L I T E R A R Y H U B

On the
Irreconcilable
Temptations of
Anne Carson
Karen Solie Considers One of Canada's
Great Writers,
Just in Time for Nobel Season

By Karen Solie October 1, 2019

 

In 70 feet of water, at the bottom of Lake Diefenbaker

in southwest Saskatchewan, lie fragments of a sacred
stone. Mistaseni (“Big Rock” in Cree) marked an
ancient gathering place for seven Cree Nations, a
valley ooded in 1967 on the completion of the
Gardiner and Qu’Appelle River Dams. Government
o cials overseeing the dam project refused to move
the 400-ton stone, or even to leave it be. ey had it
blown up with dynamite before burying it under a
man-made lake named after Canada’s 13th Prime
Minister.

In the summer of 2001, home for a visit from

university, I took Anne Carson’s Men in the O Hours
and e Beauty of the Husband on a family shing trip
to Lake Diefenbaker. e former went over the side
of the 14-foot aluminum Starcraft. Likely I’d been
asked to ready the net. ough I hung the book over
the line back at camp, it remains annotated with the
lake’s algal pro le.

I didn’t know then that Mistaseni lay under the boat

in pieces eight feet tall and thirty across. But now in
my memory the water is infused with the cruelty of
my culture’s crude exercise of power. Infused more
potently, though, with the failure of the e ort. e
government did not anticipate that the story of
Mistaseni’s origins and signi cance would be
recharged by the e ort to suppress it. Carson writes in
Economy of the Unlost that “For the Greeks, memory is
rooted in utterance,” in the cognates “I remember,” “I
mention,” “I name.” Alongside memory’s quantitative
reconstructions is its “light shed on darkening things .
. . the di erence between oblivion and fame, between
dead body and living name.”
Similarly glossed with that trip’s mold and mosquitoes
is my copy of Richard Hugo’s Selected Poems. In Hugo,
I’d found my way into the poetry of how and where I’d
grown up. How to signify the irreconcilables of that
place as a way to live with them. I read in Triggering
Town that “Your words used your way will generate
your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your
vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates,
your inner life.” My obsessions, my vocabulary, my
meanings. I’d been unused to this kind of talk.

By that summer, having left graduate school—or it

having left me—as is entirely reasonable and
expected, my linguistic geography had altered.
Everywhere, things were returning with a di erence,
haunted by the Derridean trace, stages for the
shadowy theater of psychoanalytic theory, prised open
by feminist interventions. In my amateurish readings
into ancient Greek philosophy I searched for footings
and found more uncertainty. Wilderness and
instability in the fundamentals. Initially, I resisted. It
felt too familiar—the incommensurate more
commensurate with reality as I knew it—and so was
not to be trusted. But in time the dialectical image, for
example, presented a way in to thinking about poetry
as much as did highway motels and Emily Dickinson.
Little zaps of electricity arced between them though
the contact points were often unclear. Alongside
Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” and “ e
Milltown Union Bar” had risen Carson’s “Life of
Towns” sequence, from Plainwater. Punctuation
detonating in the entries like the recrackers in the
drug-deal scene in Boogie Nights:
 When my idol left it broke.
My back it broke my legs it.
Broke clouds in the sky broke.
Sounds I was.
Hearing still hear.

O -putting, darkly funny, full of menace, these

“towns” became, to paraphrase Hugo, my home towns
too.

Can one make a hometown of uncertainty? Can one,

to use Hugo’s verb, “own” it in the sense of dwelling
there without trying to tidy it up? Yes and no.

In an essay in Decreation, Carson praises sleep for its

“glimpse of something incognito.” e nal words, she
writes, are both important. “What is incognito hides
from us because it has something worth hiding, or so
we judge.” Its etymological roots in deem and doom,
“judgment” indicates both logic and a leap of faith.
ere are risks. “I wanted one law to cover all of
living,” says the speaker of “Just for the rill.”
Instead, she says, “I found fear.” In “ e Glass Essay,”
Law is the lover who abandons the speaker. “Not
enough spin on it, / he said.” It would be hard to know
what to do with that. But the fear doesn’t really lie in
what isn’t there, isn’t enough. It lies in not knowing
what to do next.

Writing, like play, is an

exercise of the imagination,
and as such an exercise of
 desire that, Carson writes,
teaches us “something about
edges.”

“Pragmatism” derives from the Greek “pragma”—“that

which has been done”—from whence comes
“practice,” and “practical.” Carson’s experiments, even
the more esoteric ones, can have a shoulder-to-the-
wheel pragmatism about them, methods applied to
di culty. In her poetic speakers these methods meet
resistance from aspects of the psyche, from the body,
circumstances, language itself, and we feel it—the
work as work. At the same time we are, as is the
speaker of e Beauty of the Husband, “deep in the
pleasure” of it. When we read Carson, we do the
thinking. It’s why, as Guy Davenport wrote in 1987 of
Eros the Bittersweet, her books leave us “brighter and
smarter.”

In a 2004 interview with e Paris Review, Carson

speaks of how links are made between elements
thrown into proximity by the accidents of “bumping
into the world.” “I happen to have Simonides and Paul
Celan on my desk together,” she says. “What I do
with it depends on all the thoughts I’ve had in my life
up to that point and who I am at that point. It could
be Simonides and celery.” Maybe Richard Rorty is my
celery. But he also seems one way into thinking about
the pragmatic quality of a philosophy of parataxis, in
where he and Carson coincide as well as in their
divergences.
I don’t read in her Rorty’s disdain for the “general
temptation to think of the world, or the human self, as
possessing an intrinsic nature, an essence.” Nor do I
discern a belief in any such essence discoverable or
not. Her interest is in the third side, in the temptation
and its paradoxes, in our hearkening to dream-
glimpses and the “metaphysical silence [that] happens
inside words.” Possibly even this would for Rorty stray
too sincerely into the unpro table quadrant of the
unknown, the irritating company of the metaphysical.
Or possibly what he calls the “numinous haze that
surrounds the ‘creative artist’” would exempt her from
the either/or, the “bad questions” pitched at the
philosopher.

“Writing,” Rorty observes, is “an unfortunate

necessity” when what we desire is “to substitute
epiphany for a text.” Epiphanies, with their roots in
the divine, are experiences of wholeness without loose
ends or remainders. Something like how, in Men in
the O Hours, “Audubon understands light as an
absence of darkness / truth as an absence of
unknowing.” As a classicist, Carson writes, she “was
trained to strive to exactness and to believe that
rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue
is possible for us. is residue, which does not exist—
just to think of it refreshes me.” From the beginning
she has written of language as unable to convey
“exactly what we mean . . . e two symbola never
perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
 “Why should the truth not
be impossible? Why should
the impossible not be true?”

e paradox of Carson’s invigorating residue—that it

both does and does not exist—is obvious. But where
Rorty’s pragmatism considers metaphysical paradoxes
pretty much a waste of time—he recommends “that
we in fact say little about these topics, and see how we
get on”—Carson’s involves the ability to be refreshed
by paradox. is is useful, as paradox is everywhere.
Both, though, are very much about getting on with
things. For Rorty, this means leaving behind the old
vocabularies, arguments about the nature of truth, of
God, of humanity, toward a practical ethics of
community and solidarity. “ e proper analogy,” he
writes, “is with the invention of new tools to take the
place of old tools.” Carson’s way forward is in the
company of irreconcilable temptations, all the ways
our desires are incommensurate to our beliefs. In her
work arguments and vocabularies old and new interact
in a mode of speculation. “Speculation being,” as she
writes in “Merry Christmas From Hegel,” “the e ort
to grasp reality in its interactive entirety. e function
of a sentence like ‘Reason is Spirit’ was not to assert a
fact (he said) but to lay Reason side by side with Spirit
and allow their meanings to tenderly mingle in
speculation.”

Not only do abstract quantities so mingle in her work.

Not only arguments and their authors through eras of
(mostly Western, but not exclusively) philosophy and
poetry. Genres of literature, music, performance,
visual art walk through each other’s walls on the page,
in the book as object, as they do as we experience
them in the world. Registers and idioms mingle, as
they do in thought. We read in “Kant’s Question
About Monica Vitti” that “through the very failure of
its representation, ing in Itself might be / inscribed
within phenomena,” and in “Just for the rill” that
“One thing I learned from my father is to stay out of
sight while machinery is being xed.” e individual is
both the container for and an element in the mingling
of the abstract with the particular, present with the
past. e residue of uncertainty that refreshes is
simultaneously “the fear inside language.” “Why hold
onto all that?” says the speaker’s mother in “ e Glass
Essay.” To which the speaker replies “Where can I put
it down?” In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel,
Carson speaks of the teacher at Port Hope High
School in Ontario who taught her Greek during lunch
hour as smelling “of celery all the time.”

“ e lesson she has to teach us,” writes Davenport, “is

one of aesthetic geometry.” To things placed side-by-
side is added the vertex of the perceiver. Eros, as
Carson writes, is of “necessarily triangular design, and
it embodies a reach for the unknown.” As “unlikely
places of confrontation” triangulations also describe a
mobile power. Always, someone’s eyes are not being
met. Rorty does not share Carson’s attraction to
metaphysics, but both are interested in power, in how
language conditions thought. And also in language as
the material for speculation and play that exposes and
resists conditions applied to thought. Triangulation
resists the one-to-one correspondence of xed power.
It could mark out a eld of play.

Jacques Derrida is a philosopher to whom Rorty and

Carson return, whose experiments in proximity,
shadow, simultaneity, and paradox engage with the
contingency of language and refuse the power move
of the last word. Philosophy, Rorty points out, “is a
kind of writing” which for Derrida “leads to more
writing.” In writing, as in play, rules are revised,
improvised, tossed out when they become restrictive,
boring, or no longer apply. “Sometimes I feel I spend
my whole life rewriting the same page,” Carson says.
A number of di erent emotions in this sentence.

We know from childhood that play can be serious.

And it requires the freedom to play. Writing, like play,
is an exercise of the imagination, and as such an
exercise of desire that, Carson writes, teaches us
“something about edges.” As does her work, which
peers over precipices into error with error’s breath also
on the back of its neck. Her brinkmanship addresses
the point at which language’s tools are no longer
adequate to the job—to death, heartbreak, betrayal,
physical and mental trauma, absence, untranslatability
—yet remain “an unfortunate necessity.” In the work’s
desire to analyze what it knows de es analysis, to use
its logic on the illogical, is felt the life force of curiosity.
Curiosity and its procedures do not allow contingency
to harden into a last word, and so are not much
appreciated by systems that prefer power remain
stable. As Ilhan Inan has noted, curiosity “can only
take place in the absence of certainty.”
“Unintelligibility,” Simone Weil says, “why should it
not be the truth”? e golden triangle performs a ratio
that is an irrational number, both impossible and
necessary. “Why should the truth not be impossible?”
asks Carson. “Why should the impossible not be
true?” Art, writes Davenport, as “an act of attention . .
. which is to be transferred, after being made into an
intelligible shape, to other minds” is its own impossible
and necessary “miracle, a metaphysical unlikelihood.”

e analysis foregrounded in Carson’s poems and

essays operates according to the expandable rules of
play. It is writing that leads to more writing, thinking
that leads to more thinking. “Variations on the Right
to Remain Silent,” in Float, ends with six translations
of a poem by Ibykos written in the 6th century BC.
ey are accomplished through triangulations of the
original poem, the translator’s method, and words
from, in turn, Donne’s “Woman’s Constancy,” Brecht’s
FBI le, Beckett’s Endgame, Gustav Janouch’s
Conversations with Kafka, stops and signs from the
London Undergound, and a microwave owner’s
manual. It is, as she says, a little exercise in freedom.
ough freedom lives also in the play of analysis
applied to extreme experience, there is fear in it too,
and the likelihood of error. In “Essay on what I think
about most” she values Aristotle’s use of “imitation” for

the ease with which it accepts

that what we are engaged in when we do
poetry is error,
the willful creation of error,
the deliberate break and complication of
mistakes
 out of which may arise
unexpectedness.

Carson’s parataxis reminds me of all the times I’ve

picked up Float and had its 22 chapbooks y out of
their perspex sleeve all over the oor. It’s a
philosophically relevant design, and slightly perverse.
“Reading can be freefall” says the prefatory note.
Gathering them up again in the gap in intention the
act creates, in yet another order necessitated by
accident, is a little lonely. But in the new way of
reading the same material, also free.

Karen Solie

Canadian poet Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw,

Saskatchewan. She was educated at the University of
Lethbridge, where she earned a BA, and at the University of
Victoria, where she pursued graduate study. Solie is the author
of several collections of poetry, including The Road In Is Not the
Same Road Out (2015); The Living Option: Selected Poems
(2013); Pigeon (2009), which won a Grif n Poetry Prize, a Pat
Lowther Award, and a Trillium Book Award; and Short Haul
Engine (2001), which won a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her
work has also been featured in the anthology Breathing Fire:
Canada’s New Poets (1995) and has been translated into Dutch,
French, and Korean. Solie has served as an associate director of
the Banff Centre Writing Studio program and as international
writer-in-residence at the University of St. Andrews. She lives in
Toronto.

OCEAN VUONG: THE 10

BOOKS
I NEEDED TO WRITE MY LIT HUB DAILY:
NOVEL OCTOBER 1, 2019

 Anne Carson Canada Double Nobel

Guy Davenport Karen Solie

 Nobel Prize for Literature poetry poets

Richard Rorty

 

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