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  • A Brother Never Ends
  • Neil Corcoran (bio)
Nox by Anne Carson. New Directions. 2009. £19.99. ISBN 9 7808 1121 8702

Anne Carson, an academic classicist, is a poet of unlikely similitudes. While this does involve her placing of the classical and the contemporary [End Page 371] in suggestive relationship, as we might anticipate, this has hardly of itself been peculiar, original, or even particularly notable since the moment of modernism. Her best-sanctioned use of ‘mythical’ modernist structure is probably Autobiography of Red, a long narrative poem published in 1998. This maps a long lyric poem about Geryon and Herakles by the Greek poet Stesichoros onto an account of compulsive gay adolescent desire, turmoil, and violence. Even so, this classical doubling is the only well-sanctioned thing about this work; and elsewhere Carson’s classicist readings of the contemporary give rise to at least as much estrangement as recognition. Hers is work that consistently alerts us to the inevitability of disjunction, non-correspondence, and destabilisation, and to the arduous artifice involved, in literary attempts to structure patterns of meaning across divergent historical epochs.

In addition, Carson herself is constantly alert to the provisionality of her procedures. Epistemological anxiety, even distress, seems deeply to inform her methods and forms, and hers is an aesthetic of the oblique, the wry and the skewed, signalled by unpredictable crossings, transits, col-locations, and juxtapositions. Her central points of reference and allusion – touchstones of a kind, to whom frequent reference is made – are jolt-ingly eclectic: Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as we might almost expect, but also Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Simone Weil. Some of her scenarios or mises-en-scène seem almost calculated to provoke, baffle, or astound: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides hold a conversation during a TV programme about the Peloponnesian War; ekphrastic poem-annotations on Edward Hopper are accompanied by ethical and theological reflections by St Augustine; a ruinous marital relationship is framed by a set of quotations from relatively obscure texts by Keats, including his annotations of Paradise Lost and work he intended to publish under the pseudonym Lucy Vaughan Lloyd of China Walk, Lambeth; Longinus dreams about Antonioni in an essay which attempts to read out of the encounter a contemporary sublime; a piece called ‘Irony Is Not Enough’ is subtitled ‘Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve’, in a way indicating that a certain dry, even desiccated, comedy sometimes attaches to these similitudes or discrepancies; and, most extensively, in the critical study Economy of the Unlost (1999), Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos – whose best-known poem is the epitaph for the Lacedaemonians fallen at Thermopylae – are juxtaposed under the rubrics of both lyric economy and ultimate human depredation.

Economy of the Unlost offers, in its prefatory ‘note on method’, a rationale for its author’s characteristic procedures. Deciding that there is ‘too much self ’ in her writing, Carson says that her aim is to reach a state of ‘not settling’. Readers will initially almost inevitably resist the unlikely collocation [End Page 372] made by Economy of the Unlost, since no poet of modernity seems more an instance of, and witness to, ethical and aesthetic exceptionality than Paul Celan. Carson’s defence of not settling comes, though, itself to unsettle resistance. ‘With and against, aligned and adverse’, she says, ‘each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.’ Some of the similitudes in Carson’s work more generally do seem to remain disconcertingly ineffective, their capacity for comparative sharpening of vision unproven, and the gnomic, dark sayings to which they give rise resisting the intelligence all too successfully. But Economy of the Unlost supplies, in its close readings, a sustained justification of method. The comparisons and equivalents become, as the thematising of ‘economy’ develops its rigours of scrutiny and insight, richly apposite and fruitful in a set of brilliantly ramifying considerations of the work of both poets. Carson’s treatment of Celan’s ‘Matière de Bretagne’ in particular is, simply, a revelation.

Her insouciant flouting of the customary...

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