I've been dipping back into Anne Carson’s work. Since my compatriot has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I thought I should revisit her writing.
As I mentioned before, when she first began to attract attention in the mid-1990s, I tried reading some of her poems that appeared here and there in literary journals and magazines. I was left unmoved and, frankly, puzzled.
A few thoughts.
One of the first things you notice about her writing is how disconnected it is from traditional literary structures.
Much has been said about the way her writing crosses boundaries. Her essays have the narrative qualities of short stories and the short lines of poetry. A novella is written in free verse, while another book comes in a box and unfolds like a brochure. She's also written opera libretti. She's liberal in her use of form and has said that she thinks more like a visual artist than a writer.
Her playfulness with form has made her writing difficult to categorize, which appeals to people who are uncomfortable with categories, and there seem to be plenty of those these days. Most people call her a poet, perhaps because she writes so often in sentence fragments, and fragments reflect our fragmented contemporary sense of ourselves.
To me, however, her lines don't sing as memorably as I expect poetry to, although they can be very beautiful. They have the flavour of narrative, and at their best are lyrical penetrating prose.
I'm not sure why she called her best-known novella, Autobiography of Red, a "novel in verse." It's clearly not written in any conventional verse form. The lines are chopped up, but the story itself is relatively straightforward fiction, complete with an essayistic introduction and appendices. Calling it a novel in verse may initially have turned some readers away. Since its publication in 1998, however, readers have come to accept it as simply as a work of fiction that happens to be arranged in an unconventional way.
The question is whether this kind of postmodern approach adds anything to the work. Plenty of people seem to think it does. The approach has certainly captured the dislocated zeitgeist.
But it's not as though this kind of experimentation hasn't been done before.
One of my favourite novels is The Second Scroll by A.M. Klein, published in 1951. Like Carson's novella, it's relatively short. At its centre is a fairly conventional story about a young man following in the footsteps of his revered missing uncle, who has lost his faith in God and is travelling through postwar Europe. The novel also has a series of appendices, called Glosses, designed to comment on the main story. Each Gloss is written in a different literary form, from poem to a letter to a theatrical play, culminating in a prayer.
The point of Klein's novel was to mirror the structure of the Hebrew Torah in a modern retelling of the Jewish exodus into the diaspora and the return to the Promised Land. The Glosses echoed centuries of rabbinic commentary on the Torah. Here, the structure reinforces the meaning. The formal experimentation isn't simply a matter of literary play; it is integral to the meaning Klein is trying to convey on multiple levels.
With Carson, I don't always get the same sense of necessity. I sense a writer experimenting with forms, but I don't always see why a particular form is needed to convey what she wants to say. There's an element of indulgence about it.
Take Autobiography of Red. Carson begins with the story of Geryon, a red, winged monster from Greek mythology who was killed by Herakles. In Carson's version, Geryon becomes a contemporary highly sensitive and thoughtful boy who grows into a young man, falls in love with Herakles, suffers the consequences, and eventually encounters him again. The ancient myth becomes a story about sexuality, vulnerability, desire, unrequited love and the difficulty of being different. Themes as old as storytelling itself.
But for Carson it's the idea and ramifications of being different that seems to preoccupy her most, an outsider looking in. Geryon's wings, rather than being merely a feature of a mythological creature, become an outward sign of his difference. His redness is both a physical attribute and a recurring image around which his identity is constructed.
It’s questionable whether the myth, the wings, and the redness make any difference to what amounts to a pretty conventional coming of age story, albeit a queer one. The central image of the volcano, as a metaphor for hot passion, impulse, uncontrolled emotion, the tectonic shift from innocence to experience, is also well trodden ground.
In spite of the title it’s not an autobiography. (In another parallel with Klein, the first gloss of The Second Scroll is a poem called Autobiographical). The strength of the novel is in the descriptions, Carson’s use of language, not in any structural effects, and not even any mythology or other references to art and literature of which there are many.
Now consider Nox, Carson's book about the death of her estranged brother, Michael. Here, the form is even more conspicuous. The book comes in a box and unfolds into a long accordion-like strip of pages. It contains photographs, fragments of letters, recollections, and entries that resemble dictionary definitions. It is less a conventional book than an object to be physically unfolded and examined.
At its centre is a poem by the Roman poet Catullus, written on the death of his own brother. Carson translates the Latin poem word by word, surrounding each word with definitions and shades of meaning. Alongside this linguistic excavation, she assembles what she can recover of her own brother's life.
The parallels are obvious. Catullus lost a brother; Carson has lost one too. Both are trying to find language for an experience that resists expression. The ancient poem becomes a vehicle through which Carson approaches her own loss.
The form also reflects the nature of memory. A person's life cannot be reconstructed as a seamless narrative from a few surviving letters, photographs and recollections. We are left with fragments, and the gaps between them can be as significant as what remains. The accordion-folded pages embody that fragmentation, while the accumulation of definitions and documents becomes an attempt to recover a person who is no longer there.
This is a more persuasive justification for Carson's formal experimentation than I find in Autobiography of Red. The structure of Nox is intimately connected to its subject. The difficulty of translating Catullus becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of recovering her brother, while the physical act of unfolding the book suggests the work of uncovering a life.
But does it work emotionally?
The accumulation of material sometimes seems to substitute for emotional immediacy. We are presented with the evidence of a life and the difficulties of reconstructing it, but the elaborate literary apparatus can also become a barrier between the reader and the person being mourned. In fact the construction often distracts from the impact rather than serving it.
Carson's point may be that a life cannot be fully recovered, that language cannot bridge the distance between the living and the dead. Is this a revelation?
The book's final, almost unreadable translation seems to acknowledge the limits of the entire enterprise. It's an affecting idea, and I don't dismiss it. But the fact that I can understand what the book is trying to accomplish doesn't mean that I experience its emotional effects as deeply as some other readers evidently do. The self-consciousness of the work becomes its central purpose.
And this is where the comparison with A.M. Klein becomes interesting.
You know who Anne Carson is now, and you have likely never heard of A.M. Klein. I think that has something to do with the moment we're living in.
Klein's work was firmly grounded in a sense of national and cultural purpose. His experiments with language and form drew on traditions that gave them meaning. And the comparison with Carson is apt on another level: both were classicists, deeply interested in the ancient world. Carson made teaching Latin and ancient Greek her living, while Klein was a Latinist as well, but made his living as a lawyer, as well as essayist and newspaper editor. He was deeply devoted to his Jewish identity and to the well-being of his community and felt it was part of his practice as a poet and novelist.
This, to me, points to a fundamental distinction between a modernist writer (Klein) anticipating postmodernism and a postmodern writer (Carson) working in postmodern times.
Klein remained grounded in the literary traditions and historical experiences of the twentieth century, even as he experimented with forms that would later become associated with postmodernism. Carson, by contrast, seems far less bound by those traditions and treats literary form as something to be taken apart and rearranged. This is red meat for academics and literati, and less interesting for the general reading public.
Reading Carson, academic terms such as deconstruction, metatext and intersectionality come to mind, concepts that would have been foreign to Klein's literary world. His experiments had a clear purpose: to give the biblical story of the Jewish people contemporary relevance at a pivotal moment in their history.
Carson's purpose seems less clearly defined, but a lot of it seems to be about defining 'difference'. Her work reflects the fragmentation of our age, a time when categories of identity, including gender, are being questioned and public battles are regularly waged over grammar, language and pronouns. What is often called "woke" culture is, among other things, suspicious of inherited categories and the assumptions that sustain them. It isn't difficult to see why Carson's willingness to cross boundaries and unsettle conventions has been embraced, particularly in academic and literary circles.
The world Carson inhabits is primarily one of myth, language and meaning. It is esoteric in a way that Klein's work stubbornly refuses to be. For Klein, the lived historical experience of the Jewish people remains central. The literary form serves that experience, rather than becoming the experience in itself.
Of course, this isn't to say that Carson is indifferent to the world, or that her writing lacks emotional content. Autobiography of Red explores desire, vulnerability and alienation. Nox attempts to grapple with a real death through fragments of memory, language and scholarship.
But I wonder whether Carson's work sometimes becomes so absorbed in the process of constructing meaning that it loses sight of the world beyond it. The reader is invited to follow associations, make connections and discover resonances, but the journey can feel endless. One meaning leads to another, one literary reference opens onto another, and the work's ingenuity becomes its own justification.
This is not a knock on Carson's skills as a writer. She writes well. She is a master of literary accretion: her lines and meanings accumulate, one on top of another, to provide fresh insights. For that reason, she feels more like a literary archaeologist than a poet. She digs and uncovers fragments of meaning, often literally from ancient sources, drawing on myth and history to create a contemporary narrative.
But for me, reading Carson feels oddly untethered. It's as if I'm wandering through the rooms of a house in a dream, a house constructed out of meanings, myths and language. You inhabit yourself in her writing, but the outside world feels ethereal and unreal. Each room contains details that give you a sense of being somewhere, without ever quite pinpointing an address.
They say that every language is its own country. Yet for Carson, language is less a country, something that grounds you in a physical place, than a means of travel. It carries you between points in time, making stops along the way between antiquity and the present. Those stops may be named Herakles, Sappho, Catullus, Emily Brontë or Virginia Woolf.
The point of it all, sometimes, seems to be that there is no point beyond the journey itself.
To read Carson, you have to be prepared to travel on her terms. I'm sure that for some readers the experience is exhilarating. For me, it's less reorienting than disorienting: travel for the sake of travel, without any particular destination.
Perhaps that's the fundamental difference between Carson and Klein. Klein's formal experimentation brings us back to a shared history, a community and a world outside the book. Carson's takes us into the mechanics of the book itself, into the play of language and the associations it generates. One grounds us; the other sets us adrift.
Neither approach is inherently superior, but they offer very different experiences of what literature may be. You might say that in Carson's case it seems to be about what storytelling might look like in a post-literate world - where traditional forms, authors and characters are symbols to be leveraged - which I think is ironically part of her allure these days. In that sense, her Nobel is like Dylan's, more about artistry than actually about writing.
It's never easy to predict an author's legacy. So far, Carson has been a writer who is more admired than beloved. I suspect the Nobel Prize won't change that.
If I could have one wish granted that comes from Carson's Nobel win, it would be that more people discover A.M Klein's The Second Scroll, although in today's political climate, that's unlikely.
