Anne Carson: Antiquity

Laura Jansen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350256071
• eBook ISBN: 9781350174771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs
• Index: Literature

From her seminal Eros the Bittersweet (1986) to her experimental Float (2016), Bakkhai (2017) and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), Anne Carson's engagement with antiquity has been deeply influential to generations of readers, both inside and outside of academia. One reason for her success is the versatile scope of her classically-oriented oeuvre, which she rethinks across multiple media and categories. Yet an equally significant reason is her profile as a classicist. In this role, Carson unfailingly refuses to conform to the established conventions and situated practices of her discipline, in favour of a mode of reading classical literature that allows for interpretative and creative freedom. From a multi-praxis, cross-disciplinary perspective, the volume explores the erudite in discipline of Carson's classicism as it emerges in her poetry, translations, essays, and visual artistry. It argues that her classicism is irreducible to a single vision, and that it is best approached as integral to the protean character of her artistic thought. Anne Carson/Antiquity collects twenty essays by poets, translators, artists, practitioners and scholars. It offers the first collective study of the author's classicism, while drawing attention to one of the most avant-garde, multifaceted readings of the classical past.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING OF NOW

Anna Jackson

If you run backwards down the staircase of a day, can you make novelty grow? Or freeze desire?

Anne Carson, 1986: 114

Anne Carson doesn’t begin with beginnings, either in Eros the Bittersweet or in Economy of the Unlost. Both begin with a preface about thought as movement. Eros the Bittersweet begins with an account of Kafka’s story ‘The Top’, about a philosopher spending his time around children so he can grab their spinning tops: ‘The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love,’ Carson explains, ‘Beauty spins and the mind moves.’¹ Economy of the Unlost begins with a preface written on a train: ‘We flash past towers and factories, stations, yards, then a field where a herd of black horses is just turning to race uphill.’² Explaining the organizing principle of Economy of the Unlost, Carson emphasizes again the importance of movement in maintaining attention: ‘To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep each other from settling.’³ Whether bringing together twentieth-century writer Paul Celan and the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos or introducing a study of Sappho’s word glukupikron with a story from Kafka and going on to talk about eros and the bittersweet with reference to Tolstoy, Aristophanes, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Velazquez and other writers and theorists from antiquity through to the present, Carson keeps ideas always on the move.

This seems a very different project from the classical philologist’s project to ‘roll back the years and reveal to us the original in all its gleaming, pristine purity’, as Charles Martindale puts it to emphasize the absurdity of such an enterprise, as if the original were ever ‘pristine’, outside of history and free of competing interpretations. For a reception theorist like Martindale, concepts are always multivalent, and changes in meaning and interpretation across time are what keep a text alive.⁴ Yet Eros the Bittersweet does begin with philology, and both Eros the Bittersweet and Economy of the Unlost share a focus on beginnings. Carson is fascinated with Simonides as ‘the first to professionalize poetry’⁵ at the time when coinage was first beginning to circulate; this is the beginning of the commodification that, she writes, ‘marks a radical moment in the history of human culture’.⁶ Sappho’s lyric poetry arises from an even earlier intervention in the history of human culture, the alphabetization of the Greek language which allowed poetry to be not only heard but read, involving an entirely new form of attention, making the reader newly ‘aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action’.⁷ These are the radical beginnings of states that have persisted: Carson returns us to the point at which what has become so known as to be invisible was so new as to be pristine and gleaming.

now – then

Bittersweet is the title of the first chapter of Eros the Bittersweet, and the question which opens the chapter opens up the multifaceted exploration of desire that it takes the whole book to follow through. The question is one Carson had asked before, in almost the exact same words, in the abstract for her 1981 doctoral thesis, Odi et Amo Ergo Sum, from which much of the material of Eros the Bittersweet is drawn: ‘It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet”. No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?’⁸

There is a curious sleight of hand here, in Carson’s assurance that ‘No one who has been in love disputes her.’ The claim that the original readers of this remark, the examiners of a thesis, might have been expected to dispute is the claim that Sappho was the first to call eros ‘bittersweet’, not the nature of love itself. It is so brazen a sleight of hand it is hardly a sleight at all, as if a stage magician were to startle the audience by performing real magic in place of the expected card trick.

No one who has been in love is likely to object to this shift in attention. The whole book is constructed around shifts of attention, with thirty-four short chapters offering first one take then another on the question, looking at Eros from thirty-four different perspectives, seeing it now in terms of lack, now division, now yearning, now translation, now time, now space. The question itself is kept in motion, spinning like the philosopher’s spinning tops in the preface. The movement is sustained across chapters that look backwards and reach ahead: they end with questions – the first chapter ends ‘Why?’;⁹ invitations – the chapter ‘A Novel Sense’ ends ‘Let us see what we can read from the ruses of the novelists about the blind point and its desirability’;¹⁰ promises – ‘Alphabetic Edge’ ends ‘The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.’¹¹ The chapter ‘Midas’ ends with a riddling reference to unnamed creatures who appear in the Midas dialogue, ‘and who share Midas’ dilemma in its main outlines as well as in its attitude to want’,¹² and the following chapter gives us the answer to the riddle in its title, ‘Cicadas’.¹³ A word that plays one role, concluding a thought followed through in one chapter, will be picked up again to play a starring role in the next chapter: ‘Tactics’ ends by concluding, ‘Odi et amo intersect; there is the core and symbol of eros, in the space across which desire reaches’;¹⁴ the next chapter takes the idea of ‘The Reach’ as its title, and picks up the word ‘space’ too as it begins, ‘A space must be maintained or desire ends.’¹⁵

Anyone who has been in love will welcome the space held open in and between chapters for such sustained attention to the paradoxical, bittersweet nature of desire. A paradox by its nature cannot be resolved, only reached beyond, as a way of staying with the riddle of it. The problem of experiencing love as both sweet and bitter has been worried away at, generating fiction and philosophy, for centuries; it is a paradox, as Carson admits in her first chapter, ‘that is almost a cliché for the modern literary imagination’. Here she gives the example of Anna Karenina whispering to herself, ‘and hate begins where love leaves off’.¹⁶ Several chapters later, Carson turns again to Anna Karenina in approaching the question of desire from another angle, asking now what the lover wants from love. Anna’s passion for Vronsky is such that when she sees him after an absence, she must study his face, ‘comparing the image of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, and impossible in reality) with him as he was’.¹⁷ What the lover wants is to fantasize. Carson quotes the comparison made by Stendhal of such fantasizing to the crystallization that occurs in a salt mine:

Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline of Anne Carson’s Works and Distinctions
• Introduction: On Anne Carson/ Antiquity
• 1 The Beginning of Now
• 2 Chimeras: Empty Space and Melting Borders
• 3 Carson for the Non-Classicist
• 4 Écriture and the Budding Classicist
• 5 Erring and Whatever
• 6 The Gift of Residue
• 7 Carson Fragment
• 8 Shades
• 9 The Paratextual Cosmos
• 10 An Essay on An Essay on Irony
• 11 The Stesichorean Ethos
• 12 Cunning Intelligence
• 13 Mythopoetic Immersions
• 14 Deadly Erotic Tangos and Animal Affinity
• 15 Poetry and Profit
• 16 More Spectres of Dying Empire
• 17 Translation, Transcreation, Transgression
• 18 Translating the Canon, Filling the Absence
• 19 Translation Catastrophes: Pinplay
• 20 There It Lies Untranslatable
• Bibliography
• Index of Terms
• Index of Textual References
• Copyright