Anne Carson’s Ecstatic Minimalism
Twice in the last five years, the Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to a woman who takes eros seriously: Annie Ernaux, in 2022, and, now, Anne Carson. Each is, in her own way, a minimalist, and both have pursued forms of writing that constrain a terrible excess of feeling—that give shape and weight to the maelstrom of passion. There are many finely wrought forms in Carson’s œuvre: poems, plays, essays, translations of ancient Greek tragedies and lyrics, an opera, a comic book, a book-in-a-box. I first learned of her in college, through “If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho,” a translation of the poet’s surviving verses:
I remember the “melter of limbs.” (Compare it to “loosener of limbs,” an ungainlier translation that makes Eros sound like a personal trainer.) I remember, too, the shock of “sweetbitter,” which sounded all wrong—perhaps because “bittersweet” was so familiar that it hid in plain sight the brutal simultaneity of pleasure and pain. Carson had used the familiar word for the title of her first book of criticism, “Eros the Bittersweet” (1986), about the ungovernable force of desire in ancient Greek literature. “Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy,” she wrote. This enemy could be detained by a line of poetry, but it would always overrun the will’s defenses.
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Translation is Carson’s primary art form. One way to describe it is as the art of sustained metaphor: a word in one language is similar, but not identical, to a word in another language. To translate is to commit to imperfection, to unlikeness and even error, from the get-go. “Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself / in the act of making a mistake,” Carson wrote in “Men in the Off Hours” (2000). “Not only that things are other than they seem, / and so we mistake them, / but that such mistakenness is valuable.” It is the mind’s experience of error and, through it, of discovery that courses through the rest of her writing, and that allows her to move among unlike things, whether within a line (“Eros shook my / mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees,” from Sappho), or across an entire book, such as “Economy of the Unlost,” in which she reads Simonides of Keos as a distant analogue to Paul Celan, “a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.” The opposite of error is a kind of divine indifference—not bringing unlike things into considered proximity but strewing them about at random, and delighting in the disorder one creates. I think often of these chilling lines from “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos” (2001):
We do not often come across people today who speak, as the Greek poets did, of desire, anger, grief, and pride. We hide our great passions under layers of compulsive, civilized talk. We ironize; we deflate. We are not minimalists; we minimize instead. In Carson’s poetry, the vehement language of an ancient tradition is placed side to side with the ordinary elements of modern life. The results can be comic and unexpectedly tender, like when the red-winged monster Geryon walks to his kindergarten classroom with his brother in “Autobiography of Red,” or the television scripts that feature Sappho, Antigone, and “Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf” in “Men in the Off Hours.” My favorite of Carson’s “Short Talks” (1992) is titled “Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff,” on the eros of commercial flight: “Well you know I wonder, it could be love running towards my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!”
But eros is often tragic. This is its essential error. Love contains the seeds of its own destruction—the cruelty and self-absorption that turns the afflicted against one another, and themselves. Catullus told us as much in “Odi et Amo,” but I prefer the feral imagination of Carson’s “Plainwater” (1995): “Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it.” The sweetbitter unmanageable creature can turn people into animals or monsters, annihilators or “ecstatics.” The term comes from Carson’s essay “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God.” In it, she returns to a fragment from Sappho to consider how one can be undone by eros, attaining a state of near-death:
Carson admires the absolute spiritual daring it takes to submit to one’s awful longings, and to find in this state a cold radiance, a “bleak exultation”—that is Emily Dickinson, another of Carson’s frequent references—that can look like either wisdom or madness. “What I like best about the three women we’ve been studying is that they know what love is,” she writes. “They know love is the touchstone of a true or a false spirituality.” Sappho supposedly threw herself off the Leucadian cliffs for the man she loved, unrequitedly. The medieval French mystic Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. Simone Weil starved herself to death. To devote oneself to love as a form of spirituality, not knowing whether it is in the service of a true or false god, is to labor as a kind of holy fool. In these labors, Carson is akin to two other recent laureates, Jon Fosse and László Krasznahorkai, our foremost writers of holy fools.
Receiving a Nobel Prize is a lesser act of consecration than being burned at the stake. Still, it is a triumph, although the greater triumph may be to withstand eros’s assaults for as long as one can bear. When I heard the news this morning, I turned to these lines marked up in my copy of “Glass, Irony & God,” which stage a conversation between a woman in despair and her disbelieving mother: