Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) by Anne Carson (review)

humanities 327 the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia. Deppe and Tatur explain why a difference between trade unions in Poland and Hungary was so relevant to different transformations of these countries. „ambaliková's and Mansfeldová's papers discuss Tripartite Councils which mediated between the governments, employers, and employees in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Neudorfl presents a very critical, emotional, and, in my opinion, unfair picture of Havel. This extreme diversity reflects the character of the Fifth Congress, large and impressive but, perhaps, lacking focus and a leading idea. (PIOTR WRÓBEL) Anne Carson. Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) Princeton University Press. viii, 148. US $29.95 From the start, Anne Carson has shown a genius for juxtaposition, for`positioning alongside.' Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, centres on a standard paradox of erotic love, `bittersweet'; Glass, Irony, and God moves beyond paradoxical juxtaposition, while her recent Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse layers the ancient legend of Geryon, a modern love story, and a meditation on the colour red. (It was nominated for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in the USA.) Economy of the Unlost is about money and words and memory, positioned alongside each other. Carson has also chosen to juxtapose two poets, one from near the beginning of Western literature and one from recent times. The reader cannot tell whether the subjects of money, words, and memory arose from placing Simonides and Celan side by side, or whether the subjects chose these poets from Carson's capacious reading as poet, essayist, and classical scholar. The result is a series of aperçus and an essential moral question that gradually emerges to become explicit by the end. Simonides of Keos is known as the inventor of memory-places and proleptically of memory-houses, that is, of the art of memory. He was able to recall all the many banqueters crushed under a falling roof by visualizing them in their places. Memory B his and ours B causes us to remember Simonides. Carson, as a classical scholar, and as an inhabitant of a place where provincial licence-plates read `Je me souviens' (I remember), comes naturally by her awareness of the workings of memory. (Could she be tempted to reflect on memory in some Canadian work, say, by St Denys Garneau or Anne Hébert?) Simonides is also remembered as the first poet to be paid in cash for his verses, rather than in the largesse of a gift economy. (One patron refused the full fee because the verses were not laudatory enough. Nowadays the rich do not find any poem worth their money, though a biography may be.) Carson uses Marx's analysis of alien- 328 letters in canada 1999 ation, and paints the gift economy as preferable; she likes the idea of noblesse oblige. (Thoreau or Ruskin would also have served her purpose in many ways.) Memory and money B and words too, of course, Simonides being a writer, and a writer of rare economy. He is remembered for his epitaphs. Memory too can be bought. And Celan? Memory of the Holocaust is his unavoidable and terrible subject, yet his saving subject: memory that cannot be avoided, memory chosen as a legacy for later generations, like an epitaph. The `Unlost' of Carson's title comes from Celan: the unverloren, what is kept or saved or remembered. Or rather, not that. The `unlost' is rooted in loss, and only by prefix does it become something kept. Celan's words are also of the rarest economy, wrested again and again from the German that was his own language and not his own, being the language of Nazi Germany, including the killers who took his parents' lives. How to make good this language once again?`Economy' in Carson's title refers to the economy of words, yes, but also to monetary economy. How much are words worth in our day? How much do we pay for them in cash? Do words hold good? Can they? The question is implicit at the start, and Carson returns to it at the end. Money holds good only as long as the...