Do You Believe in Explanation?
Anne Carson, Red Doc>
Jonathan Cape, 176pp, £12.00, ISBN 9780224097574
reviewed by Željka Marošević
The Canadian poet Anne Carson is too much of a riddle for some. Recently she has been the ‘inscrutable’ Anne Carson (New York Times), as well as the ‘obscure, mannered and private’ Anne Carson (Harpers). Part of the problem seems to be a question of form. Carson won’t sit still. The Beauty of the Husband is a ‘fictional essay in 29 tangos’; in her translation Antigonick the words are written out on pages overlaid with illustrated semi-transparent paper, while her previous collection, Autobiography of Red, has enough narrative gist to pass as a novel and lines which run long enough that, during a quick flick through the book, they might register as prose. From the front jacket flap: ‘Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative layered with currents of meaning.’ Here we have the ‘deceptive’ Anne Carson.
Her new work, Red Doc>, is a sort-of sequel to Autobiography except that the form is completely different once again—it is mostly a long stream of text running down the centre of the page, apparently the fault of Carson’s computer—and the characters have slightly or altogether different names. This is a sequel that took so long to arrive (15 years) that the characters acquired new occupations and took on traits that feel more deeply modern than the first book. So a sequel but not really a sequel.
Oh-oh.
Both collections take as their starting point the Classical Greek poet Stesichoros’s lyric poem about the myth of Herakles and Geryon. In Autobiography, Carson casts Herakles and Geryon as gay teenagers, though Geryon still retains his mythical wings. In Red Doc> we meet Geryon, simply ‘G’, quietly and mournfully tending to his herd of oxen when Herakles, now christened ‘Sad’, comes hurtling back from the army, at which point the story relocates to a psychiatric clinic buried inside a glacier. Carson knows how to thrill.
When Carson writes ‘You/look at your face your face/ is old but suffering is/older,’ the reader feels the force of myth behind the collection; Stesichoros, wrote his lyric poem between around 650 – 550 BC, which leaves a lot of time for suffering to ripen. Though Carson’s characters channel old sufferings, the precise feeling of pain never changes, even if its reasons might. While Herakles, better known as Hercules, is the ultimate hero – killing Geryon is only one of his twelve celebrated labours – in Carson’s modern iteration he is a trailer park kid, his nerves shattered by an incident with ‘a crossroads a/woman a shopping bag’ in a war of unnamed location, presumably Iraq or Afghanistan. The Classical trope of the seer, who often overlaps with the poet (as Philip Sidney writes in his Defense of Poesy, ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet’) is re-imagined as a character called 4NO (army slang for foresight) whose prophetic powers are useless, a loss of God replaced by scientific complexity: ‘I see/ Seeing I am the god of this/I see seeing coming.’ He could be describing a medical condition, or drug trip: ‘the whole/ immediate Visible crushed/onto the frontal cortex.’
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates says, ‘God takes away the minds of poets and uses them as his ministers as he also uses diviners and holy prophets.’ In placing these war veterans in a mad house, Carson experiments with the contemporary literal fallout of Socrates’s words. 4NO doesn’t have a gift, he’s lost his mind, and his fame comes from appearances on talk shows with his therapist.
Carson is interested in the intersections between forms of utterance and how she might draw lines of inheritance between the rules followed by the orator or rhapsode reciting the epic poets and the performance of talk shows, institutionalised speech of the army’s ‘name rations’ and the practices of talking therapies. Unlike the Greek rhapsodes, the soldiers are encouraged to retell their stories of war not to relive its glories, but to purge the memories of the experience that mentally destroyed them: ‘did he cap himself/today/no/so talk helps…how we/talk how we are allowed/to talk is/the most part of happy or/not.’ Is to be understood to be happy? It’s a problem Carson’s characters struggle with, knowing that ‘The word conversation/ means “turn together”, but that the most difficult thing is to turn towards one another: ‘to be seen/feeling anything strips you/naked.’
The chorus voice of Red Doc>, ‘Wife of Brain’, confronts the issues of form, the prose-like nature of the text and the question of poetry versus prose head on:
what is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast though it
As prose is established as a safe structure, whereas poetry is the event threatening to destroy it from the inside, the analogy seems to ask the writer to choose whether she will build carefully from prose or destroy an established structure with poetry. If you’re Anne Carson, you’re doing both at the same time.
The house has been built and Carson starts running just as soon as we arrive. Sequences begin in the middle of a sentence, and proclamatory capitalisation adds to the effect of being thrown headlong into action: ‘NOT FOR THE FORSYTHIA…’, ‘JUST HOT MILK…’ ‘THAT BLACK PERIPHERAL…’ Carson’s syntactical choices, evident in her flipped clauses, means the sentence itself feels as though it has begun in the wrong place, giving her lines a jaunty wit. The reader must learn to refocus her attention. The reasoning behind this formal experimentation comes, in part, out of a respect for her reader. Carson doesn’t want to bore us; she wants to begin thoughts from a new place. The Wife of Brain offers another analogy to demonstrate the mental disturbance poetry offers, ‘when it meets the mind waves appear (poetry)’. In an interview about her writing, Carson says,
‘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 unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material 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 and bizarre forms.’
Some of the more unexpected content in Autobiography appears again in Red Doc>: it is safe to say Carson has a passion for volcanoes, which appear in both books: ‘Don’t say you weren’t/ expecting a volcano’, jokes Carson in Red Doc>, after taking Sad and G on a ‘polar adventure’. The fire, water and wind in her analogies reveal Carson’s fascination with the elemental, and they become more than simple metaphors for the properties of language and form. Carson chooses her severe and extreme landscapes because of the linguistic inventiveness they call for, allowing her to match their spontaneity with her own: ‘SULLEN SKY PADS/ soak out whitely’; ‘THE ICE FAULT is a slot/ in the ice as tall as a man/ that vanishes back into shadow’.
There’s a similar playfulness in the poetry of Alice Oswald, a classicist like Carson. Oswald’s descriptions of the natural world are an exercise in reducing words to units of sound, eliding them and then making up new ones in order to summon forth nature. A wave overtakes a canoeist in Dart:
come falleth in my push-you where it hurts
and let me rough you under, be a laugh
and breathe me please in whole inhale
Carson’s characters are refracted through the landscape in a similar way: ‘BLUER THAN HOLES/in blue are his eyes. He/ loves driving into this/ emptiness.’ While the ‘emptiness’ of the glacier matches Sad’s inconsolable desperation, the inevitable eruption of the volcano at the end of the book throws the characters into yet new forms.
Nowhere is Carson’s poetry more strange nor beautiful as when Io, G’s prize ox, takes flight:
…but Io’s getting ready
for her free
throw
with one eye on the herd
and the other on that
pyroclastic glow
The rhythmical introduction to Io’s flight is matched by the splendour of Carson’s description of this ‘masterpiece’ in the air:
IO IS NAT King Cole
soaring into the opening
bars of “Chestnuts Roasting
on an Open Fire” with
some strange gold pepper
spicking and spanning her
veins and night
blossoming out her head
like Jim Dandy’s desire
from an Elvis Presley
lyric.
Those luscious swaying opening bars of ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ (here, that ‘open fire’ is also the erupting volcano) are combined with the jittery tune of Elvis’ ‘Little Sister’: ‘I went for some candy/Along came Jim Dandy/ And they snuck right out of the door.’ These cultural reference points are touchstones of America, Christmas and Rock and Roll, and they are points so over-determined by now that they are shorthand for perfect familial love and joy, as well as innocent boyhood japes. Thus, they are metaphors for disappointment.
This grand flight of man and ox presages the death of G’s mother at the end of the book, establishing a twinned centrepiece of impossible possibility contrasted against the awkward struggle for final release. It is precisely because Io’s flight goes against fact that it can be truly embraced (‘Falling is a fact. Soaring not a fact.’) just as we can enjoy pop songs because they hark back to a time that never existed. At his mother’s deathbed, other song lyrics ‘scamper’ inside G, urging to make over fact:
…Does Proust have a
verb for this. This
struggle she faces now her
onetime terrible date with
Night. First date last date
soulmate.
Yet this neat rhyming is quickly taken over by embarrassing reality, when his mother, ‘ashamed and Ablaze and clear’ asks him to take a pair of tweezers and pluck the hairs growing on her chin:
…dying puts the two of
them (now) into this
nakedness together that is
unforgivable. They do not
forgive it. He turns away.
This roaring air in his
arms. She is released.
There’s that nakedness again, which Carson explicitly couples with G’s inability to face his mother. They turn away, not together. Their life-long conversation is over. ‘Facts harbour many incongruities’ here, as Carson breaks open a moment, examines every particle and leaves it as complicated as it is, without explanation. And how useful is explanation anyway? ‘Do you believe in explanation?’ asks Carson early in the book, questioning the very idea of ‘explanation’ and suggesting that it is a defunct belief system that we should have already cast off.
Despite this, Carson’s language in Red Doc>, as in all of her poetry, carries a sense of internal rules not known initially by the reader, an explanation inherent in the verse itself. Perhaps this is what causes critics to mark her down as ‘inscrutable’, as though this makes her poetry closed up and ‘private’. Carson, though, is following a practice begun by Stesichoros who, as Carson relates at the beginning of Autobiography, released ‘the latches of being’. Carson’s poetic craft follows in this model; like Stesichoros she undoes the linguistic and formal codes used by her contemporaries to put forth new versions of the world as she sees it.
Carson’s descriptions capture that same freshness of language that she ascribes to Stesichoros: ‘A hush carries itself up her sigh’; ‘Safe/ lovely shadows chase/ themselves brainacross in/ the thin particular light she/keeps there’; ‘a shine around him like washed air.’ ‘Brainacross’ is a useful description of Carson’s mind at work on a line level, where there is the sense of hearing, under the poetry, a endlessly curious mind, saying, ‘and what if …Aha!’
Her new work, Red Doc>, is a sort-of sequel to Autobiography except that the form is completely different once again—it is mostly a long stream of text running down the centre of the page, apparently the fault of Carson’s computer—and the characters have slightly or altogether different names. This is a sequel that took so long to arrive (15 years) that the characters acquired new occupations and took on traits that feel more deeply modern than the first book. So a sequel but not really a sequel.
Oh-oh.
Both collections take as their starting point the Classical Greek poet Stesichoros’s lyric poem about the myth of Herakles and Geryon. In Autobiography, Carson casts Herakles and Geryon as gay teenagers, though Geryon still retains his mythical wings. In Red Doc> we meet Geryon, simply ‘G’, quietly and mournfully tending to his herd of oxen when Herakles, now christened ‘Sad’, comes hurtling back from the army, at which point the story relocates to a psychiatric clinic buried inside a glacier. Carson knows how to thrill.
When Carson writes ‘You/look at your face your face/ is old but suffering is/older,’ the reader feels the force of myth behind the collection; Stesichoros, wrote his lyric poem between around 650 – 550 BC, which leaves a lot of time for suffering to ripen. Though Carson’s characters channel old sufferings, the precise feeling of pain never changes, even if its reasons might. While Herakles, better known as Hercules, is the ultimate hero – killing Geryon is only one of his twelve celebrated labours – in Carson’s modern iteration he is a trailer park kid, his nerves shattered by an incident with ‘a crossroads a/woman a shopping bag’ in a war of unnamed location, presumably Iraq or Afghanistan. The Classical trope of the seer, who often overlaps with the poet (as Philip Sidney writes in his Defense of Poesy, ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet’) is re-imagined as a character called 4NO (army slang for foresight) whose prophetic powers are useless, a loss of God replaced by scientific complexity: ‘I see/ Seeing I am the god of this/I see seeing coming.’ He could be describing a medical condition, or drug trip: ‘the whole/ immediate Visible crushed/onto the frontal cortex.’
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates says, ‘God takes away the minds of poets and uses them as his ministers as he also uses diviners and holy prophets.’ In placing these war veterans in a mad house, Carson experiments with the contemporary literal fallout of Socrates’s words. 4NO doesn’t have a gift, he’s lost his mind, and his fame comes from appearances on talk shows with his therapist.
Carson is interested in the intersections between forms of utterance and how she might draw lines of inheritance between the rules followed by the orator or rhapsode reciting the epic poets and the performance of talk shows, institutionalised speech of the army’s ‘name rations’ and the practices of talking therapies. Unlike the Greek rhapsodes, the soldiers are encouraged to retell their stories of war not to relive its glories, but to purge the memories of the experience that mentally destroyed them: ‘did he cap himself/today/no/so talk helps…how we/talk how we are allowed/to talk is/the most part of happy or/not.’ Is to be understood to be happy? It’s a problem Carson’s characters struggle with, knowing that ‘The word conversation/ means “turn together”, but that the most difficult thing is to turn towards one another: ‘to be seen/feeling anything strips you/naked.’
The chorus voice of Red Doc>, ‘Wife of Brain’, confronts the issues of form, the prose-like nature of the text and the question of poetry versus prose head on:
what is the difference between
poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose
is a house poetry a man in flames running
quite fast though it
As prose is established as a safe structure, whereas poetry is the event threatening to destroy it from the inside, the analogy seems to ask the writer to choose whether she will build carefully from prose or destroy an established structure with poetry. If you’re Anne Carson, you’re doing both at the same time.
The house has been built and Carson starts running just as soon as we arrive. Sequences begin in the middle of a sentence, and proclamatory capitalisation adds to the effect of being thrown headlong into action: ‘NOT FOR THE FORSYTHIA…’, ‘JUST HOT MILK…’ ‘THAT BLACK PERIPHERAL…’ Carson’s syntactical choices, evident in her flipped clauses, means the sentence itself feels as though it has begun in the wrong place, giving her lines a jaunty wit. The reader must learn to refocus her attention. The reasoning behind this formal experimentation comes, in part, out of a respect for her reader. Carson doesn’t want to bore us; she wants to begin thoughts from a new place. The Wife of Brain offers another analogy to demonstrate the mental disturbance poetry offers, ‘when it meets the mind waves appear (poetry)’. In an interview about her writing, Carson says,
‘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 unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material 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 and bizarre forms.’
Some of the more unexpected content in Autobiography appears again in Red Doc>: it is safe to say Carson has a passion for volcanoes, which appear in both books: ‘Don’t say you weren’t/ expecting a volcano’, jokes Carson in Red Doc>, after taking Sad and G on a ‘polar adventure’. The fire, water and wind in her analogies reveal Carson’s fascination with the elemental, and they become more than simple metaphors for the properties of language and form. Carson chooses her severe and extreme landscapes because of the linguistic inventiveness they call for, allowing her to match their spontaneity with her own: ‘SULLEN SKY PADS/ soak out whitely’; ‘THE ICE FAULT is a slot/ in the ice as tall as a man/ that vanishes back into shadow’.
There’s a similar playfulness in the poetry of Alice Oswald, a classicist like Carson. Oswald’s descriptions of the natural world are an exercise in reducing words to units of sound, eliding them and then making up new ones in order to summon forth nature. A wave overtakes a canoeist in Dart:
come falleth in my push-you where it hurts
and let me rough you under, be a laugh
and breathe me please in whole inhale
Carson’s characters are refracted through the landscape in a similar way: ‘BLUER THAN HOLES/in blue are his eyes. He/ loves driving into this/ emptiness.’ While the ‘emptiness’ of the glacier matches Sad’s inconsolable desperation, the inevitable eruption of the volcano at the end of the book throws the characters into yet new forms.
Nowhere is Carson’s poetry more strange nor beautiful as when Io, G’s prize ox, takes flight:
…but Io’s getting ready
for her free
throw
with one eye on the herd
and the other on that
pyroclastic glow
The rhythmical introduction to Io’s flight is matched by the splendour of Carson’s description of this ‘masterpiece’ in the air:
IO IS NAT King Cole
soaring into the opening
bars of “Chestnuts Roasting
on an Open Fire” with
some strange gold pepper
spicking and spanning her
veins and night
blossoming out her head
like Jim Dandy’s desire
from an Elvis Presley
lyric.
Those luscious swaying opening bars of ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ (here, that ‘open fire’ is also the erupting volcano) are combined with the jittery tune of Elvis’ ‘Little Sister’: ‘I went for some candy/Along came Jim Dandy/ And they snuck right out of the door.’ These cultural reference points are touchstones of America, Christmas and Rock and Roll, and they are points so over-determined by now that they are shorthand for perfect familial love and joy, as well as innocent boyhood japes. Thus, they are metaphors for disappointment.
This grand flight of man and ox presages the death of G’s mother at the end of the book, establishing a twinned centrepiece of impossible possibility contrasted against the awkward struggle for final release. It is precisely because Io’s flight goes against fact that it can be truly embraced (‘Falling is a fact. Soaring not a fact.’) just as we can enjoy pop songs because they hark back to a time that never existed. At his mother’s deathbed, other song lyrics ‘scamper’ inside G, urging to make over fact:
…Does Proust have a
verb for this. This
struggle she faces now her
onetime terrible date with
Night. First date last date
soulmate.
Yet this neat rhyming is quickly taken over by embarrassing reality, when his mother, ‘ashamed and Ablaze and clear’ asks him to take a pair of tweezers and pluck the hairs growing on her chin:
…dying puts the two of
them (now) into this
nakedness together that is
unforgivable. They do not
forgive it. He turns away.
This roaring air in his
arms. She is released.
There’s that nakedness again, which Carson explicitly couples with G’s inability to face his mother. They turn away, not together. Their life-long conversation is over. ‘Facts harbour many incongruities’ here, as Carson breaks open a moment, examines every particle and leaves it as complicated as it is, without explanation. And how useful is explanation anyway? ‘Do you believe in explanation?’ asks Carson early in the book, questioning the very idea of ‘explanation’ and suggesting that it is a defunct belief system that we should have already cast off.
Despite this, Carson’s language in Red Doc>, as in all of her poetry, carries a sense of internal rules not known initially by the reader, an explanation inherent in the verse itself. Perhaps this is what causes critics to mark her down as ‘inscrutable’, as though this makes her poetry closed up and ‘private’. Carson, though, is following a practice begun by Stesichoros who, as Carson relates at the beginning of Autobiography, released ‘the latches of being’. Carson’s poetic craft follows in this model; like Stesichoros she undoes the linguistic and formal codes used by her contemporaries to put forth new versions of the world as she sees it.
Carson’s descriptions capture that same freshness of language that she ascribes to Stesichoros: ‘A hush carries itself up her sigh’; ‘Safe/ lovely shadows chase/ themselves brainacross in/ the thin particular light she/keeps there’; ‘a shine around him like washed air.’ ‘Brainacross’ is a useful description of Carson’s mind at work on a line level, where there is the sense of hearing, under the poetry, a endlessly curious mind, saying, ‘and what if …Aha!’