complete, finally, without Carson’s reading of
surely the first “fake woman” in Western literary history. The figure of Helen of
Troy comes replete, in Carson’s words, with “an adjectival tradition of whoredom
already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet
from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a mo-
ment.”108 This unlatching—​recall Weil’s “unsticking”—​occurs in the Palinode
that Carson reproduces among the paratexts of Autobiography of Red: “No it is
not the true story. /​No you never went on the benched ships. /​No you never
came to the towers of Troy.”109 In her adaptation of Euripides’s Helen, Carson
reproduces the Helen unlatched from Troy that Euripides chose to stage; the
Helen whose eidōlon, likeness, or “breathing phantom” in the Loeb translation,
goes to Troy in her place, while the real Helen is in Egypt.110 The Helen who
doesn’t go to Troy—​Helen under the sign of the fake—​is excoriated in Euripides
with no less fervor than the Helen who, in Homer’s account, does.111 Carson’s
subtitled “version of Euripides’ Helen” not only unlatches Helen from Troy but,
in the same stroke, unlatches Helen from her mythic person. Carson’s Helen is, as
the title of the version suggests, displaced onto her fellow idol of female beauty,
“fake woman,” and object of sympathy and revulsion, Marilyn Monroe (née
Norma Jeane Baker), in the spoken and sung performance work, Norma Jeane
Baker of Troy.
If Euripides’s Helen is a play about fictive versions, likenesses, and eidōla,
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at least doubles its fakery. Carson’s version brings the
play’s central paradigm of imitation into focus by transposing its context and
condensing its characters into a complex monologue, woven of impersonations,
identifications, and imaginary conversations (“Enter Norma Jeane as Mr.
Truman Capote,” or, announced by Norma Jeane herself, “Enter Norma Jeane as
170 Speculative Form

Mr. Truman Capote to join Norma Jeane as Norma Jeane,” 10, 46). In Carson’s al-
ternate version of the play’s facts, Norma Jeane—​like Helen—​anguishes over the
afflicted of Troy, and—​unlike Helen—​reproduces imagined conversations with
a psychoanalyst and with “Arthur [Miller] of New York and Sparta” (Carson’s
Menelaus). This “fake” version of the Helen sings and dances its own redoubled
artifice, and sets out its rationale in a series of mock lesson plans. In the first
of these “Lessons,” complete with “Case Studies,” keywords, and “Teachable
Moments,” Carson describes the action and the interpretive strategy that mirrors
it: “Managing optics cleverly will generate an alternate version of the facts, which
then stands alongside the facts like a cloud in the shape of a woman, or a golden
Hollywood idol in place of a mousyhaired pin-​up girl from Los Angeles” (5).
The “keyword” here, Carson’s “Lesson” indicates, is “εἴδωλον [eidōlon] ‘image,
likeness, simulacrum, replica, proxy, idol’ ” (5). Where Helen’s simulacrum
exposes the false dossiers on which wars are waged (“WMD in the forked form
of woman!,” 6), Norma Jeane’s is the “decoy”—​Jacqueline Rose’s word—​who
absorbs the shock of desires stoked, disavowed, and disappointed in the making
of a Hollywood idol.112
The fantasies that Helen of Troy/​Norma Jeane Baker is made to answer for run
the full length of Carson’s text. A later “Lesson” begins with the keyword ắπάτη
(apátē), whose definition is performed as a rant: “deception illusion trickery du-
plicity doubleness fraud . . . subterfuge ruse hoax shift stratagem swindle guile
wile wiles The Wiles of Woman” (31; this last, capitalized definition is a quotation
from the Helen).113 Carson’s gloss on the list is delightfully to the point: “In war,
things go wrong. Blame Woman” (31). Norma Jeane reflects on “doubleness” in
some of the play’s wittiest asides. “One thing I learned from psychoanalysis,” she
says, “is how to fake it, with men,” describing a case of psychoanalytic transfer-
ence in which she hones her descriptions of Arthur to match the sexual tastes of
her analyst, whose enjoyment she then finds gratifying:

Psychoanalysts call it triangular desire. But it’s not what most people mean by
faking it. They just mean acting. Well, in the first place, acting is not fake. And,
number two, acting has nothing to do with desire. Desire is about vanishing.
You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red
juice. (22)

The mimetic desire of Sappho’s fragment 31 returns here, its passion dependent
on the interpolated desire of a “third.” In the logic of Euripides’s Phaidra: “What
do we desire when we desire other people? Not them. Something else.” The same
geometry of desire is shared, we have seen, by Sappho, Weil, and Porete who,
like Norma Jeane Baker, come to perceive themselves from a “fake” angle of self-​
relation. What Baker seems to mean by “faking it”—​performing to the other’s
 Fake Women 171

desire, which demands the occlusion of hers—​is not altogether different from
the “vanishing” desire Carson imputes to Simone Weil (and which comes, in the
“Decreation” libretto, with its own “bowl of cherries”). Each woman “vanishes”
so that others can “really be together” (Weil) with their own desires. So that when
we dream of a bowl of cherries, we are allowed to believe, so to speak, that the
cherries are real. The price of our desires’ fulfillment, in this particular American
“dream,” is the woman’s disappearance.114
Inviting Greece—​as Euripides’s Helen does—​to reckon with its own destruc-
tiveness, Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker also exposes Hollywood’s need to make
“fake women” in its own image.115 In an interview, Monroe spoke of her own
struggles with this need, struggles that place her in a paradoxical position: “You
try to be true, and you feel it’s on the verge of a type of craziness, but it isn’t really
craziness. It’s really getting the true part of yourself out.”116 Carson has spoken in
similar ways about her method of translating and adapting source texts: “I gener-
ally try to work first and most attentively out of the grammar, syntax, allusions of
the original while keeping the language alive in a way that interests me, then later
crazy it up if that seems appropriate.”117 Negotiating what it means to be “true” to
oneself or true to “the original,” Carson suggests, can mean working on the verge
of “a type of craziness.” What is “appropriate” there is to stray wide from your
bearings, to stretch credibility almost to breaking point.
 PART IV
OPE N T R A N SL AT ION
 7
Grief Lessons
(Two Stories of Translation)

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage?
Because you are full of grief.”1 In the opening lines of Carson’s preface to Grief
Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006), tragedy exists because you cannot get a
straight answer to a question about yourself. Tragedy’s grief lesson, triangulated
through rage as if by force of magnetism, is that a human life seldom recognizes
itself head-​on. Were grief to be seen for what it is, Carson’s reading suggests, per-
haps the thrashing and raging that is tragic violence simply wouldn’t need to
occur. But while grief struggles to recognize itself inside its own story, someone
else’s story—​even a thinly disguised version of our own, as in Hamlet’s play-​
within-​the-​play—​can recognize it for us. Carson describes something similar in
the experience of watching actors onstage. Though she claims to have “never un-
derstood catharsis,”2 her remarks offer a quirky approximation of the theory of
using “other people’s emotions (allotria pathē).”3 Stripped of the requirement to
make an object lesson of grief and rage, it is couched instead in terms of the ac-
quisition of a story:

Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself alone? Not much. What if an
actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.
You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of
you with your own life. . . . The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of
his own life in order to give you a story of yours.4

Acting “for you,” the actor, giver of stories, allows you to recognize yourself—​“a
mode of deepest intimacy”—​in a time, place, and circumstance different from
your own, and through a “sacrifice” that leaves both of you more or less un-
harmed. In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Sigmund Freud described
a similar sacrifice to action on the tragic stage. Returning from his performed
death unscathed, the actor, Freud wrote, “makes it possible for us to reconcile
ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should
still be able to preserve a life intact.”5 Both accounts would have it that this reit-
erative “other” life not only makes our own lives more bearable, but that its fic-
tion is a form of intimacy with truths we have come to disown. The stage for

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0008
176 Open Translation

sacrifices of various kinds, then, tragic theater offers up its stories to be used and
appropriated with no holds barred. The point of the spectacle is not just to offer
us something we can make our own, but to return to us something that was al-
ready ours.
Carson’s remarks on the emotive exchanges of Greek tragedy introduce
her translation of four lesser-​known plays by Euripides—​Herakles, Hekabe,
Hippolytos, and Alkestis. One thing that is immediately striking about Carson’s
idea of Greek tragedy as an iterative exchange of stories is how it squares with
her distinctive modes of studying, interpreting, and translating classical texts,
and how it jars—​as we might expect it to—​with traditional rigors of classical phi-
lology. In her freeform essay, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” (2013),
Carson tells us that “as a classicist I was trained to strive for exactness and to
believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible
for us. This residue, which does not exist—​just to think of it refreshes me.”6 She
continues:

To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of
nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am
in motion with it, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has
no death in it (or very little)—​to think of these things gives me a sensation of
getting free.7

Carson has spoken often of the demands of what she calls “the texts I deal with,”
in particular the demand on classicists—​whose discipline includes the measure-
ment of aporia, the canon’s “drenched layers of nothing”—​to stick to the verbal
“facts.”8 In Economy of the Unlost, the published version of Carson’s Martin
Classical Lectures, she talks about the struggle this demand has caused her:

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.9

These two sets of remarks suggest several things about Carson and the field of her
academic training. The opposition to subjectivity Carson describes is perhaps
particularly strong in classics because of the discipline’s distinctive relationship
to textual “fact.” Nowhere are concordances more widespread and meticulous,
intertextual connections more painstakingly mapped, than in this field whose
primary texts can be so difficult to establish; where the history of its texts’ re-
ception and quotation has in some cases—​Sappho is an obvious one—​directly
determined which, or how much, of those texts has survived.10 The history of
 Grief Lessons 177

the Ancient Greek and Latin canons is a history of appropriation and transpo-
sition of stories, determined and accidental preservation, distortion, pastiche,
parody, and staged intertextuality.11 While this history might give ground to the
idea that deliberately distortive, flagrantly intertextual, and creative readings
like Carson’s aren’t really anything new, in practice, her translations, versions,
readings, and riffs on classical texts have been received at times with a hostility
usually reserved for deconstruction and other disciplinary iconoclasms. The ex-
haustive spirit of classics, which Carson’s appropriative and interventionist spirit
seems to offend, responds to a certain inexhaustibility: the fact that so much of
its original canon is lost and therefore unmappable—​and the fact that its two
principal languages of study are dead languages—​means there is so much “res-
idue” around its facts that, in a sense close to Carson’s, it can conceivably “never
stop moving,” unstoppable, she says, “because I am in motion with it.” It is only
to be expected, then, that willfully subjective and inventive reading be looked
on, at best, as a kind of alt-​classicism—​an “erudite indiscipline,” in the words of
Laura Jansen: invigorating, impish, potentially reckless in spirit, and founded on
those precise elements to which the academic classicism of Carson’s training is
opposed.12 At worst, as an anti-​discipline whose “antipoem[s]‌” (as Carson calls
the gaps in Sappho) or “anti-​book[s]” (as Stephanie Burt calls Carson’s Nox) rad-
ically abridge or distort philological facts, forging meaning out of what is simply
not there.13
Carson positions herself from the start, then, as a classicist with a difference.
If her professed interest in the “beyond” or “residue” of facts gives her a clear ra-
tionale for creative composition, its relation to translation and academic schol-
arship is far less easily defined and far higher in its stakes. “The empty place
that a garland of fragments surrounds is a precise drawing of the contours of
the work,” Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy have written.14
In her production of new work out of these contours, Carson performs this
observation—​makes its empty place “happen”—​like no other living writer or
translator of classical texts.15 Yet as we saw in the first part of this book, the
blurring between scholarship and invention so characteristic of Carson’s
work, seems, for some, to cross a line. Readers of Eros the Bittersweet will recall
Carson’s opening image of the “spinning top” taken from Kafka’s short story,
“The Top.” T. J. Sienkewicz’s accusation, we saw, is that Carson gets caught up
in the “spinning top she creates,” falling “into an illusion of fragmentary whole-
ness, a temporary delusion that the fragmentary state of Greek lyric is struc-
turally intentional.”16 Kafka’s story, Carson wrote, “is about the delight we take
in metaphor” and its “impertinent,” “fantastic motion.”17 Carson gets carried
away—​is in motion—​, if we follow Sienkewicz, with the sublime metaphoric po-
tential of the “empty place” at the heart of classics. Rather than slowing her mo-
tion and attenuating her delight in metaphor, error, emptiness, and the negative,
178 Open Translation

if anything, in recent years, Carson’s intrepidity with her Greek and Latin source
texts has gone up a gear. New work emerges out of gaps found and gaps rent
in these texts. The question of what precisely this new work is—​translation,
transcreation, critical rewriting, strong misreading, or a refusal of the difference
between them—​not only confronts translation and its critical imaginaries.18 It
leads us to ponder what it is we ask of the texts of antiquity, and of tragedy in
particular: what lessons of destruction and redemption we still require of their
stories, and what moral exemplarity we demand be left intact.
The chapters in this final part of the book pursue what Carson does with her
source texts in some of her best-​known works of translation. “Translation” is
easy to say—​and two out of three of the works addressed in these chapters do
call themselves translations, while the other charts and contains the translation
of a single text. The loudest question on most reviewers’ lips is usually how to go
about classifying such works, but this is a question the works goad us into asking.
For where Carson involves her sources in purposes, formal organizations,
textual and emotive dramas beyond their immediate scope, the sensation of
involvement—​the traction of these texts in a given moment—​is often part of her
inquiry. So when we ask what the work is, what has occurred, and what it means
for Greek tragedy or for translation, we are often asking along with Carson.
This chapter reads two such works together. Both are accounts of stories
to which an original source text has been bound. Both open their translator’s
working to scrutiny in the texts’ structural, citational and/​or material form,
and in direct exposures of process, thought, or wider reading. Both are works
of striking visual as well as textual interest, both the fruit of collaborations that
extend acknowledgement or collaborative intent to the reader/​audience (the “ex-
change of action” we have seen Carson bind to the performative).19 The resulting
works, both strong performances of compositional artifice, stage a process of in-
quiry into their source, its central story, and the stories and purposes for which it
has come to speak.
The first of these works is Nox (2010), the high-​quality facsimile of a scrap-
book produced by Carson as an epitaph or elegy for her brother. The book
contains a semi-​autobiographical essay, handwritten notes, photographs, scraps
of correspondence, and a glossary of the individual words of another elegy,
Catullus’s poem 101—​an elegy composed for his brother—​, whose attempted
translation by Carson is the work’s unifying thread. The second is Antigonick
(2012), a handwritten and vividly illustrated adaptation of Sophokles’s Antigone,
of which Carson published a more orthodox translation, staged to international
acclaim, three years later.20 Running through both works is a story of grief and
its misrecognition, and of the fraught recognition or inscrutability of others’
lives and motives. Both depart from the untimely loss of a brother and the per-
formance of mourning rites in the respective forms of elegy and burial. In both
 Grief Lessons 179

works, these rites come up against their partial or total limitation, producing an
inquiry that turns on the mutual inscrutability of minds and languages.
The visual artist, Bianca Stone, Carson’s collaborator in the production of
Antigonick alongside Carson’s husband, Robert Currie, reflects on their work to-
gether. She describes Carson’s “collaboration with another work of art,” referring
to the translator’s use of Sophokles, Beckett, Hegel, Woolf, and others, in the
composition of her text: “Carson is less about borrowing or interpreting from
her sources,” Stone concludes, “than she is about breaking and rebuilding the
possibilities of her art.”21 This chapter pursues Carson’s “collaboration” with her
sources and the working premises, valencies, or abuses of translation, that give
rise to this striking conception of her work. We have seen Carson reproduce a
theory of desire and a reading of Plato, a reading of Proust and an appraisal of
pronouns, inquiries and staged complicities with Paul Celan, Emily Brontë, and
Simone Weil, and an unblushingly personal critique of Keats, as effects of form.
Form in Carson is an act of approximation—​measuring, likening, miming—​that
wants us to go through the motions of an idea, rather than simply hosting its
description. The translations I read here, whose approximation of their source
texts is both more and less obvious, are both performative theories of the art.
Antigonick presents an Antigone transfigured: not by changing the story, but by
importing into its present tense a long and complex history of appropriation—​of
which, we might say, Carson’s staged “collaboration” is merely the most recent.
Antigonick critiques what Judith Butler has called the “representative function”
of the Antigone: how the story, in its elevation to the morally exemplary, has be-
come a cover for its own violence and “political possibility.”22 Antigonick, on the
contrary, is a tragedy that inhabits its own wound, radically capable of reading
violence and refusing its organization into the representative lessons of the play’s
future—​our philosophical history. In Nox, with which I begin, Carson borrows
Catullus’s “last gift” of elegy: not to extract from it lessons in grief, but to join in
its pursuit of singularity; to expose its most difficult work, open, unorganized,
unfinished.

Nox

In Carson’s translation of Euripides’s Herakles, Theseus speaks for the audience

when, witnessing the fallen Herakles hide his face in shame, he asks: “what if
I came to share his grief?”23 To share another’s grief is a strange and difficult
proposition. Maybe it is only possible if what has befallen him also happens
to you. Maybe it requires you to have words for what happened, or perhaps
its proper recognition demands you have no words for it at all. The sharing of
grief, in this last case, occurs in the recognition that it cannot ever be shared
180 Open Translation

completely. While for Celan, we saw, a poem is a gift bearing immeasurable

destinies to innumerable addressees, the epitaph is a gift whose destiny (the epi-
taph itself seems to recognize) can never be fulfilled. Addressed to his infant son,
Celan’s “Epitaph for François” is a gift neither received nor reciprocated by the
“you” it ventures, but which remains pending, this side of the twin doors Celan
sees slam shut behind the child. Shutting, they seal off the shape of this last gift
from the eternity that belongs to François: they “carry the thing that’s uncertain
/​and carry the green thing into your Ever” (tragen das ungewisse, /​und tragen
das Grün in dein Immer).24 Reading such grief, Carson says in Economy of the
Unlost, “we watch helplessly as the green adjective of life (das Grün) disappears
into an everlasting adverb (dein Immer).”25 She describes epitaphs there as “an act
of attention shared between poet and reader, which moves out from the reader’s
voice through all the surfaces of the poet’s language” (87). And yet, she says, the
epitaph “makes one spare fact explicit: the privacy of grief ” (89). The formal
contours of the epitaph measure the near edges of a measureless content. But the
gripping of epitaph to these edges, Carson suggests, isn’t always fair to the dead:

The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them
go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here—​deny them
their nothingness—​by naming their names.26

In 2010, Carson publishes Nox, a concertina-​ format reproduction of the

scrapbook she produced as an epitaph for her brother, Michael, who died in
Copenhagen in 2000, following a long period of estrangement from his family.27
Nox is presented in a solid dark gray box with a light gray spine and a faded photo-
graph of Michael on the lid. The book inside is a high-​quality facsimile of Carson’s
original epitaph, made up of whole and partially intact photographs, fragments
of correspondence, sections of typed manuscript, handwritten notes, scribbles,
scrawls, and other interventions, on unnumbered pages. “Originally,” Carson
says, “it was simply a hand-​made book (at first empty) that I filled with stuff and
thoughts.”28 This “multimodal” work is the scene for two textual projects that are
mutually dependent and reciprocally incomplete.29 One, a prose commentary
on translation, history, and loss that veers in and out of the biographies of Anne
Carson and her brother, and whose numbered installments run throughout the
book; the other, a piecemeal translation of “Poem 101” (CI) by the Roman poet
Catullus, an elegy for his own brother, which appears in the Latin at the start of
Carson’s book and whose individual words are glossed throughout it in a series
of lexicographical entries. Catullus’s poem is composed in elegiac couplets, a
poetic form Carson has called “the acoustic shape of a perfect exchange.”30 The
rhythmic pattern it performs, she says, “resembles a pendulum: it moves out,
moves back, by its own momentum, wasting nothing. Economy of breath in
 Grief Lessons 181

motion.”31 A form, then, whose metrical physiology reaches into and beyond
itself; whose outreach Carson extends to meet in an unscheduled response to
its call.
The short text of Catullus “101” is reproduced on the first page following the
hand-​produced title page of Nox. Three instances of named direct address—​
frater (brother)—​reach from the poem toward one who will never hear them
spoken:

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus

advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.32

It is not until prose instalment 7.1, more than halfway through the book, that
Carson acknowledges the elegy into which her translation-​by-​glossary seeks to
make inroads:

I want to explain about the Catullus poem

(101). Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing
at all is known of the brother except his death. Catullus appears to have travelled
from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy
there. (7.1, n.p.)

Catullus 101 was written for a brother who, like Michael Carson, died far from
home.33 Carson’s speculative vignette imagines a poem performed only once,
whose unique moment of address gathers the singular intensity of a rite. “Elegy,”
the poet-​critic Angela Leighton has written, is “a literary form defined by the
body-​form which lies somewhere within the container or reliquary of the text.”34
Recital of the poem at the grave empties this container or reliquary. The literary
form is discharged—​becomes superfluous—​in the presence of the body-​form
that is its true content.35 Carson plumbs the question of what to do with the
bewildered biographical “content” she is left with: “No matter how I try /​to evoke
the starry lad he was,” Carson says of Michael, “it remains a plain, odd /​history”
(1.0, n.p.). Yet the problem of evoking, a problem that gives contour to the loss,
is approached in Nox through the task of translating another poet’s poem of loss.
182 Open Translation

Carson has said that the book itself “is not about grief ” but “about understanding
other people and their histories as if we are all separate languages.”36 There are
no grief lessons here–​–​no moral-​of-​the-​story and little apparent consolation in
the making of elegy (a “last gift” from the dead to the bereaved, offering recon-
ciliation, comprehension, wanted or unwanted closure).37 What there is, in Nox,
is the performed scrutiny of “residues” of the two sets of facts in which her work
deals: the facts of Michael’s life, and the textual facts of “101.” Cutting into the
“slow surface of a Roman elegy,” what Carson comes up against, surrounding
each of these facts, is darkness (7.1, n.p.); yet it is in darkness that their “residues”
find a store. The synthetic, symmetrically enclosed “NOX /​FRATER /​NOX”
(Night /​Brother /​Night), pasted over Michael’s hand-​scrawled name at the start
of Carson’s book, holds “Brother” in a syntax—​cartouche, container, reliquary—​
that secures his loss and his history between the unlit words of a dead language.
No form of verse, Carson wrote, eleven years before Nox and one year before
her brother’s death, “is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there,
and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph.”38 Carson wrote these lines in
an argument for the self-​effacement of epitaph, a form interested not in calling
attention to its artistry but in diverting attention to an emphatic elsewhere.
Carson uses the terms “elegy” and “epitaph” interchangeably in Nox, though she
suggests in an interview that, where elegy is “a difficult form” in which “it’s hard
to keep the dignity of the subject without getting your fingerprints all over it,”
the “epitaph” (her preferred term, appearing in the book’s blurb) is a compel-
lingly un-​self-​interested form of “making.”39 Epitaphs economize not just on
material—​less is more, and less, very often, is cheaper—​but on mediation. The
point of the epitaph, she argues in Economy of the Unlost, is to cancel itself out.
Yet Carson’s “epitaph,” in the first instance, does anything but cancel itself out. Its
immediate vindication of the book as object—​a striking object, conspicuous in
form—​poses a straight-​up question about memorialization and the monument,
the pull of artifice against human effacement. It reminds us, too, of Carson’s am-
bivalent relationship to printed, what we might call “nondescript,” textuality
and her long-​standing identification, proclaimed on numerous occasions, with
visual artistry.
The material singularity of the original handmade scrapbook, which the
industrial-​scale, “un-​Kindle-​izable” print reproduction both approximates and
misses, does a certain amount of thinking for us regarding the loss of unique
being and the possibilities for its commemoration in the epitaph.40 While the re-
production replicates the texture and visual density of the original document on
its smooth printed pages, calling constant attention to the fact that there is—​or
was—​an original, it sets up a glaring contrast with the fact that Michael is, of
course, irreplicable: there is no “original” because there can be no “copy.” The
boxed book-​object of Nox, as several readers have noted, is akin to a headstone,
 Grief Lessons 183

offering its inert material in place of a body and gestures once saturated with
meaning.41 Carson’s glossary exercise adds to the book’s material drama a per-
formance of translation as the search for an impossible original. A monument
to “what is not there,” this commemoration happens in the negative, in the space
opened for missed encounters—​for speculation, association, not affirmation—​
between languages. Not “about” grief, Nox pursues the stuff of grief ’s shapeless
trafficking. The unnamed because unnameable; that which “does not exist.”
It is in the analogy between Carson’s inquiry into Michael and her experi-
ence of translating the Catullus elegy that the book produces a critical reckoning
with translation. The prose commentary, divided into numbered sections, is in-
tercut on almost every other page with the glossary entries for each word in the
Catullus elegy, including examples of usage, etymology, grammatical variants,
and semantic associations. With no pretention to exhaustiveness, these entries
stage the presence of the sister and translator “in motion” behind them.42 Out
of the piecemeal dismantling of one elegy come the expressive terms of another:

manantia

mano manere manavi

[dubious] to flow, pour, run; to exude,

be shed, run out; to leak in or away (of
liquids); to allow water to penetrate,
leak (of containers); to be wet, run, drip;
manantia labra saliva lips dripping with
saliva; to pour forth, shed; to extend,
spread; poetica mella manat he distils
poetic honey;

...

omne
supervacuum pleno de pectore manat the
whole pointless night seeps out of the
heart.

Carson’s glossary splays out Catullus 101 in its barest facts. Her explosion of the
poem is the exposure of a process, less of translating—​though her definitions,
concordances, and exempla are a translator’s working materials—​ than of
organizing the residues accrued for Carson around the “night” that is her brother.
These residues include typical exempla, unattributed and often untypically
184 Open Translation

translated: omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat (“all that is superfluous

overflows the heart”), rendered in the above entry as “the whole pointless night
seeps out of the heart,” is from the Ars Poetica of Horace, while poetica mella
manat riffs on a line from his Epistles.43 As we follow her associations to each
word, the vanishing points of one language and one action of elegy—​Catullus’s
Latin verse, Carson’s English prose—​become a measure for the opacities of the
other. The lexicographical “entries” confess the mutual dependency of trans-
lation and elegy, and the missed encounter that, here, binds them together.
Carson’s “open” translation needs the negative—​the residues, the inscrutability,
the “night”—​to fulfill its destiny as elegy.
Like an extraordinary facing-​page translation, then, Carson’s prose account of
“prowling” Michael is placed in parallel to the itemized lexical facts of Catullus
101, as though to elucidate not so much one another as one another’s resistances.44
“Muteness” is the word Carson favors, from Catullus’s mutam, a quality she
glosses—​not without irony—​at several points in the prose instalments:

Note that the word “mute”

(from Latin mutus and Greek μυειν) is regarded by linguists as an onomato-
poeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of
human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen in hiding.
(1.3, n.p.)
...

I am looking a long time into the muteness

of my brother. It resists me. He refuses to be “cooked” (a modern historian
might say) in my transactional order. To put this another way, there is some-
thing that facts lack. “Overtakelessness” is a word told me by a philosopher
once: das Unumgängliche—​that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided
or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts—​it remains beyond
them. (1.3, n.p.)

In Economy of the Unlost, reading Celan’s use of a nonsense word coined by

Hölderlin, Carson describes what she calls a “problem of pure origin: you
cannot get behind the back of it.” Such a word is “its own clue,” she says, opaque
in its reasoning and mute in its claims.45 In Nox, Carson pursues expressions
of muteness—​of truths “seen in hiding,” a certain transparency around the
opaque—​in the book’s twin stories of loss, like a “storydog,” she says, that collects
“bits of muteness like burrs in its hide” (1.3, n.p.). And this “storydog” knows her
stories: apocryphal or fictive; interpolated, like the unattributed quotations that
bring other texts into her performance of working: versions of muteness and re-
sistance overlay and out-​speak one another in Nox. Where das Unumgängliche
 Grief Lessons 185

is Heidegger’s, “overtakelessness” is a coinage of Emily Dickinson’s, used in a

poem of her own to describe “those /​Who have accomplished Death.”46 (A quick
Google search reveals Carson’s phrase for Michael, “the starry lad he was,” is part
unacknowledged citation from an earlier translator of Catullus).47
We have seen Carson use Emily Brontë’s life, work, and errata to confess
and configure loss of a different kind in “The Glass Essay.” In the “Appendix to
Ordinary Time,” the belated conclusion to the essay “Ordinary Time: Virginia
Woolf and Thucydides on War,” she relates how crossed-​out passages from the
text of Woolf ’s diary offered a register for loss following the death of Carson’s
mother: “Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old
photographs of my mother in happier times. . . . Now I too am someone who
knows marks.”48 Both are examples of acquired “residues,” traces of another’s
writing life that provide Carson with a way of comprehending a key moment
in her own. Theirs, then, is the story of an anti-​discipline prowling the rigors
of literary scholarship: of unruly, unspoken attachments accruing around crit-
ical attention; of critical attention making its way into autobiography and lyric
testimony. They bring into the vocal and textual foreground the backstory—​
another story reading itself and comparing notes—​to Carson’s encounters with
her sources.
Carson has explained her use of the term “essay” to describe The Beauty of
the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos as the signaling of a double func-
tion: “calling it an essay,” says Carson, “means that it’s not just a story but a re-
flection on that story.”49 Ever more striking as we turn the pages of Nox is a
sense that translation and elegy together are more than just reflections on one
another’s stories of homage and pursuit. They have become inseparable, and are
bound together by necessary failure. Carson’s translation of the elegy does fail
to some extent—​or so she suggests—​but she finds in this shortfall a new way of
conceiving her task: “I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do
of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as
a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch”
(7.1). Nox grants us access to this room—​as Economy of the Unlost pointed us to-
ward a “windowless” room for “aesthetic work”—​by documenting what Carson
does and what she recalls in its unlit corners. Carson doesn’t leave the room with
a satisfactory version of Catullus “101,” but what she does get is a performative
theory of translation.
Each of Carson’s glossary entries enacts “groping for the light switch” in its
presentation of cognates, literary examples, sample syntaxes, and associations to
the word in question, and in each entry’s inexorable journey toward “night”: nox,
noctis, nocte, noctem. An exposure of the tendentiousness and deep personal
interest driving the translation, it is also a brilliantly literal rendering of the
fact that searching inside the source language brings the translator—​as the
186 Open Translation

elegist—​up against darkness. (Carson admits, as is evident in the text, to having

“manipulated” the glossary “to put in more nox”).50 The book’s prose commen-
tary begins with a curious statement to the contrary: “I wanted to fill my elegy
with light of all kinds.” To fill with light in this context is to throw light on the
dimensions of night, the darker corners of words, the unlit passages of Michael’s
life, so as to give shape to darkness, the formless and residual, not to cancel it out.
“Night” is where Michael is—​“NOX /​FRATER /​NOX”—​and where he is sought,
between the decomposed units of another elegy in another language:

vectus
. . . per
noctem in nihilo vehi: to vanish by
night into nothing; quod fugiens semel
hora vexit: what the transient hour
brought once and only once.

....

miseras
. . . nocte fratris quam ipso fratre
miserior: made sadder by the brother’s
night than by the brother himself.

....

donarem
. . . ego te
quid donem? what would I give you? nox
nihil donat nothing is night’s gift.

....

mutam
. . . silentia
muta noctis deep speechlessness of
night.

A record of process, fantasies, and encounters in the concordance—​quod fugiens

semel hora vexit is from Horace’s “Ode XXIX”—​, the glossary makes the pur-
suit and the errancy of words a proxy for “prowling” the residues of another
life. Foiling the exactitude and exhaustiveness of classical concordance, the
 Grief Lessons 187

glossary exposes the personal claims stalking so much of Carson’s scholarship,

and affirms claims to creative liberty that have long stalked Carson’s relationship
with Catullus. The alt-​Catullus of “Catullus: Carmina,” her sequence of freehand
translations in Men in the Off Hours, shows us how far classical translation can
run with its remit. What Carson does with the lyric poem “Odi et Amo”—​the
poem from which her PhD thesis takes its title—​is a limit case, turning his fa-
mous statement of erotic ambivalence into a combinatorial concrete poem
consisting of the words “hate,” “love,” “why,” and “I,” repeated in symmetrical se-
quence.51 Carson’s poem, an abstract impression of the original, offers a snapshot
of how extreme lexical reduction works as a reading, a “strong misreading” that
appraises/​destroys the original.
The openness of Nox—​its exposure of process, its open-​endedness, even
an implicit invitation to share in its task—​takes its place in a tradition of
performativity, theatricality, and invitation to complicity in Carson: from sus-
tained address to her readers (in “The Life of Towns,” “the position you take on
this may pull you separate from me”), through the alluring hermeneutic mini-
malism of The Albertine Workout and her lectures in sonnet form, to recent “in-
teractive” versions of the Short Talks, and the aleatory format of Float.52 Carson’s
move toward collaborative intermedia work and site-​specific performance,
discussed in the Postscript to this book, is inseparable from her creative partner-
ship with her husband, Robert Currie, credited for the design of Nox. The work’s
concertina format and unboxing, rather than simply opening at the first page,
invites readers into a certain iterative complicity with Carson’s project of lexical
“entry.” Carson and Currie even report how, in one of their many workshops
on creative collaboration, they had a class of eight-​year-​olds draw on the blank
backs of the pages of Nox.53 Divergence from its customary purposes is what
gives rise, in Nox, to the critical agility of Carson’s translation and its openness
to the reader, an openness that permits Carson’s “epitaph” to perform and reprise
the structural outreach of elegy. Out of the remains of one kind of work, the pur-
pose and the rituals of another begin to be defined.
“Unlike a work of literature,” Walter Benjamin wrote in his much-​cited essay
on the task of the translator, from which Carson quotes in her edition of Sappho,
“translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside
facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single
spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the
work in the alien one.”54 As a performative account of translation, Nox offers
to stage this action of address and attempted entry into an impossible interior.
Benjamin continues: while “the intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary,
manifest; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational.”55 Carson’s
translation of Catullus is certainly not ultimate, as she herself admits, and is, for
obvious reasons, both derivative and proudly ideational. Yet it is derivative to the
188 Open Translation

degree that the version of translation on display in Nox, out of which a new and
very different work is produced, is a performance of its own derivation. Rather
than simply a “copy” or faithful rendering—​possibilities raised by the book’s ma-
terial ontology, the perfect copy of a hand-​creased and fingerprinted original, a
simulacrum of aura—​Carson’s translation splays open the distance between it-
self and its “alien” original.
When we finally reach the full translation, we find a poem incapable of closing
the gaps that have emerged between the source, printed on Carson’s notional first
page, and its accommodation in the target language. Questions and wounds re-
main open for the translator:

Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed—​

I arrive at these poor, brother, burials
so I could give you the last gift owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Now that Fortune tore you from me, you
oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,
now still anyway this—​what a distant mood of parents
handed down as the sad gift for burials—​
accept! soaked with tears of a brother
and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.
Catullus 101

Like Celan’s “Epitaph for François,” the Catullus elegy sends its call out “into
forever,” offering up a “last gift owed to death” (ut te postremo donarem munere
mortis). Invoking its unreachable destination and imploring its addressee to “ac-
cept!,” the elegy in Carson’s translation hangs back in a series of asides, spoken
in a spirit of inquiry and lament that binds it to the present: “(why?),” and “poor
(wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me.” These interpellations sustain the
frustration of “entry” and address that the glossary has staged throughout. As
there, this final affirmation of a heedless, speechless region beyond the poem’s
speech (“night,” “mute ash”) is what makes the poem’s lexical facts burn. It is also
what makes the proclaimed unsatisfactory, unfinished translation a monument
to the edgeless condition of mourning a brother: “I guess it never ends,” says
Carson. “A brother does not end. I prowl him. He does not end.” This monument,
at once creative and derivative, makes the edgeless or endless something we en-
counter at every turn, as residues spread and accumulate, sources go unacknowl-
edged, and elegies—​brothers—​blur into one.
I have said little about the photographs in Carson’s book, an area to which
existing material scholarship on the work attends amply.56 The photographic
fragments of Nox sustain the same dilemma as the glossary by virtue of their
 Grief Lessons 189

fragmentation: “The more you cut, the more story they gather,” remarks Carson
on the fragment’s facilitation of a larger “empty place” to work with.57 They also
sustain it by some essential logic of photography. Speaking of a photograph of
his mother in the posthumous Mourning Diary (Journal de deuil), published in
French the year before Nox, Roland Barthes remarked that “whatever it grants to
vision and whatever its manner, the photograph is always invisible: it is not it that
we see.”58 Like the epitaph, the photograph directs our attention elsewhere, to an
object sensible by the notoriety of its absence. In this invited and avidly desired
diversion, the photograph—​again, like the epitaph—​sacrifices itself, reverts to
pure medium, in the service of another object.
Both photography and translation sacrifice themselves in this way. Laboring
among ruins, Benjamin saw, both offer strange forms of resurrection. In entry
8.4 of Nox, Carson talks about Lazarus of the Gospel of St. John as, like her
brother, “an example of resurrection or as a person who had to die twice.” “Mute
throughout his resurrection,” she says, “[e]‌ven in the painting of it by Giotto,
notice the person with raised hands and no mouth (perhaps his sister) placed
behind Lazarus to load this space with muteness.” It is this sister’s obligation,
the suggestion is, to carry the muteness that is owed to death; her obligation to
live with and comprehend her brother’s two deaths. This is where Jacques Lacan
famously placed Sophokles’s Antigone—​between two deaths: one psychic and
judicial, the other physical. Antigone, sentenced to live burial, can never leave
the cave in which she is walled. Carson speaks of Catullus 101 as a room she can
never leave, an unlit, dimensionless space between two languages. The clamor
and the residue that fills this “between” is the object of inquiry of these two very
different translations.

Antigonick

In Carson’s remarks on tragic violence, one of tragedy’s hardest lessons is that

grief seldom recognizes itself as such. Grief ’s apprehension as rage means that
inside the story of a tragedy is another story that must wait until the tragic de-
nouement to be told, claimed by chorus and survivors as the version to be carried
forward. At a speaking event in New York in 2014, Judith Butler quoted the same
remarks from Carson: “Speaking from rage,” Butler began by saying, “does not
always let us see how rage carries sorrow and covers it over.”59 Instead, she says,
sorrow gets “shouted down” by rage, turning mute and inscrutable, barely recog-
nizable in its most intimate consequences.
In the Antigone, Sophokles’s play about one form of law “shouting down”
another, inscrutability is a malady to which few of its characters are immune.
His heroine Antigone is muzzled in her grief, compromised in her honor, by
190 Open Translation

the prohibition on performing burial rites owed to her brother Polyneikes.

Antigone’s defiance of the prohibition by decree of her uncle, Kreon, unleashes a
story of rage and violence that—​we can only fantasize—​might have been avoided,
had Antigone’s grief for her kinsman been recognized and the natural justice of
burial and mourning rites been allowed its exercise. The problem of inscruta-
bility famously precedes the Antigone. In Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone leads her
father-​brother to a reckoning with his own tale of failed self-​knowledge (gnōthi
seauton), which his self-​blinding ruthlessly performs. Carson’s acclaimed 2015
translation of the Antigone—​a sharp modern-​vocabulary version premiered
in Luxembourg in the same year, starring Juliette Binoche as Antigone under
the direction of Ivo van Hove—​preserves the throughline of inscrutability and
sudden, smarting exceptions to its law: “you’re the only person in Thebes who
sees things this way,” says Carson’s Kreon. Her Antigone: “no actually they all
do /​but you’ve nailed their tongues to the floor”; a lucidity she applies to herself,
confessing to Ismene “you chose life I chose death . . . my soul died long ago.”60
Tragedy is the ultimate test for philosophy, Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe has
written.61 Yet the extreme pathos of the Antigone is where philosophy’s moral
drive gets derailed, and where “the possibility of philosophy, the opportunity of
its reassurance and its accomplishment,” hits a wall.62 Sentenced to be buried
alive, to a death that “crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into
the realm of death,” Antigone, in Jacques Lacan’s words, “crosses the line.”63 Her
father-​brother has already crossed the lines of kinship, opening a “caesura” or
“non-​site” in social intelligibility, Butler writes, a non-​site Antigone occupies
long before her banishment to the tomb.64 Her speech in the play seems to call
from this non-​site, the other side of a crossed line where we, her audience, cannot
follow. Her resolve and her tragic sublime—​much like those of Simone Weil—​
are intractable and otherworldly, perfect and alienating in their perfection. In
her translator’s note to the 2015 text, Carson highlights a single line spoken by
Antigone before she exits to her death, a line that, for Carson, isolates her percep-
tion of a moral virtue impeccable beyond scrutiny: “I was caught in an act of per-
fect piety [eusebia].”65 Antigone’s “perfect piety” shouts down all expressions of
doubt. Inscrutability joins fatal consistency in Sophokles’s drama, and Carson’s
Antigone sustains the near-​unsustainable tension produced at this juncture.
Neither Antigone nor Kreon sees the cracks in their story until it is too late to
pull back.
Three years earlier, Carson published a very different translation of the
Antigone. Antigonick (2012) is a facsimile reproduction of a graphic novel of
the play, discontinuously illustrated and penned in scrawling, uppercase script,
a format reprised in her translation of Euripides’s The Trojan Women (2021)
in collaboration with artist Rosanna Bruno.66 The irregularly spaced hand-
written text of Antigonick appears in black and red ink—​the alternating colors
 Grief Lessons 191

of Greek epitaphic verse documented in Economy of the Unlost—​where red

picks out not only the dramatis personae but pronouns, interpolated allusions
(“To the Lighthouse”), keywords (“law”), and sharp phrases (“nick of time”),
signalled using italics in my quotations from the text.67 The text is punctuated
at regular intervals by Bianca Stone’s heavy-​lined color illustrations, printed
on translucent vellum paper so that the text on the facing page overleaf shows
through. (The arrangement recalls the extraordinary “tri-​colored play with
music” and proto-​graphic novel, Life? or Theatre (1942) by the German-​Jewish
artist, Charlotte Salomon, composed in gouaches with text commentary and
dialogue painted onto translucent overlays.)68 Though Stone has suggested the
role of her drawings is structural, not illustrative, these images depict a mixture
of domestic scenery, including furniture and hung paintings, and sublime, un-
tamed landscapes, featuring animals, anodyne figures or isolated body parts, and
abandoned outbuildings.69 In certain images these registers encroach on one
another, structuring-​in a mood of disquiet and disarray. Stone tells us that the
images’ order of appearance was determined in collaboration with Currie using
a random integer generator, so as not to lead the reader of Carson’s material. “My
hand is in the book but never pointing,” Stone says.70
Antigonick, then, is a text attuned to power, domination, order, and consist-
ency at the level of its form, which seems to have been designed expressly to
counter these. The handwritten text of irregular lineation gives an impression of
reading a series of notes to the play, a “playbook” or “found” text of the tragedy,
transcribed by a single reader together with her interpolations, recollected texts,
and notes toward a philosophical history of the Antigone, “one of the enduring
and canonic acts in the history of our philosophic, literary, political conscious-
ness” (George Steiner).71 Penned in a single continuous hand, the transcription
leaves us in no doubt that these interpolations are functionally inseparable from
the play script; another way of saying that the characters and Chorus who speak
its lines have laid claim to the history of their story—​their future, our past—​in
a single discursive present. Shattering the Aristotelian unities, they reflect on
the absurdity of their destiny, but they also exchange literary analogues, philo-
sophical quips and quotations, anecdotes from the performance history of the
Antigone, and observations on one another’s speech and stage directions (“why
do messengers always exaggerate /​exit eurydike bleeding from all orifices //​
[eurydike does not exit]”).72 Where the lyric transparency of “The Glass Essay”
or The Beauty of the Husband has Carson’s narrative subject perform the col-
lapse of orders—​commentary into narrative, the citational into the lyric—​it is
the characters of Antigonick who bear the task, in the wake of a more drastic col-
lapse, of reading themselves. Transparency here redoubles tragic irony. For this is
a tragedy that knows its own script—​its own unredeemable outcome—​only too
well. Versed in permutations of their story, conversant with the critical literature,
192 Open Translation

Carson’s cast are no longer mutually inscrutable. Escaping inscrutability (to

borrow Lacan’s translation of a line from the play) “into impossible sicknesses,”
they are wretchedly conscious, powerlessly lucid.73
A “Philo-​performance” of Antigonick at the Sorbonne in 2014 cast Butler as
Kreon, the philosopher Avitall Ronell as Antigone, and invited the audience to
share the composite role of the Chorus.74 In one of several jokes, whose critical
function needs no explaining, Carson’s Chorus asks “how is a greek chorus like
a lawyer,” responding “They’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
/​finding an analogy /​locating a prior example /​so as to be able to say /​this
terrible thing we’re witnessing now is /​not unique you know it happened be-
fore.”75 In Sophokles’s original, reflected in Robert Fagles’s classic translation, the
Chorus does appeal to precedent, recalling the fate of Danaë who, like Antigone,
is buried alive.76 Carson’s 2015 translation summarizes the appeal to Danaë as
one of “three examples /​of people who lost access to the light.” Her story is told,
as it is in the original, and the Chorus wonders aloud, “what does this tell us?”77
In Antigonick, the example of Danaë, like the examples that follow her, is replaced
by a description of its function: “the business of searching for a precedent.”
Parsed from within, the play’s critical description becomes another affirmation
of the law, with its precedents, analogies, witnesses, and inexorability. Tragedy
exists, here, because you know your griefs inside out, yet are powerless to stem
their consequences.
As the interactive Sorbonne performance seemed to pick up on, then, this is
no ordinary tragic chorus, the traditional representative of our “outside” con-
sciousness of the play. The Chorus of Antigonick has its boundaries breached,
its edges nicked, and tragic consciousness and consequentiality saturate the
entire script. Antigone, Ismene, Haimon, Kreon, and Eurydike not only com-
ment on their utterances as they happen, but are disposed to edit them in real
time. Here is Haimon to Kreon on hearing of the fate of his future bride: “I
could not would /​not do not know how to say you are wrong /​it may be some
other way, I don’t know, might /​turn out, I delete this line, I am your defender
/​I’m yours.”78 Antigonick tracks its precedents and points of moral contention,
but it also interweaves them with echoes and case histories in the play’s after-
math, the iterative and iterable history of reading the Antigone. (Lacan opens
his seminar on “The splendor of Antigone” by asking, “Is there anyone who
doesn’t invoke Antigone whenever there is a question of a law that causes con-
flict in us . . .”).79 As Butler writes in Antigone’s Claim, the play’s famous critique
in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit “continues to structure appropriations
of the play” within philosophical discourse.80 Hegel, whose appraisal of the
Antigone is reproduced among the back matter of Antigonick, is one of the play’s
many examples of use and hijack of the Antigone legend, an intellectual history
whose reckoning falls to the characters themselves.81 In this simple fact alone,
 Grief Lessons 193

Antigonick offers a rebuttal. For Hegel’s reproach of Antigone for her suffering
(pathein) without self-​consciousness—​an unethical pathos—​ is answered by
Carson, not only in Antigone’s explicit remarks on it (several of which I quote
below), but with the devastating self-​consciousness that saturates the speech and
action of the drama. Echoing Carson’s aslant take on catharsis with which this
chapter began, here is Antigone on the staging of her story: “Hegel says people
want to see their /​lives on stage look at me people.”82
Barely three lines into Antigonick, Carson has Antigone broach her own phil-
osophical history in conversation with her sister, Ismene. Their conversation is
about sources and correct citation, situating the play not only among different
authorships and competing stories, but between the before and after of its events.
Antigone’s opening line, like her entire story, the play suggests, has become a ci-
tation. Not only that: it is a citation whose origin is uncertain and whose sense
has been misplaced by paraphrase. This opening presents the terrible deter-
minism in tragedy along with a determinism in the way it is read. Something
about the story’s iteration, appropriation, and paraphrase proves as inexorable as
the story’s events:

[Enter Antigone and Ismene] Antigone: We

begin in the dark and birth is the death of
us Ismene: Who said that Antigone: Hegel
Ismene Sounds more like Beckett Antigone: He
was paraphrasing Hegel Ismene: I don’t think
so Antigone: Whoever it was whoever we are
dear sister ever since we were born from the evils
of Oidipous what bitterness pain disgust disgrace
or moral shock have we been spared . . .83

In the Antigone, the sisters’ opening dispute hinges on the act Antigone proposes
to commit—​the burial of Polyneikes forbidden by decree. In Antigonick, the
same dispute concerns the phrasing of their destiny and to whom to attribute its
precise expression—​Hegel or Beckett.84 The problem returns later to absurd ef-
fect: “Ismene: Quoting Hegel again /​Antigone: Hegel says I’m wrong /​Ismene: But
right to be wrong Antigone: No /​ethical consciousness Ismene: Is that how /​he
puts it.”85 More orthodox translations have Antigone reflect here on the whole-
sale disgrace fallen on the house of Laius: “There’s nothing, /​no pain—​our lives
are pain—​no private shame, /​no public disgrace, nothing I haven’t seen in your
griefs and mine.”86 In Antigonick, the same negativity (“no,” “nothing”) is applied
to the historical effort to construe these griefs as a philosophical problem and a
political exemplum. There is nothing that hasn’t been said, no act unplumbed, no
stone unturned—​the message is—​in our reading of the Antigone, an exhaustion it
194 Open Translation

shares with the first of the Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Philosophy’s Antigone
joins the Antigone of psychoanalysis, the Antigone of post-​Renaissance perfor-
mance, of twentieth-​century literature; even Simone Weil refers to herself, as
unlucky as she was uncompromising, as “always Antigone.”87 Lacan’s famous
positioning of her “between two deaths”—​buried alive and waiting to die, a
reading Carson’s heroine reflects on—​is joined in Antigonick by a third tense
of fatality.88 Conversant with the “representative function” of her death before
the sentence is issued—​avant la lettre but après coup—​Carson’s Antigone carries
death with her from the play’s opening line. Pronouncing the words “I died long
ago,” she speaks for the shattered temporal order of the translation, where the
play’s discursive future is its past, the very flattening of time in which Lacan
locates the death drive in the play.89 The Chorus reads this exploding of tragic
time as an explosion of consciousness, responding simply “Your soul is blowing
/​ apart.”90
Stone’s reference to the work as a form of “collaboration” between Carson
and other works of “art” (with Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit or Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot, for example) suggests that Antigonick not only reflects on
appropriations and iterations of the Antigone but goes one better by producing
an iterative and appropriative text.91 “I put Hegel and Brecht into Antigonick,”
Carson has said, “because those readings of her are part of how she lives in our
minds. I put Beckett in because Antigone would have liked him.”92 Our Antigone
comes after Beckett, so Antigonick plays a Beckettian drama of paraphrase and
misquotation in place of Sophokles’s reminder of the sisters’ iterative shaming.
His play’s intertextual affiliations have already “crossed the line,” so Carson simply
daubs them into the dialogue. This is a text for which “All time is now”—​Carson’s
Augustinian rebuff, we saw, to the idea of anachronism. Yet these staged histories
and affiliations, like the inquiries around citation, shoot a look not just at the re-
ception of the Antigone but at its reader and translator. For this tragedy is not just
post-​Beckett, contemporary with Butler on kinship or with Giorgio Agamben,
whose biopolitical epic Homo Sacer stalks the play’s references to the “state of
exception.” Carson has Eurydike introduce herself with an unlikely comparison
to “poor Mrs. Ramsay who died /​in a bracket of To the Lighthouse.” Woolf ’s Mrs.
Ramsay—​a woman of few words, whose death is announced in a square bracket
of “Time Passes,” the remarkable second part of To the Lighthouse—​is Carson’s
association, and the object of reflection in several other of her writings.93 Mrs.
Ramsay and her death, whose bracketing makes it exceptional to the novel’s time,
is part of how the Antigone lives in Carson’s mind.
We have followed Carson’s performance of reading, with its underscored
present and transparency of thought, process, and intertext, throughout the
chapters of this book. What this performance lends to the adaptation of tragedy,
and to the Antigone in particular, begins with the writing-​in of its discursive fate,
 Grief Lessons 195

but it does not end there. The moral absolutism of Antigone’s “perfect piety,” like
the imperativity of moral arguments in her name, gets diluted down by Carson’s
errant, non-​positional, openly intertextual reading. For all its philosophical ref-
erence, the play is unforgiving in its treatment of philosophy—​and of Hegel in
particular—​, an exposure of its impossible stringency (or simply its “impossi-
bility,” for Lacoue-​Labarthe). Eurydike channeling Mrs. Ramsay, improbably but
ingeniously, brings her into smaller scale and brings the play into a more spec-
ulative register, the marks of a reader thinking, and being moved, improbably.
Improbability of this kind is one of the principal modes of Antigonick. When
Antigone is taken to have her sentence carried out, the Chorus reprises its search
for precedents, citing a famous staging of the work by Bertolt Brecht:94

Chorus . . . Remember how Brecht

had you do the whole play with a door strapped
to your back

Antigone: Oh I don’t want to talk about him

or him or him all that plowing in the dark
I go to them now, one final intersection O my
brother you have despoiled me95

Antigone doesn’t want to talk about the famous men who have staged and
siphoned her story. Yet the work makes plain the preponderance of their gaze;
the fact that she—​we—​can’t quite get free of their readings. The shifts in tone in
this passage are tremendous. The line that most closely approximates Sophokles’s
text and the tragic key of Fagles’s English—​“O my /​brother you have despoiled
me”—​sounds and looks in the above like an interpolation, as though Antigone
is quoting herself.96 The exchange is pure critical parody of the kind theorized
by Hutcheon: the dramatization of “difference” from the source text, but in
which the “parodic foreground and parodied background” are compressed into
one.97 Butler has described the speech of Sophokles’s heroine as an appropriative
parody of Creon’s language and law, and describes parody in general terms as
dissent that does not “domesticate difference.”98 Bonnie Honig argues superbly
for the ways in which Antigone’s parody, mimicry, and citation—​a language
of what Honig calls “agonistic humanism”—​mitigate rather than resecure the
distinctions undergirding arguments for and against her ethical exemplariness.99
Seen in this light, the controversy over citation at the beginning of Carson’s trans-
lation simply caricatures the play’s foundational logic.
If Antigonick does manage to slough off the moral exemplarity of the Antigone,
it is not by changing the course of its events or the contours of its characters,
but by reproducing the clamor of its conscription to diverse moral and ethical
196 Open Translation

causes. Intransigent Antigone, here, is whatever Hegel, Brecht, and Lacan would
have her be, and, what’s more, she knows it. This history of competing claims is
one of the chief objects of irony in the dialogues of Antigone and Ismene, and a
source of an unsettling comic bathos. Indeed, among the smattering of criticisms
of Carson’s otherwise widely acclaimed translation, Steiner reproaches her text
for introducing “vulgarity” and “populist witticisms” that fall dissonant, for him,
with the “adult” grandeur of Sophokles.100 Carson is clearly not the first writer to
parody or distort the registers of Greek tragedy; in fact, it is now widely accepted
that their appropriation and mockery begins in Old Comedy.101 What is less well
known is that the exchange runs both ways, and Greek tragedy unsettles its own
“adult” hauteur by means drawn from comedy. Classicist Craig Jendza has shown
that, far from unable to respond to comedy’s mockery of the sensibility, tropes,
and staging conventions of tragic drama, Greek tragedy does just that, including
innuendo and obscenity in the texture of its dialogues.102 “We have things in
modern movies that are blends of tragedy and comedy,” Jendza explains, “but
we don’t have a really serious drama that would co-​opt costumes, dialogue or a
scene from something like a Will Ferrell movie.”103 Perhaps Carson’s adaptations
are something approaching this missing equivalent: the lawyer jokes and
anachronisms of Antigonick, or Euripides’s Helen recast as Norma Jeane Baker
(Marilyn Monroe), on the telephone or engaging in erotic transference games
with her analyst.104 The comic improbability of Carson’s versions is not arbi-
trary, nor is it simple alienation effect, but the result, she suggests, of a philolog-
ically close reading: “I generally try to work first and most attentively out of the
grammar, syntax, allusions of the original,” she says, “while keeping the language
alive in a way that interests me, then later crazy it up if that seems appropriate.”105
Carson observes these same commitments to distance and closeness in the
history of the Antigone and in a single translation event that, for her, explodes the
complex obligations of translating to view. Her experimental lecture, “Variations
on the Right to Remain Silent,” takes up Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous “mad”
translations of Sophokles, specifically his 1804 text of the Antigone, which would
become Brecht’s principal source for his landmark 1948 adaptation. The improb-
ability of Hölderlin’s translation is the result of what Carson calls a “deadly lit-
eralism”: “His translating method was to take hold of every item of the original
diction and wrench it across into German exactly as it stood in its syntax, word
order and lexical sense,” so the verb kalkhainein, a verb for “profound and trou-
bled emotion” which Carson traces to the purple sea mollusk (kalkhē) and an
expression for its difficult capture, appears in Hölderlin as “to dye your words
red-​purple” (a Carson gloss for Du scheinst ein rotes Wort zu färben).106 Carson
rehearses variations on this form of structural imitation in her six translations
of Ibykos fragment 286, immediately following the body text of “Variations on
the Right to Remain Silent.” What she also draws from Hölderlin is a feeling for
 Grief Lessons 197

the emotional obligations that make an improbable, “disfigured,” or “unread-

able” translation—​some of the verdicts on Hölderlin’s—​an appropriate one.107
Not just appropriate to the moral violence of the Antigone, Hölderlin’s “vo-
cabulary of excess” is absolutely consistent, for Carson, with a reasoned rage
against the “gigantic cacophonous cliché” of “one’s own language,” and with an
effort to keep that language “living (lebendig) enough.”108 Hölderlin’s search for
“livingness [lebendigkeit]” in the Antigone is met by Carson’s quest to perform
“how [Antigone] lives in our minds.” But she meets him, too, in the sublime lit-
eralism of Antigonick, in which Haimon’s shaken filial piety makes him edit his
speech in real time, and the characters’ parsing of their destiny—​now a cliché—​
makes prophets of them all.
Carson’s account of Hölderlin’s Antigone joins several other accounts of trans-
lation, more or less contemporary with Antigonick, that offer to break with the
sublimating work of tragedy by preserving in translation the violent unreason
stirring in the original. Her “Cassandra Float Can,” an earlier lecture that joins
“Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” among the pamphlets of Float,
introduces us to the character who gives her name to a “sensation” Carson
associates with translating: “Whenever I am engaged on a translation project
I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up.” Carson
“call[s]‌the sensation Cassandra,” she says, because it first emerged on reading
the passage in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon where Cassandra utters the searing cry,
“OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!”—​ “untranslatable, yet not meaningless”—​ before
delivering her prophecy on the fate of the house of Atreus.109 Carson quotes
some of Cassandra’s most incandescent lines:

Behold no longer my oracle out from veils

shall be glancing like a newly married bride but
as brightness blows the rising sun
open
it will rush my oceans forward onto light—​
a grief more deep than me.
(1178–​1183)110

This blown-​open sensation describes the arrival of prophetic insight, a satu-

rated intelligibility that explodes its source—​“as brightness blows the rising sun /​
open”—​and defies its subject’s dimensions: “a grief more deep than me.” The sen-
sation is a “catastrophe” of the kind Carson claims as a method against the “cliché”
of “one’s own language” in “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” and indeed
translation and “the arts of prophecy” are compared directly in “Cassandra Float
Can.” Translating and prophesying share what she calls “some action of cutting
through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath,” an action of
198 Open Translation

mystics, prophets, and—​ in Carson’s oeuvre—​ women, my previous chapter

argued. The disclosures afforded by translation and prophecy can be “unbeliev-
able,” “tautological,” and pry at “the edge of belief,” though Nox provides us with
an important caveat to the comparison. “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all
kinds,” Carson begins there, but the exercise itself will downgrade her expecta-
tions: “Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use
expecting a flood of light,” but rather smaller, less glaring illuminations: “little
kidnaps in the dark” (or “If light appears . . . we undo a bit of the cloth” in If Not,
Winter).111 The prophet enjoys no such attenuations. “Everywhere Cassandra
ran she found she was already there,” posits Carson. “What is the future doing
underneath the past?”
This is the question Carson has us ask in Antigonick, for whose characters
the play’s future reception has already happened.112 To be a prophet is to speak
improbably and inconsequentially, only to see your speech translated into the
devastating consequences it foretold. Intelligent of their significance and pow-
erless to alter it, the characters of Antigonick—​not least Antigone, whose “soul
is blowing /​apart”—​share in the violence of the prophet’s floodlit conscious-
ness. Their struggle is also, if we follow her reading of Cassandra, a reflection on
Carson’s struggles as a translator: not with illumination, so much as with a lan-
guage in which—​her words—​“Nothing has not been said before. The templates
are set.”113 We have seen the artist Tacita Dean describe Carson’s translations
as “ripping” the classics “out of the past, shocking them back to life as if with
electrical voltage,” but this is not just a question of contemporary setting or
shocking and awing with ultraviolence, as Sarah Kane has done with Seneca.114
As she tells it, Carson’s story of translation is the pursuit of an unwritten raw-
ness in words; of lebendigkeit as something done to the target language by direct
action on its “templates” (Hölderlin’s translations she describes as “ripping the
lids off words and plunging his arms in”).115 “Ripping” is one word for Carson’s
interventions. Others she lists in her lecture on Cassandra and the sensations of
translation: “Cracks, cuts, breaks, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, conical
intersects, disruptions, etymologies.”116 The presence of “intersects” (Antigone’s
“intersection”), cuts, and gashes, clearly marks Antigonick. First, in the influx of
information that conventionally “has no business” in the script; the rupture of a
boundary between the work and its critical environs. Second, in one of Carson’s
most striking divergences from Sophokles: her title, and the silent character it
references—​“Nick.”
The word “nick” is scattered throughout Carson’s script, from its most con-
spicuous showing in the cast list to the expression “nick of time,” which several
of her characters use. “Nick a mute part [always onstage, he measures things]”
introduces us to a character who goes unreferenced until the direction for him
to remain onstage at the end of the play—​“[Exeunt omnes except nick who
 Grief Lessons 199

continues //​measuring].” That “Nick” references the edgelessness of this partic-

ular play, the extension of its consciousness beyond the script and beyond the
bounds of its performance, is suggested by his remaining onstage and by his
designated task. “For each of us has his measure,” reads Carson’s epigraph from
Hölderlin in Economy of the Unlost, a study of elegies and epitaphs, mute sounds,
visible invisibles, residues, and language kept alive in the face of loss.117 The ep-
igraph heads Carson’s paean to subjectivity and unlocked form in the essay, be-
ginning with the mise-​en-​scène that puts Celan by Simonides of Keos, “side by
side,” as they live in Carson’s mind. The measure of Antigone, still a moral bench-
mark and a site of moral scrutiny, is set and reset by reading, continuing under
Nick’s performative critical gaze beyond the end of Antigonick.
The single monologue spoken by Eurydike, almost double the length of the
equivalent speech in Carson’s 2015 rendition, points to the same ruptured criti-
cism/​literature boundary and concentrates its most powerful effects. In the 2015
text, Eurydike recounts how the intuition of things awry irrupts in her mind in
“a voice like sorrow,” overheard and only barely recognizable.118 The Eurydike of
Antigonick unspools her prescience. Her speech offers a backstory and rationale
for what has happened to Antigone, the gist of which—​as is hinted in Sophokles’s
text—​she already seems to intuit. This Eurydike brings up Brecht (“that girl with
the undead strapped to /​her back”), describes her speech in the third person
(“This is Eurydike’s monologue it’s her /​only speech in the play”), and compares
herself, we saw, to a character from Woolf. Eurydike steps in on the play’s anal-
ysis: on Antigone’s self-​exclusion from the law, her “state of exception,” and the
darkened family romance to which Eurydike, via her husband and son, is also
bound, and which she parodies in a therapeutic tableau—​the four of them “on
the staircase all on different steps”—​to disentangle crossed lines in the house of
Laius. Knowing she is too late, Eurydike asks us a question that has no equivalent
in Sophokles: “Have you heard /​this expression the nick of time.” She follows it
with another, which she repeats: “what is a /​nick /​I asked my son what /​is /​a /​
nick /​I asked my son.” “In the nick of time” is a stock phrase for something done
at the last possible moment.119 It has an obvious place in tragedy given the genre’s
concern with last possible moments, getting there in time to prevent disgrace
and bloodshed. Here, in a script saturated with foresight, the “nick of time” is a
nick in time—​a “rip in spacetime” is Carson’s expression from “Cassandra Float
Can”—​but this is also to say it is a wound. “Nick” marks an intrusion of con-
tent and a saturation of consciousness, and so signs the playtext with a knowing
woundedness. Eurydike gives the final description of this damage, wrought
by intelligence of its violence and the violence of the “state of exception”: “Exit
Eurydike bleeding from all orifices,” she announces, though remains onstage.
“Nick” is not the first mute part to appear in Carson’s versions of classical
drama. In “Twelve Minute Prometheus (After Aiskhylos),” the character “Govt
200 Open Translation

(formerly Zeus)” bears the standard of the law that is a state of exception to the
law of the play.120 This silent state of exception guarantees the play’s non-​identity.
It holds questions open, as Carson’s shorthand form does: a twelve-​minute script
in lieu of Prometheus Bound and in allusion to the Prometheia, a trilogy of which
the play is speculated to have formed part. Mute parts, muteness, gaps, entries,
cuts, fragments, radical abridgements, interpolations, and anachronism: Carson’s
interventions in the classical canon perform a position on what that canon is and
the rich speculative life of what it is not. For each of her translations and versions
enlists the presence of an anti-​work, an ellipse or excess of the established text,
that presents us with an essential speculativeness in the original. This specula-
tiveness can be textual, as in the speculations surrounding the Prometheia of
Aiskhylos, the fragments of Sappho, or the haphazard work of translation itself.
But it is, in the main, a record of how texts live and a way of keeping them alive.
Economy of the Unlost charted a similar journey of radical elision and the intui-
tion of radical excess toward the affirmation of language when it most needed to
be kept alive. Nox, we have seen, tells the story of Carson’s own personal search
for life among the ruins.
In 2018, Carson collaborated with Dean in the production of a one-​hour film
meditation on the destinies of a name, the name of the artist’s sister, Antigone
Dean. Antigone is Dean’s inquiry into the “undramatized” gap between the
Theban plays and an attempt, she says, at “scripting that fictional time” without
fixing it to a single story.121 Speaking with Carson in the film, Dean notes that
Carson has already explored this gap, first in the poem “TV Men: Antigone
(Scripts 1 and 2),” where she debuts the conceit that Antigone—​Antigone bound
to her history, Antigone who lives in our minds—​knows her script.122 Dean’s film
runs two synchronized 35mm anamorphic films on a single reel, splitting the
screen in half and telling two stories at once. This split work, she has said, “was
instructed by my blindness”: “Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent
blindness of film. Using masking inside the camera’s aperture gate, I filmed one
part of the film frame before rewinding the camera to film another part. This
meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was al-
ready exposed in the frame.”123 The scenes on one half of the screen couple and
decouple from the other at random (“like a gambler in light”).124 Conversations
between Dean, Carson, and others fall into dialogue with images of Antigone’s
father in exile, filmed on location in Thebes, and the ominous progress of a solar
eclipse. The story of the house of Laius, a story of bound and binding destinies, is
not completed, and its disquiet is not canceled. There is pain in the consequence
of a name, Dean suggests, and in what it leaves unrestored.
Writing in 1908, Ulrich von Wiliamowitz-​Moellendorff, a contemporary of
Freud, scholar of Sappho and Simonides, and fierce critic of Nietzsche’s The Birth
 Grief Lessons 201

of Tragedy, made the following remarks on what might be done with the troubled
remains of Greek drama:125

The tradition yields us only ruins. The more closely we test and examine them,
the more clearly we see how ruinous they are; and out of the ruins no whole
can be built. The tradition is dead; our task is to revivify the life that has passed
away.126

What to do with the remains of a life, a language in disuse, a tradition now ob-
scure, overread, or necessarily irredeemable, are questions threading the texts
of Antigonick and Nox into Carson’s personal story of translation. It is a story of
performed speculation, but one that can’t get away from—​rather, is committed
to staying in—​the fray of emotion roused in her source texts. We can place
Wiliamowitz-​Moellendorf ’s remarks next to Carson’s on Euripidean tragedy: it
“breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers.
Phrases don’t catch them; theories don’t hold them, they have no use. It is a the-
atre of sacrifice in the true sense.”127 What the tragedy pulls open stays open in
Carson’s porous rescripting of the Antigone. Spaces that open in the translation of
an elegy stay open in Nox. There is little consolation and scant lessons in Carson’s
dealings with the texts of both genres. What there is, in Nox and Antigonick, is a
performative openness that won’t be resealed, and which expands as we watch or
read. To seal or leave open what remains of the classical canon is a question faced
by all its translators, but few more so than translators of the fragments of Sappho.
The final chapter of this book reads Carson’s acclaimed translation of this broken
oeuvre, still unfixed, in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho.
 8
Sappho in the Open

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) is not an obvious choice to conclude

the chapters in this book. Carson’s Sappho, a tour de force of translation, has been
reviewed to almost unanimous acclaim and translated in turn into at least one
other language.1 Her edition presents Carson’s English with the extant Greek text
established by Eva-​Maria Voigt en face, a series of brief introductory remarks,
extensive and accomplished notes on the text, a “Who’s Who,” and an appendix
of “Some Exemplary Testimonia.”2 If Not, Winter is something apart from the
performances of working and interpretive “form for the form” that this book
has charted up to now. It is an outlier, too, from the emotions commonly asso-
ciated with Carson’s work. She “makes people uncomfortable,” writes a reviewer
of her most recent work, H of H Playbook (2021), “for she has a hard time being
categorized”; another way of saying that form, if only by affront to our expecta-
tions, never passes unnoticed in her work.3 If the form of this translation is dis-
tinctive, it is a distinctiveness entirely proper to the source text, which Carson’s
facing page mirrors almost exactly. Reviews of If Not, Winter mostly note the
fidelity of the translation and the plainness and elegance of Carson’s English, as
per her stated aim to use the “plainest language I could find” (x). Other readers
are struck by how anomalous the unremarkability of this language is in Carson.
The Classicist and translator Emily Wilson, writing in the London Review of
Books, confirms that “Carson tries to translate nothing which is not in the Greek,
and to follow the original word order and line breaks as far as possible.”4 Emily
Greenwood notes what many readers of Carson’s Sappho—​at least those who go
to it for Carson—​will have been struck by: “Carson has kept her own poetry on
a leash in the translation.”5 Meryl Altman goes further: “Given the art Carson
[has] made before by taking liberties with the lives and lines of others, what she
wants now, it seems, is to respect distance and difference.”6
The benchmark for readers’ expectations of what Carson might have done with
a sheaf of fragments in Classical Greek is perhaps Autobiography of Red (1998),
published and rave-​reviewed (by Alice Munro and Susan Sontag, among others)
four years before If Not, Winter. Out of the remnants of Stesichoros’s epic, the
Geryoneis, Carson produced a modern-​day, novel-​length prose poem complete
with an introductory essay, renderings of the surviving fragments in English, and
outlandish mock-​scholarly paratexts. Contrast this outlandishness and scholarly
errancy with the wishes Carson proclaims to be behind If Not, Winter: “I like

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0009
 Sappho in the Open 203

to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through.
This is,” she admits, “an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most
translators labor” (x). “Transparency of self,” we have seen, is a complex desire
in Carson. On other occasions where she invokes transparency, “distance and
difference” have appeared on the point of collapse: in the emotively charged
citational poetics of “The Glass Essay,” or in the “poem scratched on glass” that is
her “fictional essay” on Keats, where the lyric foreground and scholarly working
background of the reading are apprehended in a single, horizontal vocal texture.
No reviewer has asked where Carson or her poetry is in these readings. None
has spoken of leashed poetics or respectful distance in her translations of the
Antigone or her versions of Plato’s Symposium and Euripides’s Helen.
What readers and scholars have asked, for more than two millennia, is where
Sappho is. In Monique Wittig and Sande Zweig’s Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a
Dictionary, the entry for Sappho is a blank page.7 The twelfth-​century poet and
grammarian Joannes Tzetzes lamented that the illustration of Sapphic meter was
only possible using examples from other poets’ work.8 In Jeanette Winterson’s
experimental novel, Art and Lies (1994), Sappho herself leads the inquiry: “I have
a lot of questions, not least WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?
When I turn the pages of my manuscript my fingers crumple the paper, the paper
breaks up in burnt folds . . . I can no longer read my own writing.”9 As Margaret
Reynolds notes, Sappho cannot read her own writing because “the writing is not
hers.”10 Reynolds alludes to the widely known fact that Sappho has been quoted,
misquoted, impersonated, imitated, bowdlerized, paraphrased, and fictionalized
like few other authors in the history of Western literature.11 A good deal of the
very little Sappho we have—​what Carson calls “stranded verse” and “exempla
without context” (xii, xi)—​comes to us in the form of citations, where Sappho’s
lyric song was used to illustrate points of grammar, meter, Aeolic dialect, and
poetic sensibility. Carson describes “still more haunting instances” where con-
text is supplied without the exempla, where anecdotes float unstrung from the
songs they recall but fail to cite.12 Given that “fictions of Sappho” are de rigueur,
citational poetics part of her writing’s history, it is easy to imagine why Carson
chose not to give her fragments the Autobiography of Red treatment, or that of
the wry anachronistic poem, “TV Men: Sappho” in Men in the Off Hours.13 When
the accidental ontology of the Sappho fragment asks loud enough questions of its
own about form and authorship, why use a different form, an active “mistake” or
a fictional interpolation, to mime or elucidate its power?
This chapter puts forward If Not, Winter as the unlikely work that best
illustrates what form—​in particular, mimetic or performative form—​is for
Carson, and what, at the level of emotion, interpretation, and self-​relation, is at
stake there. What follows is a reading of If Not, Winter as a translation whose
shape on the page is a concentrated expression of the same mimetic instincts
204 Open Translation

that drive form across Carson’s writing. I return to Carson’s early theorizations
of mimesis to suggest that the idea of performative form in her work begins life
as a theory of lyric—​more specifically, as a set of close readings of Sapphic lyric.
I return to these early texts by way of some of Carson’s more recent writing on
the subject of translation to ask, and hopefully respond to, the question of what
Carson’s Sappho is exactly, and what this thrilling translator of Ancient Greek
hopes to achieve by reproducing the original material drama of the papyri on
which Sappho’s poems have been found as a drama of textual form at the very
limits of textuality. Here, where textuality is used to transact the non-​textual (the
material, the sensible, silence), the word (logos) balances on the edge of its sym-
bolic value and participates in the visual concretion of the image (eikon) that
borders on semantic emptiness. These mimetic forms are given shape by their
layout on—​their radical conditioning by—​the white space of the page. Carson’s
open translation hopes to put nothing between us and Sappho’s work. To show us
only what preservation, quotation, and accident have bequeathed to literary his-
tory. The “accidental” forms of mimesis that occur in fragments left open, broken
sentences left unfixed, raise the stakes on what the young Carson theorizes as
“lyric mimesis” and its dramatic exchange of action with the reader or listener.
Its open spaces become the stage for our own dramas of interpretation, our own
dizzying movements of mind.

White Paper and Lyric Accident

In an early essay, “Simonides Negative” (1988), Carson offers a speculative ac-

count of Simonides’s invention of four new letters of the Greek alphabet. In a
scene that remembers Plato’s Cratylus, Simonides, Carson imagines, hears sounds
being pronounced that were unaccounted for in the written language: “He sat
down and filled in the absent presences, by means of his poetic mind. Simonides’
is a mind that sees its poetic task clearly: the task is to reject absence wherever it
occurs.”14 In a note on the text, Carson reproduces a short verse extract from the
Chinese poet Lu Chi (ad 261–​303) by way of comparison:

Tax Non-​Being to demand Being

Knock on silence to seek sound
Contain what is endless on a foot of white paper
Utter what is boundless from the square inch of the heart.15

Not only do Lu Chi’s lines share an image repertoire and a lapidary negative di-
alectics with Carson’s reading of Simonides, both here and in Economy of the
Unlost.16 They also belong to an ancient form that, a decade on from her essay,
 Sappho in the Open 205

Carson would herself go on to produce—​a theory of literature written in verse.17

Several such premonitions of what would become the signature tics of Carson’s
thinking and composition appear in these first scholarly essays. The “Essay on
What I Think About Most” in Men in the Off Hours, for example, a book of essays
and poems in various draft forms, is one of several verse redrafts of the arguments
and source material of the early essay, “ ‘Just for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing
Aristotle’s Poetics,” whose reading of Aristotle on error leaves stray iterations all
over Carson’s writing.18 On the Lu Chi stanza, Carson says very little, but what
she does say is worth quoting: “A twentieth-​century mind, by contrast, may rec-
ognize the task [of negative dialectics, sustaining being on non-​being, etc.], but
is inclined to lose heart in the midst of it: ‘Nobody kept answering,’ says Holden
Caulfield, hanging up the telephone.”19
The nobody (or the “nothing”) that answers the poet’s call is the subject of
Economy of the Unlost, where Carson reads Simonides with Celan because both
poets use sound in their poems to transact silence. Both, that is, find ways of
saying “yes,” of answering a call from language, without ceding the “no” that,
in very different ways, underwrites their experiences of it. Poetry held good
for Celan, Carson proposed, until one day it didn’t, and he lost heart in the
midst of the task he had set for himself: taxing non-​being, knocking on silence,
containing what is endless, uttering what is boundless, in the measured space of
poems. Lu Chi’s verse describes what Carson argues Celan and Simonides per-
form in the compact economies of theirs. This performative quality is one of
Carson’s chief objects of interest and among the chief delights of her work. Yet
it is what Simonides and Celan perform—​the weight of a presence that pivots
on absence, forms of life given form by their cancelation, by death, non-​being,
or nothingness—​that Carson will return to time and again: in Nox, in Virginia
Woolf ’s cross-​outs, Emily Dickinson’s ecstatic “I heard a Fly buzz /​When I died,”
Marguerite Porete’s “FarNear,” Simone Weil’s “decreation,” and Sappho’s self-​
observing fragment 31 (“greener than grass I am and dead”).20 Or, in the most
striking example, in her relation to the extant Sappho oeuvre.
Lu Chi’s injunction to “[c]‌ontain what is endless on a foot of white paper” asks
us to think about writing in terms of the page it is written on. The “foot of white
paper” that both alludes to and limits what is endless, is ready to be pressed with
marks that allude to and constrain the endless in a similar way: marks that are
both features in an endless symbolic system of meaning and that potentially se-
cede from that system, acquiring a kind of retinal relief—​once decoupled, that
is, from recognizable grammars and syntax. It is difficult, in the context of this
chapter, to read Lu Chi’s verse without thinking of the very large expanses of
white paper that distinguish the mise-​en-​page of If Not, Winter at regular
intervals; expanses that remind us constantly of what is missing and (the white
paper alludes, just as it constrains) what is without limit. So much white paper is
206 Open Translation

a significant formal decision. Meryl Altman confesses to having used the blank
pages of If Not, Winter as a “workbook,” filling in “its absent presences” in a way
that recalls Carson’s Simonides, inventor of letters, as it does Carson’s anecdote
of a class of eight-​year-​olds drawing on the blank verso of Nox.21 The brackets
littering the pages of Carson’s edition of Sappho—​its most distinctive formal el-
ement together with the abundant blank space—​allude to lines whose original
shape, tonal color, and extension are unknown. Carson justifies the brackets in
the following terms:

Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event. . . . Brackets

are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is
no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or
riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp—​brackets imply a free space
of imaginal adventure. (xi)

The “drama” Carson’s brackets want to reproduce is a drama much like that of
Lu Chi and his metrics for the endless. Formal constraint is—​and has long been
understood to be—​a condition of imaginative possibility, as per Carson’s con-
fession to Peter Constantine that “I like constraints in general, there being no
better freedom.”22 Earlier in the book I quoted an observation from Philippe
Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy that the “presentation” of the fragment
is such that it “does not pretend to be exhaustive”; that “the empty place that
a garland of fragments surrounds is a precise drawing of the contours of the
work.”23 This empty place has no dimensionable shape but that imposed (un-​
exhaustively) by the remains of the poem, which measures the missing as Lu
Chi’s white page measures infinity. Looking at a fragment like 87D (p. 171;
Voigt, p. 95) on the page, our “free space of imaginal adventure,” conjuring the
“contours of the work,” has only one border, straight as an arrow in Carson’s
English text:24

] ]
] ]
]ε̣σθα ]
]ρπον ἄβαν ] youth
] ]
]εσθαι· ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
] ]
 Sappho in the Open 207

On one side of this border is “youth.” On the other side (and, in fact, all around
“youth”) is non-​being, timelessness, residue, longing, what you will. The single
legible word Carson extracts from the combination of legible and partially leg-
ible words in Greek draws its revenue from the empty place to which it offers
an edge, “youth” a lifebuoy on an open imaginal sea; “youth” becomes a kind
of boast of legibility, measured against the holes in the Oxyrhyncus papyrus on
which the fragment was discovered. Its legibility is serendipitous, falling, as it
were, on the right side of death; but in its status as sole survivor of the poem it
seems to embody a form of salvation, a small, pressurized promise of immor-
tality. It is the “green thing” (Das Grün) of Celan’s “Epitaph for François,” carried
over the threshold of “the two doors of the world” and “into your Ever,” the doors
slammed shut behind it. The accident by which this single legible word turns out
to be “youth,” so carrying an exorbitant poetic load, is a shining case of what we
might call lyric accident: the accidental imposition of constraint provoking an
accidental yield of personal imaginative freedom, the twists and turns of which
give us unique insight into what we ourselves want from poems—​perhaps espe-
cially lyric poems, with their promise of intimacy and emotional through-​line.
But the extant Sappho oeuvre is full of such accidents, just waiting for critics and
readers to overdetermine their contingencies, as I have done here. Carson, we
saw in Chapter 1, was accused of something similar by a reviewer of Eros the
Bittersweet, who chided her book for falling “into an illusion of fragmentary
wholeness, a temporary delusion that the fragmentary state of Greek lyric is
structurally intentional.”25 If Not, Winter was criticized, in one of the few nega-
tively tinged reviews of the book, for its reliance on white space, a mode, Daniel
Mendelsohn suggested, of vindicating this kind of delusion: where Sappho
the lyrist and composer of songs is out-​sung by the lure of sheer possibility.26
Carson’s reading of fragment 105a, of which three suggestive lines have survived,
states that “the poem is incomplete, perfectly.”27 That chance has made Sappho’s
original verse a better—​even a “perfect”—​poem.
Lyric accident is not only a symptom of our desire for the words that have
survived, either as a result of historical contingency or the contingencies of cita-
tion (who quoted Sappho and why, and what didn’t they quote). In her introduc-
tory remarks, Carson talks about another space of imaginal adventure, a drama
in parallel to that of the “papyrological event.” She quotes several instances of
what she calls “context without citation,” where what have survived are anecdotes
unmoored from the poems that inspired them:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and
since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When
someone asked why he said, So that I may learn it then die.
—​Stobaios, Florilegium 3.29.58 (p. xiii)
208 Open Translation

In her comments on this piece of context minus exemplum, she writes: “As acts of
deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—​at the inside edge where
her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever
wanted her to write.”28 The Stobaios anecdote places Sapphic song, alluded to
here in its complete form, on the cusp between life and death. This mythic song is
given its sharpness in the anecdote, its metaphysical bite, by the suggestion that
it transacts its own immediate reversal: as though the true métier of poetic song
were to produce silence, not sound. For in the ambiguous consequentiality of
Solon’s pronouncement, the song becomes a siren song, luring us to learn it and
then die, as though the former precipitated (rather than eased or brought reso-
lution to) the latter. The story is lent “drama” by the fact that the song is now im-
possible to place, which can look, in retrospect—​and if what we are looking for
is “drama”—​as though the song already carried fatality and loss within it. There,
Carson suggests, is the deterrent and the thrill. Like the surviving single word
“youth” in fragment 87D, the story of Solon of Athens comes to symbolize what
Carson calls in Economy of the Unlost “the poetic life of an economy of loss.”29 Yet
it does so entirely by accident.
Lyric accident may sound like something of a contradiction in terms—​like
choreographed chance or controlled falling—​but in the sense in which Carson
finds such accidents meaningful, it isn’t. For she doesn’t talk about the fragments
in terms of what they say about Sappho, as performances of her (Sappho’s—​or
even Carson’s) mind moving. The “drama” Carson reproduces—​papyrological
damage mimicked by the gesture of brackets, white space, and stranded, syn-
thetic words—​quite simply has no author. The drama she wants you to partici-
pate in is that of your own mind provoked to thought and its stranding: moved
by gaps and illegibility to acts of spontaneous composition, reasoning, sudden
suspense, and unexpected emotion. The aim of Carson’s mimetic translational
form—​insofar as it is a lyric form—​is for your mind to overhear its own “iterative
and iterable” moves in the present.30 The onus of lyric in the fragment is passed,
whether we like it or not, to us.

“An Open Force Field of Mimetic Energies”

To better understand the kind of drama Carson believes transpires at the outer
limits of the fragment, and which her brackets are put in place to mimic, it is
salutary to turn back to Eros the Bittersweet. The strongest imprint of Carson’s
doctoral thesis is felt in the book between c­ hapters 1 (“Bittersweet”) and 10
(“Alphabetic Edge”), chapters that deal with something Carson calls “logic at
the edge.”31 Carson quotes from Bruno Snell, whose The Discovery of the Mind
(1953) is a linchpin of her thesis: “It is the obstruction [of desire] which makes
 Sappho in the Open 209

the wholly personal feelings conscious . . . [the frustrated lover] seeks the cause
in his own personality.”32 Carson comments: “The self forms at the edge of de-
sire . . . (‘I am more myself than ever before!’ the lover feels) . . . Nowhere in the
Western [literary] tradition is that crisis [of contact] so vividly recorded as in
Greek lyric verse” (39, 41). Carson presents her argument—​from which she says
Snell’s thesis would have benefited—​around the phenomenon of “alphabetic lit-
eracy”: the fact that “the poets who invented Eros, making him a divinity and
a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their
poems in written form. . . . To put the question more pungently, what is erotic
about alphabetization?” (41). Carson’s “logic at the edge,” deepening what she
calls “an ancient analogy between language and love, implicit in the concep-
tion of breath as universal conductor of seductive influences and of persuasive
speech” (55), takes several forms. One is the “special sensibility” of “edges” in
the Greek alphabet (51): the limit imposed on the vowel sound by the conso-
nant (and vice versa), which Greek phonetic script “imitates” (61). Another is
the perceptual limits of textual composition on a page (and as Denys Page argues,
the single words that replace the phrase as units of composition, following the
transition from oral to written culture).33 Finally, the “edges” of self, says Carson,
contract under the constraints of written culture, where the self-​control required
by private reading replaces the “open conduits of the senses” in oral, often public
recital (43). In short, edges of all kinds are sharpened by the private acts of im-
agination fostered and forced by alphabetic script. The first lyric poets to ben-
efit from the “literate revolution,” Carson argues, were given like no poets before
them to describing and imitating the physiological assault of eros on the edges of
body and mind (47). For them, too, she suggests elsewhere, language becomes an
erotic object, a love interest in its own right.34
Among these lyric poets is Sappho, whose fragment 31, a textbook example
of the Sapphic strophe, is an unflinching dramatization of the extreme effects
of eros on the lyric subject of the poem.35 The narrator of fragment 31 is moved
by desire to an extreme state of being, “more herself ” than ever before. So ex-
treme, in fact, that she becomes the embodiment of a paradox: both a self on the
“inside of its definition” (Carson’s words in the “Decreation” essay) and a self
able to apprehend itself from without (“greener than grass /​I am and dead—​or
almost /​I seem to me”).36 Carson’s reading of the poem in the early essay “ ‘Just
for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s Poetics” sets it at the center of an ar-
gument about the “thrill” of “lyric mimesis.”37 Carson puts forward there how
Ancient Greek lyric poems concerned themselves not only with describing com-
plex sentiments aroused by time, death, eros, but with causing them “imitatively”
in the reader.38 Reading another Sappho fragment (55), she talks about the “rea-
soning process” provoked by the imitative microdramas of metrical license and
a performative address to “you”—​the poem’s anonymous female addressee, and
210 Open Translation

“you,” reader, who process the address for her. Her use of the word “reasoning”
is justified, she explains, by Aristotle’s proposition that “all the affects produced
by words fall under the category of reasoning or dianoia” (Poetics, 456a36–​37).39
By the time she reaches fragment 31, Carson is talking about “mimetic action”
as something that transacts familiarity and strangeness, the distance and close-
ness of words, in the same gesture. The famous beginning of Sappho’s poem—​
φαίνεταί μοι (Phainetai moi), “He seems to me”—​reaches out to a third (“He”),
and, in doing so, wrests open a space to feel and reason with this paradox of
distance and closeness. Here, “His” closeness to the beloved measures out the
narrator’s distance:

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴςος θέοιςιν

ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰςδάνει καὶ πλάςιον ἆδυ φωνεί-​
ςας ὐπακούει

He seems to me equal to gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

“The rest of the poem,” Carson says, “is a research through appearance to reality,
beginning and ending . . . with forms of the verb phainesthai [φαίνεςταί, to seem]
and framing a revelation at the core. The action of the poem is in a true sense
spectacular.”40 As desire runs roughshod over the narrator’s senses, what she is
left with at the end of the poem as we have it—​what she sees, what “seems” to her
(phainom’ em’ [φαίνομ’ ἔμ’])—​is herself: “I” (emmi [ἔμμι]):

έκὰδ’ μ’ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ

παῖςαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ‘πιδεύης
φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτᾳι.

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—​or almost
I seem to me.

Carson uses Aristotle’s description of “seeing” or “spectacle” (opsis [ὄψις]) to un-

derstand what exactly has happened here. This drama of complete sensory sub-
jection comes to us courtesy of a narrator in thrall; in thrall, that is, until the final
 Sappho in the Open 211

line of the stanza, when she turns to observe herself “on the brightly lit stage at the
center of her being.” Where “seeming” starts out as something done by an anon-
ymous other (“that man /​whoever he is”), now it is the narrator who “seems” to
herself.41 This translation from sensation to seeming is, Carson understands, an
effect of extreme desire known to the Greeks as ekstasis (“standing outside one-
self ”). Yet it is also, as Carson reads it through Aristotle, a compelling portrait
of mimesis. Aristotle’s terms for what happens in visual spectacle declare that it
“kidnaps the soul” (he de opsis psychagōgikon [ή δὲ ὄψις ψιχαγωγικòν, Poetics,
1450b17). “So too is Sappho’s soul kidnapped by the spectacle of her own mi-
mesis, or so it seems,” Carson concludes.42 This particular spectacle is double.
Imagining the poem sung aloud at a public performance, we can picture how
Sappho’s stunningly visual account of acute physical sensation blends seam-
lessly into the performance of lyric virtuosity (even, or perhaps especially, one
in which the narrator claims—​against the evidence—​that “no speaking /​is left
in me . . . tongue breaks”). Visual and verbal mimesis is signaled and mimicked
from within the poem by Sappho “seeing” and hearing herself, speaking and
announcing her failure to speak, as though in mirror image. Another implica-
tion is that in the experience of erotic delirium is another experience inseparable
from it at the point of expression: Sappho is carried away—​as Socrates is in the
Phaedrus—​by the artful mania of the words that perform eros; by the composi-
tional arts of seeming (phainesthai, mimēsis). Captured by the spectacle of the
poem, this narrator sees and hears herself from without just as—​and at the same
time as—​we do. Her lyric mimesis produces an exchange of action with us as she
occupies our place as its spectator, and as we occupy hers while she “seems” to
herself from without.
At the end of the essay, Carson will suggest that we, the readers of lyric, un-
dergo a similar experience of “seeming” or self-​observation as we experience
the mimetic micro-​dramas of poems that pull us into their emotional strictures,
as in the above (Carson provides several examples in addition to fragments 55
and 31, including fragment 20 of Alkman, in which the poet commits a delib-
erate error with the aim, Carson suggests, of drawing our attention to our own
“reasoning process”).43 This is her account of the inward attention transacted
by poems:

But the question of what exactly it is we enjoy . . . at that moment when the
soul turns to look at its own reasoning process like an actor upon a stage and
intervenes just in time to forestall kidnap, seems to be a question fundamental
to our understanding of Aristotle’s understanding of what poetry is. “No brush
can write two words at the same time,” says the classical Chinese proverb. Yet
Aristotelian mimesis is just such a brush, able to paint knowledge and error
shaking hands with one another in a mirror.44
212 Open Translation

Similar arguments are rehearsed in Economy of the Unlost with regard to the “rad-
ical mimesis” of Simonides’s synthetic sentences.45 A means to render the vis-
ible and the invisible at the same time, she says, “[Simonides’s] medium is words
positioned so as to lead you to the edge where words stop, pointing beyond them-
selves toward something no eye can see and no painter can paint.” Simonides’s
syntax is worked to provide a “picture” (not a description) of the ontology of
which it speaks: binding logos to eikon, words to the immediacy of the image,
Simonides’s synthetic syntax is “mimesis in its most radical mechanism,” per-
forming but also eliciting in the reader a movement of heart or mind. The “little
kidnaps in the dark” that Carson describes in her translation of Catullus “101” in
Nox imagine in similar terms the mind’s capture by something at once sensible
and invisible, an afterimage (or after-​word) that “no eye can see.”46 Mimesis, as
Carson understands it, is “an action of the mind captured on a page” that, in turn,
reproduces that action in the reader: “[reading, then,] is a movement of your-
self through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to
the end you’re different than you were at the beginning.”47 Replicating the “mind
captured on a page,” the reader’s capture or “kidnap” leaves her changed by the
encounter.
Carson is not of course the only scholar to have ascribed these compact and
compelling mimetic effects to lyric poetry. Jonathan Culler’s formula, “the itera-
tive and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present,” suggests a kind of
poetry with immediate and reprisable performative effects, poetry whose “event”
is inseparable from the reader’s present.48 Helen Vendler speaks of comparable
experiences that she says are “appropriate to lyric” in her reading of Shakespeare’s
sonnets. These are minutely perceptible changes in syntactic structure or topic
as strategies that “mimic changes of mind”—​as “[f]‌ormal mimeses of the mind
and heart in action” or, in terms closer to Carson’s, that “mimic the structure of
thinking.”49 Yet it is in the obstruction or degradation of lyric in its complete
form that Carson’s ideas find their boldest exemplum; in the movements of mind
provoked by the accidental and errant textuality of the fragment. Looking at her
description of Simonidean syntax, it is not difficult to make the leap from the
synthetic sentence to the fragment: “words positioned so as to lead you to the
edge where words stop, pointing beyond themselves toward something no eye
can see and no painter can paint.” The radical imposition of line breaks in the
fragment, the radical truncation of sentences, makes for an artificial synthesis
and dialectical valency at least on a par with the most iconic (visual) of syntaxes
or the most judiciously placed punctuation. If Carson’s arguments about ob-
struction, alphabetic edges, heightened self-​perception, and lyric mimesis gloss
experiences that lyric poets are especially attuned to, then what (perhaps more
readily universal) experiences of obstruction and fruition are aroused by the ac-
cidental, authorless edge of the fragment?
 Sappho in the Open 213

The following several examples from If Not, Winter show how fragmentation
participates in the “radical mimesis” Carson locates in Sappho and Simonides.
These fragments take their cache of meaning and desirability principally from
the “edge where words stop.” Several have a history of strong philological con-
jecture and fantasy (it is not just Greekless readers who run with the lures of
the fragment). I begin with fragment 22, from which Carson’s edition of Sappho
takes its captivating title, reproduced here as per Carson’s mise-​en-​page:50

]βλα . [ ]
]εργον, . . λ᾿α . . [ ]work
]ν ῤέθος δοκιμ̣[ [face
]ησθαι ]
]ν αὐάδην χ . [ ]
δ]ὲ μή, χείμων[ if not, winter
].οιςαναλγεα . [ ]no pain
]δε ]
.]. ε .[ . . . ] . [. . . κ]έλομαι ς . [ ]I bid you sing
. .] . γυλα . [ . . . ] α̣νθι λάβοισα . ἀ . [ of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up
πᾶ[κτιν, ἆς̣ ςε δηὖτε πόθος τ̣ . [ your lyre as (now again) longing
ἀμφιπόταται floats around you,

τὰν κάλαν· ἀ γὰρ κατάγωγις αὔτ̣α[ you beauty. For her dress when you saw it
ἐπτόαις᾿ ἴδοιςαν, ἐγὼ δὲ χαίρω, stirred you. And I rejoice.
καὶ γαρ αὔτ̣α δή πο[τ᾿] ἐμέμφ[ In fact she herself once blamed me
Κ]υπρογέν[ηα Kyprogeneia

ὠ̣ς ἄραμα̣[ι because I prayed

τοῦτο τὦ[ this word:
β]όλλομα̣[ι I want

The mise-​en-​page of Carson’s Greek text replicates that of Eva-​Maria Voigt’s

standard edition almost exactly, and is identical in its placement of parentheses
and ellipses. Reviewing Carson’s version, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis has drawn a
fascinating speculative history of the tantalizing phrase “if not, winter” (δ]ὲ μή,
χείμων[, line 6 in the above), beginning with the fusion of two texts—​fragments
22A and 22B—​by Edgar Lobel in 1925, a fact neither Voigt’s nor Carson’s text
indicates.51 That Carson was lured by this particular “fragmented ‘poetic’ image”
is apparently nothing new. The image’s reconstruction by scholars almost as soon
214 Open Translation

as the Oxyrhynchus papyri came to light (P. Oxy, 1231, printed as fragments
12 and 15 in Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt’s 1914 English
edition) has its origins in a rendering suggested by Wiliamowitz-​Moellendorff
and reproduced in a conjectural note to the English edition. Yatromanolakis
provides a genealogy of the image’s adaptation and adoption as a convention in
subsequent editions, in spite of the original line’s grammatical ambiguity and
our hampered knowledge of Sappho’s literary dialect. In “if not, winter” (δ]ὲ μή,
χείμων[) the first and last letters are inferences, the first being a conjecture that,
for Yatromanolakis, doesn’t quite hold up.52 Yet the image “if not, winter” has
held up, and is now, despite its conjectural origins, almost universally favored.
The image, says Yatromanolakis, “was to be considered especially attractive (and
appropriate for Sappho’s aesthetics) by classical scholars and readers of archaic
Greek literature. The fragmentary image was to endure time and even to become
an integral part of Sappho’s surviving poetry.”53 This history of conjecture and
poetic value judgment is part of what Sappho is and, Yatromanolakis’s account
suggests, always has been. “[W]‌hat is Sappho’s text, anyway?,” he asks.54
I’d like to pose a follow-​up question. Can we close-​read fragment 22? Analysis
of poetry in translation is an exercise apart from reading in the original. Yet
the pool of conjecture through which Voigt, Grenfell and Hunt, or Denys Page
have trawled to establish their Greek texts laps at the edges of any reading of
the English, whose instability—​and whose provisionality, for any reading of a
fragment is provisional—​must be recognized and even embraced. Margaret
Williamson has written on what we can, with some degree of certainty, infer
from the incomplete poem. Fragment 22 offers us an arrangement of “sub-
ject positions” not unlike the triangular tableau of fragment 31.55 The poem
has a speaker, an addressee (“you”), and a third (“Gongyla,” whose praises our
speaker asks Abanthis to sing). As Williamson notes, the song of Abanthis—​the
projected future tense of the poem—​corresponds to the poem we are reading or
hearing in the present.56 No sooner does the narrator conjure Abanthis than she
steps into her shoes, taking up her lyre “(now again)” in a deictically surcharged
present tense. Carson’s notes on the translation contain a reference to the perfor-
mative “(now again),” including an interpolation which Carson also employs in
fragments 1 and 130. “The parentheses are not Sappho’s,” she says,

. . . but I want to mark her use of the temporal adverb dēute [δηὖτε]. It is prob-
ably no accident that, in a poem about the cyclical patterns of erotic experience,
this adverb of repetition is given three times. . . . Dē is a particle signifying viv-
idly that some event is taking place in the present moment; it strikes a note of
powerful alert emotion (sometimes a tinge of irony or skepticism), like [the]
English “Well now!” (357)
 Sappho in the Open 215

Carson’s interest in the “now” takes us from her early work on the lover’s claims
on time to her scholarship’s compelling case against anachronism, summed
up by her as “[a]‌ll time is now.” Deictics and performatives, records and
provocations of “alert emotion” and “event,” are her own grammar of choice in
exposures of a present moment of thought and reading that would exchange its
action with ours in another present. Emily Greenwood notes the curious ab-
sence of any reference in this and other notes in the edition to Carson’s own
rich scholarly work on the erotics of the present tense in Sappho and on erotic
temporality in Ancient Greek lyric in general (the chapter “Now Then” in Eros
the Bittersweet, for example).57 Yet her introductory text throws up a striking
parallel between Sappho’s temporal adverb, with its “tinge” and “note,” and the
sensations of translating her, which take their place alongside other descriptions
by Carson of the emotions of handling texts. Carson describes hearing
“Sappho’s echo,” picking up an earlier reference to Walter Benjamin’s “echo of
the original”: “I am never quite sure how to hear Sappho’s echo but, now and
again, reading these old citations, there is a tingle” (xii). “Tingle” and “thrill”
index a kind of understanding that brooks no description, like the “gold trace
in the mind” left by certain verses of Celan.58 The “tingle” felt “now and again”
is where the poem stretches out of its deictic scheme, its cues and references to
the imagined conditions of its performance, and reaches us, as we saw Celan
imagine poems arriving continually at their destiny.59 Carson’s remarks in the
McNeilly interview float once again into view:

The ancient poets thought of the publication of a poem as the time of saying
it, and the time of saying it is also the time of it being heard, and that’s the time
when there’s an exchange of that action, that verb, whatever the verb is that’s
being described. The verb happens.60

Whether or not the “I” of a lyric or choral song is a definite, possessive “I,” or an
“I” or “we” with whom we are supposed to identify (“if those intense expressions
of individual subjective yearning were written . . . for performance by large
choruses of young girls who sang Sappho’s songs at public occasions,” as Daniel
Mendelsohn wonders); whether or not the song allows for exchanges of action
between the “creative” role of the composer-​author and the ostensibly “recre-
ative” role of the performer (as Gregory Nagy argues of Provençal lyric): per-
haps “at the time of it being heard,” these things don’t matter.61 When the verb
“happens,” it happens to us. Deictic cues like “you” and “we,” even “I,” whomever
they are speaking to and for, speak to and for us. In fragment 22, “her dress when
you saw it /​stirred you”—​and so we do see it, and so it does. The imperative to see
without seeing or to see unwillingly—​Elaine Scarry’s “Imagine this. Now.”—​can
itself be stirring.62
216 Open Translation

The final “I want” of fragment 22, final because the fragment breaks off legi-
bility there, happens to us in the reading insofar as it accounts for the stranded,
objectless desire of reading it. As Stephanie Burt says of Nox and If Not, Winter,
“we encounter a book full of spaces where poems cannot be, spaces that say what
we cannot have.”63 What Carson has professed to “value most” in translation is
“the way meaning disappears into the gaps” between words in the source and
target languages.64 Where Carson’s “apparatus” and “emptiness” (brackets and
blank space) provide space for the experience of desire, fantasy, and their cur-
tailment, we might say that what her translation achieves is a form that makes
reading Sappho a close-​up inquiry into what we want from her, and what we
“cannot have,” what “disappears.” (This echoes the sentiments of Page DuBois’s
and Margaret Reynolds on the desire-​provoking “body” of Sappho’s work but
doesn’t share their terms for it: as Emily Wilson has noted, “textual bodies are
not really much like physical bodies. For one thing, their gender is indetermi-
nate.”)65 Any close reading of Sappho that hopes to be both responsive and re-
sponsible must recognize its reliance on lacunae; that its moments of definition
are a product, not just of the words, but the uncertainties and rough edges of
Sappho’s poems. Carson’s edition is transparent in this regard, reproducing its
dependency on edges and white space for all to see.
Where Mendelsohn’s critique of Carson’s Sappho seems to be justified is in
fragment 176, for example, which Carson reproduces as “lyre lyre lyre” (the
original Greek reads “βάρβιτος. βάρωμος. βάρμος.,” described in Carson’s gloss
as “cited by Athenaios [Deipnosophistai 4.182f] free-​associating on different
spellings of the word lyre” [barbiton], 349, 382). Here, the invitation to read the
sequence of strumming dactyls, or three single strums in the English, as per-
forming the music it describes—​“lyre” imitating the lyre—​clearly is a case of ab-
sence transacting presence, the loss of almost all of the original poem yielding a
felicitous anti-​poem in its wake. In “lyre lyre lyre” it is the noun that “happens.”
Postmodern aesthetics, Mendelsohn argues, give us our taste for poems like
these—​what Burt calls the “minimalist visual poems” of Carson’s Sappho—​in
which repetition, empty signs, and performatives are sites of unreconstructed
aura.66 Similarly, fragment 118, where Sappho addresses her lyre—​“yes! radiant
lyre speak to me /​become a voice” (241)—​seems to ask the music, the medium
accompanying its original performance, to carry forward into the medium of
its reading in the here-​and-​now, in words and voice alone.67 It is difficult to
deny the fleeting charm of these accidental performatives. Yet the danger is—​as
Mendelsohn seems to warn—​that they out-​sing the lyricism that has survived
in Sappho; not the lyricism of accident, but of well-​tuned, expressly longing
lyric song.
The charm of “if not, winter,” then, is a compelling expression of what many
of Carson’s readers find in If Not, Winter. Not just the aesthetics of fragmentary
 Sappho in the Open 217

syntax and the “open work,” but the aesthetics of Carson’s fragmentary syntax as
modeled by her poems. Many of the shorter fragments, as well as longer ones such
as fragment 22, have something unmistakably Carson about them. (Fragment
22, curiously, contains an exact phrase—​“you beauty”—​spoken by the narrator’s
lover in “The Glass Essay.”)68 This struck me on my first reading of the transla-
tion more than ten years ago. But the question of Carson’s own poetics, obliquely
“cited” or recalled in the edition, sneaked up on me again on discovering that
the translation had been translated into a third language, creating a “trilingual
edition” of Carson’s Sappho. Whose poetry, I wondered, is being translated here?
The obvious and likely answer is Carson’s and Sappho’s. Yet it bears considering
that if Carson’s aim in her English version is to stand out of the way, transparent
so that Sappho shows through, then a trilingual edition seems to query, if not
to trash, this aim: to suggest there is something in Carson’s English—​some
“Carson” quality—​that is not exactly in the Sappho; or that what we recognize in
Carson’s writing is an aesthetics profoundly influenced by the look and sound of
uncorrected Sappho.
It goes without saying that, on the one hand, the poetic aesthetics of any his-
torical moment bleed into its dominant aesthetics of translation, and, on the
other, that the aesthetics of the fragment have long influenced the aesthetics of
poetic composition—​as famously in the case of Imagists Ezra Pound and H. D.,
both of whom wrote fragments after Sappho.69 Bruce Whiteman has proposed
that the prevailing notion of how Greek lyric poetry “should” sound is condi-
tioned by a canonized aesthetics of Imagism, reflected in Mary Barnard’s cele-
brated translation, just as the aesthetics of Modernist poetry are, to some degree,
conditioned by the aesthetics of the fragment.70 Yet If Not, Winter is no latecomer
to the Imagist celebration of Sappho. Let’s look now at what it is Carson seems to
be celebrating in Sappho and her accidental lyric economy.

“No Sound”: Lyric and Emptiness

In remarks made to John D’Agata, Carson describes what she calls the “enchanting
white space” around the fragment prompting us to imagine “all the experience of
antiquity floating but which we can’t quite reach.”71 Fully formed narrative gives
us “just too many words,” she says: “too many other words that aren’t just the
facts.”72 Carson acknowledges in the D’Agata interview that her “painting notion”
of writing, producing a mimetic shorthand of the kind she locates in Simonides,
comes from “dealing with classical texts . . . like Sappho. . . .”73 In the Introduction
I quote from a different interview, in which Carson says she aspires to write so as
to leave an impression in the mind “no matter what the words mean.”74 There is a
considerable jump from descriptive shorthand to semantic emptiness. Yet both
218 Open Translation

depend on—​and make claims for—​the power of mimetic syntaxes like Sappho’s
and Simonides’s. The final part of this chapter explores some of the ways in which
the pressurized forms of the fragment have left their mark on Carson’s work.
The incomplete conditionals of the poem “Seated Figure with Red Angle by
Betty Goodwin (1988),” first published three years before If Not, Winter, are
expressions of the extreme constraints and imaginative efficacy of suspended
syntax. Forcing poetic consequence out of grammatical inconsequentiality, the
incomplete “If not, winter” is evoked in the docked syntax of “Seated Figure”—​“If
to care for her is night.,” and so forth—​where conditionality is an artifice, not a re-
sult of accidental damage.75 Another strong example is the early poem sequence,
“The Life of Towns,” whose opening mock-​scholarly preface begins, “Towns are
the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear your winter.” In the
poems of “The Life of Towns,” the verse doesn’t enjamb but end-​stops paratacti-
cally like a torn papyrus, creating new and surprising units of sense: “Every day.
/​Opposed us like a wall. /​We went. /​Shouting sideways at one another. /​Along
the road it was useless.” read the opening lines of “Apostle Town.”76 Carson picks
up the elliptical pear/​winter refrain later in her preface:

What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for
one another? . . . there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see
pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate your-
self as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of
another kind—​back into real emptiness, some would say.77

The structure imagined here is one we have seen Carson read in the “radical mi-
metic economy” of Simonides and Paul Celan, in which compact, iconic syntaxes
draw on a cache of invisibility and silence. We cannot speak of a deliberate
“economy” of the fragment, but we can see the same kinds of pressure exerted
on words by radical, if accidental, formal constraint. Pear and winter become
variants for one another, the suggestion is, in a “place” where there is nothing
else to crowd them out; where their contiguity becomes a distilled form of met-
aphor, a perfect “mistake” of the kind Carson theorizes in “ ‘Just for the Thrill’ ”
and “Essay on What I Think About Most,” riffing on Aristotle’s theories of literary
and visual mimesis. Pear/​winter become the proverbial impossibility of Carson’s
Chinese proverb in the “Essay on What I Think About Most”: “Brush cannot
write two characters with the same stroke.”78 While Carson’s interest in Chinese
proverbs, and in Chinese verse such as Lu Chi’s, merits an essay of its own, it is
significant that the Chinese ideogram is—​as Ezra Pound understood—​a form
of visual mimesis that the Ancient Greek fragment sometimes comes close to
approximating. (Pound had read the work of Hispano-​American art historian
 Sappho in the Open 219

Ernest Fenollosa, whose The Chinese Character as a Medium for Written Poetry
(1936) was edited by Pound following Fenollosa’s death.)79 The “real emptiness”
promised by the ideogram—​an Orientalist fantasy if ever there was one—​is, in
Carson’s image of pear/​winter, an emptiness bound to a “place” where we “stand,”
not a language we use.80 Carson knows the place, we might say, because it is (or
stands for) the place of her early academic training—​the empty, echoing place
surrounding all fragments of Classical Greek.
Below are the final broken lines of fragment 94, a poem whose first stanzas
are complete (“I simply want to be dead. /​Weeping she left me . . . ,” and whose
narrator ventriloquizes a beloved who addresses the poet from inside the poem
(“Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you”).81 Carson translates the poem’s
final broken tercets as follows:

κωὔτε τις[ οὔ]τ̣ε̣ τι and neither any[ ]nor any

ἶρον οὐδ’ ὐ[ ] holy place nor
ἔπλετ’ ὄππ̣[οθεν ἄμ]μες ἀπέσκομεν, was there from which we were absent

οὐκ ἄλςος . [ ] . ρος no grove[ ]no dance

]ψόφος] no sound
] . . .οιδιαι [

Taking Carson’s rendition of these threadbare tercets, we can see that what has
survived in the first is a set of negations stripped of two out of three of their
objects: “neither any,” “nor any /​holy place,” “nor.” What is left of the remaining
lines is yet more negation, whose objects are named in order to be ruled out
(“grove,” “dance,” “sound,” and another, illegible word in the final line of the
Greek). As well as ruling them out, the naming of these places has an affirmative,
deictic function: pointing to the performance of the poem itself, saying “this”
place, “this” dance (. ρος is interpreted here as the remains of χό̣ρος—​choros, the
circular dance accompanying ritual song in Ancient Greek celebration and per-
formance).82 All that you are now witnessing—​even the song you are hearing—​,
it says: the poem’s lovers were all of this. All groves, all dances, all sound, because
absent from none.
The deictic invocation of place, dance, and song in fragment 94 registers as
descriptive and sensory plenitude, but the plenitude is conjured by means of a
sequence of negatives: No grove . . . no dance . . . no sound. The song seems to
draw attention to itself in order to cancel itself out, dismantling its deictic world
in the same gesture as it is invoked. It asks the listener to imagine the absence
220 Open Translation

of place, spectacle, song, in order to grasp the plenitude of the lovers and the
magnitude of the singer-​composer’s loss. Real and imagined empty space—​
including, as we read it, the missing words and verses of the original—​are made
to pull the beloved’s weight here. In the poem “Epitaph: Evil,” Carson imagines a
comparable operation: “To get the sound” we must “take everything that is not
the sound” and listen as it falls in a well, plumbing what the sound is not, for
the contours of what it is.83 The poem then asks us to drop the sound and to
listen as the difference between sound and not-​the-​sound “shatter[s]‌.” Lu Chi’s
Daoist theory of literature has it that writing trains us in the same negative dis-
cipline: “Knock on silence to seek sound /​Contain what is endless on a foot of
white paper.” In what remains of fragment 94, the lovers’ presence and their fate
disappear (to quote Carson’s essay on “Stillness”) “into what Japanese poets call
‘the silence between two thoughts’ (jikan).”84 This silence, like the nowhere, the
“nor,” “neither,” and “no” from which the lovers were absent, is given sensible
form by the fragment, with its unheard melodies and white spaces. As meaning
pours into the gaps, the open structure—​the unmarked paper—​vibrates with its
disappearance, to paraphrase Economy of the Unlost. Other sounds, other losses,
might then install themselves.
Carson remarked to D’Agata, we saw, that narrative, as opposed to fragmen-
tary forms, offers “too many other words that aren’t just the facts.” In a more re-
cent interview, she describes her first encounter with the fragments of Sappho: “I
had little interest in writing as a child and still seem to approach writing as a very
complicated, rule-​bound form of drawing . . . when I discovered Sappho at age
15 the physicality of ancient poetry (transmitted via the mystique of the frag-
ment) fitted easily into this aesthetic.”85 It is not only that the letters of the Greek
alphabet, as Carson says, “seemed to me fantastic drawings,” but that the distri-
bution of fragments in a layout like Voigt’s and Carson’s approaches the pure for-
malism of concrete poems. A recent collaboration of Carson’s with artist Jenny
Holzer (Cliff Sappho, 2013) brought this home, as Holzer carved fragments of
Sappho (in Carson’s translation) into the rocks at Ekeberg Park in Oslo. At a dis-
tance, these land-​art interventions render the Sappho fragments monumental
ideograms, concrete poems set into the landscape.86
Readers of the pamphlets of Float will know that the non-​discursive visual mi-
mesis of the fragmented papyrus is almost precisely how she describes what she
has long been trying to say about translation. Here is her confession in the exper-
imental lecture, “Cassandra Float Can,” whose remarks on prophecy I discussed
in the previous chapter:

Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page. It is a page
with “Essay on Translation” at the top and then quite a few paragraphs of good
strong prose. These begin to break down towards the middle of the page. Syntax
 Sappho in the Open 221

decays. Perforations appear. By the end there is not much left but a few flakes of
language roaming near the margins, looking as if they want to become an art of
pure shape.87

What Carson describes is the deliberate impoverishment of description, nar-

rative, “good strong prose,” in a writing that performs the decompositional
journey of lyric poem to fragment. The “flakes of language” and “art of pure
shape” that result are not only how Carson has experienced translation
(translating Sappho), but a lesson in compositional artifice she has derived
from translating an accidental “shape.” The experience of deliberation and dis-
cipline has resulted, she also suggests, in a practice she can’t quite control—​that
imposes itself like a tic or contingency (“I feel I spend my whole life rewriting
the same page”).
As it happens, Carson goes on to perform this rewriting, with its
decompositional ebb, in the prose of the lecture. “Cassandra Float Can” is about
forms of non-​discursive shorthand. It begins with the sharp, untranslatable cry
of Cassandra in the Agamemnon, moving to the shorthand of phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl (an algebra that would “disrupt or cut through” what she calls
the “usual sequence of conceptual and syntactic formation”), and ending with
the architectural interventions of American anarchitect, Gordon Matta-​Clark.
Clark’s work, she explains, consisted of cuts of various kinds in the surfaces and
structures of buildings “to make volume visible” or turn the space “into an ab-
stract of itself,” interventions through which the building summarizes its own
construction. The lecture is one of several strong expressions of Carson’s com-
mitment to mimetic or performative form (close to the “sensible form” of another
lecture, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent”), in which form transacts
meaning immediately without having to spell it out. Each of these forms involves
cutting into and excising material in order to extract a shorthand or “abstract” of
the discourse in question—​the architecture of a building, Cassandra’s “grief more
deep than me,” and so on.88 Beginning with several printed pages of block prose,
“Cassandra Float Can” gets distilled down through several “cuts” of its content
(“Original Cut,” “Birthday Cut”), reduced in the “Final Cut” to the “few flakes of
language” and “an art of pure shape” that Carson begins the lecture by describing.
The “Final Cut” bears all the hallmarks of a lyric fragment: the vertical gash of
its mise-​en-​page recalls Carson’s English in If Not, Winter. Its “idea” of form, we
have been told, is one of abstraction—​producing an “abstract” or “shorthand” of
the lecture’s “good strong prose.” The “Final Cut,” reproduced below, purports to
perform “just the facts”—​the bone structure of Carson’s lecture—​excising “the
usual sequence” of lecturers’ syntax. The remaining words, a shorthand thriving
on the emptiness around it, “vibrates” (as in Economy of the Unlost) with the “dis-
appearance” of sequential exposition:89
222 Open Translation

If
gigantic
veils
bounce
silence
offside
screaming
these
etymologies
float
until
lunch
broke
alas
just
exit
!

We cannot reduce the drama of Sappho to visual mimesis, to “kidnaps in the

dark” (Nox), arts of pure shape, and the semantic emptiness of “iconic grammar.”
What we can take from the formal choices of Carson’s edition is a sense of its
continuity with the constraints employed in her own compositions and the
commitments expressed in her scholarship. Carson’s “art of pure shape” has a
long history in her experiments in lecture and talk formats, which it is the task
of the Postscript to reflect on now in a form of conclusion. Carson’s minimalist
ending to the lecture draws on the performative force of abstraction and, on the
page, concrete visual poetics. In doing so, it reminds us why the combination of
non-​expository, sensible forms with exposure of process or explanation—​what
Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls “un-​transparent textuality” with the lyric transpar-
ency of Carson’s scholarship—​proves so compelling.90 Abstract or fragmentary
poetics can be understood as expressions of reticence and indifference to their
readers, but they can also be seen, as I suggest we see Carson’s, as an invitation
to relation. The critic and art historian Michael Fried’s much-​cited essay on the
theatricality of minimalist or “literalist” gesture in art asks us to recognize that
their withdrawal from discursive or figural relation—​the very little they appear
to have to say—​is these works’ way of courting subject/​object drama and its self-​
conscious duration.91 “Interactive lectures” and other recent performance works
at the center of my postscript court the relation of “action[s]‌of the mind” by
means transparent and untransparent. They remind us, too, just how important
the function of teaching remains to Carson’s project; teaching that draws open
 Sappho in the Open 223

rather than closes down the full emotional cache of working with letters, words,
voices, and white space.
Facing a painstaking and interminable search for “true” or “original” Sappho,
finally, perhaps love lyric as a genre has the last word. Vendler has some sur-
prising remarks about the relation between how lyric “mimic[s]‌changes of
mind” and what she calls “semantic emptiness.”92 Perhaps, the shape of Sappho’s
original lyric, too, is fairly simple, a shorthand for the lover’s slim repertoire of
claims:

. . . the wish of interpreters of poems to arrive at something they call “meaning”

seems to me misguided. . . . Lyric poetry, especially highly conventionalised
lyric of the kind represented by [Shakespeare’s] Sonnets, has almost no signif-
icant freight of “meaning” at all, in our ordinary sense of the word. “I have in-
somnia because I am far away from you” is the gist of one sonnet. . . . The poet
Frank O’Hara had a better sense for the essential semantic emptiness of love
lyrics, when he represented them (in his poem “Blocks”) as saying “I need you,
you need me, yum yum.”93
 Postscript
Short-​Talking

Taking to the stage for a lecture on “Corners” at the City University of New York
(CUNY) in 2018, Carson offers to begin “with a ‘short talk’ of the interactive
nature.”1 “A ‘short talk,’ when it’s an interactive one,” she explains, “is a thirteen-​
second lecture that has a part by me and a part by you, which come together
to form a short meaning.” The “short talk,” two words Carson lilts into one in
pronunciation, is a subgenre coined in the 1992 collection, with a few one-​off
exemplars appearing in her later writing.2 The piece performed at CUNY turns
out to be one of the shortest of the original Short Talks. The part by Carson is
just over two lines long, reproduced below in standard typescript; the audi-
ence, whom Carson splits into what she calls “Chorus A” and “Chorus B,” recite
the final, cursive line as two consecutive strophes (A: “let’s buy it,” B: “what a
bargain!”).

SHORT TALK ON THE SENSATION OF AEROPLANE TAKEOFF

Well you know I wonder, it could be love
running towards my life with its arms up
yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!3

In the brief collaborative event that is the result—​“the most fun you’re gonna have
for an hour”—​the audience perform the yelling onrush of love, a pantomime an-
tistrophe to Carson’s deadpan inquiry. Carson knows what this makeshift double
chorus shares with the Chorus of Greek tragedy, the medium by which action is
reproduced—​rises to the surface of the drama—​as knowledge. The Chorus, like
Carson’s improvised chorus here, interprets the performance in real time. This
chorus is the guarantor of Carson’s short meaning, whose coalescence, or at least
the desire for it, is confirmed by laughter and applause.4 The interpretation she
manages to secure in these thirteen-​plus seconds is double. For while we “read”
what happens between us and Carson, between ourselves and other members
of the audience, we are also the interpreters of a score—​performers, actors,
accomplices in ensuring an original “sensation,” mimed in the textual event of
the “Short Talk,” happens again in the short space of the performance. Finishing
Carson’s thought, we become the punch line we have been expecting but which,

Anne Carson. Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197680919.003.0010
 Postscript 225

nonetheless, takes us by surprise: the sensation of unexpectedness on which the

“Short Talk” stands or falls.
Carson’s unassuming script could hardly place higher demands on the lec-
ture form to which it lays claim. The three-​line “interactive lecture,” which she
has elsewhere called an “interactive poem,” depends on the kind of mimesis this
book has sought to track throughout her work.5 Instead of describing the “sen-
sation of aeroplane takeoff ” in a disquisition on high speed or the literature of
vertigo, Carson’s “Short Talk” dramatizes a scenario that mimics its mix of fri-
volity, fast, unpunctuated elation, and sublime panic. This textbook example of
the performative in Carson marshals synthetic effects to imitate her sensation;
an unbroken slipstream from lyric “I” into “you” and into the “yelling” voice of
love, which our participation turns into a live crash of voices and intentions, a
real-​time partage des voix.6 The way in which it is a talk “on” “aeroplane take-​
off ” recalls the “on” of Carson’s “essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth,” a fic-
tional essay that, we saw, is “on” Keats to the degree that it talks us through a
scenario whose stakes and questions are analogous to and aslant those of Keats.
Remember the pròs of Economy of the Unlost: “toward, upon,” but also “against,
with, ready for, face to face, engaging, concerning, touching.”7
The “talk” is mimetic, then, in the way Carson theorizes mimesis in her early
writing: as an experience of dianoia or emotional reasoning thrown into relief—​
and reproduced in whoever witnesses it—​by metaphor, grammar, meter; by the
synthetic shocks, syntactic shifts, iconic presentations, and other “true mistakes”
of poetry. In fact, the simplest way to read the “Short Talk on the Sensation of
Aeroplane Takeoff ” is as the activation of one of these “mistakes,” so that one
scenario resists and then unexpectedly converges with another—​the Aristotelian
“How true, and yet I mistook it!” moment of Carson’s “Essay on What I Think
About Most.”8 For this to work, “love running towards my life” must be “love
running towards my life” and the exponential thrust, lateral smudge, and lifting
inner rift of “aeroplane take-​off,” which in turn roars with the full-​tilt landing of
love. Coming just before what is billed as a lecture (on “Corners”), this small the-
atrical event offsets the main act in curious ways (querying the lecture form and
the lecture as performance is just one of them). Yet it also invites us to scan back
over Carson’s trajectory in search of the “talk” and the “lecture” as a history of
encounters between performative form and live, increasingly collaborative per-
formance. To inquire into how what began as the intimate, text-​driven form of
the “Short Talk” has evolved into an unreconstructed academic “happening.”9
This is where I’d like to situate these final reflections on Carson’s work.
Alongside her growing volume of translations and adaptations of Greek drama
to date, with Euripides a clear favorite and collaboration a preferred method,
Carson’s mainstay in recent years has been the more-​or-​less experimental, more-​
or-​less academic lecture. From her 2016 collaborative “Lecture on the History
226 Postscript

of Skywriting,” a dark-​toned cross-​weave of Creation myths and “footnotes”

with Carson in character as “the Sky,” to her Clark Lectures at Trinity College,
Cambridge, which included traditional lectern presentations and dance, Carson’s
lectures plumb a subgenre that emerges in her work in the first decade of this
century with the premieres of “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on
Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets,” “Cassandra Float Can,” “Uncle Falling: A
Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” and her first opera libretto.10 Many of
the most recent lectures are delivered at academic venues, the highlight of com-
parative literature or critical theory programs, and are a testament to an appetite
in Humanities departments not just for Carson but for what her work has come
to represent. Rather than read these recent lectures as a complement to Carson’s
writing or a phenomenon apart from her early, text-​based “essays” and “talks,”
I want to sketch out a rough lineage between the constrained mimetic energies
of the “Short Talk” and these recent, notably long-​form presentations that deal—​
contra the “Short Talk” form—​in exorbitance, multiplicity, free association, col-
laboration, and, in a compellingly straightforward sense, in Carson just “talking.”

*
At the start of her lecture on “Stillness,” later published as an essay in Critical
Inquiry, Carson ponders:

How to begin an essay on stillness. Insofar as an essay is a broaching, an inter-

ference, a disruption, a breaking in of me upon you—​your mind a quiet lake,
me jumping into it—​we start with some discussion of quiet as disquiet. That is
to say, Helen of Troy.11

So far, so Carson in two key senses. First, the transparency of composition, by

which Carson’s reflections on the lecture (“How to begin”) provide both its ar-
gumentative structure and lyric through-​line. Second, the performative non se-
quitur by which, in order to illustrate how the lecture should broach, break, and
jump, Carson does just that—​jumping from “quiet as disquiet” to Helen of Troy.
Carson’s inquiry into stillness travels from the Agamemnon, Sappho, Barthes, and
Sapphic papyrology, to John Cage, Meister Eckhart, Emily Dickinson, Robert
Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Keats, Woolf, Cage again, Sappho again, the
Antigone via Agamben, Derrida, and Proust, ending with the artist and Carson’s
collaborator, Jenny Holzer. This breathless summary is so because Carson’s
lecture—​likewise her published essay—​makes almost no pauses for air. It offers
no cursory justifications or gestures at summing up, except to say, in the final
paragraph, that “there are many stillnesses we didn’t get around to in this essay [/​
lecture].”12 Instead of the “abstract” of a phenomenon or quality (as Carson says
of Gordon Matta-​Clark’s architectural interventions, and as we might say of the
emotional “shorthand” of Short Talks), Carson’s lecture gives us a whole reading
 Postscript 227

list, commented, close-​read, and reflected on in the continuous texture of her

discontinuous inquiry. In a recorded interview with the Argentinian poet, Maria
Negroni, Carson offered that her work has always sought to put the mind’s “mess
of encounter” (“that same mess”) “down on the paper,” a haphazard, intimate
discursivity she compares to the arrangement of books on a bookshelf at home.13
The lecture is a performance of thinking, an exposure of working, that makes no
attempt to peel her sources away from the order and tempo of their encounter, or,
for that matter, from personal memories. In the lecture on “Corners,” she relates
that she cannot read certain scenes of The Odyssey without returning to scenes
of her father during his years of dementia, “as if to collapse the two scenes into a
single false memory.”14
It is no great leap to suggest that one of the things Carson’s work has come
to represent, at least in academic circles, is the creative un-​constraint of schol-
arship; the sabotage of structural prohibitions on experimental form, autobi-
ography, chance procedures, and what Eric Hayot describes as “belle-​lettrism”
(or we might, carefully, call “essayism”) in the contemporary academy.15 In his
illuminating Scholarship and Freedom (2020), Graham Galt Harpham cites Max
Weber’s 1917 lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” in which Weber denounced
“unmediated intimacy” with a source text, or the (quintessentially Carsonian)
concepts of “sublimity, immediacy, and totalization” as “forms of Romantic
or quasi-​theological irrationalism that lay beyond the pale of any inquiry that
claimed validity.”16 In a modern Humanities obsessed with replicable rigors and
scientific outputs (Weber’s “Science,” Wissenschaft, is closer to “scholarship” or
“research”), binding interpretation to chance—​or (which is worse?) binding
it to form—​is likely to be received at best as quaint, “literary,” or “artistic,” all
synonyms for the worst case scenario: speculative or unscientific work.
We have seen ample evidence for Carson’s saboteur relationship with scholar-
ship and its forms. What is surprising is Carson’s embrace of another term, in re-
lation to what she has called “Standard English forms” (having been trained not
in English but Classics). This term, I noted in the Introduction, is the amateur:

the thing about being an amateur is that it opens out that space for the third
thing to happen. If I’m totally professional and locked in to my credentials as a
professional, I can’t let you have a thought about what I am telling you. I have to
make you have my thought about what I’m telling you and I just don’t like doing
that. It’s not teaching, it’s closing off teaching.17

Guy Davenport hinted at something similar in Carson in his 1987 review of Eros
the Bittersweet, where he described the opening of Carson’s inquiry into eros with
Kafka’s short story, “The Top,” as the mark of “a good teacher, enticing us.”18 This
book has sought to make the case for Carson’s writing as performative in the sense
she expressed to McNeilly: reproducing or mirroring an original experience so
228 Postscript

that it might happen again in reading or recital. This is to understand her writing
as an enticement or lure: a set of conditions of possibility for reading closer to
the sensations and activity of words, facts, and ideas. What results can offer the
sublime immediacy of Aristotle’s “visual mimesis,” the immediacy of opsis (he de
opsis psychagōgikon—​visual spectacle that “kidnaps the soul”).
It is fitting, then, that Carson begins her lecture on “Stillness” with an image
of stunning visual—​or rather, synesthetic—​clarity: “your mind a quiet lake,
me jumping into it,” where stillness is brought to us as silence (a “quiet” lake),
and whose jump, then, is the sudden irruption of sound (the sensory “mistake”
mimics and reproduces the impact). “Silence noticed is stillness,” Carson says in
her lecture, and, citing Cage, “Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a
turning around.”19 What Carson finds in Cage’s infamous performed silence—​a
transparent act of sabotage—​has interesting resonances with her own project.
There is their shared concern to mime and induce “changes of mind” (metanoia),
but there is also the relation of both to the complex quality of transparency as
it has been pursued here. Carson discusses Cage’s desire “to silence personal
taste, expressiveness, ego” using “chance operations,” a proposition taken up
by Carson and Currie’s “EgoCircus” workshop in experimental collaboration,
which asks participants to use “objects and gestures to perform ideas,” and which
one participant described as “a reinforcement of what I’ve learned . . . about the
Cage/​Cunningham collaborations.”20 Carson’s relationship to form, as well as
to sources, collaborators, and influences, has striking affinities with Cage’s, and
her experimental lectures inherit clear features of his, such as the collaborative
“Lecture on the Weather” performed in Buffalo in 1975.21
Cage’s “Composition in Retrospect” includes the following mesostic (or
medial-​acrostic) on “DISCIPLINE”:

thoreau saiD the same

thIng
over a hundred yearS ago
i want my writing to be as Clear
as water I can see through
so that what I exPerienced
is toLd
wIthout
my beiNg in any way
in thE way22

We know Carson’s position on the “problem of telling,” on “too much self in

my writing,” on the “amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most
 Postscript 229

translators labor,” on the lyric transparencies of “The Glass Essay” and The
Beauty of the Husband, and so on. This last (Carson’s own “POEM SCRATCHED
ON GLASS”) reminds us that her source/​reading collapse exercises a transpar-
ency that might be called Duchampian in its aspiration to form as a drama of
whatever is in front of it, a staging of interpretation less interested in itself than
in mirroring or reproducing the world around it. In Cage’s mesostic, as Jann
Pasler has written, “the sympathy Cage feels towards a predecessor turns into
an identity. When he might like to have said something similar, Cage takes on
Thoreau’s voice as if it were his own.”23 Where Cage’s “water” is glossed as trans-
parency or self-​clearing (“wIthout /​my beiNg in any way /​in thE way”), what
that “water” performs is the merger of voices—​much in the way we have seen
Carson’s readings move between distance and closeness, separation, citation,
imitatio, and iteration, self-​withdrawal and intimate identification; the sharing
of voices—​a recognition that voice is always shared—​as an alternative to descrip-
tion. The transparency of water, like that of glass, is testy (and, as Carson says,
there are different “kinds of water”).24 Its aspiration here is the disappearance of
work into world—​or, as in Keats’s famous epitaph, “Here lies one whose name is
writ in water,” the disappearance of the author’s “I” altogether. It is also, then, an
express commitment to plurality, collaboration, world. As Duchamp famously
wrote, “* water writes always in * plural,” or, as Susan Howe has offered, “Truth is
water. Attraction makes it open.”25
The kind of medium water is, mirroring and/​or transparent, is one of the
opening concerns of Short Talks, which, like Eros the Bittersweet, entices us by
opening with a story. The “Introduction” to Carson’s micro-​lectures sets the
scene for their drastic shortness—​for something “missing”—​with an elliptical
narrative that begins “Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words
were not. Facts were, faces were.” Like one of Carson’s Daoist proverbs, “words
were missing”/​“words were not” reflect one another back, not as opposites but
as expressions of the same negativity. The narrator, we are told, “began to copy
out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradu-
ally, without the boredom of a story,” recalling the model of “academic writing”
announced in Economy of the Unlost (“I copy down the names . . . and note their
activity,” “fishing up facts of the landscape”) and preparing us for an exercise in
the making of “marks.” It is well known that the Short Talks began life as a series
of drawings—​what was published in 1992 were simply augmented versions of
their titles—​but what follows in Carson’s introductory mise-​en-​scène indicates
that mimesis, transparency, the immediacy of opsis, are retained as the métier of
the “Talks.” “I am to imitate a mirror like that of water (but water is not a mirror
and it is dangerous to think so).” What exactly is this double imitation (to mirror
230 Postscript

a mirror) that undercuts itself (“water is not a mirror”) because of some danger
in the idea of it? What is this danger?

*
Short Talks is a sequence of forty-​five reflections, vignettes, and apocryphal
anecdotes shot through with notes, quotes, and fragments of close reading from
Carson’s research. Each of these is delivered in the name of a wider phenomenon
on which it claims the status of a “talk.” The “Short Talk on Chromo-​luminarism,”
for instance, is a sequence of oblique remarks on light in the paintings of Seurat.
“Short Talk on Hölderlin’s World Night Wound” talks loosely and obliquely
about Hölderlin’s encounter with Sophokles, to which Carson returns, thirty
years later, in the lecture and performance piece “Variations on the Right to
Remain Silent” and, obliquely, in Antigonick. Though the title/​content relation of
the talks is rarely so confidently far-​fetched as the “Short Talk on the Sensation
of Aeroplane Takeoff,” each of Carson’s exemplars of the form relies on a cer-
tain mechanics of risk that it shares in common with the live performance of the
“thirteen-​second lecture.” Pending our complicity, the “short meaning” is sus-
tained momentarily and without explanation. In place of a disquisition is a brief
and elusive effect, the intuition of an inquiry that, in its text-​bound form, lacks
almost all of the means to see it through.
Carson’s mirroring of the phenomena talked of by the Short Talks is located
somewhere between the mimēsis of Plato’s late reflections (preserving the “para-
digm” or structural geometry of an object, not necessarily any of its details) and
the “true mistakes” of Aristotle’s visual mimesis, as theorized by Carson. The
“Short Talk on Shelter” exposes directly both the thrill and the danger in this
kind of imitation, for, it is announced, “I am writing this to be as wrong as pos-
sible to you.” The “wrongness” of the scene, details unmoored that provide an au-
tomatic description of a poem’s declared talking point, remembers Duchamp and
reminds me of Susan Howe’s early work, “Hinge Picture” (1974), whose poem-​
pictures—​many shapely-​small with justified margins—​operate the Duchampian
principle of the “hinge” as displacement of foreground and background, mate-
riality and idea.26 The risk of Carson’s shorthand, with its performative gestures
and far-​fetched affinities, a risk of erring too far from the phenomenon she wants
to reproduce, is that the “mistake” doesn’t ring true, or simply doesn’t get through
to the reader.
For the sake of brevity, I discuss below just two of Carson’s Short Talks, the
first briefly and the second in some detail. The first, “Short Talk on Sylvia Plath,”
just over eight lines long and making no mention of either Plath or her work,
concerns the emotive occlusion of Plath by the poet’s mother. The “Short Talk”
performs the occlusion by chronicling a television interview with “her mother,”
in which the unnamed Aurelia Plath speaks of her daughter’s writing:
 Postscript 231

SHORT TALK ON SYLVIA PLATH

Did you see her mother on television? She

said plain, burned things. She said I thought
it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did
not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle
hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back
chop it. She said self-​government she said
end of the road. She did not say humming
in the middle of the air what you came for
chop.27

What Aurelia Plath says pulls along with it a deep trawl of unsaying and not
saying, a belied aggressivity the talk parses in the “jungle fear” refrain, cut back
mid-​flow (“chop”), and whose destructiveness is named as the saying of “plain,
burned things.” Conjured aslant in a one-​off pronoun, Sylvia Plath’s striking ab-
sence from the “Short Talk on Sylvia Plath” is not only a case of Carson’s logic of
errancy and “paradigmatic” imitation, which often does not talk about what is
being observed, but also reproduces the psychic rationale it attributes to Aurelia
Plath, in which exorbitant euphemism—​a verbose art of not saying—​does the
talking. “humming /​in the middle of the air”—​what “you,” we, “came for”—​is
the persistent vibration of chopped-​back words and emotion; whether the hum
of suspense around Plath or the hum hanging in her poems is what we came to
this scene expecting, both are cut out of the picture. The drastic compositional
constraint of Short Talks, its own function of not saying, likewise calls on its
excluded faculties. Indeed, the “Talks” often access the imaginative possibilities
of “talking”—​and, in the interactive version, “lecturing” (lectio), with its tradi-
tional linear display of expositio, quaestio, and disputatio—​precisely by virtue of
not doing them. (The German Vorlesung, literally reading forth, whose etymo-
logical kin include the “gathering” of information, still enshrines this notion of
display.)
Displaying what is not there by means of a strict compositional economy,
the object of interest of Economy of the Unlost, is the work of most of the Short
Talks. Knowing there were originally drawings to accompany Carson’s forty-​
five short texts affects the way we think about their minimalism, for the texts,
sans images, are charged with doing what was once a shared labor of approxi-
mation. Talks that are ekphrastic or which conjure the backstories and sensory
affects of paintings—​“Short Talk on Chromo-​luminarism,” “Short Talk on His
Draughtsmanship,” “Short Talk on the Rules of Perspective,” “Short Talk on Van
Gogh,” “Short Talk on the Mona Lisa,” “Short Talk on the End,” “Short Talk on The
Anatomy Lesson of Dr Deyman”—​draw attention to just how much phenomenal
232 Postscript

as well as argumentative weight is being pulled by these small textual frames.

“Short Talk on the End” is one of the most striking in this regard:

SHORT TALK ON THE END

What is the difference between light and

lighting? There is an etching called The
Three Crosses by Rembrandt. It is a picture of
the earth and the sky and Calvary. A moment
rains down on them, the plate grows darker.
Darker. Rembrandt wakens you just in time
to see matter stumble out of its forms.28

Also known as Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves (1653), the copper-
plate etching summoned up here is one of many vellum prints derived from
Rembrandt’s progressive alterations to a single plate.29 While Carson does not
exactly describe The Three Crosses, beyond the three marks of “earth,” “sky,”
and “Calvary,” her “Short Talk on the End” plots the course of several almost
indivisible denouements. One is the scene pictured by Rembrandt in The Three
Crosses—​the climactic moment in the Passion of Christ. It is a “moment” whose
weight of foreboding, whose momentousness, like a microclimate, “rains down
on” the three crosses, and over earth, sky, and Calvary. Another is the material
production of the etching. “A moment /​rains down on them” is as much a de-
scription of the technique of dry point, the fine rain of hatchings that falls on the
“moment” it captures; the doubled-​down darkness (“darker. /​Darker”) elides the
mood of ending at Calvary with the intensification of ink as it builds on the plate
and, finally, saturates the print medium.
The scene of the “Talk” stages the disappearance of content into form and
moment into artifice (recall The Beauty of the Husband, “I want to make you
see time”). Its oblique commentary asks—​the question with which Carson
begins her “Talk”—​after the difference between phenomenal experience and
its imitation, between “light” (the photonic phenomenon, and “the light of the
world”; Creation’s “let there be light!”) and its mimicry in “lighting” (compo-
sitional effect, creation, technē). Where Rembrandt “wakens you just in time”
from this dream of the Passion, Carson spotlights the critical moment captured
in the etching, its optimal rendering of shadow and luminosity, and the crisis
of an inked-​up plate lifted off the vellum to reveal “matter stumbling out of its
forms”: the chance resurrection of matter out of each individual impression.
Without saying as much, and in lieu of an argumentative process, Carson
imitates a compositional one that, as it happens, played out over several years.
As documented in examples of each stage of printing held at the Bibliothèque
 Postscript 233

Nationale de France, Rembrandt’s darkening of the etching was incremental,

culminating in the occlusion of almost all the “light”/​“lighting” after which
Carson inquires.30 The “just in time” moment of this final stage of printing is
also a “just enough” moment, a historical (not to mention theological) mo-
ment of time-​bound urgency, with barely enough light remaining in the print
to insinuate matter out of forms. The “Talk” hints at a compositional process
that it mimics in its own “just enough” presentation, with a minimum of words
(or “marks”) and the intimation of a whole set of missing links, extrapolations,
and arguments. Perhaps all this analysis is a case in point that Carson “needs
explaining,” in the words of James Laughlin of New Directions, likely in re-
sponse to Short Talks: that cryptic, compelling arguments made of gesture and
image will eventually—​for better or for worse—​be made somewhere in words.31
Yet the “Short Talk” passes the onus of thinking, narrativizing, arguing, over
to us. Talking to Will Aitken, Carson returns once again to what she called the
“exchange of action” between performance and audience, explaining why she
values it: “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.”
In the lecture that doesn’t “lecture” us (the transitive sense in which “lecture” is
often used now), thinking—​and not necessarily Carson’s thinking—​stumbles
out of form as if by chance: the “starry, stumbling, chancing” of Carson’s lec-
ture on pronouns, and the “short kind of dance” she imagined the original Short
Talks to be.32
Just what, then, connects the condensed mimetic gestures of Short Talks with
the immersive long-​form narratives of lectures such as “Stillness” and “Corners,”
which simulate a process of associative thinking so perfectly that it almost sounds
off-​the-​cuff—​as though Carson is literally thinking and talking as she goes
along? Perhaps what joins them is a desire to imitate without artifice or media-
tion, to reproduce “that very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything”
(spoken by Woolf ’s Lily Briscoe as she paints in To the Lighthouse).33 In the first
case, in the performative manner of a picture; in the second, as a performance of
associative thinking as it happened, with no pretensions to either exhaustiveness
or conclusion: the brilliant “mess of encounter” before it has been put into order.
This is not to say that Carson’s lecture is formless or without device. Rather, that
its device is artlessness: a late style, following Adorno’s characterization of late
styles, whose work is in “the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.”34
A documentary interest has always been there in Carson, traceable from “The
Glass Essay,” The Albertine Workout, and the paratexts of Autobiography of Red,
through the scrapbook formats of Nox and H of H Playbook. Yet in these late
lectures it is as though the documenting of process, the performance of thought,
is the sum and total of the work. Their associations and idiosyncrasy move trans-
parently, almost nonchalantly—​as Barthes’s lectures did, lured by “what shines
234 Postscript

by bursts”—​, from one object to another, with little concern for whether the
arguments hold water.
In Scholarship and Freedom, Galt Harpham reflects on what he calls the “mis-
sion” of scholarship: what it is that distinguishes scholarship from “argument”
and “the approximations and illusions of received wisdom.”35 “The constant mis-
sion of scholarship is to bring about a change in the way the reader thinks,” he
says; it expresses a “capacity to create, to bring newness into the world.”36 Though
we can be fairly sure the Short Talks do not figure on Galt Harpham’s list of schol-
arly works, they, like Carson’s long-​form lectures, give themselves over fully to
both of these aims—​metanoia, a change of mind, and poiesis, creation. Where
the long-​form lecture spools out the process, the close readings and annotations,
Short Talks capture the afterimages of study. Their mission, under Harpham’s
terms, is shared.
John D’Agata begins his 1997 interview with some remarks on Carson’s “cre-
ative” work and a rationale for the scare quotes he hems around the word. He
notes her distinction as a scholar of Greek, then invokes the c-​word with some
hesitancy: “We write “creative” because Anne Carson’s scholarship is as lucid as
her poetry and essays, her essays and poetry as sharp as her scholarship. Indeed,”
he adds, “the two are, for many readers, indistinguishable.”37 Twenty-​five years
on from this, are we still to write “creative”? In the age of Performance Philosophy
and Clark Lectures with dance accompaniment, what does “creative” cover for,
and what conclusions do the quotation marks hold in suspense? Carson talks
in that interview about her writing as an “approximation of what the facts are
doing,” of “their activity more than their surface appearance”; first seeing “that
a fact has a form” and then “trying to make that happen again in language.”38
It is not just their lucidity and sharpness that causes the singular indistinction
of Carson’s scholarship, poems, and essays. Carson’s “approximation” (unlike
Harpham’s “approximations and illusions of received wisdom”) doesn’t parse
wisdom or retell stories. It produces a form, and form—​as Carson, like few
others, has sought to show—​makes us think differently. It is useless, then, to talk
of any of her forms in terms cut loose from these forms’ occasion, the discoveries
and demands about which Carson is always, though never simply, transparent.
Why not talk instead about what these forms–​–​their shapes, titles, internal
theorizations–​–a​ sk us to do, and whether we’re willing to go along with it. To
throw ourselves “off the building,” to be broached and disrupted, or just to “look
at this.” To find here and there “a fragment of unexhausted time.”39
 Notes

Introduction

1. Carson alludes in her essay on Cy Twombly to several works invoking Catullus by

name, including Catullus (1962), Six Latin Writers and Poets: Catullus (1976), and
Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994). She cites Barthes’s
“incomparable” reading at several points. See Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works
on Paper” (“Non multa sed multum,” 1979), in his The Responsibility of Forms: Critical
Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell,
1986), pp. 157–​176 (p. 163), quoted in Anne Carson, “The Sheer Velocity and
Ephemerality of Cy Twombly,” LitHub, October 22, 2020, https://​lit​hub.com/​anne-​
car​son-​the-​sheer-​veloc​ity-​and-​ephem​eral​ity-​of-​cy-​twom​bly/​. The essay was previ-
ously published in Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, ed. Christine Kondoleon et al.
(Boston: MFA Publications, 2020).
2. Barthes, “Cy Twombly,” p. 167.
3. Ibid., p. 164. See Rosalind Krauss’s compelling defense of Barthes’s argument that
Twombly’s Latin is performative and not “to be consumed as erudition.” Rosalind
Krauss, “Cy’s Up,” Artforum International, September 1994, https://​www.artfo​rum.
com/​print/​199​407/​cy-​s-​up-​33352.
4. Carson, “The Sheer Velocity and Ephemerality of Cy Twombly.” Carson’s quotation
is a paraphrase. Twombly’s exact words, spoken during an interview for the Louvre,
are: “Everything lives in the moment, that’s the only time it can live. But its influence
can go on forever.” Marie-​Laure Bernadac and Cy Twombly, “Interview/​Entretien,”
Cy Twombly—​The Ceiling: Un plafond pour le Louvre, ed. Marie-​Laure Bernadac
(Paris: Èditions du Regard, Musée du Louvre, 2010), p. 21.
5. Tacita Dean, “Anne Carson Punches a Hole Through Greek Myth,” Interview
Magazine, December 16, 2021, https://​www.interv​iewm​agaz​ine.com/​cult​ure/​anne-​
car​son-​punc​hes-​a-​hole-​thro​ugh-​greek-​myth.
6. Melanie Rehak, “Things Fall Together,” New York Times, March 26 2000, https://​
www.nyti​mes.com/​2000/​03/​26/​magaz​ine/​thi​ngs-​fall-​toget​her.html; and Will
Aitken, “Anne Carson, the Art of Poetry No. 88,” The Paris Review 171 (Fall 2004),
(207), https://​www.the​pari​srev​iew.org/​int​ervi​ews/​5420/​anne-​car​son-​the-​art-​of-​
poe​try-​no-​88-​anne-​car​son. Carson describes her working arrangements in several
interviews. See, for example, John D’Agata, “A_​_​with Anne Carson,” The Iowa Review
27.2 (1997), 1–​22 (9); and Kevin McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions: An Interview with
Anne Carson,” Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003), 12–​25 (14).
7. Dean, “Anne Carson Punches a Hole Through Greek Myth.”
236 Notes

8. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan),
Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. viii.
9. Ibid.
10. Sam Anderson praises what he calls the sensation of “distant closeness” in her
juxtapositions. See Sam Anderson, “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,”
New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2013, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2013/​03/​17/​
magaz​ine/​the-​insc​ruta​ble-​bri​llia​nce-​of-​anne-​car​son.html. Robert Stanton, Laura
Jansen, and Gillian Sze have each used the term “errancy” or “erring” to describe
Carson’s deliberate courting of surprise and mistakenness. See Robert Stanton, “‘I am
writing this to be as wrong as possible to you’: Anne Carson’s Errancy,” Canadian
Literature 176 (Spring 2003), 28–​43; Laura Jansen, “Introduction,” in Anne Carson/​
Antiquity, ed. Laura Jansen, Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception (London and
New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), p. 5; Gillian Sze, “Erring and Whatever,” in ed. Jansen,
Anne Carson/​Antiquity, pp. 63–​74.
11. Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2014), pp. 275–​286 (p. 276).
12. The remarks are Ernest Hilbert’s in a review of Men in the Off Hours. See Ernest
Hilbert, “On and Off Parnassus” [Review article], Contemporary Poetry Review (July
8, 2005), https://​www.cprw.com/​on-​and-​off-​of-​parnas​sus. In the light of this criti-
cism, Carson’s early poem “Now What?” (1990) reads like a reckoning with the ques-
tion of where to go “after” the scholarly essay.
13. The remark was made by Michael Lista: “How many genres can you mix before your
inventiveness waters itself down? Is there a limit to pretending there is no limit?”
Lista’s answer, of course, is “yes”: “Carson’s poems stopped singing; the essays stopped
thinking. The cross-​pollination that had made her writing popular was now run-
ning to seed.” Michael Lista, “Is Anne Carson the Only Poet with More Fans than
Readers?,” The Walrus, October 2016, https://​thewal​rus.ca/​aud​ens-​oppos​ite/​. In
response to a question about the danger of her subject matter running dry, Carson
responded: “As to the danger, wouldn’t I be the last to ‘know’ this?” See Kate Kellaway
and Anne Carson, “I do not believe in art as therapy,” The Guardian, October 30,
2016, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2016/​oct/​30/​anne-​car​son-​do-​not-​beli​
eve-​art-​ther​apy-​interv​iew-​float.
14. Charles Simic, “The Spirit of Play,” New York Review of Books, November 3, 2005,
https://​www.nybo​oks.com/​artic​les/​2005/​11/​03/​the-​spi​rit-​of-​play/​; and John
Timpane, “Nox Is a Moving Story—​and an Art Object,” Philadelphia Inquirer,
October 3, 2010, https://​www.inqui​rer.com/​phi​lly/​entert​ainm​ent/​20101003_​_​
quot_​Nox_​quot​_​_​Is​_​a_​m​ovin​g_​bo​ok_​-​_​an​d_​an​_​art​_​obj​ect.html.
15. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 1.
16. See McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 20.
17. Ibid., 14.
18. Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
(London: Vintage, 2001). Carson was the first woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry (2001). Other major awards and prizes include: a Lannan Literary Award
 Notes 237

(1996), the Pushcart Prize (1997), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998), a MacArthur

Fellowship (2000), the Griffin Poetry Prize (2001, 2014), a Princess of Asturias Award
(2020), the PEN/​Nabokov Award (2021). Carson has been widely reported to feature
on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022).
19. “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets,”
published in unpaginated pamphlet form in Float, was performed at the 92nd Street
Y in New York, March 26, 2008. A recording of the performance can be viewed on-
line: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​j8y5​Svhp​bwU. Carson’s Autobiography of
Red: A Novel in Verse (New York: Knopf, 1998) brought her work to the attention of
a wider audience, garnering the highest number of published articles and reviews of
the whole Carson oeuvre to date. The book is currently taught on several university
and college syllabuses in the United States, and eNotes and GradeSaver guides are
available.
20. See Joshua Marie Wilkinson, ed., Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2015) and Jansen, ed., Anne Carson/​Antiquity (2022). Wilkinson’s
multi-​author collection brings together “a constellation of approaches” to Carson,
in thirty-​ two short “appreciations, readings, investigations, experiments, and
performances” by writers and artists (p. 5). Jansen’s volume of scholarly essays
approaches Carson’s “engagement with classical antiquity” (p. 1), highlighting “the er-
udite indiscipline of her classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays and
visual artistry” (p. 2). A study by classicist Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. has approached “the
role played by generic transgressions on the one hand, and by embodied spirituality
on the other,” arguing for Carson’s refusal of the “tired (and falsifying) dichotomy that
separates Classical and Christian learning.” See Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Reach Without
Grasping: Anne Carson’s Classical Desires (Lanham.MD: Lexington Books, 2021),
blurb and preface. The submission of a full manuscript of Anne Carson: The Glass
Essayist for review in November 2021 coincided with the publication of both Jansen
and Ruprecht’s books. The manuscript has been updated to reflect the new research
landscape.
21. See Neil Hertz, “Lurid Figures,” Reading De Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and
Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), p. 86.
22. “Sleight of hand” is an expression used by critic Robert Potts in relation to Carson’s
use of scholarly material in her work. See Robert Potts, “Neither Rhyme nor Reason,”
The Guardian, January 26, 2002, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2002/​jan/​26/​
poe​try.tselio​tpri​zefo​rpoe​try.
23. Aitken, “Art of Poetry no. 88,” 204.
24. Carson uses the term “interactive lecture” in recent performances of several
“Short Talks,” for example, preceding the lecture on “Corners” delivered at the City
University of New York in 2018 (discussed in my Postscript). See Carson’s discussion
of the imitation of “affect” and “causal connection” in the grammatical organization
of lyric verse: Anne Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s Poetics,”
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics (Winter 1990), 142–​154 (147).
25. D’Agata, “A_​_​with Anne Carson,” 14, 13, 14.
238 Notes

26. Aitken, “Art of Poetry no. 88,” 204 (italics mine). For Carson’s approach to mimesis in
classical lyric, see Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill’ ” and Economy of the Unlost, pp. 51–​52.
27. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in her Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(1961; London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), p. 8; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
“Paranoid and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think
This Essay Is about You,” in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 132.
28. Hilbert, “On and Off Parnassus.” Hilbert describes Men in the Off Hours as “a disserta-
tion on poetic possibilities. This can be invigorating but also a bit overpowering.”
29. Christopher Ricks, “Literature and the Matter of Fact,” in his Essays in Appreciation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 286.
30. An early, nuanced discussion of Carson’s “generic hybridity” can be found in Ian
Rae’s essay “Dazzling Hybrids.” See Ian Rae, “‘Dazzling Hybrids’: The Poetry of Anne
Carson.” Canadian Literature 166 (Autumn 2000), 17–​41.
31. Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Shelter,” in her Short Talks (Kingston, ON: Brick Books,
1992, 2015), p. 70; Carson, Economy of the Unlost, vii; Carson, Short Talks, p. 24.
32. See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015) and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading.” This wide-​ranging discussion touches
questions of critical method (Anker and Felski, 2017; Felski, 2015; Hartman, 1976;
Jarvis, 2002; Ulmer, 1983); descriptive attention and textuality (Love, 2013; Rooney,
2010); criticism’s affective styles (Ruddick, 2015; Sedgwick, 2003; Serpell, 2014,
2017); critical culture as a determinant of literary style (Eve, 2017; McGurl, 2009);
and hybrid and adaptive modes of scholarly writing (Bammer and Boetcher-​Joeres,
eds., 2015; Benson and Connors, eds., 2014).
33. Charles Bernstein, “Frame Lock,” in Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 90–​99 (p. 90). Rachel Blau DuPlessis
has produced a fascinating survey of writers who have “loosened the tone and af-
fect of critical (‘academic’) prose coming from a professional space they regard with
some suspicion”: from Susan Howe and Avitall Ronell to Alicia Ostriker and Jacques
Derrida. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “f-​Words: An Essay on the Essay,” American
Literature 68.1, “Write Now: American Literature in the 1980s and 1990s” (March
1996), 15–​45 (19).
34. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” pp. 130–​131. In 1950, Lionel Trilling described the
culling of surprise as one of the destinies of “liberal” critical culture: “there may come
a moment when [art, literature] cannot satisfy one of our legitimate demands, which is
that it shall surprise us.” Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Scribner’s
Sons, 1976), p. 256.
35. Carson remarked on the origins of the “Short Talk” form in a reading of the work
“We’ve Only Just Begun” at the European Graduate School, Saas-​Fee, Switzerland,
June 30, 2016 (0.45–​1.02s), https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​3Oaz​I4ky​gXQ.
36. Stephen Benson and Claire Connors, eds. Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
37. See Lisa Samuels’s Introduction to Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough, ed. Lisa
Samuels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. xiii, xiv.
 Notes 239

38. Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards. The Ferrante Letters: An
Experiment in Collective Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); and,
for example, Ann Lauterbach, “As (It) Is: Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment,” in
American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, ed. Claudia
Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), pp.
363–​366. Juliana Spahr speaks of “awkward, bifocal moments” in her writing that
are the result, she says, of feeling “caught between an academic scene and a poetry
scene that are often antithetical in desires and intents.” Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s
Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2001), xi.
39. Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles: Green Integer Editions, 2014);
Stephen Collis, Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-​Scholasticism
(Victoria: ELS Editions, 2015).
40. Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein Elegies (Kingston, ON.: Brick Books, 1986); and Jan Zwicky,
Lyric Philosophy (1992; Edmonton and Calgary: Brush Education, 2014).
41. See T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume I, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), pp. 3–​25. The “search for style” is the expression used by Gillian Rose
in The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of T. W. Adorno, Verso
Radical Thinkers (1978; London and New York: Verso, 2014), pp. 15–​26. Susan
Sontag, “On Style,” in her Against Interpretation and Other Essays, pp. 15–​36 (p. 31).
In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, Arthur C. Danto describes the history
of Western philosophy as “a history of dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems,
examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations, discourses, hymns, critiques, let-
ters, summae, encyclopedias, testaments, commentaries, investigations, tractatuses,
Vorlesungen, Aufbauen, prolegomena, parerga, pensées, sermons, supplements,
confessions, sententiae, inquiries, diaries, outlines, sketches, commonplace
books, . . . and innumerable forms which have no generic identity or which themselves
constitute distinct genres.” Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement
of Art, foreword by Jonathan Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986,
2005), p. 141.
42. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated and with an introduction by Barbara
Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981); Gregory Ulmer, “The Object of Post-​
Criticism,” The Anti-​Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle,
WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 83–​110; and Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; Fragments
(1977), trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002). Anastasia-​Erasmia Peponi
has suggested that, in its evolution out of the 1981 doctoral thesis, Carson’s ex-
tended essay shows the influence of French écriture. See Anastasia-​Erasmia Peponi,
“Écriture and the Budding Classicist,” in Anne Carson/​Antiquity, ed. Jansen, pp. 51–​
61. Peponi proceeds to “single out Barthes . . . as a refreshing presence one can sense
in the undercurrents of Carson’s book” (p. 54), but does not discuss any of the striking
formal and ideational similarities between Barthes’s textual “simulation” of desire
and Carson’s. For a discussion of these similarities and of affinities and tensions with
Derrida’s iconic reading of the Phaedrus, see my Chapter 1.
240 Notes

43. Carson’s description of Barthes appears in “The Sheer Velocity and Ephemerality of
Cy Twombly.”
44. Description from the conference brochure “Reinventing the Poet-​Critic,” Miami
University Summer Institute for Literary History, June 2–​4, 1994, https://​sc.lib.miam​
ioh.edu/​han​dle/​2374.MIA/​6312?show=​full.
45. Bernstein, “The Revenge of the Poet-​Critic, or The Parts are Greater than the Sum of
the Whole,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems, p. 12.
46. DuPlessis, “f-​Words,” 17.
47. For example, Anne Carson, “Stillness,” Critical Inquiry 48.1 (Autumn 2021), 1–​22.
48. Cage’s “Lecture on the Weather” was composed in 1975 and first performed in
Toronto, on February 26, 1976. A database of Cage’s work contains his complete tech-
nical specifications for the performance: https://​johnc​age.org/​pp/​John-​Cage-​Work-​
Det​ail.cfm?work​_​ID=​109.
49. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), p. 105. Carson, The Beauty of the Husband, p. 38, and Carson, “Epitaph: Evil,”
Men in the Off Hours, p. 29.
50. Anne Carson, “The Life of Towns,” in her Plainwater (New York: Knopf, 1995;
New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2000), p. 93.
51. Barthes, “Cy Twombly,” p. 167.
52. “Just for the Thrill” is the short title of an early scholarly essay by Carson, discussed in
Chapter 8 of this book.
53. See Jim Fleming and Anne Carson, “Transcript for Poesis with Anne Carson,” “To the
Best of Our Knowledge,” Wisconsin Public Radio, http://​arch​ive.ttb​ook.org/​book/​tra​
nscr​ipt/​tra​nscr​ipt-​poe​sis-​anne-​car​son.
54. Eric Hayot, “Then and Now,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and
Rita Felski (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 279–​296
(p. 291).
55. D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 12.
56. Ibid., 17. It is interesting to read these remarks alongside Susan Howe’s characteri-
zation of “the grace of scholarship,” a grace that enables her to “know” her objects of
study “just from reading” and that leaves her “indebted to everyone.” See Susan Howe,
The Birth-​mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown,
CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), p. 39.
57. Howe, The Birth-​mark, p. 38. Reflecting on her own creative, often mimetic, reading
of Dickinson, Howe’s comment reads: “Ask what form for the form. . . . Truth is water.
Attraction makes it open,” calling perhaps for a similar kind of formal transparency in
response to the form of another work.
58. Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), p. 84.
Carson talks to Will Aitken about Wilde’s influence during her teen years: “[Wilde]
gave me an education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of irony toward myself
that was useful in later life.” Aitken, “The Art of Poetry no. 88.”
59. See scholar-​poet Angela Leighton’s discussion of “forma efformans” in her book, On
Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7.
 Notes 241

60. Megan Berkobien, “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie,” Asymptote: A
Journal of Translation, https://​www.asymp​tote​jour​nal.com/​interv​iew/​an-​interv​iew-​
with-​anne-​car​son-​and-​rob​ert-​cur​rie/​.
61. Carson’s vision of her work here bears strong affinities with Umberto Eco’s famous as-
cription of a deliberate “openness” to chance and contingency in the arrangement and
presentation of the work of art. See Umberto Eco, The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna
Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Kim Anno describes
the “metaphorical” relation of text and image producing an “open reading” in remarks
quoted by Berkobien, “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie” (n.p.),
and reproduced on Anno’s personal website: http://​www.kima​nno.com/​books/​
. The Albertine Workout was originally published in the New Directions “Poetry
Pamphlet” series. The artist book edition is a boxed set of unbound sheets alternating
Carson’s text with Anno’s illustrations (St. Joseph, MN: One Crow Press, The Literary
Arts Institute of the College of St. Benedict, September 2014). Anno has also illus-
trated the original libretto of Carson’s “Mirror of Simple Souls,” a proto-​version of
the “Decreation” opera: Anne Carson and Kim Anno, The Mirror of Simple Souls: An
Opera Installation (St. Joseph, MN: One Crow Press, The Literary Arts Institute of the
College of St. Benedict, 2003). Images of Anno’s illustrations to both the libretto and
The Albertine Workout are available to view on Anno’s website (as above).
62. The phrase is from Carson’s justification of her “conversation” between Simonides
and Celan as a means to sustain readers’ attention. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, viii.
63. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments: Bilingual Edition, trans. Michael
Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 206–​207. Quoted in
Rüdiger Görner, “Hölderlin’s Romantic Classicism,” in The Oxford Handbook of
European Romanticism, ed. Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
pp. 274–​292 (p. 279).
64. Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), p. 16. Dillon cites
Jean Starobinski’s remarks on the etymological story of the French verb “essayer”
in Jean Starobinski, “Can One Define the Essay?,” first published in La Revue des
Belles-​lettres (1983), reproduced, in a translation by Lyndsey Scott, in Carl H. Klaus
and Ned Stuckey French, eds., Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), pp. 110–​111.
65. Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay,” in her Glass, Irony and God (New York: New
Directions, 1995), pp. 1–​38.
66. Ian Rae, “Verglas: Narrative Technique in Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay,’” ESC 37.3–​
4 (September–​December 2011), 163–​186 (166).
67. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, vii; Carson, “The Glass Essay,” p. 2.
68. Carson, “The Sheer Velocity and Ephemerality of Cy Twombly.” See Barthes, “Cy
Twombly,” p. 166, on Twombly’s marks uniting “by an inimitable stroke, both inscrip-
tion and erasure.”
69. Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985; New York: New Directions, 2007), “Introduction”
(unpaginated).
70. Carson, Short Talks, p. 23; and Carson, “Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as
Catherine Deneuve (2nd Draft),” in Men in the Off Hours, pp. 119–​126.
242 Notes

71. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth (1966), trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (1987;
London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 36.
72. For example, the essays collected in Hélène Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector,
ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1990); Julia Kristeva, Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans.
Lorna Scott Fox (2008; New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Carol Mavor,
Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust,
and D. W. Winnicott (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
73. Sarah Chihaya, “A Glass Essay: Reading Anne Carson Post-​breakup,” The Yale Review,
June 1, 2022 https://​yal​erev​iew.org/​arti​cle/​sarah-​chih​aya-​anne-​car​son.
A doctoral thesis by Paul Meyer (University of Toronto, 2016) is structured around
a series of short “fractal” chapters whose titles mimic Carson; e.g., “little blues for
(On Encyclopaedism in Anne Carson).” McNeilly’s “Five Fairly Short Talks on Anne
Carson” plays a similar riffing game. See Kevin McNeilly, “Five Fairly Short Talks on
Anne Carson,” Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003), 6–​10.
74. D’Agata, “A_​_​with Anne Carson,” 12.
75. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, p. 36; Roland Barthes, Critique et Vérite (Paris: Éditions
du Seuil, 1966), p. 77.
76. Stephen Halliwell’s account of mimesis suggests the history of Western literature
is also a history of misreading or misapprehension of Plato’s image of the mirror in
Book X of The Republic. See Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient
Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2002), especially pp. 118–​150.
77. After Duchamp, Anish Kapoor and Gerhard Richter have both used mirrors to turn
the viewer-​object relation on its head.
78. From the poem “What Is the Language Using Us for?,” W. S. Graham, New Collected
Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 202. See David Nowell-​Smith, W.
S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), “to make
/​An object,” pp. 1–​42 (p. 4).
79. Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 134.
80. Joan Brossa et al., Poesía Brossa: Imagen, texto y performatividad /​Brossa Poetry: Image,
Text and Performativity (Mexico City: Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo,
2021), p. 69. The Catalan poet’s original Spanish reads: “Estos versos se han escrito /​
para que pasen desapercibidos como /​un cristal” (p. 68).
81. See in particular Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, pp. 30–​61 (p. 39). Carson’s thesis in the
book builds on the work of Denys Page and Bruno Snell (see my Chapter 1 for a fuller
discussion of the book’s central ideas).
82. Bruno Snell (1948), The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature,
trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 53, quoted in Carson, Eros
the Bittersweet, p. 38.
83. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 45.
84. Ibid., pp. 152–​153.
85. Ibid., pp. 20–​21.
86. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 20.
 Notes 243

87. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (2002; London: Virago
Press, 2003), x.
88. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, vii.
89. Eleanor Wachtel and Anne Carson, “An Interview with Anne Carson,” Brick 89
(Summer 2012), 29–​47, https://​brick​mag.com/​an-​interv​iew-​with-​anne-​car​son/​.
90. The collective began under the name “EgoCircus: a Workshop in Collaboration.”
91. Berkobien, “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie” (n.p.).
92. For example, the constrained vocabularies of Carson’s sequential translations of
Ibykos fragment 286 in “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” and recent
collaborations with Currie using random integer generators to produce aleatory
lineation patterns, recall the techniques of Oulipo. For an illuminating study of
Oulipo and its legacy after the mid-​century, see Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle
Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012).
93. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1961), p. 69.
94. David Solway, “The Trouble with Annie: David Solway Unmakes Anne Carson,”
Books in Canada (July 2001), 26, 25, http://​www.booksi​ncan​ada.com/​artic​le_​v​
iew.asp?id=​3159. Ian Rae has written an elegant riposte to the Solway piece: Ian
Rae, “Anne Carson and the Solway Hoaxes,” Canadian Literature 176 (2003), 45–​
65. See Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal
Genius: Poetry by Other Means (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 20,
and Kaya Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy: Writing at the Iterative Turn (London and
New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
95. From Robert Potts’s well-​known critique: see Robert Potts, “Neither Rhyme nor
Reason,” The Guardian, January 26, 2002, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​
2002/​jan/​26/​poe​try.tselio​tpri​zefo​rpoe​try.
96. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 175
(L’illusioniste, le technicien du trompe-​l’oeil, le peintre, l’ecrivain, le pharmakeus);
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 140. See Plato, “Sophist,” trans. F. M. Cornford, The
Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series
LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 1016–​1017 (268c).
97. Plato, “Sophist,” The Collected Dialogues, p. 1016, and Derrida, Dissemination, p. 140.
Stephen Halliwell makes a strong case for caution in translating Plato and Aristotle’s
mimēsis as imitation, given the word’s negative associations of fraudulence and im-
personation. He opts, instead, to preserve the word “mimesis” as is. Halliwell, The
Aesthetics of Mimesis, pp. 13–​14.
98. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” p. 21.
99. See Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: From Plato to Futurity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019); Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis; and Linda Hutcheon,
A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-​Century Art Forms (New York and
London: Methuen, 1985). Daphne Merkin, “Last Tango,” New York Times, September
30, 2001, p. 12, online edition: https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2001/​09/​30/​books/​last-​
tango.html.
244 Notes

100. Burrow, Imitating Authors, pp. 2–​3. In his “Posthuman Postscript,” Burrow discusses
the work of Canadian author Christian Bök, whose uncreative writing practice
includes implanting a particularly resonant verse from Virgil’s Georgics into the
DNA of thale cress, thus allowing the poem to reproduce permutatively across time.
See Christian Bök, The Xenotext: Book I (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2015).
101. See Reena Sastri, “‘Wildly Constant’: Anne Carson’s Poetics of Encounter,”
Contemporary Literature 62.3 (Fall 2021), 307–​337; Stanton, “ ‘I am writing this to
be as wrong as possible to you’: Anne Carson’s Errancy”; and Gillian Sze, “Erring and
Whatever,” in Anne Carson/​Antiquity, ed. Jansen, pp. 63–​74. My thanks to Reena
Sastri for sharing her article with me in draft form.
102. In Harold Bloom’s theory of creative influence, “strong misreading” (and its al-
ternative term, “misprision”) is how poets read other poets. See Harold Bloom,
Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
103. Burrow, Imitating Authors, p. 10.
104. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa
Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997),
p. 83, cited in Burrow, Imitating Authors, p. 12.
105. See Carson’s own definition of eidolōn in Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, p. 5. Liddell
and Scott’s definition is “shape, image, spectre, phantom”: Henry George Liddell
and Robert Scott, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-​English Lexicon Abridged (n.p.: Simon
Wallenberg Press, 2007), p. 196. Burrow’s reference is to Plato, Theaetetus; Sophist,
trans. H. N. Fowler (London, 1921), lines 235d–​e, cited in Burrow, Imitating
Authors, p. 60.
106. Burrow, Imitating Authors, pp. 60–​61.
107. See Bloom, Agon, and Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in The Lyric Theory Reader,
ed. Jackson and Prins, p. 278.
108. René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), p. 165.
109. Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Introduction and Afterword by
Sheila Heti (1935; London: Lawrence King, 2020), p. 42.
110. T. W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (1977), 120–​133 (131): “An
exact fantasy; fantasy which abides strictly within the material which the sciences
present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrange-
ment: aspects, granted, which fantasy itself must generate.”
111. Carson, “Stillness,” 2.
112. Carson, The Beauty of the Husband, p. 38.
113. Carson’s comments appear in Sara Elkamel, “Anne Carson and Robert Currie
in Conversation with Sara Elkamel and NYU Undergrads—​On Starting in the
Middle,” Washington Square Review (May 5, 2021), https://​www.was​hing​tons​quar​
erev​iew.com/​onl​ine-​featu​res/​2021/​5/​4/​anne-​car​son-​amp-​rob​ert-​cur​rie-​on-​start​
ing-​in-​the-​mid​dle-​in-​conve​rsat​ion-​with-​sara-​elka​mel-​amp-​nyu-​und​ergr​ads.
114. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 17 (italics mine).
115. Anne Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” in Float (unpaginated), and McNeilly, “Gifts
and Questions,” 22. My Postscript discusses this anti-​descriptive element as it
emerges in Short Talks.
 Notes 245

116. See Johanna Drucker’s fantastic essay on concrete “visual performativity”: Johanna
Drucker, “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text,” in Close Listening, ed. Bernstein,
pp. 131–​161. Also see Susan Howe, “The End of Art,” Archives of American Art
Journal 14.4 (1974), 2–​7.
117. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent.” The intermedia piece was first
performed in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, in 2012.
118. See Scarry, Dreaming by the Book.
119. Carson, “ ‘Just For the Thrill,’ ” 148.
120. Ibid., 147 (Carson’s line reference in the Poetics is 456a, 36–​37).
121. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader, ed.
Jackson and Prins, p. 2. “The survey of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century criti-
cism offered here shows that this general definition of the lyric (whether valued or
devalued) now seems to us a given only because twentieth-​century literary criticism
made it up.”
122. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017), p. 226.
123. See Stanton, “I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you.”
124. Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 150 (Carson’s line reference is Poetics, 1450b 17).
125. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 22. She expresses similar sentiments in an inter-
view with Peter Constantine: “[I]‌still seem to approach writing as a very compli-
cated, rule-​bound form of drawing.” Peter Constantine and Anne Carson, “Ancient
Words, Modern Words: A Conversation with Anne Carson,” World Literature Today
88.1 (January–​February 2014), 36–​37 (37). For a sensitive and intelligent discussion
of Carson’s collaboration with Currie in the composition of “Wildly Constant,” see
Sastri, ‘ “Wildly Constant” ’ For a reading of Carson’s visual art alongside her poems,
see Oran McKenzie, “ ‘to see matter stumble out of its forms’: Anne Carson’s Poetry
and Visual Art,” mémoire submitted at the English Department of the University
of Geneva, August 2015. Monique Tschofen has written powerfully on the work of
artist Betty Goodwin, to which Carson responds in the ekphrastic poem “Seated
Figure with Red Angle by Betty Goodwin (1988),” in Decreation, pp. 95–​102. See
Monique Tschofen, “Drawing out a New Image of Thought: Anne Carson’s Radical
Ekphrasis,” Word and Image 2.2 (2013), 233–​243, and my discussion of the poem in
Chapter 5 of this book.
126. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, foreword by Harold Bloom
(Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1957; 2000), p. 280 (“the
radical of opsis in the lyric is riddle, which is characteristically a fusion of sensation
and reflection, the use of an object of sense to stimulate a mental activity in con-
nection with it”). The title of Sam Anderson’s profile for the New York Times, “The
Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson,” is suggestive in this regard.
127. Carson, “Stillness,” 1. The text was first presented as a “lecture,” in which the word
“lecture” substitutes “essay” here.
128. Jarvis, “An Undeleter for Criticism,” 16.
129. DuPlessis, “f-​Words,” 28.
246 Notes

130. Raoul Eshelman, Performatism or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, CO: Davies
Group, 2008).
131. The term is Barthes’s to describe the lyric texture of A Lover’s Discourse. See Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, p. 7.
132. Carson’s interest in these questions can be traced back to Glass, Irony and God, in
particular “The Truth About God” (pp. 39–​54) and “Book of Isaiah” (pp. 107–​118)
sequences.
133. Anne Carson, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings,” Plainwater, pp. 1–​26. Her
“Pinplay: A Version of Euripides’ Bacchae” was commissioned by the artist Elliott
Hundley as an accompaniment piece to his installation, The Bacchae, Wexner Center
for the Arts, Ohio (2011). The piece was performed, Carson’s performance notes
state, by members of the Ohio State Department of Greek and Latin, and is published
in Float (unpaginated). Carson’s “Twelve-​Minute Prometheus (After Aiskhylos)”
appears in London Review of Books 30.20 (October 23, 2008), https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​
v30/​n20/​anne-​car​son/​twe​lve-​min​ute-​pro​meth​eus-​after-​aiskhy​los. Her version of
Euripides’s Herakles, H of H Playbook, was published by New Directions in 2021.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (subtitled “a version of Euripides’ Helen”) premiered
at The Shed in New York, with fragments from the work performed at London’s
Southbank Centre later in 2019.
134. See Edith Hall’s excellent essay on Autobiography of Red: Edith Hall, “Autobiography
of the Western Subject: Carson’s Geryon,” in Living Classics, ed. S. J. Harrison
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 218–​ 237; also see Edith Hall,
“Subjects, Selves and Survivors,” Helios 34.2 (Fall 2007), 125–​ 160. A recent
study provides exhaustive commentary on the extant text of the Geryoneis, in-
cluding the distinctive metrical organization of the poem as choral song, and
the myth and cult of Geryon: Paul Curtis, Stesichoros’s Geryoneis, Mnemosyne
Supplements: Monographs on Greek and Latin Language and Literature, no. 333
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011).
135. Jansen’s edited collection, Anne Carson/​Antiquity, includes chapters on Carson’s
adaptations, translations, “transcreations” (Haroldo de Campos’s term), and
Carson’s early academic relationship to the Classical canon. Louis A. Ruprecht
Jr.’s Reach Without Grasping approaches Carson’s classicism in dialogue with
her commitments to “embodied spirituality.” Several articles and short essays in
Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s edited collection address individual Carson adaptations.
See, for example, Harmony Holiday, “Masters of the Open Secret: Meditations
on Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red” (pp. 69–​73); Vanessa Place, “What’s
So Funny About Antigonick?,” (pp. 165–​171); and Bianca Stone, “Your Soul Is
Blowing Apart: Antigonick and the Influence of Collaborative Process” (pp. 152–​
155), in ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre. Illuminating recent work has
been done on the contemporary adaptation and translation of classical texts by
authors including Carson, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. See ed. Harrison,
Living Classics. Another collection analyses the specific case of contemporary
adaptations of Greek tragedy: see eds. Vayos Liapis and Avra Sidiropoulou, Adapting
Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge
 Notes 247

University Press, 2021). Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has discussed the wider ques-
tion of “updating” Classical texts in translation and adaptation: Daniel Mendelsohn
and Alec Ash, “Daniel Mendelsohn on Updating the Classics (of Greek and Roman
Literature,” interview, Five Books: https://​fivebo​oks.com/​best-​books/​class​ics-​dan​
iel-​men​dels​ohn/​. For Mendelsohn’s response to Carson’s translation of Sappho, see
my Chapter 8.
136. This translation of the Antigone was premiered at the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg,
in collaboration with The Barbican, London. The production was directed by
Ivo van Hove and starred Juliette Binoche as Antigone. Sophokles, Antigone,
trans. Anne Carson (London: Oberon Books, 2015), and Anne Carson, trans.,
Antigonick: Sophokles (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2012).
137. Carson, If Not, Winter, x, xi.
138. See Carson’s entry in Charles Simic et al., “Reading 9-​11-​01,” Artforum (November
2001), 41–​42.

Chapter 1

1. “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” in Float (unpagi-
nated). Copyright © 2016 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC, and Jonathan Cape, a division of the Penguin Random House
Group Limited. All rights reserved.
2. The “Performance Notes” included among the pamphlets of Float state that “Lecture
I” was first performed at Housing Works Bookstore Café, New York, in 2008 by
Carson, Robert Currie, and others, including the visual artist Tacita Dean and per-
formance artist Laurie Anderson. “Lecture II” was added in 2010 for a performance
at “The Poetry Project” at St. Mark’s Church-​in-​the-​Bowery, New York: https://​
www.poetry​proj​ect.org/​david-​shap​iro-​anne-​car​son-​excer​pts-​10610/​.
3. “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” in Float (unpaginated).
4. Streb’s description of her work’s main goal in the context of her studio, SLAM: Streb
Lab for Action Mechanics, Brooklyn: https://​streb.org/​elizab​eth-​streb/​. Streb
understands the audience as “co-​conspirators” in her work, and the mobilization
of audience expectations is crucial to the effect of the controlled fall. Streb’s own
stunts, her webpage tells us, include diving through glass.
5. Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Men in the Off Hours, p. 35. The
“Essay,” along with its redraft or companion piece “Essay on Error,” was first
published in Raritan 18.3 (Winter 1999). Carson’s short disquisition on Aristotelian
error and its performative or mimetic quality echoes her reading of the same pas-
sage from the Poetics and her discussion of the same Alkman fragment in the ac-
ademic article, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 151–​152. Her phrase “the true mistakes of
poetry,” also in the “Essay on What I Think About Most,” appears in this article
(151). Carson’s line references in Aristotle are Poetics (1460b15–​17), and, for “How
true, yet I mistook!,” Rhetoric (3.11.6).
248 Notes

6. Carson uses the term “accidents” to describe her unorthodox reading combinations.
See Aitken, “The Art of Poetry no. 88.”
7. “Scheduled mischief ” is her term for the channeling of erotic instinct in the psycho-
analytic transference; see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 64.
8. See Carson-​Giacomelli, “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum.”
9. Plato, “Phaedrus,” trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Hamilton and
Cairns, p. 477 (228b1).
10. Catherine Bush, “A Short Talk with Anne Carson,” unpublished email interview,
2000, http://​cather​ineb​ush.com/​artic​les/​a-​short-​talk-​with-​anne-​car​son/​
11. These arguments from Carson’s thesis, which draw on the work of Classicists Bruno
Snell and Denys Page, are reprised in Eros the Bittersweet, e.g., pp. 32–​60. Carson’s
principal sources here include Bruno Snell’s magnum opus, The Discovery of the Mind
in Greek Philosophy and Literature.
12. Carson and D’Agata discuss this in his interview with the poet. D’Agata, “A_​_​with
Anne Carson,” 8.
13. Several academic articles engage with Carson’s reading of desire. Jessica Fisher writes
on what she calls Carson’s “stereoscopic poetics,” drawing on Carson’s own descrip-
tion of “the difference between what is and what could be visible” as “a kind of stereos-
copy” in Eros the Bittersweet. See Jessica Fisher, “Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics,”
in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Wilkinson, pp. 17, 11.
14. D’Agata, “A_​_​with Anne Carson,” 12, 13.
15. Eros the Bittersweet was published as an academic book in 1986 by Princeton
University Press, and was re-​released by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1998 as a trade
paperback.
16. Guy Davenport, remarks reproduced in the front matter of Eros the Bittersweet
(Dalkey Archive paperback edition). Davenport’s full response to Carson’s book is
published in Grand Street: Guy Davenport, “Review [Eros the Bittersweet],” Grand
Street 6, no. 3 (Spring 1987), 184–​191.
17. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p. 30. See Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About
Most,” Raritan, 18.3 (Winter 1999), https://​rarit​anqu​arte​rly.rutg​ers.edu/​issue-​index/​
all-​volu​mes-​iss​ues/​vol​ume-​18/​vol​ume-​18-​num​ber-​3.
18. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p. 30.
19. The italics here are Carson’s.
20. The essay was first delivered as one of Carson’s Clark Lectures, held at Trinity,
College, Cambridge: “Stillness,” March 12, 2018; “Corners,” March 13, 2018; “The
Chair (And a Dance),” March 15, 2018. Lectures in the series have since been
presented at the City University of New York, the New York Public Library, and
other venues.
21. Carson, “Stillness,” 1.
22. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 17.
23. Cited in ibid., p. 7.
24. Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 148. See the definition of mimēsis and the infinitive
verb form mi-​me’omai in Liddell and Scott, p. 447, and Halliwell’s extensive discus-
sion of the term in Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis.
 Notes 249

25. Susan Howe’s phrase in The Birth-​mark (“Ask what form for the form,” p. 38), quoted
in the Introduction to this book.
26. See Liddell and Scott, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-​English Lexicon Abridged, (metaphora),
p. 440.
27. From Guy Davenport’s “Introduction,” to Carson, Glass, Irony and God, p. viii.
28. Though Carson’s image sequence is built out of a series of verbal figures and literary
anecdotes, it recalls the collage form or Bilderreihen of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne
Atlas to the extent that the images fulfill the dual function of repository (content,
source material) and rehearsal (argumentative structure). It is also the method fa-
mously employed by Walter Benjamin in the unfinished Arcades Project (Das
Passagenwerk, 1982), structured around alphabetically organized “convolutes,” in-
cluding quotations with and without commentary. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades
Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and
London: Harvard University Press, 1999).
29. Carson provides the reference Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. E. Lobel and
D. Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), fr. 31, for the original Greek text.
The English translation is Carson’s (Eros the Bittersweet, p. 13). A revised translation
appears in Carson, trans., If Not, Winter, p. 63.
30. Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 165.
31. Joanne O’leary, “Pulling out the Screams: A Scattershot Collection of Unsettling
Poems” [Review of Float], Times Literary Supplement, September 1, 2017, https://​
www.the-​tls.co.uk/​artic​les/​pull​ing-​out-​the-​scre​ams/​.
32. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 17.
33. Ibid.
34. John D’Agata and Susan Steinberg, “John D’Agata Redefines the Essay,” an interview
with Susan Steinberg, Electric Literature (July 14, 2016).
35. Karen Solie, “On the Irreconcilable Temptations of Anne Carson,” Literary Hub,
October 1, 2019, https://​lit​hub.com/​on-​the-​irr​econ​cila​ble-​temp​tati​ons-​of-​anne-​
car​son/​.
36. T. J. Sienkewicz, “Anne Carson: Eros the Bittersweet,” The Classical Bulletin, 63.3
(Summer 1987), 89, 90.
37. Derrida, Dissémination, p. 70.
38. Ibid., xvi (in Barbara Johnson’s Introduction).
39. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-​Criticism,” (p. 94).
40. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 87. Her reference is Montaigne, 1603, bk. 5, ch. 3.
41. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, pp. 3, 4, 7, 3.
42. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 9.
43. Ibid.
44. Peponi suggests that Eros the Bittersweet bears the influence of écriture: “a book written
by a budding classicist, with antiquity at its thematic core, but creatively aligned with
contemporary debates in Europe, and especially in France, regarding the very nature
and function of writing. I use écriture here to evoke precisely that period in recent
history rather than a specific definition of the term” (p. 54). She mentions Barthes as
a “refreshing presence one can sense in the undercurrents of Carson’s book” (p. 54),
250 Notes

but does not note the striking formal, stylistic, and citational similarities between
Eros the Bittersweet and Barthes’s more famous account of desire, or his significance
more broadly in Carson, who praises explicitly his “golden persuasions.” See Peponi,
“Ècriture and the Budding Classicist,” Anne Carson/​Antiquity, pp. 51–​62, and Carson,
“The Sheer Velocity and Ephemerality of Cy Twombly.”
45. D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 9.
46. Ibid., 11.
47. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Walter Hamilton (London and New York: Penguin, 1973;
1995), p. 57. Plato, “Phaedrus,” The Collected Dialogues, p. 509 (263b): “to say of it
what you said just now, namely that it is harmful both to the beloved and the lover,
and then to turn around and say that it is really the greatest of goods.” Quotations
in the text hereafter are from Walter Hamilton’s lively, reader-​friendly translation.
I include translations from the Bollingen edition of The Collected Dialogues in these
notes to provide readers with the standard paragraph reference.
48. Plato, Phaedrus, p. 57; Plato, “Phaedrus,” p. 509 (263d): “thanks to my inspired condi-
tion I can’t quite remember. Did I define love at the beginning of my speech?”
49. Longinus, “On Sublimity,” in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and
Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1998), p. 158 (13.2).
For Carson’s remarks on the treatise, see Decreation, p. 45. I discuss Carson’s “Essay
with Rhapsody” briefly in Chapter 5.
50. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 3.
51. D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 8.
52. Roland Barthes, “Interview for Les Lettres Françaises, February 9, 1972,” in The Grain
of the Voice: Interviews 1962–​1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang,
1985), p. 161.
53. Sienkewicz, “Anne Carson: Eros the Bittersweet,” 90. Carson opens Eros the Bittersweet
with a series of brief remarks on Kafka’s short story “The Top,” about, she says, “a phi-
losopher who spends his time around children so he can grab their [spinning] tops in
spin” (xi) to confirm his belief, she quotes, “ ‘that the understanding of any detail, that
of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.’ ”
54. D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 14.
55. See my discussion in Chapter 8.
56. Derrida, Dissémination, p. 71.
57. Transcribed from Carson’s reading of “59 Paragraphs About Albertine” at the
Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, New York, September 10, 2013, https://​www.
yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ofR3​Qd2E​_​A0.
58. Anne Carson, “The Albertine Workout,” London Review of Books 36.11 (June 5,
2014), https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v36/​n11/​anne-​car​son/​the-​albert​ine-​work​
out. The full version of The Albertine Workout, including appendices, was published
in New Directions “Poetry Pamphlet” series on June 25, 2014. A limited edition of the
London Review of Books version also appeared in artist book format, illustrated with
photogravures by the artist Kim Anno: Anne Carson and Kim Anno, The Albertine
Workout (St. Joseph, MN: One Crow Press, The Literary Arts Institute of the College
of St. Benedict, 2014).
 Notes 251

59. For example, the following image of Albertine and her girlfriends: “They form a
frieze in [Marcel’s] mind, pushing their bicycles across the beach with the blue waves
breaking behind them” (entry 37) and “Albertine’s eyes are blue and saucy. Her hair
is like crinkly black violets” (entry 32). See Adam Watt’s detailed account of the rela-
tionship between Carson’s descriptions and Proust’s: Adam Watt, “Poetry as Creative
Critique: Notes on the Desert of After Proust (On Anne Carson’s The Albertine
Workout),” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 20.4–​5 (2016), 648–​656.
60. Carson’s remark on the appendices to her doctoral thesis comes from her 1997 inter-
view with John D’Agata. See D’Agata, “A_​_​_​with Anne Carson,” 10.
61. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, III, édition publiée sous la direction de
Jean-​Yves Tadié avec, pour ce volume, la collaboration d’Antoine Compagnon et de
Pierre-​Edmond Robert (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). “La Prisonnière,” p. 570.
62. Barthes expresses something similar when he says “there is no sincere
boredom. . . . Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1975), pp. 25–​26.
63. See T. Clutch Fleischmann, “The Transposition Workout,” Brooklyn Rail, September
2014, https://​brook​lynr​ail.org/​2014/​09/​books/​the-​transp​osit​ion-​work​out.
64. “Appendix 59 on a bad photograph” describes a photograph of Proust and Alfred
Agostinelli seated side by side in a motorcar. Carson tells us that the photograph
would have been one of those “that arouses merely a docile interest and is then
forgotten—​as Barthes says, a photograph with no fissure in its surface, no punctum
to draw you in and disturb you (Camera Lucida, p. 41)—​except for the posture of
Alfred Agostinelli’s head,” which, she goes on to say, is tilted back at an angle that
suggests motion at some velocity when the two are in fact sitting, “stock-​still in the
car” (p. 38). Carson alludes to Barthes’s famous distinction between the punctum and
studium of a photograph, where the studium of an image “arouses a merely docile in-
terest,” in Carson’s words—​or in Barthes’s, that “derives from an average affect, almost
from a certain training. . . . the studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire.”
See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980), trans. Richard Howard (London and
New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 26–​27). Barthes goes on to explain in Camera Lucida,
in language that chimes with the Albertine question, that the studium “is a kind of
education . . . which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions
which establish and animate his practices, but to experience them “in reverse,” ac-
cording to my will as a Spectator” (p. 28).
65. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 36.
66. Barthes, Le Neutre: Notes de cours au Collége de France, 1977–​1978 ed. Thomas Clerc
(Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 58 (scintillations de la délicatesse . . . Non pas “traits,” “éléments,”
“composants,” mais ce qui brille par éclats [but what shines by bursts], en désordre,
fugitivement, successivement, dans le discours “anecdotique”).
67. See Barthes, Le Neutre, e.g., pp. 183–​185. An excellent article on Barthes’s unwritten
novel discusses the “notational” form in relation to contemporary novels of process,
including Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012). See Rachel Sagner Buurma
and Laura Heffernan, “Notation After “The Reality Effect”: Remaking Reference with
Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125.1 (Winter 2014), 80–​102.
252 Notes

68. The artist Kim Anno has described the “metaphorical” relation of text and image in
her and Carson’s artist book edition of The Albertine Workout as inviting an “open
reading,” one that readers can arrive at “on their own.” Quoted in Berkobien, “An
Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie” (n.p.). Carson and Anno’s artist
book edition is a boxed set of unbound sheets alternating Carson’s text with Anno’s
illustrations, published by One Crow Press and The Literary Arts Institute of the
College of St. Benedict.
69. Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe and Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (1978), trans.
Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988),
pp. 43, 47.
70. Watt, “Poetry as Creative Critique,” 650.
71. See Justin O’Brien, “Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust’s Transposition of
Sexes,” PMLA 64, no. 5 (December 1949), 933–​952. O’Brien’s article is where the
overdeterministic transposition theory is first and most powerfully set out. Later
studies set out to “unmask” Marcel’s homosexuality and Proust’s “lesbianism.” His
representation of lesbianism or “Gomorrah,” as determined by a homosexual male
gaze, has been discussed by authors including Colette, Djuna Barnes, and Monique
Wittig. See Mark D. Guenette, “Le Loup et le Narrateur: The Masking and Unmasking
of Homosexuality in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu,” Romanic Review 80.2
(March 1, 1989), and Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 1999), in which Ladenson writes that “no account
of lesbianism in literature could be complete without coming to terms with Proust”
(p. 4).
72. Carson, Nox, entry 1.3. The idea can be traced to Heidegger (see my Chapter 7).
73. Sontag, “On Style,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1961; London and
New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), pp. 15–​36 (p. 28); Lisa Ruddick, ‘When Nothing
Is Cool’, The Future of Scholarly Writing, ed. A. Bammer and R.-​E. Boetcher Joeres
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 71.
74. See Samuel Beckett, Proust/​Three Dialogues (London: J. Calder, 1965).
75. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 35.
76. Ibid.
77. See Jacqueline Rose, Albertine (2001; London: Vintage, 2002), and Angela Carter, The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972; London: Penguin Books, 1986).
78. See Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (London and New York: Jonathan Cape, 2019);
Marina Warner, Indigo or Mapping the Waters (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992),
and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966; London: Penguin Books, 2000).
79. See “Appendix 40 on sleep theory,” The Albertine Workout, p. 36. There are allusions
to Heraklitos in La Prisonnière that may be Carson’s source for the fictional letter.
See Jacob Sider Jost, “Bergotte’s Other Patch of Yellow: A Fragment of Heraclitus in
Proust’s La prisonnière,” Modern Philology 112.4 (May 2015), 713–​720. The context
of the letter throws it off balance in ways that recall Carson’s own essay on sleep in
Decreation. Before writing the letter, Proust wakes in the aftermath of a dream, “swept
aside by something that had passed; he wakes, we are told, ‘on the wrong shore,’ ”
 Notes 253

echoing Carson’s paraphrasing of Jacques Lacan in “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A

Praise of Sleep)”: “sleep is a space from which the sleeper can travel in two directions,
both of them a kind of waking” (Decreation, p. 22; see Chapter 5 of this book). Carson
speaks of waking on the wrong side of sleep, entering a scene from real life “from the
sleep side” (Decreation, p. 20). The things that theory cannot prevent from existing,
the apocryphal letter scene suggests, are themselves of dubious origin, unplumbable
things anchored deep in the life of fantasy, sleep, and dreams.
80. See Brady, Poetry and Bondage on the relationships between formal constraint in po-
etry and the experiences it transacts of freedom and liberty. Brady also proposes that
notions of constraint (the “fetters of verse”) depend, in turn, on the experiences of
people in actual bondage.
81. Traces of Barthes’s thinking are all over Eros the Bittersweet and The Albertine Workout.
Carson quotes from A Lover’s Discourse, The Pleasure of the Text, and Camera Lucida,
but we can also find echoes of Barthes’s many fantasies of neutralizing discursive
power. This from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is perhaps the most powerful of
his reflections on hermeneutic as well as linguistic forms of capture: Barthes recalls
a childhood game, “prisoner’s base,” where, he says, “what I liked best was to free the
prisoners—​the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation. . . . In
the great game of the powers of speech, we also play prisoner’s base: one language
has only temporary rights over another.” Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975),
trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1977), p. 50.
82. “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus” in Float (unpaginated;
the italics are Carson’s).
83. The sonnet sequence was first performed at Harvard University’s English Institute in
2007, following a commission by the University.
84. The sequence of sonnets has since been performed at the 92nd Street Y in New York
and at Princeton University: https://​engl​ish.prince​ton.edu/​eve​nts/​pos​sess​ive-​used-​
drink-​me-​lect​ure-​prono​uns-​form-​15-​sonn​ets. A number of the sonnets are available
to view on the University of Michigan’s “Play Gallery” site: https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​
ils/​podca​st_​p​lay-​gall​ery-​posess​ive-​use​d_​43​1518​246.
85. “Merce Sonnet” in “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the
Form of 15 Sonnets,” Float (unpaginated). See Carson’s performance of the sonnet at
the 92nd Street Y, New York: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​pLdA​kDi5​u9E.
86. Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York
and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 97–​98.
87. Copeland, Merce Cunningham, p. 114. See Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marchel
Duchamp: Anti-​Artist,” View: The Modern Magazine [Duchamp Issue], Series V, no. 1
(March 1945), reprinted in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An
Anthology (1951; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 306–​316 (p.
307: the correct quotation reads, “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order
to avoid conforming to my own taste”). “Sonnet Isolate” was published in London
Review of Books 32.21 (November 4, 2010), http://​www.lrb.co.uk/​v32/​n21/​anne-​car​
son/​son​net-​isol​ate. For a recording of the performance at the 92nd Street Y: https://​
www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​j8y5​Svhp​bwU from minute 4:32.
254 Notes

88. See Linda Hutcheon, “Interdisciplinary Opera Studies,” PMLA 121.3 (May 2006),
802–​810, and Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Interdisciplinary Opera,”
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134.1 (2009), 149–​159.
89. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 14.
90. Berkobien, “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie.”
91. Carson touches on related ideas in the long poem “Pronoun Envy,” included among
the pamphlets of Float.
92. From Carson, “Reticent Sonnet” in “Possessive Used as Drink (Me),” Float
(unpaginated).
93. Carson, “The Glass Essay,” in Glass, Irony and God, p. 2; Carson, The Beauty of the
Husband, p. 34 (“There is something pure-​edged and burning about the first infi-
delity in a marriage. . . . I cannot live without her. /​Her, this word that explodes”).
94. Anne Carson, “Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony,” published in London Review of
Books 29.16 (August 16, 2007), 16, reprinted in Float (unpaginated). For a recording
of “Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony” at the 92nd Street Y: https://​www.yout​ube.
com/​watch?v=​j8y5​Svhp​bwU.
95. Carson, “Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Part II,” “Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony
Part III,” Float (unpaginated). Copyright © 2016 by Anne Carson. Used by permis-
sion of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Jonathan Cape, a division of the
Penguin Random House Group Limited. All rights reserved.
96. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can” in Float (unpaginated).
97. See Jean-​Luc Nancy, Le Partage des voix (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1982) on a “rhap-
sodic” hermeneutics; also see Jean-​Luc Nancy, À L’écoute (Paris: Éditions Galilée,
2002), on the “sound”—​the tone and timbre—​of “listening” (p. 17). The phrase
“dialogical rhapsody” is from Max Statkiewicz, Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues
with Plato in Contemporary Thought (University Park: Penn State University Press,
2009), p. 193.
98. Pickstock, After Writing, p. 5. See Derrida, Dissémination, p. 128.
99. Derrida’s “insistence on the transcendental writtenness of language is,” Pickstock
says, “. . . a rationalistic gesture which suppresses embodiment and temporality.”
Pickstock, After Writing, p. 4.
100. Jorie Graham, “The Art of Poetry No. 85,” interview by Thomas Gardner, The Paris
Review (Spring 2003), no. 165, http://​www.the​pari​srev​iew.org/​int​ervi​ews/​263/​the-​
art-​of-​poe​try-​no-​85-​jorie-​gra​ham.
101. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Float (unpaginated).
102. See Adorno, Prisms, p. 27 on the “hubris” of criticism and his remarks on criticism’s
“self-​satisfied contemplation” (p. 34). In the same interview, Jorie Graham speaks of
her poetry’s efforts to “rebuild the shattered community of the we” through crossing
into the reading time of the reader, even asking for his help. Graham, “The Art of
Poetry no. 85.”
 Notes 255

Chapter 2

* This essay has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-​ Curie grant agreement
no. 887344.
1. “Letter to Hans Bender” (1960) in Paul Celan, Collected Prose, translated and with
an introduction by Rosemarie Waldrop (1986; New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 26.
Copyright © Rosemarie Waldrop 1986, 1999, 2003. Used by permission of Taylor and
Francis Group LLC (Books) US through PLSclear.
2. “The Meridian” in Celan, Collected Prose, p. 53.
3. In the words of Bruce Krajewski in his review of the book for Bryn Mawr Classical
Review. See Bruce Krajewski, “Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with
Paul Celan [Review],” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2.39 (2003), https://​bmcr.brynm​
awr.edu/​2003/​2003.02.39/​. As Krajewski points out later in the review, the recep-
tion of Carson’s book shows just how polarizing a figure she is: Stanley Corngold’s
review in Modernism/​Modernity is awash with praise for the ingenuity of her
reading: see Stanley Corngold, “Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos
with Paul Celan” (review), Modernism/​Modernity 7.2 (2000), 322–​324. Steven Willett
is strongly critical of its philological weaknesses: see Steven Willett, “Economy of the
Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2.28
(2000), https://​bmcr.brynm​awr.edu/​2000/​2000.02.28.
4. “Grandiose” is one of the adjectives thrown at Carson’s book by Willett, for whom
this “slim” book suggests “the academic subgenre, the ‘lyrical’ meditation that rests
on a few scholarly posts and often shows a distinct lack of interest in truth or lucidity.”
Willett highlights what he calls Carson’s “casual respect for care, accuracy, evidence
and logical reasoning,” and concludes this scathing review, which includes a raft of
appendices listing Carson’s errors, that “the errors are of such extent and magnitude
that they could seriously mislead someone not familiar with the scholarship, espe-
cially when Leslie Kurke assures us in the book jacket puff that it is a work of ‘meticu-
lous scholarship’ ” (Willett, “Economy of the Unlost,” n.p.).
5. Carson, “Now What?,” 43–​45. Ian Rae describes Carson’s use of adjoining schol-
arly introductions as a kind of hypotaxis, understood as the arrangement of une-
qual constructs in a sentence. See Rae, “Verglas,” 164, 182. On the function of scholia
throughout the history of Ancient Greek scholarship, see eds. Franco Montanari
and Lara Pagani, From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek
Scholarship (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011).
6. In Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, pp. 206–​207. Quoted in Görner,
“Hölderlin’s Romantic Classicism,” in ed. Hamilton, The Oxford Handbook of
European Romanticism, p. 279.
7. Willett, “Economy of the Unlost” (n.p.). Willett is particularly severe in his remarks on
the “Note on Method.” In his view, the final paragraph of the extract I quote here can
be parsed as follows: “If we unpack this statement, it tells us that (1) only some facts
will be retained, (2) there will be little method behind their retention, (3) they will be
employed capriciously as they excite attention and (4) ‘creative’ exploitation will take
256 Notes

precedence over careful reasoning from evidence. That is a good summary of what
EU. gives us.”
8. Carson’s reference is to Lukács, “Die Subjekt-​Objekt Beziehung in der Ästhetik”
(1917), Logos (1917–​1918), 14–​28 (19).
9. See the extended discussion of Short Talks in the Postscript to this book. The remark
on Short Talks is from Rachel Wyatt, quoted on the dust jacket of the Brick Books
edition.
10. Alongside Lukacs’s proposed excision of the world beyond Erlebbarkeit, Carson’s
remarks also invoke Martin Heidegger’s notion of Lichtung (translated as “Clearing”
but rooted in Licht, so a space opened for light to pass). The word suggests not just
excision—​clearing away, clearing out—​but an open, illuminated space into which less
readily heeded forms of meaning can be perceived; a counterpoint to the “darkening
landscape” of material fact.
11. Carson, Short Talks, p. 23.
12. Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and
Other Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 149–​150. The similarity of this statement to
Carson’s was suggested to me by Amador Vega, who quotes Gadamer’s confession
in an illuminating comparative essay on Celan, Meister Eckhart, and the German
priest, poet, and mystic Angelus Silesius: Amador Vega, Tres poetas del exceso: La
hermenéutica imposible en Eckhart, Silesius y Celan (Barcelona: Fragmenta Editorial,
2011), pp. 90–​91.
13. The listing of etymological and historical facts also appears in Norma Jeane Baker
of Troy, Carson’s adaptation of Euripides’s Helen, as a means of calling attention to
ambiguities and lacunae in the narratives of both the mythic Helen and the histor-
ical Marilyn Monroe. The use of associative “footnotes” can also be seen in Carson’s
experimental “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” performed at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in collaboration with Robert Currie and Faisal bin Ali
Jaber, an engineer from Yemen, on May 27, 2016: https://​whit​ney.org/​educat​ion/​
educat​ion-​blog/​sky​writ​ing-​lect​ure.
14. The phrase appears in the second line of Catullus’s “Poem 101” in Carson’s transla-
tion. See Nox, 7.2 (facing the glossary entry for “prisco”).
15. See Paul Celan, The Meridian. Final Version. Drafts. Materials, ed. Bernhardt
Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2011), p. 104 (from Celan’s notes on “The Poem”). Celan’s remarks
on the poem as “encounter” (Begegnung) are discussed and referenced in note
40 below.
16. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 1995), p. xvi. Felstiner notes that the word du is “voiced some
1,300 times in over three decades of verse” (p. xvi). Felstiner discusses Celan’s use of
both “the intimate “you”“ (du) and the “addressable thou” of “Du /​und Aber-​Du” in
“Zurich, at the Stork” (p. 158).
17. Carson, ““Echo with No Door on Her Mouth,” 255–​256.
 Notes 257

18. See D’Agata, “A_​_​with Anne Carson,” 17. Carson also responds to the following ques-
tion from Kevin McNeilly: “Do you see poems as gifts?”—​“Ideally.” McNeilly, “Gifts
and Questions,” 15.
19. Danielle Allen, “Review (Economy of the Unlost),” Chicago Review, 46.1 (2000), 162–​
164 (164).
20. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 157.
Steiner’s utopian argument for interpretation as the performance (as in virtuoso “ex-
ecution”) of a source object, as in the live interpretation of a musical score, and his
call, after Geoffrey Hartman, for a form of criticism “answerable” to its object, is an
argument borne out, to a certain extent, by Carson’s reading of Celan. (Steiner, in-
cidentally, was an avowed admirer of both poets). See G. Douglas Atkins, Geoffrey
Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
21. According to records of the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures held at Oberlin
College, Carson’s original lecture series was titled as follows: Anne Carson (McGill
University), Greed: A Fractal Approach to Simonides (1992). April 27, “The Art of
Negative Attention”; April 28, “Radical Defect Radical Eye: Greed for the Invisible”;
April 30, “Writing on the World: Greed for Exactitude”; May 1, “Your Money or
Your Life.”
22. Carson’s academic output in the years running up to the Lectures bears this out.
Material and ideas revisited in the lectures and in Economy of the Unlost first appears
in several earlier journal articles and prose pieces. See, e.g., Anne Carson, “Simonides
Negative,” Arethusa 21.2 (Fall 1988), 147–​157; “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 144–​146; and
“Economy, Its Fragrance,” 14–​16 (“If I were marketing the poetry/​prose distinction
as a perfume, I would call it Economy” . . . “Economic measures allow poetry to prac-
tice what I take to be its principal subversion. That is, insofar as it is economic, poetry
relies on a gesture which it simultaneously dismantles,” 14). It should be emphasized
that Celan is not an afterthought to Carson’s early work on economy. The reading of
his “No More Sand Art” that appears in Economy of the Unlost makes an unexpected
appearance in the final part of “Economy, Its Fragrance” (15). Indeed, the essay might
be read as a compact early rehearsal of Economy of the Unlost.
23. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 15. The phrase also makes a cameo appearance
in the title of Elizabeth Lowry’s review of Economy of the Unlost and Autobiography
of Red: Elizabeth Lowry, “The Man Who Would Put to Sea on a Bathmat,” London
Review of Books 22.19 (October 5, 2000), https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v22/​n19/​
elizab​eth-​lowry/​the-​man-​who-​would-​put-​to-​sea-​on-​a-​bath​mat.
24. Carson’s reference for her quotation from Bourdieu is J. G. Peristiany, Honor and
Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), p. 210.
25. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (Spring 1977), 439–​447.
26. Carson also discusses uses and forms of the symbolon in Eros the Bittersweet, pp. 70–​
76. For broader definitions of the Greek term, see Liddell and Scott, p. 663.
27. At the end of his highly critical review of Economy of the Unlost, Willett compiles a
long list of philological and biographical “blunders” littering Carson’s essay, and is
particularly censorious of what he suggests is her naïveté or wishful thinking in her
258 Notes

treatment of the biographical myths grown up around Simonides of Keos. Curiously,

given Carson’s Classical training, most of the errors Willett attributes to her essay
apply to her readings of Simonides, where unattributed sources and the scarcity of
corroboratory material are the condition for a degree of poetic license that, Willett
argues, would be impermissible in the case of Celan. Willett, “Economy of the Unlost.”
28. See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (London and New York: Norton, 2018).
Odysseus’s vivid recounting runs from Book 9 to Book 13, whereupon we hear his au-
dience “praised his words . . . since he had spoken well” (p. 318, Book 13, lines 48–​49).
29. E.g., M. M. Austin and P. Vidal-​Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient
Greece: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Ian Morris,
“Gift and Commodity in Archaic Greece,” Man 21.1 (March 1986), 1–​17; in addi-
tion to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies,
trans. I. Cunnison (1925; New York: Norton, 1967). Carson explores the versatility
of charis, whose meaning moves between “return favour” and “free gift,” in the essay
“Echo with No Door on Her Mouth: A Notional Refraction through Sophokles, Plato,
and Defoe.”
30. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1991), trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 30.
31. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in his Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 142.
32. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 75.
33. In his attempted takedown of Carson, Solway reads Carson’s chapter “No More Sand
Art” and argues “the few interesting things Carson does have to say about Celan’s
poem are cribbed almost verbatim” from Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.
See Solway, “The Trouble with Annie,” 24. Also see Rae’s strong riposte to Solway
in “Anne Carson and the Solway Hoaxes,” where Rae acknowledges Carson “draws
heavily from Felstiner” but notes that Felstiner is referenced frequently throughout
the book, suggesting Carson makes no attempt to hide her debt to Celan’s biographer
and one of his finest readers. Rae, “Anne Carson and the Solway Hoaxes,” 46.
34. Barthes, Criticism and Truth, p. 37.
35. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in Selected Writings, Volume
I: 1913–​1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), pp. 253–​263. Benjamin, citing Rudolf Pannwitz, argues in
favor of the translator “allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign
tongue”: in this case, then, of Carson allowing her English to be Germanized (p. 262).
36. The most famous instance of the demand placed by Celan on individual letters is in
the final lines of the poem “No More Sand Art” [“Keine Sandkunst mehr”]: “Your
song, what does it know? //​Deepinsnow, /​Eepinnow, /​Ee–​i–​o.” [“Dein Gesang, was
weiß er? //​Tiefimschnee, /​Iefimnee, /​I–​i–​e”]: Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans.
Michael Hamburger (1972; London: Anvil Press, 2007), pp. 268–​269. John Felstiner
notes that “translated into Hebrew, which has no vowel letters, this poem would
verge on silence—​a testimony to the literal truth that Celan sought” (Felstiner, Paul
Celan, p. 220). Carson makes a similar observation in her essay: “For one cannot help
but think, watching ‘Deepinsnow’ melt away, that if this poem were translated into
 Notes 259

Hebrew, a language in which vowels are not usually printed, it would vanish even be-
fore its appointed end. As did many a Hebrew”: Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 116.
37. A similar reading of “with” and the first lines of John 1 is presented in Forrest Gander’s
collection Be With, in the poem “First Ballad: A Wreath,” a loose translation of the
first ballad of St. John of the Cross: In the beginning the Word /​was as being /​In
happiness /​infinitely the Word possessed //​The same Word being was /​said to be be-
ginning //​Beginninglessly /​it went on.” See Forrest Gander, Be With (New York: New
Directions, 2018), p. 32.
38. See André Furlani, “Reading Paul Celan with Anne Carson: What Kind of Withness
Would That Be?,” Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003), 84–​104. The question in the
title of Furlani’s article is taken from Carson’s poem, “God’s Christ Theory” (Carson,
Glass, Irony and God, p. 51).
39. See “L.A.,” a selection of works composed for Laurie Anderson, in Float (unpaginated).
40. Celan speaks of the “encounter” (Begegnung) of poetry in the following terms: “The
poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact
not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery
of encounter?” [im Geheimnis der Begegnung]. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 49. See
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, 2005), Part I: IV, pp. 149–​162.
41. Willett, “Economy of the Unlost” (n.p.).
42. Ibid. (n.p.).
43. See Rita Felski’s discussion of description and redescription as alternatives to “suspi-
cious” critique: Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, e.g., pp. 17, 30.
44. Carson’s “slapdash” use of sources in her readings of Simonides, making the case for
the distant closeness of his and Celan’s poetics, is one of the points criticized most
heavily by Steven Willett (Willet, “Economy of the Unlost,” n.p.). He states: “She begins
by comparing Celan’s “Matière de Bretagne,” which combines a wide range of other
poetic traditions focused on a single dramatic moment when the false sail appears
to Tristan, with two citations from Simonides: (1) a passage from Plutarch’s Life of
Theseus (17.4, fr. 550 PMG) in which Simonides says that the false sail which misled
Theseus’ father was red and (2) a scholiast who reports the words of the messenger
sent to inform Aegeus of the true story (fr. 551 PMG). Celan’s use of negatives and
negative theology is well known, but C. now argues that the negative in the first and
the counterfactual in the second passage show that ‘Negation links the mentalities of
Simonides and Celan’ (9). They do no such thing. In the Life of Theseus, the statement
that the sail was “not white” belongs to Plutarch’s prose, the statement that it was a
kind of red belongs to Simonides’ poem. Whether Simonides used a negative here is
unknown.”
45. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), vol. 1, p. 171,
translated by Carson in Economy of the Unlost, p. 5.
46. Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 142–​143.
47. Ibid., pp. 70–​71.
48. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” p. 260.
49. Ibid.
260 Notes

50. On the reproduction of meter in her own practice of translation, Carson has said: “I
wouldn’t say there’s metrical fidelity to the original meters, which isn’t reproducible,
but there’s a new rhythmic design to take in the English sounds and the shifting con-
tent.” See Berkobien, “An Interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie” (n.p.).
51. See Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 38.
52. Ibid., p. 32.
53. Carson, Decreation, p. 175.
54. Willett, “Economy of the Unlost” (n.p.).
55. Ibid. (n.p.).
56. Ibid. (n.p.).
57. Carson cites this description of Mallarmé from Jean-​Paul Sartre, marking out the
lines of a poetic tradition joining Mallarmé to Celan (and perhaps Carson herself).
Jean-​Paul Sartre, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. E. Sturm (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 1988), cited in Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 6.
58. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
59. See Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s powerful argument for the public, emotional resonances
of language, the community invoked in the mother tongue, as what sustains the lyric
“I.” Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton,
NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Chapter 3

* This essay has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-​ Curie grant agreement
no. 887344.
1. Carson, Glass, Irony and God, “Introduction” by Guy Davenport, ix.
2. John D’Agata and Deborah Tall, “New Terrain: the Lyric Essay,” Seneca Review 27.2
(Fall 1997), 7. Ian Rae has discussed the influence of essayistic practices such as those
of Michel de Montaigne in “The Glass Essay”: see Rae, “Verglas,” 164–​165.
3. Mary Gannon, “Anne Carson: Beauty Prefers an Edge,” Poets and Writers 29.2
(March–​April 2001), 26–​33 (33).
4. Carson, Glass, Irony and God, “Introduction” by Guy Davenport, ix.
5. The phrase summarizes a critical tradition long nourished on what Brontë scholar
Lucasta Miller calls the “Brontë myth”: a reading of her work that assumes its visionary,
metaphysical inspiration. See Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Jonathan
Cape, 2001).
6. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. viii.
7. See, e.g., Carson, “Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War” and
“Appendix on Ordinary Time,” Men in the Off Hours, pp. 3–​8 and pp. 165–​166, as
well as The Beauty of the Husband (discussed in Chapter 4 of this book) and Nox
(discussed in Chapter 7).
8. Carson, “God’s Christ Theory,” in Glass, Irony and God, p. 51.
 Notes 261

9. See the poem sequences “The Truth About God” and “Book of Isaiah” in Glass, Irony
and God, pp. 39–​54 and pp. 107–​118. The poem “Teresa of God” appears halfway
through the first of these sequences (pp. 44–​45).
10. See D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 12.
11. As per my benchmarks for the lyric in this book: Vendler’s “performance of the mind
in solitary speech,” often in Carson a performance of the mind in and after reading,
and especially Culler’s “iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric
present.” See Helen Vendler, “Introduction” to The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
reproduced in A Lyric Theory Reader, ed. Jackson and Prins, pp. 128–​140 (p. 129), and
Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
12. Juliana Spahr, “Introduction” to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where
Lyric Meets Language (2002), reprinted in ed. Jackson and Prins, The Lyric Theory
Reader, p. 557.
13. Emily Bronte’s original punctuation, prior to the intervention of her sister, can be seen
in the first published edition of poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë: Poems
by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (London: Aylott and Jones, 1846), access courtesy of
the Munby Rare Books Room, Cambridge University Library. The edition of Bronte’s
poems to which I refer in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, is The Poems of Emily
Brontë, ed. Barbara Lloyd-​Evans (London: B. T Batsford, 1992, hereafter Poems).
Emily Brontë’s “erratic” spellings are listed in Appendix 2 of the Poems, beside an edi-
torial rationale for their excision and regularization. See Poems, p. 185.
14. See John Milton, “When I Consider . . . ” (Sonnet XIX), in Complete Poems and Major
Prose, ed. Meritt Y. Hughes (1957; Cambridge and Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003),
p. 168 (lines 2 and 4).
15. See Carson’s remarks in Dean, “Anne Carson Punches a Hole Through Greek Myth.”
16. See Rae, “Verglas,” 168–​171. See also Aitken, “The Art of Poetry No. 88,” 206, where
the poem’s image of “a frozen ditch” is cited.
17. See Erica McAlpine’s work on mistakes in poems and on the history of their reading.
Erica McAlpine, The Poet’s Mistake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
18. The phrase appears in Charlotte Bronte’s preface to Wuthering Heights, and is quoted
at several points by Stevie Davies in her book, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: The
Women’s Press, 1994). Carson makes much of Charlotte Brontë’s interventions, set-
ting them up as an analog to the role of the narrator’s mother in the text. Ian Rae, for
example, discusses several possibilities for the pronunciation of “whacher.” Where
the word has been read as belonging to a category of “portmanteaux” (a single word
composed of two separate words), Rae suggests such words “might better be defined
as nonce-​words”: “because the terms are personal, provisional, and often irregular in
spelling” (“Verglas,” 176).
19. Carson also reflects on the loneliness of Charlotte after Emily’s death in “Short Talk
on Charlotte,” Short Talks, p. 58.
20. See Carson, “Appendix to Ordinary Time,” Men in the Off Hours, pp. 165–​166 (p. 166).
21. Howe, The Birth-​mark, p. 1.
22. Ibid. pp. 15, 9. Howe also speaks in My Emily Dickinson of a misreading that begins
with “canonical criticism [. . . that] persists in dropping [Dickinson and other’s]
262 Notes

names and ignoring their work”: Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 11. The poet Claudia
Rankine proclaims her own romantic attachment to Dickinson, though she appeals to
a very different set of circumstances—​the history of disqualification of black lives—​in
her address to her reclusive predecessor: “sadness lives in the recognition that a life
can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the rec-
ognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart,
without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, per-
haps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers.” Rankine’s ref-
erence is to Dickinson’s famous poem “ ‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers,” for which
hope “perches in the soul -​/​And sings the tune without the words —​”: in this prose
section of Rankine’s poem, and for the historical injustices she invokes without hope
of redress, the words are to be sung without the tune. See Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be
Lonely, pp. 22–​23.
23. Walter Benn Michaels writes illuminatingly on Howe’s commitment to the mate-
rial ontology of the Dickinson fascicles. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the
Signifier, 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006),
Introduction: “The Blank Page” (especially pp. 3–​5).
24. Susan Howe quotes a remarkably similar reading of Emily Dickinson by T. H.
Johnson, editor of Dickinson’s poems for Harvard University Press: “ ‘her creative
energies were at flood, and she was being overwhelmed by forces which she could
not control’ (PED xviii).” See Howe, The Birth-​mark, p. 149. The origin of Brontë’s
poiesis has long been the object of scholarly mystification, linked for almost as long to
her alleged Mystical experiences. Although there is evidence for Brontë’s conversancy
with elements of Kantian idealism—​Thomas Carlyle’s essay on Novalis in Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays of 1839 is a likely candidate—​Brontë scholar Lucasta Miller is at
pains to stress the extent to which Brontë’s writing process has been mythologized at
the expense of her work’s critical reading. See Miller, The Brontë Myth, in particular
the chapter “The Mystic of the Moors” (pp. 251–​288). Miller cites May Sinclair’s idio-
syncratic 1912 study, The Three Brontës, as instantiating a twentieth-​century tradition
of transcendental explanations for Emily Brontë’s writing.
25. This again tallies with predominant readings of Emily Dickinson, whose relation to
the figure she addresses as “Master” has been understood as decisive, Susan Howe
shows, in transforming her from a maker of “verses” into a poet. See Howe, The Birth-​
mark, pp. 132–​134 (133).
26. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1980), p. 104.
27. Ibid., p. 108.
28. Poems, p. 50. In poem 26 in the earliest available manuscript of Bronte’s poems, the
“EJB MS,” transcribed in February 1844, Brontë figures this expansive ambivalence to
the muse: “Thee, ever present, phantom thing, /​My slave, my comrade and my King!”
See Poems, p. 56.
29. F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969),
pp. 83–​152, my italics. Leavis’s criticism is a strong example of the “Intentional
 Notes 263

Fallacy” theorized by W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley in The Verbal Icon (1954;

London: Methuen, 1970).
30. In his essay “Experimentum Linguae,” Giorgio Agamben writes of the “unwritten
work” to which every text is prologue or afterword. See Giorgio Agamben, Infancy
and History (1979), trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), p. 3.
31. Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 133.
32. A list of Bronte’s “erratic” spellings can be found in Appendix 2 of the Poems, along-
side an editorial rationale for their excision and regularization. See Poems, p. 185.
33. Rae, “Verglas,” 177. Rae proposes that the poem be understood as staging a dialogue
between “I” and “Aw,” the latter the Yorkshire dialect term for “I” as spoken by minor
characters in Wuthering Heights (176–​177).
34. Carson, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” Decreation, pp. 72–​73.
35. See A Concordance to the Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, eds. S. Akiho and T.
Fujita (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1976). Carson quotes the line from Bronte’s “At Castle
Wood,” in “The Glass Essay,” Glass, Irony and God, p. 30.
36. In Bronte’s “The Prisoner. A Fragment,” sight and sounding are described as an afflic-
tion for the soul bound to the sensible body: “Oh, dreadful is the check—​intense the
agony—​When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins
to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the
chain.”
37. See David James’s powerful inquiry into the consolations of fiction and life-​
writing, and “the critical work contemporary literature itself can perform when
evoking consolation’s experiential and representational complexities”: David
James, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 8.
38. Chihaya, “A Glass Essay: Reading Anne Carson Post-​breakup.”

Chapter 4

1. Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson.” Carson speaks in similar terms of her
handling of classical sources: “to jump from what you know into empty space and see
where you end up.” See Rehak, “Things Fall Together.”
2. See Stanton, “I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you.”
3. Carson, “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” Float
(unpaginated).
4. Gannon, “Beauty Prefers an Edge,” 33.
5. The remarks appear in DuPlessis’s landmark essay “For the Etruscans,” in The Pink
Guitar, p. 5. In the freeform essay, DuPlessis inquires into “the production of formal,
epistemological, and thematic strategies by members of the group Woman,” which
she considers in relation to the rhetorical limitations of “formal argument” (p. 6).
Woolf ’s remarks, quoted by DuPlessis (p. 5), appear in Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Thrale,”
264 Notes

in Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (1949; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1974), p. 52.
6. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 7. Barthes’s confession of his “piratical law”—​“I follow
a somewhat piratical law that doesn’t always recognize original property. Not at all
from a spirit of contestation, but from the immediacy of desire”—​appears in Barthes,
The Grain of the Voice, p. 277. Andrea Rexilius has remarked on the relevance of
Barthes to Carson’s representation of desire in The Beauty of the Husband, and is one
of few readers to engage with the significance of the tango in the work. See Andrea
Rexilius, “The Light of This Wound: Marriage, Longing, Desire in Anne Carson’s The
Beauty of the Husband,” in ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, pp. 107–​113.
7. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 3 (italics mine).
8. Ibid.
9. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
10. B. K. Fischer remarks that “Carson’s dominant mode in The Beauty of the Husband . . . is
not painterly but dancerly . . . the poem’s tempo and pacing mimic the dance’s alter-
nation of long steps with quick complicated ones, as well as its exaggerated posturing.
Carson’s frequent use of tercets with lines of shortening lengths evokes the tango’s
centrifugal arc.” See B. K. Fischer, “Review: Carson, Fulton, Rankine,” Boston Review,
July 15, 2014, https://​bosto​nrev​iew.net/​artic​les/​bk-​fisc​her-​rev​iew-​car​son-​ful​ton-​
rank​ine/​.
11. Anne Carson, “The Keats Headaches,” Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 2019,
https://​www.the-​tls.co.uk/​artic​les/​the-​keats-​headac​hes/​. See note 54 below on the
Foucauldian affiliations of Carson’s expression.
12. See Elizabeth S. Anker on the extreme metafiction of J. M. Coetzee, which poses com-
parable difficulties for suspicious reading models. See Elizabeth S. Anker, “Why We
Love Coetzee; or, The Childhood of Jesus and the Funhouse of Critique,” in Critique
and Postcritique, ed. Anker and Felski, pp. 183–​210.
13. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 75. Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, p. 89
(le délire—​ou le leurre dans lequel je suis pris).
14. See Carson, “The Keats Headaches,” which stages the narrator’s blending and
unblending with the biography of Keats as she wrestles with headaches “crashing on
all coasts of me.” The exchanges between these stories recalls the staged identifications
with Emily Brontë in “The Glass Essay.”
15. This is also a concern of Barthes’s (see Chapter 1, note 81).
16. In Euripides’s Helen, one of the principal literary transmissions of the Persephone
myth, Demeter is referred to as “the Mother.” Carson’s text sets up a structural parallel
with the Hymn to Demeter, casting the narrator’s mother as a stalwart against seduc-
tion. Carson’s 2018 version of the Helen is discussed in Chapter 6 of this book.
17. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947;
London: Methuen, 1949), p. 124.
18. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats: Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956; 1990), pp. 209–​210 (p. 210).
19. Ibid.
20. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 20.
 Notes 265

21. C. Namwali Serpell, “A Heap of Cliché,” in Anker and Felski, eds., Critique and
Postcritique, pp. 153–​182 (p. 159). Serpell’s remarks refer to literary cliché in general.
22. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (1975), trans., Robert Czerny with Kathleen
McLaughlin and John Costello, Routledge Classics (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), p. 6.
23. The characterization of metonymy as “devouring” is Roland Barthes’s. See Barthes, A
Lover’s Discourse, p. 75.
24. Carson, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” Decreation, p. 72.
25. The term is Robert Potts’s, though Solway’s sentiments toward Carson are similar. See
Potts, “Neither Rhyme nor Reason.”
26. See James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), where Longenbach argues that the elements in poetry that push
against or sabotage themselves are in fact “the wonder of poetry.” Resistance is what
distinguishes poetry from writing whose function is to transmit knowledge or infor-
mation without obstructing it.
27. Carson, “Stillness,” 12.
28. See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 475–​509
(p. 475).
29. Keats: Poetical Works, pp. 207–​209.
30. See Culler’s powerful, synthetic definition in Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
31. Carson seems, too, to have Walter Benjamin’s “one true language” in mind. See Walter
Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Selected Writings, Volume 1, pp. 253–​263
(p. 259).
32. Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose (1985), trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 47–​48.
33. Ibid., p. 48.
34. See Carson’s vignette in the “Decreation” essay in which she describes a childhood
urge to eat the pages of The Lives of the Saints (Decreation, p. 175). Though Carson’s
“Notes” mention neither Dante nor Agamben, they refer to “Johann Sebastian Bach,
Cantata, BWV, 56; Rev. 7.15–​17.” Bach’s so-​called cross cantata (from its title “Ich
will den Kreuzstab” [I shall willingly carry the cross-​staff]) departs from the text of
Matthew 1–​18 to reflect on the suffering of man’s “pilgrimage” “to God, in the prom-
ised land” (“zu Gott in das gelobte Land”), a journey which is compared in the cantata
to a sea voyage and arrival at the “port of my rest” (“Port der Ruhe”). Resonances
with Dante’s pilgrimage in The Divine Comedy, with the mother tongue as a “port
of rest,” are possible but oblique. See the entry for “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne
tragen,” Oxford Composer Companions: J. S. Bach, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 489.
35. Agamben, The Idea of Prose, p. 48.
36. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 9. A small but significant cache of material absorbed
by Carson’s narrative concerns the work of Marcel Duchamp, as discussed toward the
end of this chapter.
37. Carson’s reference is to “Plato, Phaedrus, 264.” The idea of “cuts” expressed here
returns in Carson’s experimental lecture “Cassandra Float Can,” in which she
266 Notes

describes “cuts” and “incisions” revealing the internal structures of, respectively, the
Trojan language as uttered by Aeschylus’s Cassandra, the thought and shorthand of
Edmund Husserl, and the buildings into which “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-​Clark
made his interventions (Float, unpaginated). See my Chapters 7 and 8 for discussions
of the lecture.
38. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 20.
39. Both texts were published in the 1848 volume Literary Remains. See Keats: Poetical
Works, pp. 247–​306 and pp. 316–​340.
40. It is perhaps easy to see why Carson chose these works, given their parallels with the
jealous intrigues of her narrator. However, her own remarks on the spuriousness of
the fragments (which she chose for their “shininess”) suggest we would do best not to
take these parallels too seriously. See McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 20.
41. Carson provides references for a number of her allusions to Keats at the end of the
book, but the reference for this sighting is not among them. The vignette is taken
from a letter sent in 1817 from the Isle of Wight, in which Keats reports local opinion
that the island had been ruined by the presence of soldiers, an opinion he later finds
expressed in the graffiti on glass: “In the room where I slept at Newport I found this on
the window “O Isle spoilt by the Milatary.” See John Keats, “Letter to J. H. Reynolds,
17–​18 April 1817,” in The Letters of John Keats, 1814–​1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins,
2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), volume I, pp. 131–​132.
42. See Howe, My Emily Dickinson.
43. Howe, The Birth-​mark, p. 9.
44. See Marcel Duchamp, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel
Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 26.
45. Duchamp famously expressed his preference for the work following the damage (“It’s a
lot better with the breaks, a hundred times better. It’s the destiny of things.”). See Pierre
Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1971), pp. 75–​76.
46. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Float, unpaginated.
47. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, p. 234.
48. Keats: Poetical Works, p. 209.
49. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, pp. 130, 129.
50. Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than
Works by British Artists (London: Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-​Bernet, 1981), pp.
186–​191 (p. 186).
51. Octavio Paz, Apariencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp (Mexico City: El
Colegio nacional/​Ediciones Era, 2008), pp. 39, 15 (my translation).
52. See Eco, The Open Work.
53. Paz, Apariencia desnuda, pp. 46, 38.
54. Carson’s reference in the “Notes” is to Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault [1977], trans.
Nicole Dufresne (New York, 1987), 34, where Baudrillard speaks of “the agony of
sexual reason” and summarizes Foucault’s notion of “transparence” in Discipline and
Punish. Unconvinced, Baudrillard explains how the “simulating device” ostensibly
replicates the work of the “original” or “desiring machines” of “libidinal energy” (33–​
34). See also Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation
 Notes 267

and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 120,
and Lawrence Steefel, “Marcel Duchamp and the Machine,” in Marcel Duchamp, ed.
Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1973), pp. 69–​80.
55. Examples include Duchamp’s Rotary Demiphere (Precision Optics), 1924. See the
wonderful essay by Rosalind Krauss, “The Story of the Eye,” New Literary History
21.2 (Winter 1990), 283–​298, which provides a fascinating account of the theoretical
foundations of “Op’ Art.”
56. It should be emphasized that Duchamp was strongly against this notion: “One has to
be on guard because, despite oneself, one can become invaded by things of the past.
Without wanting to, one puts in some detail. There [in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even] it was a constant battle to make an exact and complete break.” See
Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 38.
57. J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of
Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 247.
58. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, pp. 124, 134.
59. See Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron, Treacherous Transparencies: Thoughts and
Observations Triggered by a Visit to the Farnsworth House (Barcelona: Actar/​IITAC
Press, 2016); Leighton, On Form, p. 3.
60. Brooks discusses the readings suggested by “enigmatic parable” of the “Ode,” in-
cluding the suggestion, if we emphasize the second variant, “truth [is] beauty” of “a
propaganda art.” Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, p. 125.
61. Paz describes the Readymade as a form of “active critique,” suggesting its critical
function is performative, not expository. Paz, Apariencia desnuda, p. 31.
62. See Rachel Blau Duplessis, “Sub Rrosa: Marcel Duchamp and the Female Spectator,”
in DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar, pp. 68–​82 (p. 80).

Chapter 5

1. Carson’s “Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni”
was first published in Conjunctions 37 (Twentieth Anniversary Issue, 2001), 96–​104.
2. Oran McKenzie has written on what Carson describes here as “the sense of ban-
ditry” and its resonances with the wider spilling-​over of moments and quotations
in Carson. McKenzie’s complex argument offers that new notions of poetic value are
required to account for Carson’s forms of “derivation” (the “spillage” of sources) in
the age of “financial derivatives.” See Oran McKenzie, “Spillage and Banditry: Anne
Carson’s Derivatives,” Economies of English. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language
and Literature 33 (2016), 225–​243 (232–​235 on “Foam”).
3. Carson’s reference is Seymour Chatwin, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 57.
4. Dan Disney, “Sublime Disembodiment? Self-​as-​Other in Anne Carson’s Decreation,”
Orbis Litterarum 67.1 (2012), 25–​38. See also McKenzie, “Spillage and Banditry,”
which takes its central metaphors from Carson’s essay.
268 Notes

5. Carson, “Longing: A Documentary,” in Decreation, p. 244. The work introduces

terms (Emily Dickinson’s “overtakelessness”/​Heidegger’s das Unumgängliche) and
ideas that are later developed and reused in Nox (see my Chapter 7).
6. Carson uses the word “stereoscopic” in Eros the Bittersweet to describe “the difference
between what is and what could be visible”: Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 17. See
Jessica Fisher, “Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics,” in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed.
Wilkinson, pp. 10–​16.
7. John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964).
8. Carson, Decreation, p. 152 and epigraph. Carson’s reading of the “incongruous ideas”
in the literature of eclipse echoes what she describes as “sustained incongruence” in
Eros the Bittersweet (which Fisher discusses in relation to Carson’s idea of stereoscopy
in the book). The epigraph is taken from John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essais of
Michel de Montaigne’s (“Essay on Some Verses of Virgil”). See Michel de Montaigne,
“Essay on Some Verses of Virgil,” in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne: Done into
English by John Florio (London: David Nutt, 1892), Third Book. Carson also
takes the title of the chapter of Eros the Bittersweet, “My Page Makes Love,” from
Montaigne’s essay.
9. Fisher, “Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics,” 10. See also Disney, “Sublime
Disembodiment.”
10. Fisher, “Anne Carson’s Stereoscopic Poetics,” 10. While Fisher’s essay is strong
and largely convincing, I disagree with her reading of decreation as a philosophy
proposing to “literalise the deprivation of the self in choosing death” (10). Weil does
not imagine decreation as choosing “death” but as the renunciation of an “apparent”
existence grown up in the absence of God: “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 non-​
being.” Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978), pp. 96–​97. For an in-​depth discussion of Weil’s “decreation”
and how Carson reads it, see Elizabeth Coles, “The Sacred Object: Anne Carson and
Simone Weil,” Acta Poetica 34.1 (2013), 127–​154.
11. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 21.
12. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1948), trans. A Wills (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 89, p. 88. I cite here from the text used by Carson
(Decreation, pp. 169, 168).
13. Few readers have sought to engage with Carson’s reading of mysticism and decreation
theology, tending instead to approach Decreation as an example of Carson’s
“intergenericity” and “multimodality” (Van Praet) or the characteristic “spillage” of
sources in her work (McKenzie). Helena Van Praet makes the case for Decreation
as a “project of re-​engagement that is underpinned by synthetic disjunctions of
competing viewpoints” and as a model of literary “iteration.” Carson’s concep-
tual reading in Decreation, Van Praet argues with recourse to “literary semiology,”
is “better conceptualized as a network of relations.” See Helena Van Praet, “Writer’s
Writer Revisits Authorship: Iteration in Anne Carson’s Decreation,” Canadian
Literature 241 (2020), 18–​35 (18 and abstract).
 Notes 269

14. Aitken, “The Art of Poetry no. 88” (italics mine).

15. Several instances in Decreation suggest Carson’s engagement with the ideas of phe-
nomenology, in particular the writings of Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whose
concept of “overtakelessness” (das Unumgängliche) appears in the book’s final text,
“Longing, A Documentary,” p. 245, as well as in Nox (see my Chapter 7). See Edmund
Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer
Academic, 2001).
16. Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson.”
17. See Kurt Flasch, Meister Eckhart: Philosopher of Christianity (2011; New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 205 (“God’s exit is his entrance”). Carson does not
cite Eckhart in Decreation, but she does refer to his distinctive syntactic inversions in
her recent essay on “Stillness.”
18. This bold translation of Adorno’s remark is cited in Benson and Connors, Creative
Criticism, p. 82. A more tepid translation appears in Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” p. 4.
19. Plato, The Republic, pp. 283–​ 285 (Book X); Plato, “Republic,” The Collected
Dialogues, pp. 820–​821 (596b–​597). See de Man on “material vision” in Paul de
Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 88. Several thinkers in the phe-
nomenological tradition are evoked here. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the
Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge,
1993), whose thesis on the non-​instrumental life of objects is picked up by Carson
on “the emptiness of things before we make use of them” (Decreation, p. 24), and
Edmund Husserl (see notes 36 and 38 below), whose theories of attention are
suggested in several texts in Decreation, and whose writing is discussed explicitly
in “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated). A more recent philosophical affinity
is with the “object-​oriented ontology” of speculative realism, which seeks a non-​
relational, disinterested philosophy of objects in the world. E.g., Graham Harman,
Object-​Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin, 2018) and
Harman’s essay on “Art Without Relations,” Art Review 66 (November 4, 2014), 144–​
147, https://​artrev​iew.com/​featu​res/​september_​2​014_​grah​am_​h​arma​n_​re​lati​ons/​.
20. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, ed.
and trans. James Strachey (1955; New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 101.
21. Carson, “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared Chorus,” Float
(unpaginated).
22. Carson, “Every Exit is an Entrance,” in Decreation, pp. 17–​40 (p. 22).
23. Spoken by Lecturer II in Carson, “Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Shared
Chorus,” Float (unpaginated).
24. Carson, “Sleepchains,” Decreation, p. 3.
25. See Carson, “God’s Christ Theory,” Glass, Irony and God, p. 51, and “Note on Method,”
Economy of the Unlost, viii.
26. Gillian Rose, “Angry Angels: Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas,” Judaism and
Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 221.
270 Notes

27. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947), eds. Emma Crawford and M. von du Ruhr
(1953; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. See Weil’s original French in Simone Weil, La
Pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1947), p. 25.
28. Weil, Gravity and Grace (2002), p. 13; La Pesanteur et la grâce, p. 61.
29. I am grateful to Gaétan Charbonneau, for the estate of Betty Goodwin, for permission
to reproduce the image.
30. Betty Goodwin (1923–​2008) was a Canadian painter and printmaker. The themes of
her work include, according to a review of a 2009 exhibition in Frieze, “fragility, em-
pathy, self, absence.” See James D. Campbell, “Review: Betty Goodwin: Musée d’art
contemporain, Montreal, Canada” Frieze (October 1, 2009), https://​fri​eze.com/​arti​
cle/​betty-​good​win. See Monique Tschofen’s compelling article on Carson’s poem
and its relationship to the themes of Goodwin’s work. Tschofen, “Drawing out a New
Image of Thought.”
31. Carson, “Seated Figure with Red Angle by Betty Goodwin (1988),” Decreation, pp. 99–​
101. An earlier version of the poem was published under the title “Betty Goodwin
‘Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988),’” Art Forum 38.1 (September 1999), 156–​157.
A recording of Carson reading “Seated Figure” can be found on YouTube.com: http://​
www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​HmJJ​pR_​b​P74.
32. See Tschofen, “Drawing out a New Image of Thought,” 235–​240.
33. Sigmund Freud’s recommendation was that analysts listen with an “evenly suspended
attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) to the discourse of the patient. See also
Simone Weil’s aim “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”
in Gravity and Grace, p. 13 (“Détacher notre désir de tous les biens et attendre,” La
Pesanteur et la grâce, p. 61). Compare Carson’s “to keep attention strong means to
keep it from settling,” “Note on Method,” Economy of the Unlost, viii. Also see Weil’s
remarks in Waiting on God (Attente de Dieu, 1950): “[a]‌bove all, our thought should
be empty, waiting, not seeing anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the
object that is to penetrate it.” Simone Weil, Waiting on God (1950), trans. Emma
Crawford (London: Routledge, 1951), p. 111–​112.
34. Carson-​Giacomelli, “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” and Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 20.
35. See Tschofen, “Drawing out a New Image of Thought,” note 26, and Husserl, Analyses
Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 196, lines 11–​13.
36. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, p. 196, lines 26, 28
(italics mine).
37. Ibid., p. 196, line 15.
38. Husserl uses the term “transcendental association” in his Analyses to refer to the char-
acteristic mode of thought under passive synthesis, as opposed to active connections.
39. See McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 14 (“I like the space between languages because
it’s a place of error or mistakenness. . . . And that’s useful I think for writing because
it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in
which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived.”—​
“[a]‌kind of tension that’s disruptive,” McNeilly summarizes). See Chapter 8 for a dis-
cussion of error and mimesis in Carson’s early writing.
 Notes 271

40. See the following discussion of Carson’s lecture and writer’s workshop hosted by
Critical Inquiry: Reema Saleh, “Stillness Complicated by Corners: A Reflection on
Anne Carson’s Lecture Series,” The Official University of Chicago Arts Blog, December
2019, https://​www.uchic​agoa​rtsb​log.art/​arch​ive/​2019/​12/​19/​stilln​ess-​comp​lica​ted-​
by-​corn​ers-​a-​ref​l ect​ion-​on-​anne-​cars​ons-​lect​ure-​ser​ies.
41. Mark C. Taylor has written extensively on ideas of figuration and disfiguration
in twentieth-​century art and religious thought: Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art,
Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
42. Weil reads The Iliad with an extraordinary sensitivity, arguing that the poem models
the transformation of the object of violence from person into thing. See Simone
Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” [trans. Mary McCarthy], Chicago Review 18.2
(1965), 5–​30. The essay is a remarkable exception to the coolness of Weil’s aphoristic
writing.
43. While numerous recordings of performances and readings can be consulted online,
this recent recording of a “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” provides a classic ex-
ample: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​9F9x​Uhai​mTY.
44. Quoted in Carson, Decreation, p. 169. Emma Crawford and Mario von du Ruhr’s
translation reads: “To see a landscape as it is when I am not there. . . . When I am in
any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating
of my heart.” Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 42. Weil refers to herself as the “unwelcome
third” in the presence of two lovers; as Weil sees it, she “ought to go away so that they
can really be together”: Gravity and Grace, p. 41.
45. Carson, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” Decreation, pp. 72–​73.
46. In Aitken, “The Art of Poetry no. 88,” Carson remarks: “Well, I think there are dif-
ferent gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away
from me and some up close, and the up-​close ones generally don’t say what I want
them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.”
47. While she seeks the annihilation of lover into lover, what the poet gets instead is tied
up in the avid life of words. “There are things unbearable. /​Scorn, princes, this little
size /​of dying”: the line looks like a list of “things unbearable.” It is also a near appro-
priation of a line by the poet, Lucy Hutchinson: “Scorn, princes, your embroidered
canopies. And painted roofs: the poor whom you despise.” While Hutchinson’s
meaning makes the line more an imperative address to “princes” (“Scorn, [you]
princes”]) than a list, Carson’s might equally allude to the borrowing of the line, the
“little size” of typeface, the smallness and bathos of all that has been written, all of it
drunk, an immense human production on the problem of mortality. Human remains
are, after all, also these things: the accumulated history, the “little size,” of writing.
See Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). With thanks to
Peter Howarth for drawing my attention to the similarity.
48. In “The Glass Essay,” Carson has ex-​lover “Law” diagnose their relationship as “not
enough spin on it.” Carson, “The Glass Essay,” Glass, Irony and God, p. 11.
49. See Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” in Marvell, Selected Poems, ed. Bill Hutchings
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 60.
272 Notes

50. Barthes, Image Music Text, p. 142. For Barthes’s French, see Roland Barthes, “La Mort
de l’auteur,” in Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil,
1984), p. 61.
51. See Barthes, Le Neutre (“Non pas ‘traits,’ ‘éléments,’ ‘composants,’ mais ce qui brille
par éclats, en désordre, fugitivement, successivement, dans le discours ‘anecdotique,’ ”
p. 59).
52. Barthes’s S/​Z deals in a similar defiance of sexual difference in his reading of Balzac’s
Sarrasine. Barthes discusses the case of the castrato, La Zambinella, a “female im-
personator” whom Sarrasine mistakes for a woman. See Roland Barthes, S/​Z (1970),
trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
53. See Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson,” and McNeilly, “Gifts and
Questions,” 20.
54. See Carson, “By Chance the Cycladic People” and the Ibykos translation exercise in
“Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” both in Float (unpaginated), and Carson,
Red Doc>. Reena Sastri situates the Ibykos translations in relation to Carson’s wider
“wild constancy” to her sources. See Sastri, “ ‘Wildly Constant.’ ”
55. See Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels, on “literature in the conditional mood”
post-​Oulipo.
56. See Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing.
57. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius.
58. Burrow, Imitating Authors, “Posthuman Postscript: Poems more Durable than Brass,”
pp. 407–​425.
59. Burrow’s example of the genetic generation of verse is Canadian experimental poet
Christian Bök, who embedded a particularly resonant line from Virgil’s Georgics in
the DNA of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans: “Nec vero terrae ferre omnes
Omnia possunt” (“Nor can all of the earth bring forth all fruit alike”). See Burrow,
pp. 422–​423, and Bök, The Xenotext.
60. See Harold Bloom’s essay on the writings of second-​century gnostic, Valentinus,
“Lying Against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism,” in The Rediscovery of
Gnosticism: Proceedings of the International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale, New
Haven, Connecticut, March 28–​31, 1978, ed. Bentley Layton, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,
1981), vol. 1, pp. 57–​72, and Eric Voegelin’s discussion of the gnostic dialectic of
knowledge and captivity, by which gnosis is both the knowledge of captivity and
the means of escape: Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington,
DC: Regnery, 1968), pp. 10–​11.
61. Readers of Susan Howe will note an echo in the title of her 2010 work, That This.
Susan Howe, That This (New York: New Directions, 2010).
62. In the words of “Gnosticism VI”: “The language knew” (p. 93).
63. Carson, “Stillness,” 9.
64. Carson, “Stillness,” 13 (the Woolf diary entry cited by Carson is dated January 26,
1920, and referenced The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, p. 14. She provides no page
references for quotations from Between the Acts (1941).
65. Carson, “Stillness,” 13.
66. See Liddell and Scott, p. 51 (analogia) and p. 46 (preposition ana-​).
 Notes 273

67. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10.

Chapter 6

* This essay has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-​ Curie grant agreement
no. 887344.
1. The essay was first published under the same title in the journal Common Knowledge
8.1 (Winter 2002), 188–​203.
2. See Carson, Decreation, p. 180. Carson’s source in her remarks on the term is an ar-
ticle by Paul Verdeyen, “Le process d’inquisition contre Marguerite Porete,” Revue
d’histoire ecclesiastique 81 (1986), 47–​94. Following her questioning by the king’s
confessor, William of Paris, excerpts of Porete’s book were presented before a panel
of twenty-​one theologians tasked with judging its content for heresy. The expression
pseudo-​mulier was used by the Continuer of William of Nangis, in his account of
Porete’s trial and execution. See Sean Fields, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), for a full discussion of the
trial proceedings. An illuminating discussion of the possible meanings of pseudo-​
mulier (a gloss for her controversy, writing with the help of no known scribe or con-
fessor, or even a reference to “Porete” as a false surname, derived from poret or “leek”
in Middle French) is published on the website of the Leverhulme-​funded interna-
tional research network “Women’s Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon,” based
at the University of Surrey (December 2015): https://​blogs.sur​rey.ac.uk/​mediev​alwo​
men/​2015/​12/​07/​a-​burna​ble-​book-​and-​a-​pse​udo-​woman-​the-​case-​of-​mar​guer​ite-​
cal​led-​por​ete/​.
3. Victoria Blut writes in “A Burnable Book and a Pseudo-​Woman: The Case of
Marguerite, called Porete” that in Porete, Virginia Woolf ’s observation that
“Anon . . . was often a woman” finds something of an “early test-​case” (see “Women’s
Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon,” University of Surrey). Laura Moncion’s
blog for the “Dangerous Women Project”(May 2016) at the Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, features an entry on
Porete, noting she “refused to submit to the Church’s idea of what proper female piety
should be”: https://​danger​ousw​omen​proj​ect.org/​2016/​05/​28/​mar​guer​ite-​por​ete/​
#_​ftn3.
4. The expression “wiles of woman” is from Euripides’s Helen. See Colin Burrow on the
feminizing power of imitation in Imitating Authors, pp. 46–​50, and the influence the
ideas of mimesis dramatized in the Helen (and Aristophanes’s imitatio of its author)
had on Plato (pp. 50–​62).
5. See Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 45. Writing on Weil, Toril Moi observes that
Weil “never defined herself as a woman, any more than as a Jew.” See Toril Moi, “I
274 Notes

Came with a Sword: Simone Weil’s Way,” London Review of Books 43.13 (July 1, 2021),
https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v43/​n13/​toril-​moi/​i-​came-​with-​a-​sword. Sophie
Bourgault observes, “Many biographers have commented at length on Weil’s discom-
fort with bodily contact, food, and sexuality (the disturbing subtext here is that it
is particularly strange for a woman to eschew romantic love, children, or sex).” S.
Bourgault, “Beyond the Saint and the Red Virgin: Simone Weil as Feminist Theorist
of Care,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 35.2 (2014), 1–​27 (1).
6. Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, p. 11. Emma Crawford translates the phrase “I also am
other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness”: Weil, Gravity
and Grace, p. 9.
7. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated).
8. Weil’s mystical-​theological concept of “decreation” has several antecedents in the
“annihilating detachment” of fourteenth-​century mysticism (Eckhart, Porete). See
Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–​1500),
The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, vol. IV (New York: Herder
and Herder, 2005), p. 170. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Porete are
my translations from the Middle French text established by Romana Guarnieri
(Le Mirouer des simples ames), reproduced in the following edition with extensive
annotations and with a modern Italian translation en face: Margharita Porete, Lo
Specchio delle anime semplici, trans. Giovanna Fozzer, with a preface by Romana
Guarnieri and commentary by Marco Vannini (Milano: Edizioni San Paolo, 1994),
p. 422, line 30. References hereafter are to Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio.
9. Carson is not the first to link “decreation” to practices of writing and particularly
to a lyric poetics. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe seeks to emphasize “the
implications of a nineteenth century American penchant for linguistic decreation
ushered in by their [Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s] representative poet Emily
Dickinson” (p. 13). Decreation of syntax and grammatical law, but so as to move the
“I” out of its center (or in Howe’s words, “breaking the law just short of breaking off
communication with a reader” (p. 11). Carson discusses Dickinson’s poem “I heard a
Fly buzz /​when I died” in terms that echo her concerns in the “Decreation” essay. See
Carson, “Stillness,” 9–​10.
10. See Bernstein, Shadowtime, p. 13. The libretto is the result of a collaboration between
Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough, who composed the music and is credited with the
concept for the opera. Marjorie Perloff discusses Shadowtime (premiered in 2004) in
terms of its citational poetics: the libretto, according to Bernstein, uses appropriated
text as a means of “writing-​through” Benjamin. See Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, p. 17.
11. Burrow, Imitating Authors, p. 3.
12. See my comments in the Introduction on Plato’s late variation on the theory of
mimēsis in The Sophist.
13. Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIe—​XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982),
p. 257. My references are to the French edition and translations are my own.
14. The term “Appellstruktur” is employed by Wolfgang Iser in Die Appellstruktur der
Texte (1970) but is taken up by Haas to describe the invocational structure of Eckhart’s
sermons. See Alois M. Haas, Sermo mysticus: Studien zu Theologie und Sprache der
 Notes 275

deutschen Mystik (Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag, 1979), p. 15. Haas’s term is

cited by Niklaus Largier in “Recent Work on Meister Eckhart: Positions, Problems,
New Perspectives,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 65.1 (1998),
147–​167 (p. 158).
15. The tradition runs from the biblical Song of Songs through the commentary of
Bernard of Clairvaux (Sermones super Cantica canticorum), the Cántico espiritual of
St. John of the Cross, Marguerite Porete’s Le Mirouer, Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida,
to list some well-​known examples.
16. See Barbara Newman on Porete’s Mirror in the context of what she calls “la mystique
courtoise” or a mysticism modeled on the structural conceits of courtly love. See
Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion
and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 137–​139.
Also see Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the
Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
17. Solway, “The Trouble with Annie,” 25.
18. See Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing; Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy; and Perloff,
Unoriginal Genius.
19. Scholarly readings of Decreation customarily focus on the same textual features that
attracted the negative attention of Solway, namely Carson’s formal technique, usu-
ally praised as iterative or post-​structuralist in character. See e.g., Van Praet, “Writer’s
Writer Revisits Authorship” and Jennifer Thorp, “Prowling the Meanings: Anne
Carson’s Doubtful Forms,” PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2015.
20. Rae, “Anne Carson and the Solway Hoaxes,” 49.
21. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 107.
22. D’Agata, “A _​with Anne Carson,” 5.
23. Carson’s essay first appears in D. Halperin and F. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality. See
also Burrow, Imitating Authors, and Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, on the his-
tory of anxieties surrounding mimesis.
24. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p. 133 (Carson’s note 7).
25. Carson. Eros the Bittersweet, pp. 13–​14.
26. Ibid., pp. 15, 16.
27. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 16; Carson, Decreation, p. 161. Carson’s reading of
Sappho’s ecstasy/​decreation echoes another early reading in a journal article from
1990. Fragment 55, Carson argues, stages the “invisibility” of an unnamed woman
in such a way that draws us into her place: “the second person singular verbs of the
poem locate us within some woman by calling her ‘you.’ You transact your own in-
visibility by living in the present as if you were already dead—​which, by the time you
realize it, you are.” Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 147. Her reading of fragment 31
appears on pages 148–​151.
28. Italics in original. The translation is as appears in If Not, Winter.
29. The work’s full title in the Middle French is Le Miroir des âmes simples anéanties et qui
seulement demeurent en vouloir et désir d’amour. A good English translation, which
Carson adapts in her own translations, is Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple
Souls, trans. Ellen Babinsky (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993).
276 Notes

30. Guarnieri’s unaccented Middle French text is reproduced in facing page in the edi-
tion from which I cite, and includes an illuminating preface discussing her attribu-
tion of the work to Porete.
31. Corinthians I, 13: 12; “in a mirror dimly” in the English Standard Version; “an in-
distinct image in a mirror” in the International Standard Version. For discussions
of the genre of miroir-​livres, see Fabienne Pomel, ed., Miroirs et jeux de miroirs dans
la littérature médiévale (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016) and in par-
ticular Einar Mar Jonsson, Miroir, Naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1995), p. 12.
32. Carson, Decreation, p. 181. Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, p. 434.
33. See Manuela Ceballos, “Life and Death by the Book: A Dramatic Reading of
Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls,” English Language Notes 56.1 (April 2018),
183–​196 (183).
34. Or, in St. John of the Cross, “Adonde te escondiste /​amado y me dexaste con gemido?”
(“Where have you hidden, /​beloved, and left me moaning?”). Werner G. Jeanrond
writes that “[t]‌he mystical discourse of love thus shows that the erotic and the sa-
cred need not be understood in terms of radical opposition.” Werner G. Jeanrond, A
Theology of Love (New York: T & T Clark, 2010), p. 18.
35. Certeau, Le fable mystique, pp. 258, 26; 258, 27.
36. Carson speaks of the “thrill—​at the inside edge where [Sappho’s] words go missing”
in the introductory notes to If Not, Winter (xiii). She also uses the word emphatically
in a reading of Sappho fragments 31 and 55 in “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” describing the
effect of mimetic forms on emotional reasoning (dianoia). See Chapter 8 of this book
for further discussion. The phrase “Just for the Thrill” also appears in the title of a
text in “The Anthropology of Water,” “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference
Between Women and Men,” Plainwater, pp. 192–​244.
37. Carson, Decreation, p. 165; Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, pp. 476–​478.
38. Carson, Decreation, p. 164; Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, p. 308 (“l” apareil du divin
estre, don’t j’ay estre, qui es estre”).
39. Carson, Decreation, p. 165; Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, p. 479 (“Et tant estoie
aise, et me amoye ‘avec’ luy, que je ne povoye pour rien me contenir, ne avoir en muy
maniere: j’estoye tenue en destroit, par quoy je n’aloye pas l’ambleure”).
40. Hutcheon quotes this fortuitous description of parody from Bakhtin: “The genre it-
self, the style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks (1981,
55).” Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 41.
41. Niklaus Largier, “Recent Work on Meister Eckhart: Positions, Problems, New
Perspectives,” 158. On the relationship between Porete’s and Eckhart’s writings,
see Maria Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart: The Mirror of
Simple Souls Mirrored,” in Meister Eckhart and the Béguine Mystics: Hadewijch
of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn
(New York: Continuum Press, 1994), pp. 65–​86.
42. Carson and Anno, The Mirror of Simple Souls: An Opera Installation.
43. Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, p. 282. Loingprès has a clear antecedent in the
Neoplatonism of St. Augustine, for whom God is paradoxical in location and nature,
 Notes 277

both everywhere and nowhere. My thanks to Amador Vega, whose conversations on

Augustine, Eckhart, Porete, and Weil made this chapter possible.
44. Giovanna Fozzer discusses the presentation of Le Mirouer in her introduction to the
bilingual text. Commentary below the Middle French text by Marco Vannini states
that this remark, the first reference to auditeurs in the text, shows that the author read
her book aloud in public or before a small group of listeners. See Porete, Le Mirouer/​
Lo Specchio, p. 282.
45. See Carson, “Blended Text,” Decreation, p. 79, and Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio,
p. 439.
46. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 41.
Quoted in Carson, “Stillness,” 22.
47. Burrow, Imitating Authors, p. 12.
48. Cole Swensen has written on the machinic elements of Carson’s opera libretto,
which he links back to the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy, the mekhane or crane-​
like structure by which gods were lowered onto the stage. Cole Swensen, “Opera
Povera: Decreation, an Opera in Three Parts,” in ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic
Lyre, p. 127.
49. In Homer, Hephaistos’s trap succeeds but, likewise, the capture of his beloved brings
him no relief: “I am horrified to see it,” he says; “Her eyes stare at me like a dog.”
Homer, The Odyssey, p. 230.
50. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, Penguin Modern Series (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, 2018), p. 1. See Carson, Decreation, pp. 192, 197.
51. Sontag, Notes on Camp, p. 2.
52. Ibid.
53. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 36. Hutcheon notes that “if the decoder [the
reader] does not notice quotation he will just naturalize it,” eliminating the point and
meaning of the work (p. 34).
54. Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, pp. 178–​180 (Prenez ce Sacrement, mectez le en
ung mortier avec aultres choses, et breez ce Sacrement tant que vous n’y puissez point
veoir ne point sentir de la Personne que vous y avez mis). The Sacrement refers to the
consecrated host, the “bread” and body of the Eucharist.
55. Carson, Decreation, p. 170 (“Such a Soul . . . swims in a sea of joy”); Porete, Le Mirouer/​
Lo Specchio, p. 212. “FarNear” (Loingprès) was customarily translated as “far night”
before the work’s attribution to Porete. For references to nothingness (e.g., “comment
elle est venue cognoissance de son nient” and “Hee Amour, dit ceste Ame, le sens de ce
qui est dit m’a fait nulle, et le nient de ce seul m’a mis en abysme dessoubs moins que
nient sans mesure) see Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, pp. 256, 264.
56. The textual source for the duet is quoted in the “Decreation” essay: Carson, Decreation
p. 165 (Porete, Le Mirouer/​Lo Specchio, p. 478).
57. Manuela Ceballos has asked how the various transformations and “un-​making”
undergone by Porete’s characters in The Mirror might be realized in performance.
I suggest Carson’s mise-​en-​scène offers a compelling example of how contemporary
audio-​visual technologies make it possible to represent psychic phenomena such as
ecstatic self-​separation. See Ceballos, “Life and Death by the Book.”
278 Notes

58. Burrow, Imitating Authors, p. 13.

59. Carson-​Giacomelli, “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum,” p. 299 (elision mine). The reference
Carson gives is The Simone Weil Reader, ed. G. A. Panichas (New York: David McKay,
1977), p. 212. The full quotation can be found in Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 65, and
runs on a parallel with Carson’s arguments regarding aidos in the thesis: “To soil is
to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To as-
sume power over is to soil, to possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance,
to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”
60. Carson gives the reference “1977, 364” (The Simone Weil Reader, p. 364). Quoted in
Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 10.
61. See Pétrement, Simone Weil. On “desire without an object,” see, e.g., Weil, Gravity and
Grace, p. 65.
62. See Susan Sontag, “Simone Weil” [Review of Simone Weil, Selected Essays], New York
Review, February 1, 1963, https://​www.nybo​oks.com/​artic​les/​1963/​02/​01/​sim​one-​
weil/​. In a less vehement example, Claire Wolfteich finds Weil’s gnostic “distaste for
the material” “reinforce[d]‌” by the details of Weil’s biography: “[Weil’s] conception
of Creation, and her emphasis on annihilation of the self and the Crucifixion, simi-
larly may indicate a rejection of mater and an unhealthy focus on death. In addition,
Weil’s own dangerous eating habits and body denial reinforces such an interpreta-
tion.” Claire Wolfteich, “Attention or Destruction: Simone Weil and the Paradox of
the Eucharist,” The Journal of Religion 81.3 (2001), 359–​376 (360).
63. Sontag, “Simone Weil.”
64. See Sharon Cameron, “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of
Impersonality,” Critical Inquiry 29.2 (Winter 2003), 216–​252, where Cameron speaks
of the “minimalist economy” governing Weil’s prose (218).
65. Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Hugh Price (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), p. 193.
66. Quoted in Carson, Decreation, p. 171. Carson cites from Weil, Gravity and Grace,
trans. A. Wills, p. 148.
67. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 64.
68. See Joan Dargan, Simone Weil: Thinking Poetically (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1999), p. 5, for Dargan’s remarks on Weil’s “clear rejection of au-
tobiography in favour of abstraction,” and Carson, Decreation, p. 174 (Carson’s de-
scription of Gustave Thibon’s strategy in handling Weil’s notebooks: Thibon, she says,
“extracted punchy passages”). Citing Pétrement’s biography of Weil, Toril Moi notes
Weil’s perfectionism as signaled by the absence of cross-​outs or corrections of any
kind in her manuscript for The Need for Roots. See Moi, “I Came with a Sword.”
69. Sharon Cameron describes the “I” in Weil’s writing as an “I” that “has been deprived
of its particularity; it is positional rather than substantive, an abstraction, an ‘I’ that is
a figure.” Cameron, “The Practice of Attention,” 220.
70. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 221.
71. Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” 9.
72. Ibid., 6.
73. Simone Weil, L’Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 283.
 Notes 279

74. Carson, Decreation, p. 174; Carson cites Gravity and Grace, trans. A. Wills, p. 11.
75. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. A. Wills, 2 vols.
(New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), vol. 2, p. 411. Cited in Cameron, “The
Practice of Attention,” 233.
76. Though parodic in tone, this imitation of a Weil letter is close in tone and content to
actual letters sent by Weil. See note 78 below for several examples.
77. Carson, Decreation, pp. 230–​233..
78. Letters sent from London to Weil’s parents include references to light summer
clothing (not usually needed in London, she reassures them, first in a letter dated
June 15, then again in a letter dated June 25, 1943, pp. 191, p193); and a request for
her parents to post an article on the Romans to her “as quickly as possible” (March 1,
1943, p. 182). A letter sent by Weil to Jean Posternak in 1938 discusses tensions and
brutal attacks against the organizations and parties of the Left (p. 95), in Simone Weil,
Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker, trans. Richard Rees
(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1965).
79. See Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels, for a compelling account of the formal
variants in Oulipo and “potential literature.” Carson’s translations of Ibykos fragment
286 employ a different form of remix, retaining the fragment’s constative structure
while substituting vocabularies, where in the remixed Weil letter, a single vocabulary
is reorganized internally.
80. Moi, “I Came with a Sword.”
81. See Gillian Rose on the complexities of mediated self-​relation: “my relation to myself
is mediated by what I recognise or refuse to recognise in your relation to yourself;
while your self-​relation depends on what you recognise of my relation to myself,”
Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 74.
82. See Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 10 (“Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter
where there is a void to receive it”), and La Pesanteur et la grâce, p. 12 (“. . . comble,
mais elle ne peut entrer que là où il y a un vide pour la recevoir”).
83. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 221.
84. Ibid., pp. 221–​222 (221).
85. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 40.
86. Ibid., p. 41.
87. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 41.
88. See Carson’s remarks in “Stillness” on the “third voice” or “another voice” to which
Woolf refers in Between the Acts. Carson, “Stillness,” 13.
89. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, pp. 36, 35.
90. Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text, 52/​53, Queer Transexions of Race,
Nation, and Gender (Autumn–​Winter 1997), 265–​277 (277).
91. Ibid., 266.
92. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 13.
93. Ibid., p. 22.
94. A letter sent from Weil to her parents on June 15, 1943, mentions the fruit currently in
season: “what one sees now is cherries, strawberries, ripe peaches.” See Weil, Seventy
Letters, p. 190.
280 Notes

95. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, p. 17; Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 34.
96. Carson, Decreation, p. 175.
97. Jean Tortel quoted in Moi, “I Came with a Sword.” “Performance of impersonality”
is Sharon Cameron’s expression; see Cameron, “The Practice of Attention.”
98. Gillian Rose quotes Thibon in Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 222. Rose calls this
failure to pass unnoticed Weil’s “spiritual . . . supernatural, failing.”
99. Cameron has suggested that the “resistance between [the] positions [Weil
represents in her writing] is what makes Weil’s writing interesting”; Cameron, “The
Practice of Attention,” 218.
100. Carson, Grief Lessons, p. 309.
101. Ibid., p. 309.
102. Ibid., p. 310.
103. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated).
104. Ibid.
105. See Carson, “Teresa of God,” Glass, Irony and God, pp. 44–​45.
106. On St. Teresa’s performance of naming, see Certeau, La fable mystique, pp. 257–​279.
107. Kristeva, Teresa My Love, p. 105. Kristeva’s French reads “l’extase de Thérèse ne
serait ni plus ni moins qu’un effet d’écriture!”: Julia Kristeva, Thérèse mon amour
(Paris: Fayard, 2008), p. 129.
108. Carson, Autobiography of Red, p. 5.
109. “Fragment 192 poetae melici graeci,” “Appendix B,” in Carson, Autobiography of
Red, p. 17.
110. Euripides, Euripides in Four Volumes, I: Iphigeneia at Aulis, Rhesus Hecuba, The
Daughters of Troy, Hecuba, trans. Arthur S. Way (London: William Heinemann,
1916), pp. 468, 469 (line 34).
111. “Does the presence of this mimēma make the heroic tradition into a kind of ghostly
charade?” asks Burrow in Imitating Authors, p. 47.
112. See Jacqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 101.
113. In Arthur S. Way’s translation of the Helen, Theoclymenus, betrothed to Helen but
finds himself deceived when she and Menelaus escape, bemoans having been “by
wiles of woman cozened, caught as in the net.” See Euripides: In Four Volumes, p. 603
(lines 1621–​1622). See also Weil’s words in Gravity and Grace: “what is more terrible
than discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary
being?,” (p. 65).
114. In Rose’s reading of Monroe, the actress is made to pay for thwarted fantasies bound
up in the American Dream: Rose, Women in Dark Times, pp. 100–​138.
115. “(Norma Jeane speaking as Fritz Lang): ‘we can’t jeopardize the cloud scam’ ”: Carson,
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, p. 15.
116. Quoted in Rose, Women in Dark Times, p. 126.
117. Andrew David King, “Unwriting the Books of the Dead: Anne Carson and Robert
Currie on Translation, Collaboration, and History,” Kenyon Review, October 6,
2012, https://​kenyo​nrev​iew.org/​2012/​10/​anne-​car​son-​rob​ert-​cur​rie-​interv​iew/​.
 Notes 281

Chapter 7

1. Carson, Grief Lessons, p. 7.

2. See the transcript of “Freaks and Greeks. Antigone: A Roundtable Between Anne
Carson, Simon Critchley, and Trajal Harrell,” hosted by Lauren O’Neill-​Butler,
ArtForum, September 22, 2015: https://​www.artfo​rum.com/​slant/​antig​one-​a-​rou​
ndta​ble-​with-​anne-​car​son-​simon-​critch​ley-​and-​tra​jal-​harr​ell-​55046. Stephen
Halliwell argues that the expressions of culture on which Plato based his critique
of mimēsis not only required their audiences to emote, but were conditional on a
total, emotionally saturating performance—​the ecstatic “intense assimilation, the
self-​likening identification” of the actor or poet with his role or object—​whose func-
tion was exemplary: its “self-​likening” position could be occupied by audiences and
readers. See Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, p. 80 (see also pp. 76–​80 and p. 52).
3. In The Republic, Plato describes how reason constrains the spectator in his iden-
tification with the spectacle and in the pity and fear he feels. Aristotle, in book VI
of the Poetics, refers to the telos or endgame of tragedy as the purgation of emotion
through the pity and fear aroused during the spectacle. See Halliwell, The Aesthetics
of Mimesis, p. 77, and Plato, “Republic,” p. 831, line 606b1 (“the woes of others”). Also
see Edith Hall, “Aristotle’s Theory of Katharsis in Its Historical and Social Contexts,”
in Transformative Aesthetics, ed. Erika Fischer-​ Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz
(London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 26–​47.
4. Carson, Grief Lessons, p. 7.
5. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death” [“Zeitgemäßes über
Krieg und Tod,” 1915], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XIV (1914–​1916), “On the History
of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works”
(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-​analysis, 1957), p. 291.
6. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Nay Rather, p. 32.
7. Ibid., italics mine.
8. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 14, 21.
9. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. vii.
10. See my discussion of the fragments of Sappho in Chapter 8.
11. Numerous studies account for this textual history. Examples discussed in this book
include Burrow, Imitating Authors (pp. 37–​138), and a fascinating recent study on the
appropriation and “citation” of Old Comedy and comic tropes in Greek tragedy: Craig
Jendza, Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
12. See Jansen’s introduction to Anne Carson/​Antiquity, ed. Jansen, p. 2. Though Carson’s
originality lies in probing the “afterlife” of classical antiquity “somewhere off-​centre
from its mainstream traditions,” the essays in Jansen’s collection, she notes, largely
suggest that “[Carson’s] classicism responds in philosophical terms more consistently
to certain European and Anglophone schools of thought” (p. 1).
282 Notes

13. See Stephanie Burt, “Professor or Pinhead,” London Review of Books 33.14 (July 14,
2011), https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v33/​n14/​stepha​nie-​burt/​profes​sor-​or-​pinh​
ead; and If Not, Winter, xiii.
14. Nancy and Lacoue-​Labarthe, The Literary Absolute, p. 47.
15. Jansen reminds us in her introduction to Anne Carson/​Antiquity that Carson is not
alone in her “turn on the Classics,” citing the poems of Alejandra Pizarnik, the poetry
and performance art of classicist Phoebe Giannisi, and the translations and poems
of classicist Josephine Balmer (p. 1). Several other recent examples might be cited,
including Alice Oswald’s long poem, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea (New York: Norton,
2020), whose meditation on the sea “lives between the murkiness between [two]
stories” in the Odyssey; the off-​kilter versions of Catullus in Isobel Williams’s Shibari
Carmina (Manchester: Carcanet, 2021); and the poems of Fiona Benson in Vertigo
& Ghost (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), which includes a stunning sequence on the
rapes of Zeus.
16. Sienkewicz, “Anne Carson: Eros the Bittersweet,” 90.
17. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, xi.
18. See Marjorie Perloff ’s discussion of “transcreation,” as coined by Haroldo de
Campos: Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, pp. 16–​17.
19. See King, “Unwriting the Books of the Dead,” for a discussion with Carson and Currie
on the thinking behind both works, as well as the relationships they invite between
text and image.
20. Sophokles, Antigone, trans. Carson, hereafter “Antigone.” The play was premiered
in Luxembourg in 2015. See the account of the work’s preparation and staging
by Will Aitken, who accompanied Carson and the actors for the premiere: Will
Aitken, Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of
Resistance (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2018).
21. Bianca Stone, “Your Soul Is Blowing Apart: Antigonick and the Influence of
Collaborative Process,” in ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, p. 152.
22. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), p. 2.
23. Carson, Grief Lessons, p. 73.
24. See Celan, “Epitaph for François,” in Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 84–​85. Carson
reproduces the poem on pages 86 and 87 of Economy of the Unlost.
25. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 87.
26. Ibid., pp. 84–​85.
27. Carson refers to it interchangeably as “epitaph” and “elegy,” and explains this in in-
terview with Andrew David King: “ ‘Elegy’ was a polyvalent genre in ancient Greek
poetry, used in the archaic period for exhorting troops to battle, outlining political
views, pithy military wisdom, mild erotic description, consolation after shipwreck,
and meditation on drunkenness. It was not until the time of Simonides of Keos that
epitaphs for the dead began to be written in elegiac couplets and so to become almost
synonymous with that genre functionally. That’s why I used epitaph as well as elegy
when referring to Nox. I did not use couplets but I did have in mind a range of func-
tion and tone.” King, “Unwriting the Books of the Dead,” n.p.
 Notes 283

28. Ibid.
29. The term “multimodal” is increasingly used to describe works like Nox and Susan
Howe’s The Midnight (2003). Readings adopting the approaches of cultural material
studies increasingly emphasize the material experiences of reading enabled by new
technologies, and on “the book’s materiality as a medium of sociality” (Plate). See, for
example, Liedeke Plate, “How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age: Anne
Carson’s Nox, Multimodality, and the Ethics of Bookishness,” Contemporary Women’s
Writing 9.1 (March 2015), 93–​111. Howe’s materialist reading of the Emily Dickinson
fascicles, we saw in Chapter 3, offers an interesting framework to approach the mate-
rially driven textuality of The Midnight. For a polemical account of Howe’s reading of
Dickinson, see Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, pp. 3–​18.
30. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 89.
31. Ibid.
32. Nox is unpaginated, so I refer to Carson’s glossary entries by word, when citing from
them, or else to the book’s numbered prose instalments.
33. See Charles M. Stang, “‘Nox,’ or the Muteness of Things,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin,
Poetry and Faith, Winter/​Spring 2012, https://​bulle​tin.hds.harv​ard.edu/​nox-​or-​the-​
muten​ess-​of-​thi​ngs/​. Stang remarks on a striking parallel between the little Carson
knew of her brother and the little that is known historically about Catullus’s brother.
34. Leighton, On Form, p. 222.
35. Ibid., p. 220.
36. Parul Sehgal, “Evoking the Starry Lad Her Brother Was,” Irish Times, March 19, 2011,
https://​www.iri​shti​mes.com/​cult​ure/​books/​evok​ing-​the-​sta​rry-​lad-​her-​brot​her-​
was-​1.577​255.
37. See James, Discrepant Solace, on what James calls “consolatory form” (pp. 20–​27) and
his chapter “Elegy Unrestored” (pp. 88–​113).
38. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 73.
39. Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson.”
40. Sehgal, “Evoking the Starry Lad Her Brother Was.”
41. E.g., Meghan O’Rourke, “The Unfolding,” New Yorker, July 5, 2010, https://​www.
newyor​ker.com/​magaz​ine/​2010/​07/​12/​the-​unfold​ing.
42. The glossary entries have been called “exhaustive definitions,” though as I understand
it their tendentiousness and non-​exhaustiveness is Carson’s point here. See Eleni
Sikelianos, “Sentences on Nox,” in ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, p. 148.
43. Horace, The Art of Poetry, line 337 (my adapted translation), and Epistles, Book 1,
Epistle XIX, line 44 (fidis enim manare poetica mella), in Horace, Satires, Epistles,
Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 194 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), online edition, https://​www.loebc​lass​ics.com/​
view/​hor​ace-​ars_​poet​ica/​1926/​pb_​LCL​194.479.xml.
44. Carson has said that she derived the idea for the structure of her book from facing-​
page translations of classical texts. She remarks that “you get used to thinking in that
little channel in between the two languages where the perfect language exists.” See
Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson.”
45. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 132.
284 Notes

46. Emily Dickinson, “1691 [Part Five: The Single Hound’],” in The Complete Poems
(1890; London: Faber & Faber, 2016), p. 690. The word also appears in Carson’s
“Longing: A Documentary,” Decreation, pp. 245. See Martin Heidegger, “Science and
Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (New York and London: Harper Colophon, 1977), pp. 155–​182 (177–​179). In
William Lovitt’s translation, das Unumgängliche is rendered “that which is not to be
gotten around [Unumgängliche], intractable and inaccessible” (p. 177). With thanks
to Amador Vega for explaining the word’s significance in Heidegger.
47. See Hugh Macnaghten, The Poems of Catullus: Done into English Verse
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 148. The unattributed citation is
also noted in a review of Nox for Open Letters Monthly, in which Abigail Deutsch
links the borrowing to a wider “literary gamesmanship” in the work. See Abigail
Deutsch, “Tribute and Farewell,” Open Letters Monthly, December 1, 2012, https://​
www.openle​tter​smon​thly​arch​ive.com/​olm/​nox-​car​son.
48. Men in the Off Hours, p. 166. See also Priscilla Uppal, We Are What We Mourn: The
Contemporary English-​Canadian Elegy (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press,
2009) on the contemporary elegy form and its shifting affective requirements. Uppal
discusses Carson’s “Appendix to Ordinary Time” as an “elegy” for her mother, and
offers a sensitive reading of Woolf ’s cross-​outs in Carson’s text: “A writer’s cross-​outs
are preserved evidences of revision, of changes to expression. If the cross-​out can be
understood as the textual equivalent of a death, then death merely revises life instead
of permanently erasing it.” See Uppal, We Are What We Mourn, pp. 96–​100 (p. 98).
49. Gannon, “Beauty Prefers an Edge,” 33.
50. See Wachtel, “An Interview with Anne Carson.”
51. See Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p. 42, “Odi et Amo (I Hate and I Love Perhaps You
Ask Why),” which includes the epigraph “Catullus is in conflict.” The poem is an ad-
aptation of Catullus’s poem “85,” also known by the title Carson provides.
52. See Carson, “The Life of Towns,” Plainwater, p. 94.
53. See Sehgal, “Evoking the Starry Lad Her Brother Was.”
54. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” pp. 258–​259.
55. Ibid., p. 261.
56. E.g., Plate, “How to Do Things with Literature in the Digital Age,” and Tatiana
G. Rapatzikou, “Anne Carson’s Nox: Materiality and Memory,” Book 2.0, 7.1
(2017), 57–​65.
The majority of articles published on the work approach it from the perspective of
cultural material studies. An interesting exception is an article by Gillian Sze, whose
approach to the work in terms of a “melancholic archive” reads it against Freud’s
“Mourning and Melancholia” (and implicitly, against Carson’s protestations that the
work is “not about grief ”). See Gillian Sze, “The Consolatory Fold: Anne Carson’s
Nox and the Melancholic Archive,” Studies in Canadian Literature 44.1 (2019), 66–​80.
57. See Carson and Currie’s discussion in King, “Unwriting the Books of the
Dead.” A Master’s thesis is dedicated to the photographic images in Carson’s
book: Rebecca Anne Macmillan, “The Languages of Nox: Photographs, Materiality,
and Translation in Anne Carson’s Epitaph,” University of Texas at Austin, May 2013;
 Notes 285

as well as several academic articles, including Sophie Mayer, “Picture Theory: On

Photographic Intimacy in Nicole Brossard and Anne Carson,” in Studies in Canadian
Literature 33.1 (2008), 97–​ 117, and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, “Re-​ Vision as
Remediation: Hypermediacy and Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Image (&)
Narrative 14.4 (2013), 20–​33.
58. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 6 (italics mine). (“Quoi qu’elle donne à voir et quelle
que soit sa manière, une photographie est toujours invisible. Ce n’est pas elle qu’on
voit”: Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard,
1980), p. 18). Barthes, citing Sontag’s famous description, describes the photograph
of his mother as touching him “like the delayed rays of a star” (Camera Lucida, p. 81).
59. Judith Butler “Speaking of Rage and Grief,” filmed in The Great Hall, The Cooper
Union, April 28, 2014, at the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival: https://​www.yout​
ube.com/​watch?v=​Zxya​bzop​Qi8. Butler also quotes Carson’s lines in her review of
Antigonick: Judith Butler, “Can’t Stop Screaming (Review),” Public Books, May 9,
2012, https://​www.publ​icbo​oks.org/​cant-​stop-​scream​ing/​.
60. Carson, trans., Antigone, p. 28, p. 30. For a charismatic account of the production and
performance of Carson’s translation under van Hove’s direction, see Aitken, Antigone
Undone.
61. See Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, “On Ethics: A Propos of Antigone,” European Journal
of Psychoanalysis 5.1 (2018) https://​www.jour​nal-​psy​choa​naly​sis.eu/​artic​les/​on-​eth​
ics-​a-​pro​pos-​of-​antig​one-​2/​. George Steiner writes extensively on the embedding of
the Antigone in the history of Western philosophy, see George Steiner, Antigones: How
the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (1984; New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 6–​8 especially.
62. Lacoue-​Labarthe, “On Ethics,” n.p.
63. Ibid. The quotation from Lacan appears in his famous reading of the Antigone. See
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
1959–​ 1960,” ed. Jacques-​ Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London and
New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 241–​284, in particular p. 278–​280.
64. See Lacoue-​Labarthe, “On Ethics,” and Butler, Antigone’s Claim.
65. Antigone, trans. Carson, p. 5 (“A Note from the Translator”). Antigone’s line appears
on page 42 of this translation, line 1034 in line-​numbered translations such as
Robert Fagles’s, which renders the line: “all for reverence, my reverence for the gods.”
See Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin, 1982), p. 107 (hereafter Three Theban Plays).
66. Euripides, The Trojan Women: A Comic, by Rosanna Bruno, text by Anne Carson
(Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2021).
67. See Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 82. Carson describes the chromatic structure of
epitaphic text, with alternating red and black lines producing an “economical” double
epitaph—​the red letters forming one sentence, the black another.
68. See Charlotte Salomon, Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? (1942), trans. Leila
Vennewitz, ed. Judith C. E. Belinfante et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1998), p. 43.
69. See Stone’s essay in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Wilkinson, p. 152, where she
describes her drawings as “an element of form.”
286 Notes

70. Ibid., p. 153.

71. Steiner, Antigones, Preface. A review of the recent, handwritten and illustrated H
of H Playbook (2021) in The New Yorker describes the work as “A cross between a
dramaturge’s dream journal and a madman’s diary, it features Carson’s transformed
version of the Euripides play, rendered in handwritten lines and blocky paragraphs
of pasted word-​processor text, alongside original illustrations.” See Casey Cep, “Anne
Carson’s Obsession with Herakles,” New Yorker, November 1, 2021, https://​www.
newyor​ker.com/​magaz​ine/​books/​11/​08/​anne-​cars​ons-​obsess​ion-​with-​herak​les.
72. Antigonick is unpaginated. For orientation, I provide line numbers and page
references for the equivalent passages in Fagles’s translation. The lines I quote here are
Carson’s rendering of lines 1310–​1312 of the Antigone, in Three Theban Plays, p. 121.
In Sophokles’s play, Eurydice does not exit but remains onstage until after messenger’s
speech, when she “turns and reenters the palace,” Three Theban Plays, p. 123 (between
lines 1373–​1374).
73. Lacan, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” p. 275.
74. The performance was held on June 26, 2014, curated by Ben Hjorth and held in col-
laboration between the University of Paris-​Sorbonne, the University of Paris-​Diderot,
Paris-​Ouest, the University of Avignon, the Laboratory of the Arts and Philosophies
of the Stage (Labo LAPS), and the international Performance Philosophy network.
The performance can be viewed online: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​6yge​
QDu-​4EU.
75. Antigonick; Three Theban Plays, p. 108 (lines 1035–​1040).
76. Fagles’s translation of the same lines reads: “Danaë, Danaë—​/​even she endured a fate
like yours, /​in all her lovely strength she traded /​the light of day for the bolted brazen
vault, /​buried within her tomb, her bridal chamber, wed to the yoke and broken.”
77. Antigone, trans. Carson, p. 42.
78. Antigonick. Carson’s 2015 translation is similar in tone, minus the metadramatic in-
terpolation “I delete this line.” The equivalent lines in Fagles’s translation read: “Far
be it from me—​I haven’t the skill, /​and certainly no desire, to tell you when, /​if ever,
you make a slip in speech . . . though /​someone else might have a good suggestion.”
Three Theban Plays, p. 95 (lines 766–​769). Fagles alludes to an unsayable portion
of Haemon’s discourse, insinuating the deleted line Carson’s Haimon confesses in
real time.
79. Lacan, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” p. 243.
80. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, pp. 2–​3.
81. “ ‘The Antigone [is] one of the most sublime and in every respect most excellent
works of art of all time’—​G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics,” reads the back cover of Antigonick
in the 2012 Bloodaxe Books edition.
82. The equivalent lines in Three Theban Plays read: “But think of Niobe—​well I know
her story—​think what a living death she died,” p. 102 (lines 915–​916). Antigone
recognizes her story through the story of Niobe—​just as we, Carson suggests, see our
lives reflected on the stage. See Andrew Benjamin on Hegel’s critique of Antigone and
invocation of Niobe in pursuing the problem of justice: Andrew Benjamin, Towards a
Relational Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 33.
 Notes 287

83. The equivalent of lines 1–​12 in Three Theban Plays, p. 59, and in Antigone, trans.
Carson, p. 13. Other comparable examples in Antigonick spoken by Antigone in-
clude: “Hegel says people want to see their /​lives on stage look at me people I go my
last /​road I see my last light look, death who /​gathers /​all of us into his old bent arms
in the end is /​gathering me but I am still alive,” and “let’s say my /​unconscious while
remaining unconscious could /​also know the laws of consciousness.”
84. Andrew David King admits his unsuccessful attempts to trace the line in Hegel,
coming up with Estragon in Godot as the closest parallel: “We are all born mad.
Some remain so.” When asked about the rationale behind the play’s opening contro-
versy, Carson responded: “sheer sensationalism.” See King, “Unwriting the Books of
the Dead.”
85. Carson heavily abridges Sophokles’s dialogue, covering lines 102–​116 in the Fagles
translation: Three Theban Plays, p. 64 (“you’re wrong from the start . . .” appears at
line 107).
86. Three Theban Plays, p. 59 (lines 5–​8). Carson’s 2015 translation of the Antigone
reads: “what bitterness pain disgust disgrace or moral shock /​have we been spared”
(p. 13).
87. Simone Weil, Seventy Letters, p. 161 (a letter to her parents dated December 16,
1942). Weil had published an important essay on Antigone several years earlier: see
the opening chapter of Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient
Greeks (London: Routledge 1957).
88. Lacan, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” pp. 270–​283.
89. Ibid., p. 281. There is no equivalent line in the Antigone. Carson seems to have
inserted the declaration between Antigone’s remarks on her piety—​“my reverence
only brands me for irreverence” in Fagles’s translation (1016); “they call my piety
impiety” in Antigonick—​and her invocation of suffering as the measure of jus-
tice: “once I suffer I will know that I was wrong. /​But if these men are wrong, let
them suffer . . .” (1017–​1020), Three Theban Plays, p. 106. Carson’s equivalent line in
Antigonick is “Who suffers more I wonder.”
90. An interpolation by Carson, replacing the Chorus Leader’s “still the same rough
winds, the wild passion /​raging through the girl” in Three Theban Plays, p. 106 (lines
1022–​1023).
91. See Stone, “Your Soul Is Blowing Apart,” in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Wilkinson,
pp. 152–​155.
92. King, “Unwriting the Books of the Dead.”
93. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Vintage Classics Woolf Series (1927;
London: Vintage, 2016), p. 143. See, for example, the essay on “Stillness” and “Every
Exit is an Entrance.”
94. In his introductory notes, Bernard Knox includes an interesting discussion of Brecht’s
interpretation, a “radical revision of Hölderlin’s translation.” Brecht famously cast
Antigone as a symbol of the resistance to fascism in Germany. Three Theban Plays,
p. 36–​37.
288 Notes

95. The Chorus’s reference to Brecht is an interpolation following lines 943–​946, and
is followed by an abridged and transformed rendering of lines 947–​958 spoken by
Antigone, who, in Sophokles’s play, recounts the “coiling horrors” of her mother’s
marriage bed and the griefs borne as a result. Three Theban Plays, p. 103.
96. The equivalent lines in Fagles’s translation read: “O dear brother, doomed /​in your
marriage—​your marriage murders mine, /​your dying drags me down to death
alive!” Three Theban Plays, p. 103 (lines 956–​958).
97. See Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 31, where Hutcheon argues parody can be used
to point to the artifices of a text, not just to signal forms of derivation and/​or mockery.
Her theory of parody, here, is conceived as a modification to Gérard Genette’s notion
of “hypertextuality,” which, Hutcheon argues here, is “not just about formal bor-
rowing” (p. 30). Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s edited collection contains a revelatory
essay on Antigonick and comedy, covering the play’s in-​jokes, lawyer jokes, potential
for self-​mockery, etc. See Vanessa Place, “What’s So Funny about Antigonick?,” in
ed. Wilkinson, Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, pp. 165–​171. Also see Rodolphe Gasché,
“Self-​Dissolving Seriousness: On the Comic in the Hegelian Conception of Tragedy,
in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, Warwick
Studies in European Philosophy Series (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 37–​56.
98. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 68. See also Butler, “Merely Cultural,” on parody’s ca-
pacity as an expression of dissent. On the Antigone, parody, and political action, see
Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws,” 4–​8.
99. See Bonnie Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of
Humanism, New Literary History 41.1 (Winter 2010), 1–​33 (4) and Bonnie Honig,
“Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of
Exception, Political Theory 37.1 (February 2009), 5–​43.
100. George Steiner, “Anne Carson ‘Translates’ Antigone,” The Times Literary Supplement
5705 (August 3, 2012), 8–​9.
101. For example, A. E. Housman’s mock “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy,” which sends up
tragic diction and sensibility. Contemporary to Greek tragic drama, Aristophanean
comedy also sends up key elements of tragedy: a well-​ known example is
Aristophanes’s featuring of Euripides himself (and referencing his Helen) in the play
Thesmophoriazusae or Women at the Thesmophoria. See Burrow, Imitating Authors
(pp. 46–​50), and Jendza, Paracomedy, which also shows how tragedy appropriated
aspects of comedy to the emotive enrichment of tragedy and tragic irony.
102. See Jendza, Paracomedy, Introduction (esp. pp. 5–​9). Jendza discusses a key case of
sexual innuendo spoken by Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon (p. 8).
103. Comments made by Jendza: https://​today.ku.edu/​2020/​05/​22/​par​acom​edy-​exami​
nes-​approp​riat​ion-​humor-​greek-​trag​edy).
104. See Place, “What’s So Funny about Antigonick?,” in ed. Wilkinson, Ecstatic Lyre.
105. King, “Unwriting the Books of the Dead.”
106. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Nay Rather, p. 18; reprinted in
Float (unpaginated).
 Notes 289

107. These objections are described in Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain
Silent,” Nay Rather, p. 20.
108. Ibid., pp. 24, p. 22. “Vocabulary of excess” is an expression from David Constantine,
whom Carson cites in the piece (pp. 20–​22).
109. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” unpaginated. For discussions of Cassandra’s cry,
see Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth
Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 74–​75, and
Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws,” 5–​7, on the capacity of “non-​discursive sound” to
generate identifications, promoting a humanism that overcomes political divisions.
Cassandra’s cry “OTOTOTOI POPOI DA,” Honig clarifies, is not the aiai cry of
bereavement that Loraux identifies with the “anti-​politics” of mourning (Honig,
“Antigone’s Two Laws,” 7).
110. The equivalent lines in Carson’s 2006 translation of the Agamemnon are as
follows: “No longer now out from veils like some /​firstblush bride /​shall my oracle
glance /​but as brightness blows the rising sun open /​it will rush my oceans forward
onto light–​–​/​a wave of woes far worse than these.” Carson, An Oresteia, p. 54.
111. Nox, 7.1. “all those little kidnaps in the dark” cites without citing Aristotle on the
“kidnapping of the soul” (psychagōgikon) that occurs in the abrupt immediacy of
seeing or spectacle. See my discussion of Aristotle’s term in Chapter 8. Carson,
trans., If Not, Winter, x.
112. A review piece in the Harvard Review seems to pick up on the play’s prophetic func-
tion: “Out of Sophokles’ timeless work, she has crafted a taut, weirdly prescient re-
invention.” Dawn Tripp, “Revisiting Anne Carson’s Antigonick,” Harvard Review
Online, November 21, 2019, https://​www.harvar​drev​iew.org/​cont​ent/​rev​isit​ing-​
anne-​cars​ons-​ant​igon​ick//​ Also see Zawacki, “Standing /​in the Nick of Time,” in
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Wilkinson, on a “temporal rift” in Antigonick (p. 156).
113. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated).
114. Sarah Kane, “Phaedra’s Love,” Complete Plays, introduced by David Grieg
(London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 63–​104. Dean, “Anne Carson Punches a Hole
Through Greek Myth.”
115. Carson, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, Nay Rather, p. 22.
116. “Cassandra Float Can,” an iteration of the same “Essay on Translation” she claims
to have spent her life rehearsing, goes on to perform these actions—​“cuts” is the
descriptor she settles on—​on the matter of its own text. See the final section of my
Chapter 8.
117. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. vii. See my Chapter 2 for a discussion of the
epigraph.
118. The equivalent lines in Three Theban Plays read: “My countrymen, /​all of you—​I
caught the sound of your words /​as I was leaving to do my part, /​to appeal to queen
Athena with my prayers. /​I was just loosing the bolts when a voice filled with sorrow,
family sorrow, /​struck my ears, and I fell back, terrified, /​into the women’s arms–​
everything went black. /​Tell me the news, again, whatever it is . . . /​sorrow and I are
hardly strangers. /​I can bear the worst” (p. 121, lines 1301–​1312).
290 Notes

119. Andrew Zawacki suggests the inverse becomes true: that the “nick of time” does
not carry a sense of “speed and reprieve” but a sense of arriving “too late.” Zawacki,
“Standing in /​the Nick of Time,” in Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, ed. Wilkinson, p. 156.
120. Carson, “Twelve Minute Prometheus (After Aiskhylos).”
121. Tacita Dean, Complete Works and Filmography (London: Royal Academy of Arts,
2018), pp. 293–​300.
122. Anne Carson, “TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)” in Men in the Off Hours,
pp. 100–​101. Though Carson reads from “TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and
2) during the work, Dean’s extracts from Antigone come from Fagles’s translation
(Dean, p. 295). My quotations are from Tacita Dean, Selected Writing 1992–​2018
(London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2018), p. 107.
123. Dean, Selected Writing, pp. 109–​110.
124. Ibid., p. 110.
125. Carson cites the work in her early essay, “Simonides Negative,” 157.
126. Ulrich von Wiliamowitz-​Moellendorff, Greek Historical Writing and Apollo, trans.
Gilbert Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 25. Quoted in Simon Critchley,
Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (London: Profile Books, 2019), p. 7 (italics mine). With
thanks to Simon Critchley for a conversation on the untimeliness of prophecy and
philosophy at Barcelona’s Escola Europea d’Humanitats in 2019.
127. Carson, Grief Lessons, pp. 8–​9.

Chapter 8

1. At the time of writing, a trilingual edition exists in Greek, English, and

Spanish: Anne Carson, Si no, el invierno: Fragmentos de Safo, trans. Aurora Luque
(Madrid and Mexico City: Vaso Roto, 2019).
2. In her introductory notes, Carson clarifies that her text excludes some of Voigt’s
single-​
word fragments. See Eva-​ Maria Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta
(Amsterdam: Polak & van Gennep, 1971).
3. Emma Heath, “Theatre Reimagined in H of H Playbook,” Chicago Review of Books,
October 27, 2021, https://​chire​view​ofbo​oks.com/​2021/​10/​27/​h-​of-​h-​playb​ook/​
4. See Emily Wilson, “Tongue Breaks,” London Review of Books 26.1 (January 8, 2004),
27–​28, https://​www.lrb.co.uk/​v26/​n01/​emily-​wil​son/​ton​gue-​bre​aks.
5. Greenwood, “Review [untitled],” 159. Bruce Whiteman, whose prodigious ar-
ticle compares versions including Sappho imitations by H. D., Ezra Pound, and
translations by Mary Barnard and Guy Davenport, says Carson’s versions “sound
more like trots than fully achieved English poems. She prints every scrap that
has survived, including single words, and her translations hew very closely to the
Greek. . . . This is useful for the reader lacking Greek, but the English demonstrably
needs more, well, poetry.” See Bruce Whiteman, “Sappho; or, On Loss,” The Hudson
Review 66.4 (2014), 673–​688.
6. See Meryl Altman, “Looking for Sappho [Review article],” The Women’s Review of
Books 21.4 (January 2004), 8–​10 (10).
 Notes 291

7. Monique Wittig and Sande Zweig, Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary
(New York: Avon Books, 1976), “Sappho” entry.
8. The grammarian Tzetzes notes that “the passage of time has destroyed Sappho
and her works, her lyre and her songs.” Quoted in Margaret Williamson, Sappho’s
Immortal Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 43.
9. Margaret Reynolds discusses Winterson’s fiction, as well as a short story, “The Poetics
of Sex” (1993), on the same theme: Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 375–​376.
10. Ibid., p. 376.
11. Catullus and John Donne have both impersonated the lyric voice of fragment 31. See
Ellen Greene, “Refiguring the Feminine: Catullus Translating Sappho,” Arethusa 32.1
(Winter 1999), 1–​18; and Page DuBois, Sappho (London: Bloosmbury, 2015), pp. 105,
118, on Donne’s cross-​dressing identification with Sappho’s lyric speaker. DuBois also
discusses translations by Aphra Behn, Monique Wittig, and imitations of Sappho’s
aesthetics by H. D., etc. See also Joan de Jean, Fictions of Sappho (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1989).
12. Carson’s examples are given on pages xii and xiii of the introductory notes to If Not,
Winter.
13. I allude here to the title of Joan de Jean’s Fictions of Sappho.
14. Carson, “Simonides Negative,” 155.
15. Carson’s reference is to Lu Chi’s “Exposition on Literature” [also translated “Essay
on Literature” or “The Art of Writing”], reproduced in J. J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of
Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
16. The poem also echoes sentiments of short “Simonidean” poem in Carson, Men in the
Off Hours, “Epitaph: Evil” (p. 29), which I quote later in the chapter.
17. Thinking of Carson’s “Essay on What I Think About Most” and “Essay on Error”
(Men in the Off Hours, pp. 30–​36, 37), “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture
on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets,” in Float, and, at a push, The Beauty of the
Husband.
18. In addition to the poems from Men in the Off Hours cited above, the reading appears
in Carson’s essays, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” and “Stillness.”
19. Carson, “Simonides Negative,” 155. The title of a recent Carson lecture bears same
message: “Zero Is a Number and Nothing Is Something,” the Turnbull Poetry
Lecture, Johns Hopkins University, November 10, 2021. Carson’s comment also
echoes sentiments expressed by Carson’s mother in Nox when, sensing that her son is
no longer alive, she says, “When I pray for him nothing comes back” (Nox, 4.2).
20. Carson refers to Dickinson’s poem in “Stillness,” 9.
21. See Altman, “Looking for Sappho,” 8, and Sehgal, “Evoking the Starry Lad Her
Brother Was.”
22. Constantine and Carson, “Ancient Words, Modern Words,” 37. See Andrea Brady’s
Poetry and Bondage for an original exploration of the human conditions of possi-
bility for the idea of verse as constraint, bondage, chains, etc. In Brady’s argument,
these conditions of possibility are writers and non-​writers who have suffered actual
bondage.
292 Notes

23. Nancy and Lacoue-​Labarthe, The Literary Absolute, p. 47.

24. Sappho, “87D [youth]” in Carson, If Not, Winter, pp. 170–​171. Copyright © 2002 by
Anne Carson. Reproduced with permission of Little Brown Book Group Limited
through PLSclear and used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All
rights reserved.
25. Sienkewicz, “Anne Carson: Eros the Bittersweet,” 90. Carson opens Eros the Bittersweet
with remarks on Kafka’s short story “The Top,” a story about, she says, “a philosopher
who spends his time around children so he can grab their [spinning] tops in spin”
(xi), in order to confirm his belief, she quotes, “that the understanding of any detail,
that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.”
26. See Daniel Mendelsohn, “In Search of Sappho,” New York Review of Books, August
14, 2003, https://​www.nybo​oks.com/​artic​les/​2003/​08/​14/​in-​sea​rch-​of-​sap​pho/​. See
Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p. 5, where Williamson asks whose image
has most often been inscribed on the blank page—​“[Sappho’s] or her readers’?”
27. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 27.
28. Carson, trans., If Not, Winter, p. xiii.
29. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 10.
30. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
31. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 32.
32. Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, p. 53, quoted in Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 38.
The ellipsis and second parenthetical insertion are Carson’s.
33. “Fondation Hardt 1963, 119,” is Carson’s reference, cited in Eros the Bittersweet, p. 43.
34. John D’Agata makes a similar observation regarding Eros the Bittersweet in his inter-
view with Carson: “you say it’s because there’s perhaps no true lover suggested?—​no
guy or gal that’s literally intended in the poems?—​but instead that the real lover and
recipient of this desire is language itself. At least I think that’s what you say.” Carson
seems to assent to his reading (“Isn’t that profound?”). D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne
Carson,” 8.
35. Fragment 31 is one of precious few near-​complete poems in the Sappho oeuvre (sev-
eral more were added following the discoveries in 2004 and 2014 of several lots of
fragments, including the “Brothers Poem” and “Kypris Poem,” along with a host of
smaller fragments. The fragments, and the two longer poems, were confirmed to be
Sappho’s by Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist at the University of Oxford. For a detailed
philological profile of the discoveries, see Anton Bierl and André Lardinois, eds., The
Newest Sappho: P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105, Frs. 1–​4: Studies in Archaic and
Classical Greek Song, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
36. Carson, Decreation, p. 179.
37. Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 148.
38. Ibid., 146.
39. Ibid., 147.
40. Ibid., 150.
41. Ibid.
 Notes 293

42. Ibid.
43. The same fragment appears in Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Men in
the Off Hours, p. 32. I discuss the poem’s argument about error briefly in Chapter 1.
44. Carson, “ ‘Just for the Thrill,’ ” 153. See her later iteration of these ideas (and the
Chinese proverb) in Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Men in the Off
Hours, p. 30.
45. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 52.
46. See Carson, Nox (7.1).
47. Aitken, “The Art of Poetry no. 88,” 203. Also see Anderson’s interview with Carson
for The New York Times, in which Carson says: “I’m really trying to make people’s
minds move, you know, which is not something they’re naturally inclined to do . . . it’s
really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has
never moved before. That happens partly because the material is mysterious or un-
known but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to
word in a sentence. And it’s that that I’m more interested in doing, generally, than
mystifying by having unexpected content or bizarre forms. . . . [To just] throw in a bit
of Hegel. Who knows what that means? But to actually take a piece of Hegel and move
it around in a way that shows you something about Hegel is a satisfying challenge.”
Anderson, “The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson.”
48. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, p. 226.
49. See Vendler, “Introduction” to The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in A Lyric Theory
Reader, eds. Jackson and Prins, p. 130.
50. Sappho, “22,” in Carson, If Not, Winter, pp. 40–​41. Copyright © 2002 by Anne Carson.
Reproduced with permission of Little Brown Book Group Limited through PLSclear
and used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
51. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, “Fragments, Brackets, and Poetics: On Anne Carson’s If
Not, Winter,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11.2 (Fall 2004), 266–​272.
52. Ibid., 267.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Margaret Williamson, “Sappho and the Other Woman,” in Reading
Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), pp. 248–​264. See my discussion of fragment 31 in Chapter 1.
56. Williamson, “Sappho and the Other Woman,” p. 255.
57. Greenwood, “Review,” p. 159. Greenwood calls Eros the Bittersweet the “logical com-
panion” to If Not, Winter.
58. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 95.
59. On the deictic elements in Sappho’s verse, see André Lardinois, “Sappho’s Brothers
Song and the Fictionality of Early Greek Lyric Poetry,” in eds. Bierl and Lardinois, The
Newest Sappho, 167–​187. See the epigraph and opening paragraph in Chapter 2 on
Celan’s idea.
60. McNeilly, “Gifts and Questions,” 17 (italics mine).
294 Notes

61. Mendelsohn, “In Search of Sappho.” On the prerogatives of the composer (trouba-
dour) and the performer (jongleur), not a “strict dichotomy” between the “creative”
and the “recreative,” see Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 20.
62. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, p. 105.
63. Burt, “Professor or Pinhead.”
64. Eleanor Wachtel, “Anne Carson on Writing from the Margins of Her Mind,” CBC
Radio, Writers and Company series, May 6, 2016, https://​www.cbc.ca/​radio/​writer​
sand​comp​any/​anne-​car​son-​on-​writ​ing-​from-​the-​marg​ins-​of-​her-​mind-​1.3568​450.
65. See Page DuBois, Sappho Is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
p. 31. On the “many bodies of Sappho [that] express her contradictions,” see Reynolds,
The Sappho Companion, p. 7, and Wilson, “Tongue Breaks.” Wilson’s comments refer
to Margaret Reynolds’s The Sappho History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and
to the “body/​text” metaphor that is, Wilson says, “all too common in writing about
Sappho.”
66. Burt, “Professor or Pinhead.”
67. Carson, trans., If Not, Winter, pp. 349, 241.
68. See Carson, “The Glass Essay,” Glass, Irony and God, p. 8.
69. Ezra Pound’s poem “Papyrus,” from Lustra (London: Elkin Matthews, 1916)
reads: “Spring . . . . . . . . . Too long . . . . . . . . . Gongula,” turning the historically contin-
gent state of the fragment into a formal poetics. In the same volume, “Iμερρω” ends
with the line “Thou restless, ungathered.” In their understated aesthetics, these poems
could have come from If Not, Winter.
70. Whiteman, “Sappho; or, On Loss.” See Rebecca Varley-​Winter, Reading Fragments
and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2019).
A research project on precisely the question of “Fragmentary Modernisms” is led
by researchers at Durham University: “Fragmentary Modernisms: The Classical
Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures 1896–​1950”: https://​gtr.ukri.org/​proje​
cts?ref=​AH%2FS012​01X%2F1. See also Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics,
Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), on the complex
backstory to the twentieth-​century literary fascination with the fragment.
71. D’Agata, “A _​_​with Anne Carson,” 14.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated), and McNeilly, “Gifts and
Questions,” 22. The Postscript of this book reflects on the origins and futures of this
anti-​descriptive element in Carson.
75. See my discussion of the poem in Chapter 5.
76. Carson, “Apostle Town,” Plainwater, p. 95.
77. Carson, Plainwater, pp. 93–​94.
78. Quoted in Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” Men in the Off Hours, p. 31.
79. See Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008).
 Notes 295

80. See Haun Saussy, “Outside the Parenthesis (Those People Were a Kind of Solution),”
Comparative Literature 15.5 (December 2000), 849–​891, a fascinating, roaring cri-
tique of post-​structuralism’s “resort to Asia” and the fantasies of an Asian culture
“beyond” writing and therefore transcendent, “underdetermined” antitype to deter-
minism of alphabetic culture (851).
81. If Not, Winter, p. 185; Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta, pp. 102–​103.
82. With thanks to Antonio Rigo for clarifications on the Greek text. See note 59 for fur-
ther reading on the deictic elements of Sappho’s poetry.
83. Carson, “Epitaph: Evil,” in Men in the Off Hours, p. 29.
84. Carson, “Stillness,” 7.
85. Constantine and Carson, “Ancient Words, Modern Words,” 37.
86. See the description of Holzer’s intervention on the Ekeberg Park web-
site: https://​ekeber​gpar​ken.com/​en/​kunst/​cliff-​sap​pho). My quotations are taken
from Constantine and Carson, “Ancient Words, Modern Words,” 37.
87. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can,” Float (unpaginated).
88. Quoted in Carson, “Cassandra Float Can” (unpaginated) and, in an alternative trans-
lation, in An Oresteia: “a wave of woes far worse than these” (p. 54).
89. Carson, “Cassandra Float Can: Final Cut,” Float (unpaginated). Copyright © 2016
by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and and
Jonathan Cape, a division of the Penguin Random House Group Limited. All rights
reserved.
90. DuPlessis, “f-​Words,” 19.
91. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory
Battcock, introduction by Anne M. Wagner (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), pp. 116–​147 (pp. 125, 135).
92. Vendler, “Introduction” to The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in A Lyric Theory Reader,
eds. Jackson and Prins, pp. 130, 132.
93. Ibid., p. 132.

Postscript

1. The keynote lecture was delivered at the interdisciplinary “Visualizing Theory

Conference” on Thursday, May 10, 2018: https://​visu​aliz​ingt​heor​ycon​fere​nce.wordpr​
ess.com/​keyn​ote-​lect​ure/​. A full recording of the lecture is available to view: https://​
www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​CYiM​mCLR​IQ0. The lecture was originally delivered
as one of Carson’s Clark Lectures—​a series of three lectures including “Stillness,”
“Corners,” and “Chairs”—​at Trinity College, Cambridge.
2. For example, the “Short Talk on the Withness of the Body,” a “short talk” in three
parts, which appears in “L.A.,” a collection of pieces composed for performance
artist Laurie Anderson, printed in Float. The “Talk” was produced for the catalog of
Anderson’s multimedia show, Forty-​Nine Days in the Bardo (2012).
296 Notes

3. Carson, “Short Talk on Aeroplane Takeoff,” Short Talks, p. 66. © 1992 by Anne
Carson. Used with permission of Brick Books.
4. I was in the audience at Carson’s performance of the talk along with excerpts from
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, at London’s Southbank Centre on October 30, 2019.
I refer here to my own experience of participating in Carson’s “interactive lecture.”
5. Carson performs the same “Short Talk” in her message of gratitude on receipt of the
Princesa de Asturias award in 2020, referring to the piece as an “interactive poem.”
6. See Nancy, Le Partage des voix, cited in Chapter 1.
7. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, viii.
8. Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most,” in Men in the Off Hours, p. 31.
9. In the tradition of Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Oscar Masotta, etc.
10. Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” was performed at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in collaboration with Robert Currie and Faisal bin Ali
Jaber, an engineer from Yemen, on May 27, 2016. “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A
Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets” was first presented at Harvard’s
English Institute in 2007 in collaboration with dancers from the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company, whose original choreography was presented in a recording by Sadie
Wilcox, with an audio composition by sound artist Stephanie Rowden. “Cassandra
Float Can,” described as “a lecture in three parts,” was first performed at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music in 2008 accompanied by an intervention by Robert Currie based
on images of the work of Gordon Matta-​Clark in slide and poster format. Lecture I of
“Uncle Falling” was first presented at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York in
2008, with Lecture II added for a collaborative performance at the Poetry Project, St.
Mark’s Church in-​the-​Bowery, New York, in 2010, as listed in the Performance Notes
of Float.
11. Carson, “Stillness,” 1 (the original lecture spoke of a “lecture” instead of an “essay”).
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Anne Carson and Maria Negroni, “Entrevista a Anne Carson por Maria Negroni,”
a Zoom interview forming the final installment of a course on “Poetry: The Art of
Impertinence” at the Museo Malba (Museo Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires,
Argentina): https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​haJb​Vh8a​rOM. A reviewer of Men
in the Off Hours describes the work: “as though someone standing in a room cluttered
with papers and books suddenly opened a door on a windstorm”; Hilbert, “On and
Off Parnassus.”
14. Anne Carson, “Corners,” a lecture given at the New York Public Library, December 7,
2018: https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​iE7R​9n8a​Oxg.
15. Hayot, “Then and Now,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Anker and Felski, p. 291.
16. Graham Galt Harpham, Scholarship and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2020), p. 66; citing Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The
Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingston, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).
17. See Fleming, “Transcript for Poesis with Anne Carson.”
18. Davenport, “Review [Untitled],” 185.
 Notes 297

19. Carson, “Stillness,” 12, 8. Carson’s reference is John Cage, “An Autobiographical
Statement,” www.johnc​age.org/​beta/​aut​obio​grap​hica​l_​st​atem​ent.html, a statement
she presumes to have been made in Kyoto, 1989, on receiving the Kyoto Prize, though
she notes the statement is “variously attested.”
20. Taken from the testimony of “EgoCircus” participant Matthew Whittinger, following
the workshop at Poets House, New York: http://​matth​ewhi​ttin​ger.com/​2011/​02/​26/​
egocir​cus/​.
21. See the article “Lecture on the Weather: John Cage in Buffalo,” Burchfield Penney Art
Center at Buffalo State College, January 23, 2010–​February 14, 2010: https://​burch​fiel​
dpen​ney.org/​exhi​biti​ons/​exh​ibit​ion:01-​23-​2010-​02-​14-​2010-​lect​ure-​on-​the-​weat​
her-​john-​cage-​in-​buff​alo/​.
22. John Cage, “Thoreau Said the Same,” “Composition in Retrospect,” in X: Writings ’79-​
’82 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 133. © 1983 by John Cage.
Used by permission.
23. See Jann Pasler, “Inventing a Tradition: Cage’s ‘Composition in Retrospect,’” in John
Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 134.
24. See Carson, “Thirst: Introduction to Kinds of Water” and “Kinds of Water: An Essay
on the Road to Compostela” in Plainwater, pp. 119–​123 and pp. 124–​187.
25. See Octavio Paz, “Water Writes Always in Plural,” Diacritics 8.4 (Winter 1978), 41–​54;
Paz, Apariencia desnuda, pp. 105–​187, in the original Spanish. Paz traces the phrase
to Duchamp’s The (1915), the artist’s first text in English, in which the word “the” was
systematically replaced with asterisks (p. 105). See Howe, The Birth-​mark, p. 38.
26. See Susan Howe, “Hinge Picture” (1974), in Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–​
1979 (New York: New Directions, 1996), pp. 31–​56.
27. Carson, “Short Talk on Sylvia Plath,” Short Talks, p. 53. © 1992 by Anne Carson. Used
with permission of Brick Books.
28. Carson, “Short Talk on the End,” Short Talks, p. 52. © 1992 by Anne Carson. Used
with permission of Brick Books.
29. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Crosses (1653), dry point and burin on vellum,
Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://​www.metmus​eum.org/​art/​col​lect​ion/​sea​rch/​
354​631. The Museum’s description of the work goes some way to accounting for
Carson’s “darker. /​Darker”: “When Rembrandt created this [later] impression, he de-
liberately left ink on the printing plate . . . a thicker layer almost completely covers
the bushes along the right edge. By creatively inking the copperplate, Rembrandt in
a certain sense painted each impression.” Examples from several of the four stages
of printing are also held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
30. Images of The Three Crosses corresponding to each of the four stages of printing can
be consulted on the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: http://​expo​siti​
ons.bnf.fr/​rembra​ndt/​grand/​048_​4.htm.
31. See the opening paragraph of Chapter 3. Davenport quotes Laughlin’s observation in
the introduction to Carson, Glass, Irony and God (ix).
298 Notes

32. See “Merce Sonnet” in “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the
Form of 15 Sonnets,” Float (unpaginated).
33. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 218.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937), in Essays on Music, selected
with an introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H.
Gillespie et al. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
2002), pp. 564–​568 (p. 564).
35. Galt Harpham, Scholarship and Freedom, pp. 7, 4.
36. Ibid., pp. 7, 9.
37. D’Agata, “A_​with Anne Carson,” 1.
38. Ibid., 13.
39. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. viii.
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 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear
on only one of those pages.

Abanthis (Sappho), 213, 214 Chorus’s appeal to precedent in, 192

Adorno, Theodor, 17–​19, 129, 233–​34 Hegel’s critique of, 192–​95
Agamben, Giorgio, 112–​13, 154–​55, Hölderlin’s translation of, 196–​97, 198–​99
194, 226–​27 killing of Polyneikes in, 178–​79, 189–​90
Agamemnon (Aiskhylos), 148, 168, 197, 221 sisters’ dispute in, 193–​94
Agostinelli, Alfred, 46–​47, 48, 251n.64 as source for Antigonick, 27, 178–​79
aidōs, 15–​16, 17–​18, 33, 106, 137, 278n.59 Antigonick (Carson)
Aiskhylos (Aeschylus), 148, 168, 197 Antigone as a source for, 27, 178–​79
See also specific works Barthes and, 39–​40
Aitken, Will, 232–​33 Beckett and, 194
Akhmatova, Anna, 150 Brecht and, 195
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 34–​35, Chorus of, 192–​95
43, 44–​51 Eurydike’s monologue in, 199
Albertine (Rose), 49–​50 as found text, 191–​92
Albertine Simonet (Proust), 44–​45, 46–​47, 48–​ illustrations in, 178–​79, 190–​91
50, 51, 59–​60 imitation and pastiche in, 158
The Albertine Workout (Carson) as immanent commentary, 15–​16
aesthetics of notation and, 46 “nick” in, 198–​200
À la recherche du temps perdu as a source for, Sorbonne performance (2014) of, 192–​93
34–​35, 43, 44–​51 transparency and, 27, 191–​92
appendices of, 44–​46, 50–​51, 121 Woolf and, 190–​91, 194
artist book edition of, 46 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 125–​26, 130–​31,
Barthes and, 45–​46, 50–​51 136, 144–​45
hermeneutics and, 45, 49–​50, 65, 187 Aphrodite, 153, 156–​57
Mallarmé and, 47–​48 “Apostle Town” (Carson), 218
nonsequitur connections in, 52 Appellstruktur (Haas), 149, 153–​54
Proust’s letter to Heraklitos in, 49–​50 “Appendix to Ordinary Time” (Carson), 90–​
transposition theory and, 46–​47 91, 185
Alkestis (Alcestis, Euripides), 176 Archilochos, 14–​15, 126
Alkman, 14–​15, 211 Ares, 156–​57
Allen, Danielle, 66–​67 Aristotle
Altman, Meryl, 202, 205–​6 dianoia and, 209–​10
Anakreon (Anacreon), 14–​15, 36–​37 on error, 204–​5
Andrews, Bruce, 8 on metaphor, 35–​36
Anne Carson/​Antiquity (Jansen), 26–​27 mimesis and, 211, 218–​19, 227–​28, 230
Anno, Kim, 11–​12, 46, 252n.68 on the poet as imitator of reality, 31–​32
Antigone (Dean film), 200 on visual spectacle (opsis), 22, 210–​11
Antigone (Sophokles) Ars Poetica (Horace), 183–​84
burial rites and, 189–​90 Art and Lies (Winterson), 203
Carson’s 2015 translation of, 2–​3, 189–​ Auden, W. H., 109–​10, 141
90, 195–​96 Augustine, 1–​2, 276–​77n.43
320 Index

Austin, M. M., 69–​70 on poetic imitation, 108–​9

Autobiography of Red (Carson) pronouns and, 51, 54–​55
commercial success of, 3 “too much self ” in, 121
Geryoneis as a source for, 19–​20, 26–​27, 149–​ transparency and self-​exposure in, 24–​25,
50, 202–​3 102–​4, 110–​11, 116, 120, 191–​92, 202–​3
as immanent commentary, 15–​16 visibility of time and, 12–​13, 110–​11
paratexts of, 169, 203, 233–​34 Beckett, Samuel, 44, 48, 101–​2, 179, 193–​94
Red Doc> and, 26–​27 Benjamin, Walter, 7–​8, 13, 70–​71, 74–​75, 148,
verse-​novel form of, 2–​3 187–​88, 189, 215
Benson, Fiona, 282n.15
Bacon, Francis, 21, 59–​60 Bernstein, Charles, 2–​3, 7–​8, 13, 148
Baker, Norma Jeane. See Monroe, Marilyn Bernstein, Jay, 120
Bakhtin, Mihkail, 153–​54 Between the Acts (Woolf), 144–​45
Barnard, Mary, 217 Binoche, Juliette, 189–​90
Barthes, Roland. See also specific works Bishop, Elizabeth, 126
on criticism as lifting and variation of Bloom, Harold, 1–​2, 5, 19, 144
signs, 13 “Book of Isaiah” (Carson), 86–​87
on the critic’s language, 41–​42, 70–​71 Bourdieu, Pierre, 68–​70
on dedication, 105–​6, 111–​12 Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 20–​21, 194–​97, 199
on “destruction of every voice,” 69–​ Brontë, Charlotte, 90–​92
70, 142–​43 Brontë, Emily. See also specific works
eros and, 39–​40, 41–​42, 43 Ellis Bell pseudonym of, 93
on form as “what is between the thing and its “The Glass Essay” as reading of, 12–​13, 24–​
name,” 117 25, 62, 72, 78, 85–​88, 99, 185
on fusion of first-​person voice with source liberty in the writing of, 86–​87, 92–​93
text, 13 “Nudes” (Carson) and, 89–​90, 96–​99
horizontal discourse and, 103, 115 “thou” as muse of, 86–​88, 92–​93, 95–​
on language without adjectives, 50–​51 96, 97–​99
the neuter and, 143 “whaching” by, 88–​92, 94
on the photograph’s invisibility, 188–​89 Brooks, Cleanth, 107, 118, 121
Proust and, 45–​46 Brossa, Joan, 13–​14
on the punctum, 251n.64 Bruno, Rosanna, 190–​91
“simulation” and, 8, 39–​40, 103, 249n.42 Burrow, Colin, 18–​19, 144, 148–​49, 155, 158
on time’s visibility in Twombly, 1 Burt, Stephanie, 176–​77, 216, 220
on writing as a neutral space, 143 Butler, Judith, 164–​65, 179, 189–​93, 194, 195
Bataille, Georges, 7–​8 “By Chance the Cycladic People”
Baudrillard, Jean, 120 (Carson), 143–​44
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in
29 Tangos (Carson) Cage, John, 17, 36, 143–​44, 159–​60, 228–​29
autofictional response to Keats in, 3–​4, 19–​ Cunningham and, 17, 228
20, 24–​25, 72, 102, 106–​7, 108–​9, 110–​11, on silence, 228
116, 119 struggle “to get every Me out of the way” of,
dedication of, 104–​9 143–​44, 159–​60, 228–​29
eros and, 34 Cameron, Sharon, 159, 166–​67
fatalism of, 109, 121–​22 The Cap and Bells; Or, The Jealousies (Keats), 114
form of, 102–​3 Carson, Anne. See also specific works
The Large Glass and, 13–​14, 103–​4, 116–​ on “being an amateur,” 10, 227
17, 119–​20 classical education of, 2–​3, 176–​78
lyric essay and, 103 direct address to readers in the works of, 3–​4,
marriage in, 101–​2 5–​6, 66, 77, 101–​2, 110, 116, 187
metaphor in, 101, 103–​4, 107, 121–​22 on the essay as gift, 10, 66
Persephone in, 106–​7 on form arising “out of the thing itself,” 10, 35
Phaedrus and, 111–​12, 113, 118–​19 on imitation, 20
 Index 321

on lecturing, 28 Cratylus (Plato), 204

on mimesis and “painting notion” of writing Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide
4–​5, 217–​18 (Benson and Connors), 7–​8
on poetry and the academy, 3 Critchley, Simon, 281n.2, 290n.126
on reading Proust, 43–​44, 51 “The Critic as Artist” (Wilde), 10–​11
teaching posts held by, 6–​7 Culler, Jonathan, 21–​22, 79, 103, 212
Carson, Michael, 3–​4, 180–​83, 184–​86 Cunningham, Merce, 3, 17, 52–​54, 228
Carter, Angela, 7–​8, 49–​50 Currie, Robert
Cassandra Antigonick and, 179, 190–​91
“fake women” and, 150–​51, 168 Carson’s collaborations with, 22
prophecy on house of Atreus by, 197–​98 EgoCircus Collective and, 17, 228
Trojan emotion and, 168 on “Merce Sonnet” in performance, 54
Twombly and, 1 Nox and, 187
“Cassandra Float Can” (Carson), 52, 197–​98,
199, 220–​22, 225–​26 D’Agata, John
Catullus Carson’s interviews with, 4–​5, 10, 40–​41
Catullus 85 and, 14–​15 on Carson’s “creative” work, 234
Catullus 101 and, 3–​4, 15–​16, 27, 178–​79, on Carson’s “very formal” oeuvre, 23–​24
180–​81, 183–​85, 188, 212 on Eros of the Bittersweet, 41–​42
Nox and, 3–​4, 15–​16, 27, 65, 72, 178–​79, 180–​ on the essay’s lyric action, 39
81, 183–​85, 188, 212 on “The Glass Essay,” 13, 87–​88
Twombly and, 1, 12–​13 on lyric essay’s “overt desire to engage with
Ceballos, Manuela, 152 facts,” 85–​86
Celan, Paul. See also specific works Dante Alighieri, 112–​13
Carson on Simonides in “conversation” with, Davenport, Guy, 18–​19, 35–​36, 37, 85–​86, 227–​
62–​63, 65–​66, 67–​68, 69–​70, 72, 80–​81, 205 28, 229–​30
Carson’s identification in Economy of the Dean, Tacita, 1, 15–​16, 19, 198, 200
Unlost with, 24, 77–​78, 79–​80 decreation
on “encounter” (Begegnung) of poetry, 65–​66 contradictions of, 26, 127–​28, 140,
Gadamer’s readings of, 64–​65 146, 160–​61
mimesis and, 218–​19 dementia and, 130–​31
on the poem as gift, 58, 61, 179–​80 displacement of the conceptual center
Tristan and Isolt legend in “Matière de and, 127–​28
Bretagne” by, 73–​77 ecstasy and, 127, 138–​39
“unlost (unverloren)” and, 64–​65, 78–​79 everyday emotion and, 132
Certeau, Michel de, 149, 153 Marvell and, 142
“Chairs” (Carson), 138–​39 performance and, 151–​55
Chihaya, Sarah, 13, 99 as “self-​undoing,” 25–​26, 126, 146, 159–​60
Chorus uncreativity and, 143–​44
in “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts,” Weil’s articulation of the concept of, 109–​10,
156–​58, 162, 165–​66 125–​26, 127–​28, 160–​61
improvised, 224–​25 the will and, 138–​39
in Greek tragedy, 224–​25 writing and, 127–​28, 142–​43
lecture with, 130–​31, 225–​26 “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts” (Carson)
Cixous, Hélène, 13 camp aesthetics and, 19, 156–​57, 166–​67
Clark Lectures (Carson), 6–​7, 225–​26, 234 “fake women” and, 155, 157, 167
Cliff Sappho (Carson and Holzer), 220 imitation and citational poetics in, 155, 157–​
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10–​11 58, 164, 167
“Composition in Retrospect” (Cage), 228 love triangle of Aphrodite and, 156–​57
Constantine, Peter, 206 “The Mirror of Simple Souls” opera (Carson)
Copeland, Roger, 53 and, 154–​55
Corinthians, Paul’s First Letter to, 152 Porete in, 157–​58
“Corners” (Carson), 224, 225, 226–​27, 233–​34 Sappho’s fragment 31 and, 156
322 Index

“Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts” (Carson) Donne, John, 20–​21

(cont.) “Drop’t Sonnet” (Carson), 55
as “thought opera,” 148 Drucker, Johanna, 21
tripartite structure of, 151, 155 DuBois, Page, 216
Weil in, 157, 161–​66 Duchamp, Marcel
“Decreation: How Sappho, Marguerite Porete Cunningham and, 53
and Simone Weil Tell God” (Carson) hinge principle of, 230
Carson’s reading of Weil in, 25–​26, 78 The Large Glass and, 13–​14, 103–​4, 116–​
Carson’s rehearsal of “conversations” 17, 118–​21
in, 65–​66 machine célibataire of, 120
“fake women” and, 26, 146–​48, 167 “readymades” of, 116–​17, 119
imitation and, 148–​49 on water writing in plural, 228–​29
mysticism and, 25–​26, 130, 136 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 8, 23, 103, 121–​
on Porete’s “FarNear,” 152–​53, 154–​55 22, 222–​23
prepositions in, 72
problem of self in, 16–​17, 51 Eckhart, Meister, 36, 129, 154, 226–​27,
Sappho’s fragment 31 and, 37, 151 276–​77n.43
solemnity of, 156–​57 Eco, Umberto, 119
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Carson). Economy of the Unlost (Carson)
See also specific essays and poems distinction between academic and aesthetic
blended text in, 154–​55 work in, 63–​65, 79–​80
conceptual jumps in, 127, 128–​29, 145 Carson’s comparison of herself and Celan in,
eros and, 34 24, 77–​78, 79–​80
fatalism in, 121–​22 on Celan’s retelling of Tristan and Isolt legend
mysticism and, 127, 138–​39 in “Matière de Bretagne,” 73–​76
paratactic organization in, 127–​28 on classical training and sticking to “verbal
on phenomenology and mystical facts,” 176
thinking, 130 “conversation” between Celan and Simonides
problem of self in, 25–​26, 86–​87, 125–​26, in, 62–​63, 65–​66, 67–​68, 69–​70, 72, 80–​
127, 144–​45 81, 205
the Sublime in, 126, 127 copying of names and noting activity in,
transparency in, 24–​25, 121–​22 63–​65, 70–​71
“withness” in, 72 on despair and poetry, 80
Defoe, Daniel, 65–​66 on epitaphs, 179–​80, 182, 198–​99
deixis, 8–​9, 215, 219–​20, 293n.59, 295n.82 on the essay as gift, 66
apostrophe and, 154, 215 gift exchange (xenia) and, 24, 67–​69, 78–​
de Kooning, Willem, 226–​27 79, 80
Deneuve, Catherine, 13 Hölderin’s “The Rhine” and, 63
Derrida, Jacques. See also specific works Martin Classical Lectures as a source for,
on gifts, 69–​70, 80–​81 16–​17, 24, 67–​68
logos and, 42–​43, 59 Marxist analysis of commodity economics in,
mimetic reading of Plato by, 8, 17–​18, 39 67–​68, 69–​71
“paraliterature” and, 39 mimesis and, 212
on philosophy and writing, 39, 150 “Note on Method” section in, 11–​12, 16–​17,
Dickinson, Emily 62–​67, 70–​73, 76–​77, 78–​79
Howe’s readings of, 12–​13, 91–​92, 114, 274n.9 poetic economy and, 61–​62, 66–​67, 71, 80
“I heard a Fly buzz” by, 144–​45, 205 on poetry’s surplus, 71
“overtakelessness” and, 184–​85 on praise poems, 80–​81
Rankine on black lives and, 261–​62n.22 reader address in, 66, 77
Dillon, Brian, 11–​12 reciprocity in, 62, 68
“Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology reviews of, 61–​62, 66–​67, 72–​73, 78–​79
of Female Pollution in Antiquity” on symbola, 69
(Carson), 8–​9, 150 on “too much self ” in writing, 63, 78–​79
 Index 323

on “vibration,” 63–​65, 73, 74–​75, 78–​ Euripides

79, 219–​20 Alkestis and, 176
on wasting and saving of words, 61–​62, 72–​73 Grief Lessons (Carson) and, 149–​50, 175–​
“windowless room” (Lukács) in, 63, 99, 185 76, 179–​80
“withness” in, 71–​72 Hekabe and, 176
“The EgoCircus Collective” (Carson and Herakles and, 3–​4, 26–​27, 176, 179–​80
Currie), 17, 228 Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (Carson) and,
eidōlon/​eidōla, 18–​19, 169–​70 15–​16, 18–​19, 26–​27, 39–​40, 158, 169–​
“Epitaph: Evil” (Carson), 219–​20 70, 195–​96
“Epitaph for François” (Celan), 65–​66, 179–​80, The Trojan Women and, 190–​91
188, 207 Eurydike (Eurydice, Sophokles), 191–​93, 194–​
eros (erōs). See also Eros the Bittersweet (Carson) 95, 199
aidōs and, 15, 17–​18, 33 Eve, Martin Paul, 49–​50
À la recherche du temps perdu and, 34–​35, “Every Exit Is an Entrance: A Praise of Sleep”
43, 44–​51 (Carson), 7–​8, 129, 142
“crisis of contact” and, 14–​15, 32
“discovery of the mind” and, 14–​15 “fake women”
lyric poetry and, 34, 37 critiques of Carson’s writing and, 149–​50
mimetic desire and, 37–​38 “Decreation: An Opera in Three Parts” and,
paradoxes and contradictions of, 32–​34, 41 26, 146–​48, 167
personal sovereignty and, 15 “Decreation: How Sappho, Marguerite Porete
as a verb, 20–​21, 36–​37, 39, 43, 51 and Simone Weil Tell God” and, 26, 146–​
Eros the Bittersweet (Carson) 48, 167
alphabetization and, 208–​9 mimesis and, 147–​48
Barthes and, 39–​40, 41–​42 Porete’s inquisitorial trial and, 26, 146–​47,
Carson on the process of writing, 34, 40–​41 149–​50, 157
dance and, 53–​54 “position” and epistemology of, 147, 148–​
form of chapters in, 38 49, 150–​51
Kafka’s “The Top” and, 41–​42, 177–​ Felski, Rita, 7
78, 227–​28 Felstiner, John, 65–​66, 70–​71
“logic at the edge” and, 208–​9 Fenollosa, Ernest, 218–​19
on the lover’s confrontation with time, 32 Ferrante, Elena, 7–​8
love triangles and, 38, 54–​55, 156 Fisher, Jessica, 127
metaphor in, 35–​37 Float (Carson). See also specific poems and
on “the moment Eros enters you,” 15 performance works
“Odi et Amo Ergo Sum” as a source for, 15, aleatory presentation of, 187
32–​33, 34 eros and, 24, 34
on oral poetics, 59 mimesis and, 220
Phaedrus and, 33–​34, 40, 107, 111–​12, 156 “reading is freefall” and, 52, 143–​44
pointillist structure of, 50 reviews of, 1–​2
Princeton University Press’s publishing of, “Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime
35–​36, 79 in Longinus and Antonioni” (Carson), 9,
privacy of reading in, 28 41, 125–​26
reviews of, 35–​36, 39, 41–​42 Fränkel, Herman, 59
on rhetorical possession, 42–​43 Frankissstein (Winterson), 49–​50
Sappho’s fragment 31 and, 37–​38, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 130, 133, 136–​37, 175–​76
scholarly and poetic “impulses” in, Fried, Michael, 222–​23
40–​41, 43 Frye, Northrop, 22
Weil and, 158–​59 Furlani, André, 72
Eshelman, Raoul, 23
“Essay on Error” (Carson), 8–​9, 21–​22, 138 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 64–​65
“Essay on What I Think About Most” (Carson), Genette, Gérard, 18–​19
21–​22, 31–​32, 35–​37, 108, 138 Geryon (Stesichoros), 246n.134
324 Index

Geryoneis (Stesichoros), 19–​20, 26–​27, 202–​3 Guarnieri, Romana, 151–​52

The Gift (Mauss), 69–​70
Girard, René, 19, 38, 49–​50 Haas, Alois M., 149
glass Haimon (Haemon, Sophokles), 192–​93, 196–​97
as figure, 13–​14, 19–​20, 101, 103–​4, 105–​6, Hamburger, Michael, 74
116–​18, 120, 121, 126, 147, 152, 202–​3 Harpham, Graham Galt, 227, 234
as medium, 13–​14, 19–​20, 87, 90, 96, 101, Hayot, Eric, 10, 227
114, 116–​17, 119–​20, 121, 126, 228–​29. See H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 7–​8, 217
also Duchamp, The Large Glass Hegel, G.W.F., 1, 162, 179, 192–​95, 287n.83
Glass, Irony and God (Carson), 37, 85–​87. See Heidegger, Martin, 72, 184–​85, 269n.15
also specific essays and poems Hekabe (Euripides), 176
“The Glass Essay” (Carson) Helen (Euripides). See Norma Jeane Baker of
Charlotte Brontë as critical interlocutor in, 92 Troy (Carson)
Chihaya’s mimetic variation on, 13, 99 Helen of Troy, 150, 169
idiosyncratic spelling in the poetry of Emily Hephaistos, 156–​57, 166
Brontë and, 94 Herakles (Euripides), 3–​4, 26–​27, 176, 179–​80
“I’ll Come When Thou Art Saddest” Hertz, Neil, 3–​4
quoted in, 95 “Hinge Picture” (Howe), 230
loneliness of Emily Brontë in, 88, 93–​94, Hippolytos (Hippolytus, Euripides), 167, 176
95, 96–​97 H of H Playbook (Carson)
lyric essay and, 85–​86 Herakles and, 3–​4, 26–​27
“Nudes” in, 89–​90, 96–​99 as immanent commentary, 15–​16
poem and commentary speaking in “one reviews of, 202, 286n.71
consistent voice” in, 87–​88 scrapbook styling of, 233–​34
pronouns in, 54–​55 “too much self ” in, 121
reading of Emily Brontë in, 12–​13, 24–​25, 62, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11–​12, 63, 196–​97, 198–​99
72, 78, 85–​88, 99, 185 Holzer, Jenny, 220, 226–​27
real time in, 86–​87 Homans, Margaret, 93
structure of, 85–​86 Homeric Hymn to Demeter (anon.), 106–​7
“thou” as muse in Emily Brontë’s work and, Homo Sacer (Agamben), 194
86–​88, 92–​93, 95–​96, 97–​99 Honig, Bonnie, 195
“too much self ” in, 121 “Hopper: Confessions” (Carson), 1–​2, 19–​20
transparency in, 24–​25, 90, 191–​92, 202–​3 Hopper, Edward, 1–​2
visibility of time and, 12–​13 Horace, 183–​84, 186–​87
“whaching” by Emily Brontë in, 88–​92, 94 Horn, Roni, 22
“Gnosticisms” (Carson), 130, 132, 144 Howe, Susan
“God’s Christ Theory” (Carson), 72, anarcho-​scholasticism and, 7–​8
86–​87, 132 Dickinson and, 12–​13, 91–​92, 114, 274n.9
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 143–​44 on editorial practices and official
Gongyla (Sappho), 213, 214 textuality, 91–​92
Goodwin, Betty, 132–​38, 134f, 139, 218 materialist arts of sound of, 8
Graham, Jorie, 59–​60 poetry compared to “sun against glass”
Graham, W. S., 13–​14 by, 13–​14
Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce, on truth as water, 228–​29
Weil), 140, 147–​48, 270n.33, 271n.44, Hunt, Arthur Surridge, 213–​14
274n.6, 278n.59 Husserl, Edmund, 127–​28, 138, 221
“Greed: A Fractal Approach to Simonides” Hutcheon, Linda, 53–​54, 76–​77, 153–​54, 157,
(Carson), 67–​68 164, 195
The Green Box (Duchamp), 116–​17
Greenwood, Emily, 202, 215 If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Carson)
Grenfell, Bernard Pyne, 213–​14 appendix of, 202
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (Carson), brackets in, 205–​6, 208, 216
149–​50, 175–​76, 179–​80 Carson’s restraint as translator in, 15–​16
 Index 325

fragments’ accidental perfection and, 41–​42 Keats, John. See also specific works
layout and mise-​en-​page of, 205–​6, 208, 216 “Beauty is truth” proclamation, 19–​20,
mimesis and, 203–​4, 213 25, 102–​4, 106, 107–​8, 113–​14, 115–​16,
performativity and, 27 119, 121–​22
reviews of, 202 Carson’s autofiction in The Beauty of the
transparency and, 74–​75, 202–​3 Husband and, 3–​4, 19–​20, 24–​25, 72, 102,
“I heard a Fly buzz” (Dickinson), 144–​45, 205 106–​7, 108–​9, 110–​11, 116, 119
“The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” (Weil), 139–​ Paradise Lost annotations of, 114–​15
40, 160–​61 water epitaph of, 228–​29
“I’ll Come When Thou Art Saddest” (Emily “The Keats Headaches” (Carson), 104, 105–​6
Brontë), 95 Kermode, Frank, 93–​94
Imitating Authors (Burrow), 18 Kierkegaard, Søren, 39–​40
imitation. See also mimesis Kreon (Creon, Sophokles), 189–​90, 192–​93
critical responses to Carson’s engagement in, Kristeva, Julia, 13, 169
17–​18, 26–​27
“deep analogies” (Burrow) and, 155 Lacan, Jacques, 189–​94, 195–​96
derivative form and, 18–​19 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Philippe, 46, 177–​78, 190,
doubles and, 148–​49 194–​95, 206
elasticity of, 18 La Dissémination (Dissemination, Derrida), 39
formal (Burrow), 18–​19 La Prisonnière (The Captive, Proust), 44–​45, 48–​50
Helen (Euripides), Norma Jeane Baker of Troy The Large Glass (Le Grand verre, Duchamp),
(Carson) and, 169–​70 13–​14, 103–​4, 116–​17, 118–​21
imitatio and, 17–​18, 32, 148–​49, 154–​55, Largier, Niklaus, 154
156–​57, 158, 164, 167, 228–​29 Laughlin, James, 85, 232–​33
interpretation as a prerequisite for, 18 Lauterbach, Ann, 7
parody and, 18, 32, 76–​77, 148–​49, 154–​55, Leavis, Q. D., 93–​94
157, 158, 164, 165, 166–​67 lebendigkeit (Hölderlin), 196–​97, 198
performativity and, 20–​22, 39 “Lecture on Pronouns.” See “Possessive Used as
proportion and, 18–​20 Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the
as “strong reading” (Bloom), 19 Form of 15 Sonnets” (Carson)
impersonation, 13, 114, 141, 143, 149–​50, “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” (Carson,
155 , –​68 Currie, Ali Jaber), 28, 228
Indigo (Warner), 49–​50 “Lecture on the Weather” (Cage), 8–​9, 228
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Leda, 1
(Carter), 49–​50 Leighton, Angela, 121, 181–​82
“Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Le Neutre (The Neuter, Barthes), 45–​46, 143
Catherine Deneuve” (Carson), 8–​9, 13 Lewis, Wyndham, 7–​8
Ismene (Sophokles), 189–​90, 192–​94, 195–​96 “The Life of Towns” (Carson), 9–​10, 62–​63,
139–​40, 187, 218
James, David, 263n.37 Life? or Theatre (Salomon), 190–​91
Jameson, Fredric, 110–​11 Lispector, Clarice, 13
Jansen, Laura, 26–​27, 176–​77 Lobel, Edgar, 213–​14
Jarvis, Simon, 23 “Longing: A Documentary” (Carson),
Jendza, Craig, 195–​96 126, 127–​28
Johnson, Barbara, 17–​18, 39 Longinus, 41, 125–​26
John the Evangelist, 71–​72 A Lover’s Discourse (Barthes), 8, 39–​40, 41–​43,
“‘Just for the Thrill’: Sycophantizing Aristotle’s 103, 264n.6
Poetics” (Carson), 9–​10, 21–​22, 36–​37, Lu Chi, 204–​6, 218–​20
204–​5, 209–​10, 218–​19 Lukács, György, 63
lyric
Kafka, Franz, 41–​42, 177–​78, 227–​28 accident and, 207–​8
Kane, Sarah, 198 eros and, 34, 37
Kant, Immanuel, 1–​2, 19, 126 lyric essay and, 85–​86
326 Index

lyric (cont.) Moore, Marianne, 109–​10

“lyric mimesis” and, 21–​22, 37, 55, 203–​4, Mourning Diary (Journal de deuil,
210–​12 Barthes), 188–​89
lyric philosophy and, 7–​8 Munnerlyn, Marcie, 54
lyric transparency and, 25, 103–​4, 116 Munro, Alice, 202–​3
performative dimension of, 14–​15, 21–​22, My Emily Dickinson (Howe), 12–​13, 91–​92, 114
36–​37
private reading and, 14–​15, 34 Nagy, Gregory, 215
song and, 21–​22, 58–​59, 111, 203, 216 Nancy, Jean-​Luc, 46, 58–​59, 177–​78, 206
transcription and, 14–​15 Nay Rather (Carson), 20–​21
The Neuter (Barthes). See Le Neutre
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 47–​48, 63 Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (Carson), 15–​16, 18–​
Man Ray, 120 19, 26–​27, 39–​40, 158, 169–​70, 195–​96
Marcel (Proust), 44–​47, 48–​51 “Notes on Camp” (Sontag), 156–​57
Martin Classical Lectures (Carson), 16–​17, 24, “Now What?” (Carson), 62–​63
67–​68, 176 Nox (Carson)
Marvell, Andrew, 142 as “anti-​book,” 176–​77
“Matière de Bretagne” (Celan), 72–​77 Catulllus 101 and, 3–​4, 15–​16, 27, 65, 72,
Matta-​Clark, Gordon, 221, 226–​27 178–​79, 180–​81, 183–​85, 188, 212
Mauss, Marcel, 69–​70 doubt of the translator in, 23
Mavor, Carol, 13 as epitaph, 178–​79, 180–​83, 184–​86, 188
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 207, 215–​16 glossary format in, 182–​84, 185–​86
Men in the Off Hours (Carson), 1–​2, 7–​8, grief and, 181–​83
186–​87, 204–​5. See also specific essays mimesis and, 222–​23
and poems on muteness in, 184–​85
“Merce Sonnet” (Carson), 53–​54 open-​endedness of, 187
“The Meridian” (Celan), 61, 65–​66 photographs in, 188–​89
Merkin, Daphne, 18 residues and, 181–​82, 183–​84, 185, 186–​
Miller, J. Hillis, 68–​69 87, 189
Milton, John, 89–​90 scrapbook original of, 178–​79, 180–​81, 182–​
mimēma, 157 83, 233–​34
mimesis (mimēsis). See also imitation “too much self ” in, 121
Aristotle and, 210–​11, 218–​19, 227–​28, 230 transparency in composition of, 24–​25, 27
capture of mind and, 4–​5, 212
Derrida and, 8, 17–​18, 39 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 102–​4, 106–​8,
“fake women” and, 147–​48 113, 117–​21
glass and, 13–​14, 117–​18, 119–​4, 121 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 111
“lyric mimesis” and, 21–​22, 37, 55, 203–​ “Ode to Indolence” (Keats), 114
4, 210–​12 “Ode to Sleep” (Carson), 126
mimetic desire and, 19, 38, 170–​71 “Odi et Amo Ergo Sum” (Carson), 8, 14–​15,
performativity and, 20, 32 32–​33, 34, 158–​59
Plato and, 15, 17–​19, 210–​11 The Odyssey (Homer), 69, 156, 226–​27
sophistry and, 17–​19, 25, 39, 59 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophokles), 189–​90
“Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings” Oedipus the King (Sophokles), 189–​90, 193–​94
(Carson), 26–​27 O’Hara, Frank, 223
The Mirror of Simple Souls (Porete), 146–​47, “Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)”
149, 151–​55 (Carson), 15–​16
“The Mirror of Simple Souls: An Opera Olson, Charles, 7–​8
Installation” (Carson), 154–​55, 158–​59 On the Sublime (Longinus), 41, 125
Moi, Toril, 163, 273–​74n.5 opera. See also “Decreation: An Opera in
Monroe, Marilyn (Norma Jeane Baker), 18–​19, Three Parts”
150–​51, 169, 171, 195–​96 interdisciplinary opera, 53–​54
Montaigne, Michel de, 39, 126 “thought opera” and, 7–​8, 148
 Index 327

opsis, 22, 41, 121–​22, 210–​11, 227–​28, 229–​30 Plato. See also specific works
“Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and beds and, 130
Thucydides on War” (Carson), 90–​91, 185 Carson’s reading of Defoe and, 65–​66
Oresteia (Carson’s translation), 2–​3 on eidōla and likeness, 18–​19
Oswald, Alice, 282n.15 mimesis and, 15, 17–​19
Otho the Great (Keats), 114 the spoken word and, 51, 59
Oulipo, 104, 243n.92, 279n.79 Porete, Marguerite
analogies of, 128–​29
Page, Denys, 34, 208–​9, 214 “fake woman” charge leveled against, 26,
paranoid reading (Sedgwick), 7, 46–​47, 48, 49–​ 146–​47, 149–​50, 157
50, 104, 110, 115–​16, 238n.27 “FarNear” (Loingprès) neologism of, 152–​
Pasler, Jann, 228–​29 53, 154–​55
Paz, Octavio, 119 Inquisitorial trial of, 26, 146–​47, 149–​50, 152
Peace (Aristophanes), 68 “undoing the creature” and, 148
Peponi, Anastasia-​Erasmia, 39–​40, “Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture
249–​50n.44 on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets”
performance (Carson)
aesthetics of, 28, 53, 57–​58, 149, 154–​55, 158, eros and, 24, 34–​35
187, 210–​11, 215, 216, 219, 222–​23, grammar as inebriant and, 52
224–​25, 230, 232–​33 grammar of difference and exchange
Carson on, 10–​11, 20–​21, 31, 75–​76 in, 54–​55
Currie on, 54 Harvard University premiere (2006) of, 52
decreation as, 151–​55 onstage dance collaboration for, 3, 52, 53–​
deixis and, 215, 219–​20 54, 59–​60
of impersonality (Cameron), 159 pronouns as open form of address in, 54
improvisation and, 52, 224–​25 search for missing pronoun in, 55
interactivity and, 23–​24, 192–​93, 222–​23, sonnet form and, 51, 52–​53, 58–​59
224, 225, 231, 237n.24 “stands” as verb in, 58
Performance Philosophy and, 192–​93, 234, toy pony in, 56–​57
286n.74 post-​critical, 23–​24, 104, 109–​10, 249n.39
Performatism (Eshelman), 23 Pound, Ezra, 7–​8, 217–​19
Performative form, 5, 25–​26, 27, 35, 46–​47, 50, The Preparation of the Novel (Barthes), 45–​46,
126, 135, 138, 203–​4, 221, 225 251n.67
Perloff, Marjorie, 143–​44 “The Prisoner. A Fragment” (Emily
Pétrement, Simone, 159 Brontë), 98–​99
Phaedrus (Plato) “Prologue: False Sail” (Carson), 62–​63
The Beauty of the Husband and, 111–​12, Prometheia (Aiskhylos), 199–​200
113, 118–​19 Proust, Marcel. See À la recherche du temps
contradictions of eros in, 32–​34, 41, 43, 166 perdu (Proust)
Derrida’s mimetic reading of, 8, 39 psychagōgikon, 22, 210–​11, 227–​28
Eros the Bittersweet and, 33–​34, 40, 107,
111–​12, 156 Rae, Ian, 12, 90, 95, 150
logos and, 59 Rankine, Claudia, 261–​62n.22
the lover in, 33, 130–​31 Rauschenberg, Robert, 226–​27
Lysias and, 33, 113, 118–​19 Reading Boyishly (Mavor), 13
the nonlover in, 33, 40, 59, 113, 118–​ Red Doc> (Carson), 26–​27, 145
19, 130–​31 “Reinventing the Poet-​Critic” Conference
the spoken word in, 59 (1994), 8
Phaidra, 150–​51, 167, 170–​71 Rembrandt van Rijn, 22, 232–​33, 297n.29
Pickstock, Catherine, 59 The Republic (Plato), 17–​19, 108–​9, 130
“Pinplay: A Version of Euripides’s Bacchae” Reynolds, Margaret, 203, 216
(Carson), 26–​27 “The Rhine” (Hölderlin), 11–​12, 63
Plath, Sylvia, 22, 230–​31 Rhys, Jean, 49–​50
328 Index

Ricks, Christopher, 5–​7 copying of names and activity in, 64–​65

Ricoeur, Paul, 108 drawings as origin of, 229–​30
Riding, Laura, 7–​8 mimesis and, 12–​13, 225
Ronell, Avitall, 192 “Short Talk on Chromo-​luminarism” and,
Rose, Gillian, 132, 145, 160–​61, 163–​64, 166–​67 230, 231–​32
Rose, Jacqueline, 49–​50, 169–​70 “Short Talk on Hölderlin’s World Night
Rowden, Stephanie, 52 Wound” and, 230
Ruddick, Lisa, 48 “Short Talk on Sylvia Plath” and, 22, 230–​31
“Short Talk on the End” and, 231–​32
Salomon, Charlotte, 190–​91 “Short Talk on the Sensation of Aeroplane
Samuels, Lisa, 7–​8 Takeoff ” and, 224–​25, 230
Sappho Sienkewicz, T. J., 41–​43, 177–​78
on “bittersweet desire” (glukupikron), 32–​ “Simonides Negative” (Carson), 204
33, 36–​37 Simonides of Keos
Carson’s restraint in translating, 15–​16 Carson on putting Celan in “conversation”
erotics of the present tense in, 215 with, 62–​63, 65–​66, 67–​68, 69–​70, 72,
“fake woman” charge and, 146 80–​81, 205
fragment 22 and, 213–​14, 216–​17 Carson on the absence of despair in, 80
fragment 31 and, 37–​38, 41, 151, 156, 170–​ invention of Greek letters and, 204, 205–​6
71, 209–​11 mimesis and, 4–​5, 218–​19
fragment 55 and, 209–​10 poetic economy and sale of poems by, 61–​62,
fragment 87D, 206, 208 67–​68, 78
fragment 94 and, 218–​20 surplus in poetry of, 71
fragment 105a and, 41–​42, 207 “Sleepchains” (Carson), 127–​28, 131–​32
fragment 118 and, 216 Snell, Bruno, 14–​15, 34, 208–​9
fragment 176 and, 216 Solway, David, 125–​26, 149–​50, 258n.33
kletic hymns of, 149, 153 “Sonnet Isolate” (Carson), 53
mimesis and, 4–​5 The Song of Songs, 153, 275n.15
postmodern aesthetics and reading of, 216 Sontag, Susan, 5–​6, 8, 48, 156–​57, 159–​
preservation of poems through 60, 202–​3
quotation, 176–​77 The Sophist (Plato), 17–​20
transcription of lyric song and, 14–​15 Sophokles (Sophocles). See specific works
Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 39–​40 Stanton, Robert, 18–​19
Sastri, Reena, 18–​19 “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (Carson), 97–​98,
Scarry, Elaine, 8–​9, 215 108–​10, 132, 140–​43
“Seated Figure with Red Angle by Betty Steiner, George, 66–​67, 191–​92, 195–​96
Goodwin (1988)” (Carson) Stesichoros (Stesichorus), 5–​6, 19–​20, 26–​27,
allure and, 137–​38 149–​50, 169, 202–​3
the body in, 133–​35 “Stillness” (Carson), 36, 53–​54, 144–​45, 219–​20,
contradiction and, 140 226–​27, 228, 233–​34
Goodwin’s artwork reproduced alongside, Stobaios, 207–​8
133, 134f, 137 Stone, Bianca, 22, 179, 190–​91, 194
open-​ended inquiries and conditional syntax “Stops” (Carson), 129
in, 133–​35, 136, 138, 139, 143–​44, 218 St. Paul, 152, 160
opening of, 135 Streb, Elizabeth, 31–​32, 38, 100, 130–​31
violence in, 136–​37 Symposium (Plato), 15–​16, 202–​3
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5–​6, 7–​8, 48, 104 Sze, Gillian, 18–​19
Serpell, Namwali, 108
Shadowtime (Bernstein), 148 Teresa of Avila, 13, 86–​87, 150–​51, 168
Short Talks (Carson) “Teresa of God” (Carson), 86–​87, 168–​69
Carson on her motivations for writing, 7 Thoreau, Henry David, 228–​29
Carson’s “interactive” lectures based on, The Three Crosses (Rembrandt), 22, 232, 297n.29
4–​5, 224–​25 “The Top” (Kafka), 41–​42, 177–​78, 227–​28
 Index 329

Tortel, Jean, 163, 166–​67 desire to disappear of, 121, 159–​60, 161, 166–​
To The Lighthouse (Woolf), 190–​91, 194, 233–​34 67, 170–​71
“Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony” dilemma of no contact for, 127
(Carson), 56–​59 “dream of distance” (Carson) and, 130
The Trojan Women (Euripides; Carson “fake women” and, 146
translation), 190–​91 on impossible union with creation, 140
“The Truth About God” (Carson), 86–​87, 168 on interpretation and attention, 136–​37
Trilling, Lionel, 238n.34 notebooks of, 151–​52, 160–​61, 268n.10,
Tschofen, Monique, 136–​37, 138 278n.68
“TV Men” (Carson), 19–​20, 200, 203 paradox of self for, 160
“TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)” and, 200 parents of, 147–​48, 161–​64, 165–​66
“TV Men: Sappho” and, 203 Sontag on the “fanatical asceticism”
“Twelve-​Minute Prometheus (After Aiskhylos)” of, 159–​60
(Carson), 15–​16, 26–​27, 199–​200 the Sublime and, 132
Twombly, Cy, 1, 8, 9–​10, 12–​13, 110–​11 “undoing the creature” and, 148
“The Tyger” (Blake), 141 Whiteman, Bruce, 217
Tzetzes, Joannes, 203 “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra”
(Carson), 168
Ulmer, Gregory, 39 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 49–​50
“Uncle Falling: A Pair of Lyric Lectures with Wilcox, Sadie, 52
Shared Chorus” (Carson), 8–​9, 31–​32, 52, Wilde, Oscar, 10–​11
130–​31, 225–​26 Wiliamowitz-​Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 200–​
das Unumgängliche (Heidegger), 46–​47, 184–​ 1, 213–​14
85, 268n.5, 269n.15, 284n.46 Willett, Steven, 63, 72–​73, 78–​79, 255n.4, 255–​
56n.7, 257–​58n.27
van Hove, Ivo, 189–​90 Williams, Isobel, 282n.15
“Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” Williamson, Margaret, 214
(Carson), 8–​9, 52, 117, 176, 196–​98, Wilson, Emily, 202, 216
221, 230 Winterson, Jeanette, 36, 203
Vega, Amador, 256n.12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7–​8, 13
Vendler, Helen, 212, 223 Wittig, Monique, 203
Vidal-​Naquet, Pierre, 69–​70 “Woman’s Constancy” (Donne), 20–​21
Virgil, 1, 268n.8, 272n.59 Woolf, Virginia
Vitti, Monica, 1–​2, 19, 126 Between the Acts and, 144–​45
Voigt, Eva-​Maria, 202, 213–​14, 220 Carson writing “with,” 86
cross-​outs in diary of, 90–​91, 185, 205
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 194 involuntary “shadow shape” of read texts
Waiting on God (Attente de Dieu, Weil), 132–​33, posited by, 19
270n.33 To the Lighthouse and, 190–​91, 194, 233–​34
Warner, Marina, 49–​50 techniques of reticence and, 144–​45
Weber, Max, 227 on writing as one speaks, 103
Weil, Simone. See also specific works Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), 90–​94
analogy in the works of, 127
Antigone and, 193–​94 xenia, 24, 67–​71, 80
Being and personality as separate for, 147–​48
Carson’s ventriloquizing of, 19, 25–​26, Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios, 213–​14
78, 164
contradiction for, 160–​61, 166–​67 Zeus, 199–​200, 282n.15
decreation theology and, 109–​10, 125–​ “Zurich, at the Stork” (Celan), 65–​66
26, 127–​28 Zweig, Sande, 203
on desire, 132–​33, 137 Zwicky, Jan, 7–​8, 13