Imagining the Unimaginable: Anne Carson

Wrong Norma, by Anne Carson, New Directions Books, 2024.
Reviewed by Wayne Grady

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. She lives for part of the year in Reykjavik, Iceland. Poet and classicist, she has taught at New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. New Directions Publishing has published two collections of her poetry, Nox (2010), and Glass, Irony, and God (1995), as well as plays and translations. Penguin Random House Canada published Float (2016), Red Doc (2013), and The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2002).

In “1 = 1,” the first story in Wrong Norma, Canadian poet Anne Carson’s collection of flash fictions and fragmentary poems, we are forewarned of the themes that recur throughout the book: “she” goes for a swim in a lake, but after a short while climbs out. “People think swimming is carefree,” Carson writes, but “in fact it is full of anxieties.” Isn’t it the swimmer who is full of anxieties? “Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty…” For whom, we ask, is knowing beauty a “commonplace struggle”? The answer: for millions of people on this planet, the imprisoned, the detained, the poor, the displaced, and it is those who are Carson’s concern in this intense, disturbing collection.

In “Clive Song,” friend Clive has been working on behalf of prisoners in Guantanamo for 35 years:

His current client, a Moroccan man,
has been cleared for release
and also informed
he will never leave.
Clive, a lawyer, questions the logic of this.

Guantanamo, or places like it, comes up again. In “Dear Krito,” Sokrates writes to his friend thanking him for the hemlock: Sokrates is in a prison where a humming “drowns out every other sound. Remember the old days when they’d play Iggy Pop all night to break the prisoners down?” In “Eddy,” the narrator is working on a sonnet cycle about detainment, “thinking other people’s suffering.” And in “Poverty Remix,” Carson asks, “Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does.” Poverty, she writes, “is a scapegoat,” with the inference that all victims of violence, personal or official, are scapegoats – they are beaten with fig branches and driven from the city, “sacrificed as an atonement for others or to cleanse a community,” condemned to suffer so that we don’t have to. The ritual is described by Hippomax, a 6^th-century BC poet who invented a poetic metre called “limping iambic,” which is deliberately ugly in rhythm. But the concept of the scapegoat persists through time: “How did the scapegoat sleep, the night before the ritual, on his strip of cardboard over the subway grate…?”

For Carson, who is a classicist as well as a poet, words are weapons that can easily be turned against us. Words “can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.” (“Snow”) She notes that the word “idea” originally meant “to see,” and in the story “Thret” says that our word “threat” comes from the Old English word for coercion, thret, and the Middle High German dröz, annoyance, thus linking us back to scapegoats: “People so pushed will leave town for a while, six months, a year, return quietly. See how things go.” (“Thret Part 1”) They rarely go well: the story takes place in a not-too-distant future in which schools pay protection money so that students won’t be mowed down by machine-gun fire.

Each story in the collection is separated by fragments of a poem in which questions are repeated in an incantatory sequence and given nonsensical answers, so that the poem takes on the insistence of an interrogation: (p. 49)

how do you sustain morale during a long project
Lutheran guilt
how do you sustain morale during a long project
bourbon
how do you sustain morale during a long project
just smile
how do you sustain morale during a long project
pills can help

Carson is clearly concerned with “the fate of the earth. The fate of me. The fate of you” (“Fate, Federal Court, Moon”) and the way that our fates are intertwined, connected across space (to Guantanamo, or the Gaza Strip, or urban America (in “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a middle-class couple is tortured and beaten by home invaders, until they are rescued by their hungry pet python) and across time (on their way to Hades, Penelope’s suitors pass “a big file catalogue with all the dreams waiting in alphabetical order to slip into some head at night”)*. Like Sylvia Plath, who was tormented by images of the Holocaust, the tortured and the massacred are never far from Carson’s mind. In The Silent Woman, her biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm writes that “to say that Plath did not earn her right to invoke the names of Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen, is off the mark. It is us who stand accused, who fall short, who have not accepted the wager of imagining the unimaginable.”

Anne Carson has accepted that wager. Not as a scapegoat, not so that we don’t have to. She imagines the unimaginable so that we cannot turn away. As she reminds us, “by suffering we learn” (“Oh What A Night”).

Who is the “Wrong Norma?” In the last story, also the title story, there is a reference to Norma Desmond, a character in the movie Sunset Boulevard (1950), which Carson is watching until she begins to think about her surroundings: “Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond…” She turns the movie off, thinking “I am safe but that won’t last.” Like the swimmer in the first story, Carson is unable to enjoy the simplest pleasures without being conscious of the violence and deprivation around her.

Wayne Grady is an award-winning novelist, essayist and translator who, with his wife Merilyn Simonds, divides his time between Kingston, Ontario, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Further

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, by Janet Malcolm. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
In 2002, Anne Carson became the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, for her book The Beauty of the Husband. The Guardian.
Carson is also an award-winning translator: in 2010 she received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Read about her books of poetry: The Poetry Foundation.
“Throwing Yourself Into the Dark,” Kate Dwyer interviews Anne Carson in The Paris Review (April 17, 2024).
Sarah Elkamel interviews Anne Carson with her husband, artist Robert Currie, with whom she co-taught a creativity course for NYU until 2020: Literary Hub (May 12, 2021).
Eleanor Wachtel interview with Anne Carson in Brick 89, 2012.
Princeton University Press reprinted Carson’s essay, Eros The Bittersweet (2023).
St Andrews University, where Carson studied Classics, and in 2014 received an honorary doctorate.