Exactness and Earliness: Wrong Norma by Anne Carson

A review of Anne Carson's latest collection, in which she writes "about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my dad, Saturday night."

Franz Marc, The Foxes (1913)

We all have writers—musicians, artists, filmmakers—whose every utterance we hang upon, as if it were an edict from a higher order. They, the geniuses, sit upon their airy clouds, their Olympian thrones, their minds floating high above us in some rarefied aether, while we, poor sods, crane our necks in expectation, ever hoping, ever praying, ever wishing—however futilely—for our sprinkle of manna. Anne Carson is such a writer for me, and this past February I have received much more than a sprinkle, in the form of Wrong Norma, a collection of twenty-five writings interspersed with facsimiles of typescript. “The pieces are not linked,” writes Carson in the book’s blurb. “That’s why I’ve called them wrong.” 

“Wrong Norma”—that’s the title of the last piece in the collection, which references “wrong Norma Desmond,” the central character in “wrong movie” Sunset Boulevard. Carson’s readers, however, cannot help being reminded of Norma Jeanne Baker of Troy, her 2019 performance piece based on Euripides’ Helen, in which Marilyn Monroe, eidolon of Norma Jeanne Baker, stands in for the eidolon that is Helen of Troy; in that way, what we have here is the wrong Norma. “Norma”—normal, normative, normalcy, normalize, all gone wrong. Carson is not your normal writer, and she does not write in normal forms. You have a feeling that she is always starting from scratch, both in her way of looking at the world and in her way of writing it down. We get pieces that are manifestly fiction, yet sometimes a detail that gels with what we know about Carson herself slips in; for example, in “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a piece that reads like a fever dream, the speaker mentions a brother named Michael “on the downslope to drugs and death”—Carson too had such a brother, the subject of her 2010 epitaph Nox. In a different piece, Carson hews closely to the line and stanza pattern of the sestina (at the very end of the book, we get a handwritten facsimile of this schema), but meter is thrown out the window, and tacked on are eight illuminating appendices, each of which investigates a different theme of the preceding poem. 

For Carson, wrongs are a way of getting it right. She shares with Emily Dickinson an impulse to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”. The collection’s first piece, “1 = 1,” describes a speaker who goes for a morning swim and obsesses over the “mental pressure to swim well and use this water correctly.” “Misuse is hard to explain,” she finds, but “you can fail [the water] with each stroke.” Swimming, is that not a metaphor for writing? Doesn’t every writer feel the mental pressure to write well and to use these words correctly, knowing that you can fail with each stroke of the pen or key? What the speaker wants from swimming are “the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the straining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life watching it differently unfold but in it, as it, it.” Does that not describe the task of the poet, to strain always for vividness, for accuracy, for emotion and experience that soaks into you as water does? “If I can find the words I can make it real,” thinks the speaker in “Flaubert Again,” “and that was when she sat down to be a writer.” 

Carson’s ability to “make it real” is what distinguishes her from her contemporaries. This is not to say that her writing is at all realist (in fact, I find her work quite often surrealist), but like all true artists, she cuts to the heart of certain aesthetic and emotional truths. A great artist must tell us something we already know—or instinctively intuit to be true—in a way that leaps out at us with the freshness and clarity to see it new again, and in a way that is peculiarly her own. Carson has not lost her ability to delight readers with configurations of words and a bent of mind that is uniquely Carsonesque: “…he seeps away, small tide of a person”; “Everyone sat packed like teeth”; “Night and its stars soak slowly backwards out of the world.” In describing a rainstorm, she writes that “a sudden single chord ran drenched across the roof,” a vividness that lashes you. In “Saturday Night As an Adult,” Carson reproduces the disappointments of adulthood, of trying to make friends as an adult, of having a social interaction, or failing to, of things going wrong in little ways, the ultimate let-down of not being the cool, collected person you imagined in your head you would be when you grew up: “We thought we’d be Nick & Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats.” The usage of the word “blurred” is “wrong” as in “not normal”—and is exactly right.

“DENK ES GENAU,” the speaker of “Eddy” writes in her notebook. It is a phrase from the German poet Ernst Meister, “Think it exact.” Accuracy is something we can sense Carson feeling around for, like someone searching for a gold earring between sofa cushions; it is in large part what makes up the “mental pressure to swim well.” In “Thret,” a strange fiction in three parts, the narrator muses on accuracy and finds an example in Hölderlin: “Mein Herz ist schwimmt in Zeit,” “My heart is swimmed in time.” Accuracy impels creativity, pushes the mind forward and out of its ruts, turns words inside out, electroshocks them. 

And yet one comes to realize that Carson is more interested in the quest for accuracy rather than accuracy itself; the search is what animates her rather than the finding. “If you think like a lawyer / you find the limits of human wisdom / in facts like that,” says the speaker of “Clive Song”—facts that are concrete, statistical, scientific. “I’ve been a scientist all my life, a moderately successful Aristotelian-type person, understanding human existence as a set of questions to which there are answers,” the speaker of a later piece tells us. “I am hopping and popping with scientific method, I am ready for final realities.” Fortunately for us, Carson herself is neither a lawyer nor a scientist. She is not an “Aristotelian-type person,” she is a Socratic-type one—Socrates, that old inquirer, who corrupted the youth by that which always corrupts, the asking of questions, and was called the wisest by the Oracle of Delphi for knowing that he did not know.

There are two pieces that feature Socrates, “Dear Krito,” a letter written in the philosopher’s voice from jail, and “Oh What a Night,” a translation of the speech of Alcibiades (Socrates’ student and perhaps lover) in Plato’s Symposium. “When Sokrates speaks,” says Alcibiades, “I experience something uncanny.” Carson too produces an experience of uncanniness. This is because Carson and Socrates are both early people—“If I were an early person, I’d look for the limits of human wisdom / by going to sacred oak trees”—and early people prefer that “the limits of human wisdom remain.” 

This does not preclude, however, poking around at the edges of those limits. Carson’s main strategy here is to excavate language, plumbing it for its secret whispers, its curious murmurs, its uncanny chimes. Ever the professor of Classics, she rests on her old standby etymology, tracing along the roots of words in order to think early, but refreshingly less often than she had in previous works. Other techniques come to the forefront. In her translation of Alcibiades’ speech, written in verse, we get random instances of end rhyme: “age” / “page,” “Shame” / “game,” “vanish” / “famish,” “wise” / “disguise,” “those nights you dance as if in a trance / and glance in the mirror to find you’re in tears.”¹ All lines of the last stanza are rhymed. The effect is one that goes from playful to lyrical to ironic, and, because it occurs so sporadically, it forces us to pay attention, to consider language with a sharper eye. In “The Visitors,” Roget’s Thesaurus becomes a fruitful subject for inquiry and then starts to sneak its way into the text, registering the attempts of the speaker to grasp reality and think it exact by means of the imperfect tool that is language. We see her stretching her language muscles out for accuracy—“When not drawing I am incongruous (inappropriate, inapt, improper, incompatible, irreconcilable, inconsistent, unusual, warring, strange, alien)”—but in a bizarre world this quest devolves, and where meaning breaks down synonyms turn into strings of alliteration: “a beachcomber, a beachhead, a beacon, a beast, a bedlam, words fail me.” 

However, it is in dealing with matters that are more public, matters of social and political injustice, that Carson most of all comes up against questions without answers, questions that don’t even “warrant a question mark.” We know her as a poet and essayist of desire, of language, of the self and its self-inquiries, but in a few of these pieces we see her turning away from herself and to homelessness, poverty, refugee crises, the inequities of the judicial system. Reflecting on the case of Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemini man who sought justice from the US government for a drone strike that killed his brother-in-law and nephew in 2012, she wonders “why it is unavailable to say ‘Sorry,’” wonders “what kind of thing the law is anyway.” Sometimes these inquiries, these curious glimpses into the lives of those less fortunate seem glib or tossed-off, disconnected from her usual literary concerns. Indeed, the speaker of one piece tries to complete a sonnet cycle co-opting the pain of some distant person, and yet—it is a moral dilemma—she cannot bring herself to “raise the knife and cut.” At her best, however, Carson is as incisive as ever: “But what is the rhythm of poverty? Homeless people sit on the sidewalk, beggars stand fairly still. If a visibly poor or homeless person were running in the street he would be assumed to have stolen something and might be shot in the back by police.” This is an answer, but it is one in which, quite literally, “the bloodstains still refuse to evaporate.” Questions cut, answers respond by bleeding.

Indeed, blood is what I demand most from any artist: the red freshness, the throbbing vitality, the iron smell and spill. About a year ago, I thought I would find a fresh infusion if I went to a talk of Carson’s—this one was on the American painter Cy Twombly and the Latin poet Catullus. The room was packed; the crowd was mostly young, arty people, or rumpled, older intellectuals. Carson was erudite, witty, enlightening, just as I had expected. And yet… there was a distance to her, an inaccessibility—nobody was allowed to go up to her afterwards to speak to her, and her signature in the signed copies of her books was just her initials and the year. I don’t know what I was hoping for—a greater sense of connection? 

A year later, I have finally gotten it. To be sure, compared to my favorites in the Carson Canon, this collection paled a little. Whenever I re-read “The Glass Essay,” no matter how many times I’ve read it before, no matter how well I already know the words, I still get chills all over when I come to the end, a transfusion of blood every time. No such effect here—but Carson is still Carson, and her words never fail to open up secret passages in my mind, little pockets of surprise and earliness, reams of delight, wit, humor, enlightenment, the warmth I had been seeking. Our gods must come down every once in a while and be mortal, and we love them the more for it.

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Dear Readers, thank you for reading! I hope you have all been doing well this lovely month of March <3 If you read and liked, express your feelings by hitting the LIKE button, and if your feelings happen to overflow into language, you are of course welcome to LEAVE A COMMENT. xoxo Ramya

1. Italics mine.