An artist of analogy in all its disclosive incongruities, an inventor of unfamiliar masks, Anne Carson is above all a writer concerned with the many ways we are left broken, bereft, adrift, alone. These wounds are the source of her melancholic art. In this sense, as in others, there is a good measure of Samuel Beckett in Carson. Both write serial portraits of the artist as a melancholic; both are owl-like, intent on seeing what there is to see in the dark; both are preoccupied with falling and failing; both are deeply responsive to suffering and deeply aware of the rage that is a part of grief; both have a dry sense of humor; both are erudite, cerebral, irreverent, and fearlessly inventive. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” a threefold imperative on the first page of Beckett’s late Worstward Ho, is the epigraph to Carson’s Red Doc>. The thought connects these two artists of the wayward. Here I would like to approach Carson in the light of Beckett, concentrating on three concerns essential to the work of both: solitude, errancy, and the mask.
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Perhaps solitude goes with a life as a shadow goes with a body. In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson says that desire is lit in a triangle consisting of the lover, the beloved, and the space between them. This space, in the end, is the distance or difference between two selves. The impossibility of crossing this distance awakens eros, stirs the lover’s awareness of lack, of an inner hole. “If we follow the trajectory of eros,” Carson says, “we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before.” The hole is what the lover is made acutely aware of in longing, and made acutely aware of again in loss, when the beloved, as Carson puts it in “The Anthropology of Water,” runs out of the lover’s life as water runs out of our hands. “We’re undone by each other,” as Judith Butler writes, and if “this seems so clearly the case with grief…it can be so only because it was already the case with desire.”
Many of us dream of a romantic quest going on and on, deepening, with an other making us whole, as in the story Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. Clearly Carson has had this dream, but it is not the story she tends to tell. Again and again she tells the story of heartbreak. The lovers she represents go from solitude to ecstasy to solitude. The earlier poems and stories, all the way through Autobiography of Red, trace a path of loss and recovery: insight in these works is an articulation of the work of mourning. A stripping away is turned into a clearing of vision. At the end of Autobiography of Red, Geryon, at once a young gay man and a red-winged monster out of Greek myth, dives into a volcano and returns, descends into the fire of passion and comes back with a sense of wonder at the whole painful journey. The story of loss and recovery in the early works becomes in the later works a story of despair and going on: insight in these works is an articulation of the drift of melancholy. Almost everyone in Red Doc> is wounded, damaged, traumatized, or dying. The main characters take a journey not into a volcano of erotic and creative fire but into a glacier of despair. They come together in a kind of precarious openness expressed in the directness and care and incompleteness with which they talk to one another. But in the end, having briefly gathered for a journey, having briefly gathered in a psychiatric clinic in a glacier, having briefly gathered in a hospital room and at a funeral, they disperse: one begins working on a novel in a motel room, one takes a bus to nowhere, one returns to her life beneath an underpass, one stands in the rain weeping for his lost mother. Each returns to a deep aloneness.
In Beckett, too, the quest goes from solitude to solitude, with little ecstasy aside from the occasional rapture of destitution. One of the important changes marking the passage from Beckett’s early work to his major novels of the early postwar years—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—is that his early characters, people who withdraw from the world, give way to characters who fall out of the world: wanderers who, as Hugh Kenner once put it, are not only social tramps but metaphysical tramps as well. What do they suffer from? Beckett, unlike Carson, has almost nothing to say about love. He probably has less to say about love, in fact, than any other major writer. Eventually one begins to suspect that the absence is the sign of a deeper wound behind all the stories. In the early Murphy we read: “‘I am not of the big world, I am of the little world,’ was an old refrain with Murphy.” In Autobiography of Red Geryon comes to a similar discovery after having been sexually abused by his older brother. “Inside is mine,” he says to himself. The day of that discovery was also “the day he began his autobiography.” “In this work,” we learn, “Geryon set down all inside things…. He coolly omitted all outside things.” This is one version of the formation of the artist: art comes out of a solitude both suffered and sought.
As the search for insight can be a compensation for trauma or loss, though, so writing can be a solitary’s dream of company. “To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past,” we read in one of Beckett’s late stories, “Company.” “With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company.” In “Appendix to Ordinary Time,” in Men in the Off Hours, Carson writes: “My mother died the autumn I was writing this. And Now I have no one, I thought. ‘Exposed on a high ledge in full light,’ says Virginia Woolf on one of her tingling days…. I was turning over the pages of her diaries, still piled on my desk that day after the funeral, looking for comfort I suppose—why are these pages comforting?” She then recalls the way Woolf found rapture in turning the shock of loss into words. Carson, in response to loss, repeatedly turns to other writers—Emily Brontë or Stesichoros, Keats or Catullus, Beckett or Woolf—weaving their words into her words. To one in the dark come all these voices telling of another, in another dark or the same, devising it all for company.
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Beckett and Carson lend voice to a basic errancy at work in our lives, our stories, and our efforts to understand. All goes astray. Watt, the last of Beckett’s novels originally written in English, a novel he wrote while hiding from the Gestapo on a farm in the south of France, is the beginning of the journey in the dark that we think of as Beckett’s journey. It is a parodic version of a quest narrative. Watt is a tattered servant, who works for a period of time in the house of a nearly silent and entirely incomprehensible Mr. Knott, and who ends in a mental asylum where he tells his story to Sam, another patient in the asylum. The story told by Sam is so precise, so calm that it begins to sound otherworldly and, as it were, beautifully delirious. The antiheroes of the trilogy, though as articulate as Sam, are more chaotic versions of Watt, ruined questers, fallen and falling, on their way further into the dark. What do they all come to see? They all see what Watt sees when two piano tuners arrive to inspect the piano at Mr. Knott’s house. “The piano is doomed, in my opinion, said the younger. The piano-tuner also, said the elder. The pianist also, said the younger. This was perhaps the principal incident of Watt’s early days in Mr. Knott’s house.” Moran, failing to find the Molloy he has gone searching for, discovers an inner Molloy that ruins the defenses of his old identity. “What I saw,” he says, “was…like…a collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.” Molloy turns out to be but one of the figures in which, Moran says, “[his] sense of disaster had sought to contain itself.” “That I did not labour at [these figures] more diligently,” he adds, “was a further index of the great changes I had suffered and of my growing resignation to being dispossessed of self.” Sam, Molloy, Moran, and the others tell of a dispossession without end. All they know is that they know nearly nothing.
Carson, I would say, eventually comes to a similar place. In many of her earlier works, from “The Glass Essay” through Autobiography of Red, she writes idiosyncratic versions of the old story of the broken and the mended. Recovery, as she understands it, requires detours, odd juxtapositions, voyages through multiple masks and texts. But heartbreak turns out to be an intimation of lifebreak. Mourning turns out to be melancholy. The hole in the self awakened by erotic longing turns out to be the hole in the self carved by trauma, devastation, the irreparable, the stripping away death imposes on us. The story of recovery becomes the story of hanging on. In Red Doc> two of the main characters, Sad and 4NO, are traumatized by violence; another, G, has been adrift for years and barely fends off suicidal despair; and another, Ida, sounds almost as lost as she is free, almost as sad as she is high-spirited. In the past 4NO saw his lover shot to death in an act of homophobic violence, and ever since he has blocked out any immediate perception of the present, seeing only what he calls “Seeing coming,” a blank field “all white.” In the psychiatric clinic in the glacier he writes a play that at one point sounds like a commentary on Waiting for Godot:
prometheus [says]
I went a bit too far
chorus
how do you mean
prometheus
I stopped them seeing death before them
chorus
who
prometheus
human beings
chorus
how
prometheus
I planted blind hope in their hearts
chorus
why
prometheus
they were breaking
chorus
you fool
The breaking, the breaking down, is what Red Doc> and the other elegies Carson has written in recent years are about. What to do with our grief and despair is her theme as it is Beckett’s. “I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about,” Carson says in an interview. “Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies.” “Not that for a moment Watt supposed that he had penetrated the forces at play, in this particular instance,” we read in Watt, “or even perceived the forms that they upheaved, or obtained the least useful information concerning himself, or Mr. Knott, for he did not. But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for a head.” This turns out to be only a temporary stay against confusion. He later loses his mind. Then the strangely poised Sam makes a pillow of old words, for a head, a pillow of old words telling the story of Watt’s ruin. 4NO, alone in a motel room at the end of Red Doc>, rewriting his play as a novel, finds a similar relief in words. His old defense against pain (blocking out the present with a blank field) has brought about another sort of pain. Writing is the swan-like pilot he comes to rely on:
Writing itself is what he
loves now the mental
action the physical action.
He thinks about writing all
the time while doing other
things or talking to people
he is forming sentences
in his head it keeps the white
away. He can block the
one stream with the other
and steer around in it like
a swan in reeds around the
headache too which
continues to rain planets
within his forehead.
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“The objective form is the most subjective in matter,” Oscar Wilde says in “The Critic as Artist.” “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” The mask is important to both Beckett and Carson. In part, I think, this is because they are obsessive writers. The mask is the variable and the obsession the constant. A reader of their works begins to see that, for all their intellectual range and formal inventiveness, they again and again come back to and depart from a basic matrix of deep preoccupations. “Saying is inventing,” Molloy says. “Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.” Above all, though, Beckett and Carson are drawn to the mask owing to a particular sensitivity that both of them have to the relationship between inward wound and expression. The mask is a measure of the tension between exposure and deflection.
The making and unmaking of masks in Beckett’s work, as Dieter Wellershoff has shown in detail, is vertiginous. His ruined questers are writers, compelled to record in writing the long mistakes their lives have been (to borrow a line from Molloy). Molloy writes his story while in his deceased mother’s bed—she had died by the time he reached her room. Moran, if in one sense failing to find Molloy, in another sense finds himself becoming Molloy as well as writing about his search for him. Malone later claims authorship of Molloy, Moran, and other masks he composes, including Macmann, a man dying in a hospital as Malone is dying in a hospital. Malone conceives of his inexpressible darkness as earnestness and of all the stories he invents as play: as an escape from his inexpressible darkness. He holds his imminent death at bay by telling his own story through the stories of others. “I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story,” he says, “and to the long silence that has silenced me…. But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise…. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave.” If the Unnamable speaks from beyond the grave, it goes on beyond the grave, though no one knows exactly where the Unnamable is. He claims that he has never wanted anything to do with these puppets, as he calls them, that they have been forced on him by the voices plaguing him.
Carson’s journey through masks is different from this one. Her trajectory begins with fairly expansive confessional works like “The Glass Essay” and “The Anthropology of Water.” Later, in quasi-novelistic works such as Autobiography of Red and Red Doc>, the autobiographical voice is refracted through a range of masks. Autobiography of Red is her remarkable Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Geryon is her young man (or young woman imagining herself as a young man, or young woman imagining herself as a sensitive red monster with wings he is a little self-conscious about). Geryon is wounded, vulnerable, acutely aware of his difference from others, given to curious ideas and identifications, quick to fall deeply in love, slow to recover from the loss of love, a wanderer in life and thought, and ultimately surprised, it seems, by his own power of recovery. When he returns in Red Doc>, now called G, he is older and sadder, as are all the characters in the story, damaged as they are by what they have seen and suffered. In the end G loses his mother to death and is left in the rain at night. In the dark, in the rain, as the poet Rachel Mindell once showed me, G’s favorite musk ox, Io, appears. But Io and the author of the work come together at this point. For the author is there, too, suspended, watching G:
RAIN HITS EVERY
side of everything. Her
deep blue raiment streams.
Her history hums along
the veins and balanced on
the beam of her. Familiar
by now with the
neckbones of night as they
shift into yet another old
dawn. Familiar to be suspended
in the lives of
others and still not. She
with her unspilled cup
of love her perfect stench her
vague knowledge of them.
Suspended in the lives of others and still not. Similarly, Beckett’s Malone, in the dark, watches the figures in which he expresses his grief and rage and disorientation. “I shall hear myself talking,” he says, “afar off, from my far mind, talking of the Lamberts, talking of myself, my mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins.” In the voice at the end of Red Doc>, though, there is a tenderness never heard in the voice of Malone.
“Poetic form itself,” Michael Hamburger has said, “can act as a mask.” The wayward forms of so many of Carson’s works produce a strangeness that draws near and veers away. She likes to hover on boundaries of poetry and prose, the vernacular and the erudite, the abrupt and the evasive: this hovering is another mode of expressive masking. Above all, though, it is Carson’s tone that is her deflective-disclosive mask. Describing this tone is no simple matter. In part it draws on the stance of scholarly detachment. The textual apparatus concerning Stesichoros that frames the story of Geryon in Autobiography of Red, if not an absurdist parody of scholarship, is perhaps a dadaist recasting of scholarship as freestyle collage. Carson’s characteristic tone owes something to Oscar Wilde, too, whose dry wit and aphoristic gift have been important to her. At times, perhaps a touch too often, her tone echoes Stein’s poker-faced impertinence: a way of confidently saying what one likes while throwing dust and charm in the reader’s eyes. At other times it echoes Dickinson’s impersonation of a child or a naïf as a way of letting the lightning through with the force of the unexpected. Carson says in one of her essays that she likes “the impression [a poem] gives of blurting out the truth in spite of itself.” Surely her tone has a good deal to do, finally, with a tone that has been in the air of our culture since at least the seventies, a tone of blank irony (to recall a concept from Fredric Jameson’s well-known essay on postmodernism). All the ghosts in Carson’s work might suggest that she sees style or tone as what Ida, another of her masks in Red Doc>, conceives as a “grid”: a grid to defend against feeling, vulnerability, nakedness, the wound inside, the hole inside. The experience of vulnerability is the heart of the matter. An image of nakedness, a stripping away of the self’s defenses, is what the early “The Glass Essay” begins and ends with. The image of a hole in the self is found, in different ways, in Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband, and Red Doc>. “I never saw a human being so naked,” the author of “The Anthropology of Water” says, recalling an encounter with her father when he was lost in dementia. A “nakedness together that is unforgivable” is what G feels he and his mother are made to experience as she dies. Carson’s masks, as Roy Scranton has underlined, are the measure of these conditions of the breaking or broken self that she comes back to again and again: her inventive work, he says, is meant “not to be inscrutable for its own sake, but to find new ways to make feeling possible, new ways to connect with the raw nakedness of human existence.” It’s as though the formal and tonal masks prepared for the moments of abrupt, candid, tender, wild, or piercing feeling they finally do not quite deflect. Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” John Hollander once said, means “tell all the truth by telling it slant.”
Where are we? Carson, I’ve said, is a solitary, a solitary who writes of solitaries, a solitary who writes of the deep aloneness into which we readily drift. She writes of error and discovery, falling and missing, falling and losing, ruin and despair. She composes masks that are ways of touching on what they initially seem to mask: the stripping away that generates our need for masks. In these ways, I’ve suggested, she has affinities with Beckett, a writer who belongs to a different historical and cultural climate. Are these affinities optical illusions? Or do they tell us something about our lives now? We are all, word has it, dispersed, scattered, multiple, plastic. We are neither here nor there, wired and connected, wired and disconnected, skeptical of depths, along for a ride that every day fewer and fewer of us believe can be saved from doom. Carson registers these contemporary realities. She conveys, in her quirky way, our floating attention. At the same time she expresses an older existential intuition of our depths, our loneliness, our breaking, our despair. She recalls the empty places behind the distractions. Here, then, is another of the boundaries she hovers along in her art of the incongruous and the candid. Ironic and exposed, hip and wounded, she recasts Pynchon’s “keep cool, but care” for our weirdly glassy, weirdly desperate time.