Approaching the Bench
I have found within myself an inability to write an essay that does not feel both singular and necessary to the work I write about. In order to start writing I require some kind of take, some independent discovery that I can use to warrant a voice of importance in my analysis. Without it I fear that I’m just talking for the sake of talking. In trying to find my way into Anne Carson I have come up against this barrier: I don’t have anything original to say. Perhaps it is because Carson herself works so closely with her own textual influences, an academic already knitting her writing closely together with everyone from Plato and Sappho to the Brontë’s and Keats. What connections can I forge or discover that she has not already laid bare in her scathing verse?
Another part of it is that Anne Carson’s writing has always felt too lofty for me to approach. This is nonsensical because she is known to weld together her passions for the classics and capital “L” Literature with the extremely personal, to create a body of “accessible” (relatable, colloquial) hybrid work. Yet I have never experienced Carson as “accessible.” It may be her unpredictability—or more aptly, my inability to predict where she is going in a given piece of writing. Or this sense of loftiness may be attributed to her wide array of literary knowledge—I was afraid to approach The Beauty of the Husband because of my unfamiliarity with Keats, and convinced I was lacking crucial context in “The Glass Essay” because of my unfamiliarity with Wuthering Heights. I suppose my apprehension has been more a symptom of academic perfectionism: I will never understand Anne Carson’s influences as well as she does. I will never know Carson’s work as deeply as the scholars who teach and study her. It has felt to me that I have needed permission to approach the bench.
Confessions of a Non-Confessional Poet
I chose to ease myself in; focusing only on her “Glass Essay” and The Beauty of the Husband, a fascinating pairing of breakup poetry. My first thoughts were that I envy Carson’s approach. With her academic prowess I could never have managed such restraint and lack of pretense in my writing. Yet Carson does. In “The Glass Essay,” the misleading simplicity of Carson’s prose is clearly the result of much labor. The relatively straightforward syntax frames Carson’s patent blend of literary criticism, philosophy, and poetry.
The question of the speaker is a troubling one. Were Carson’s writing autobiographical, it would be easy to analyze her philosophy and approach via her speaker. Yet from the differences in the two texts I analyze (which surely were inspired by the same biographical events), Carson does not offer the opportunity or the excuse to simply conflate her life with the events within her writing. While the “I” voice is certainly hers, and many assumptions can be made, Carson has “discouraged autobiographical readings of her writings,” and though a personal poet, she is not a confessional one. In the long poem she asserts, “my questions were not original. Nor did I answer them.” Similarly, when the speaker’s lover explains his leaving of her, he says simply, “not enough spin on it.” Carson’s perception of her own voice seems to be that she does not manipulate or obfuscate communication; instead her straightforwardness (for lack of a better word) is her undoing. She is left unable to answer the unoriginal questions, and is left by the man she attempted to have an honest and real relationship with.
The L Word, Process, and “Spin”
Carson’s work quite literally spins in and around and through her life, through the lives of John Keats and Emily Brontë, in and out of truth, fact, fiction, history, and the present. The fact that her work lies outside of confessional poetry is evidence of her commitment to spin, given that she clearly has the facilities to be an all-time-great confessional poet if she so chooses. The mythologization of the Writer is as one who creates spin: whirling their own lives and histories and that of those around them into a falsity in order to create. It is interesting that in the world of “The Glass Essay,” it is Carson’s lack of “spin” which ends her relationship (insert the “technically it’s not Carson but the narrator who Carson embodies in the first person voice blah blah blah…”) Most would assume that as a writer and creative, Carson’s issue in a relationship would be too much spin. This brings me to Jenny Schecter.
I have been watching the seminal early aughts lesbian television drama known as The L Word. Jenny, the reprehensible main character, has just moved to Los Angeles after completing a writing MFA (good for Jenny!). She has a nice, boring fiancé named Tim and no friends in her new city. Of course, she becomes wrapped up in this fantastical queer enclave of beautiful, messy, intelligent women. Jenny’s gay guru and first lesbian lover is an intellectual named Marina. Marina is tall, beautiful, the owner of an unrecognizable European-ish accent... When the two meet, they discuss literature, and Marina asks Jenny if she knows Anne Carson. In her typical breathy fashion, Jenny responds that Carson “practically changed her life.” Then the two have a torrid affair, wrecking both their relationships in the process. I bring this up because Jenny, as a writer, forms the show’s outside-in point of view. It is interesting that Carson is chosen as the symbol of intellectual female connection that leads into interpersonal chaos instead of perhaps a more recognizable and thematically obvious choice: Dickinson, Plath (Jenny is tacitly Bipolar), Sappho, etc. Instead it is Carson who provides the foundation for the hurricane of lies, manipulation, and artistry which Marina and Jenny whip up together. In trying to find pieces of analysis on “The Glass Essay,” I found a blogger’s piece on reading the 30-page poem every single day for weeks after a painful breakup. She solidifies her pain through Carson in the same way Marina and Jenny solidify their passion for one another. So it seems that in the universal horrors of interpersonal pain, transition, and processing, Carson’s writing is thematically used to solidify these into static states of being.
Process, and processing, are at the forefront of the two Carson texts I reference. In The Beauty of the Husband, Carson intentionally chooses obscure, incomplete, and notational fragments of Keats’ writing. These quotes are less about their content (often consisting of references within references, sentence fragments, and referents missing a subject) and more a profile or attempt to understand the process that brought Keats to his conclusion in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “truth is beauty, beauty truth.” It is not about the adage itself but rather the histories and voltas that lie between each letter in Keats’ masterwork.
As a self-identified Anne-Carson-outsider, I have noticed that she is perceived by audiences to contain a series of paradoxical identities. By turn hysterical, reticent, hyper-feminine, hyper-masculine, too colloquial, too grandiose, et cetera, et cetera. Like any creative, but particularly female creatives, critics have a tendency to categorize and characterize Carson. It is so interesting to me that Law leaves the speaker of “The Glass Essay” because “Not enough spin on it,” probably because of my own internalized prejudices towards women writers. It is yet another reason why I feel frightened to write about Carson: this crucial moment is something I almost cannot understand. In The L Word, Jenny’s whole identity is shaped around her being a writer, and because of it there is so much spin on her relationships that she cannot maintain them. This is the familiar narrative, and one that Carson subverts in her writing. When one tries to fit Carson into categories, as narrow as “confessional poet” or as wide as “Writer,” (Carson has been working in theatre, sculpture and visual art lately, anyway) her texts function as a preexisting rebuttal.
Doggy Style
I was reading “The Glass Essay,” in a room of a library with a few friends. I interrupted their studying to read aloud to them the moment when Law leaves the speaker, and the speaker offers sex to keep him there just a moment longer.
“Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself
thrusting my little red burning backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.”
I read this to my friends. We discussed how sex from the back is so detached because it removes an ability to lie to yourself about your own pleasure: there is no responsibility to fake pleasure in your face—you know what your face is doing when it is unwatched. Then we parse over an adage that one of us heard. Knowing in your mind that you want to say “no” during an intimate encounter, but allowing your partner to continue, is its own trauma: violating your own consent creates trauma in the body.
I also read to them a few other quotes that I liked next to each other: Carson recalls watching her father make a sexual compliment towards her mother as a child, “in a voice which I (age eleven) thought odd. / I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say. / Her answer would clear this up. / But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it.” Carson returns to this laugh a little later, with another memory. Her mother “was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. / Well a woman would be just as happy with a kiss on the cheek / most of the time but YOU KNOW MEN, / she was saying. Laugh.” This view of female sexuality is of course heartbreaking but interesting, and with a nod to the titular “essay” structure, develops in argument throughout the long poem. Carson explores female sexuality as tool and as burden, but rarely as a source of pleasure or freedom.
Sacrificing Pleasure for Divinity
Since reading “The Glass Essay” I have mulled over Carson’s relationship to sexuality frequently, and it comes to mind in the myriad sex-focused conversations that I have with my other college-age friends. In our feminist zeitgeist, the pleasure of intimacy is never really at question, but rather the barriers that keep us from accessing that pleasure—from sexual violence and infidelity, to miscommunication and loneliness. It seems in “The Glass Essay” that to Carson, sex itself is a barrier between real intimacy or pleasure. This is not by nature but rather a result of how young women are raised: the motif of the “laugh with ropes all over it,” a representation of this.
At the beginning of “The Glass Essay,” Carson writes that she fears she is turning into Emily Brontë. Later, Carson discusses Brontë’s relationship to divinity through a figure referred to in the latter’s writing as Thou. Carson writes that Brontë “talks about a sweetness that ‘proved [them] one.’ / I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet, / there is no question, / it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night, / without the terrible sex price to pay.” Carson returns to this recipe of female sexuality, but adds in a new spice: the divine as a relief from feminine psychosexual pain. This is a move that draws Carson closer to the poem’s end. It is an end somehow both profound and conventional, but the exertion which brought Carson to it is so clearly painful and singular that no one could begrudge her this final, pure, faithful gesture. A paraphrase feels insufficient; her words so carefully chosen:
“I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.
It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,
but as I came closer
I saw it was a human body
trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones.
And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.”
In “The Glass Essay,” Carson finds a divine power in disembodiment. It seems that leaving behind the body individual for the body universal is Carson’s path out of darkness. Like any good poet, I’ll tie content to form here and note that Carson’s literary path has also, arguably, left behind the poem individual for the poem universal: Carson imagines her personal experiences in a context unbound by time, place, genre, confession, or the individual—she contextualizes confessionality as a path away from the self, towards truth, beauty, and a separation from the body.