 As
Reviewed By: |
On and Off of Parnassus
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. USA $24.00, Canada $37.00 |
As
Reviewed By: |
On and Off of Parnassus
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. USA $24.00, Canada $37.00 |
Anne Carson’s most recent collection, Men in the Off Hours, is a
conspicuous departure from the uniform tone and patient psychological
exploration of her previous book, Autobiography of Red, which, for
all its intellectual elegance, was essentially a bildungsroman, a
formational novel in verse. Against the elegantly balanced narrative
configuration of Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours
seems overgenerously protean. Carson introduces no regularity of style,
subject, or form. This endless retreat from cohesion assumes the quality
of a mad sonic or ocular polyphony, the stuff of wonder and headaches,
resembling at times the aural experiments of Edgar Varèse or stormy
visual language of Robert Rauschenberg. It is at times chatty, at others
Sibylline, at others glaringly plain, still at others virtually
impermeable, as she lays an adamantine lamina over certain impossible
truths. This stylistic diversity is compelling, a lurid movement between
the most open of lyrical insights and most impenetrable of semantic
clusters. Carson’s readers will no doubt be familiar with her
intellectual dexterity, but nothing in her earlier books, such as Plainwater
or Eros the Bittersweet, prepares them for the decapodal
evasiveness of Men in the Off Hours.
It seems at first odd that a 170 page
book of poetry would begin with a slab of cerebral prose on historiography
and the origins of war, as does Carson’s with "Ordinary Time: Virginia
Woolf and Thucydides on War." Following this, however, there is a
transition to a compact four-line epitaph and then another shift to a
breezy lyric poem. It becomes clear that the book’s defining properties,
and perhaps most valuable assets, are its versatility and range. Further
reading reveals that these assets are by turns as broadly composite as
Richard Wagner’s in his Ring and as disconcertingly overworked as
Franz Liszt’s Etudes d’exècution transcendante. As
with the magical-scholarly masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges, Carson
brings together texts by notoriously assured authors and thereby sets off
magnetic reactions that repel and attract ideas with their own energy. At
the start of the book, Thucydides, father of historians, is engaged in
solemn disputation with Virginia Woolf, mother of Modernist literary
feminism, the whole Peloponnesian War stalled between them as they quibble
over terms and approaches. In the elusive and sometimes taunting manner of
Borges, the language can be far from poetic (hardly a necessity in a
post-experimental age lacking faith in a single beauty), but it prepares
the reader for the expressive tonal plasticity to come: Historiographical
time is itself bound by the habits of nature. Thucydides decided military
history should be dated as to campaigning seasons. “The events of the
war have been recorded in the order of their occurrence, summer by summer
and winter by winter,” he says at the beginning of Book II (2.1.1).
Naturally he locates the affair of the Thebans who entered Plataea, which
triggered the war and so came just before the first summer, “at the
opening of spring . . .” (2.1.2).
The following piece, "Epitaph: Zion," is the first of many epitaphs
interspersed throughout the book. “Epitaph,” which derives from the
ancient Greek for “writing on a tomb,” is fitting. Hers are portals
through which none may pass and return to tell, yet fragments of hope and
humor are projected onto them from those living who have anticipated
death. Carson would, of course, be familiar with the possibilities
provided by previous authors of the epitaph, such as Simonides of Ceos and
John Dryden, who composed a flippant epitaph on his wife: “Here lies my
wife: here let her lie / Now she’s at rest and so am I.” But whatever
may be known of epitaphs, readers are still unprepared for the slippery
solidity of Carson’s. It is difficult to determine the exact weight and
measure of something like "Epitaph: Zion." Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives
This could be a lament on the Babylonian captivity, as its title might
suggest and the word “refugee” maintain, but what is to be made of
“once our objects had gazes”? Is this an implication that the speaker
is in a world populated by graven images or even animistic pursuits? Is
one to elevate this small poem into a vortex of post-structuralist
literary theory in order to derive significance or deny the same? What
objects had gazes? And what is to be made of the historically disjunctive
speaker of the epitaph, one of a chorus that greets the reader throughout?
Perhaps it is an elaborate joke, as is common in Carson’s writing.
Perhaps it is the wandering in the wilderness; perhaps it is an expressive
poetic scintilla meant to mirror the breadth of Jewish history,
Tennyson’s God and man congenitally sealed in his flower in a crannied
wall. Little is written, and so one assumes that much is being implied.
This analytical tangle is multiplied repeatedly with each new example. The
epitaphs resemble the alternately dazzling and tedious feats of
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Concrete poets, though Carson’s do not necessarily
follow any theoretical program that may have informed the efforts of
either. Nonetheless, after the cool lucidity and woven allusiveness of the
other poems that they cleave, the epitaphs emerge as panes of smoked
glass. One can discern irregular forms and movement on the other side but
no color or diagrammatic detail.
They deny entry. The reader can be drawn into a muddle of
over-qualification and over-reading. The epitaphs easily remain as
mysterious as the tombs on which they could be engraved. As the collection proceeds, one finds lyric poems that, to be fair, could have come from the hand of any number of accomplished contemporary poets:
down at me, clutching his branch as it
bobbed
If this seemingly effortless example is a thrust at postmodern irony, it
is a successful one, aligned with Roy Lichtenstein’s painting the word
ART in his 1962 painting Art, or, more precisely, painting oversize
brushstrokes in his 1967 Yellow and Green Brushstrokes. Put more
simply, Carson may be saying “I am being a poet, and look, ma, no
hands.” She could also be attempting to work out a more personal grief
with the most direct language at her disposal, tilling the soft soil of
the garden rather than tumbling overhead as a skywriter. The collection
advances beyond this to poems such as “Sumptuous Destitution’, in
which Carson not only publicizes her willingness to borrow as freely as a
Baroque composer or jazz soloist, but assembles a collage consisting of
letters between Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson, Greek mythology (Ariadne’s
thread used for herself in the guise of Emily Dickinson rather than for
the ungrateful playboy Theseus), and her own poetry about the problematic
scholarly term “Sumptuous destitution.” “Sumptuous destitution”
Carson’s lines, never more than a few tight words each, are eclipsed by
Emily Dickinson’s (if hers is flirtation of a sort, it is of quite an
elevated order), perhaps exemplifying an anxiety of influence: but both
are encumbered by the invasive scholarly citations, which bear down on the
harmonic flow of the two female voices—one, whispering in private
correspondence, the other declaiming from the pages of the published book.
Rather than anchoring the poem or serving any more purpose than a bicycle
would a fish, the dullness of the citations muddies the finer notes of the
other voices. Carson makes great use of personal letters in other parts of
the collection as well. Letters, particularly in an era before the
lassitude of electronic mail, were carefully-considered private conduits
of communication that often provided their authors with an informal
aperture through which to express nascent or otherwise unacknowledged
beliefs and opinions. Protracting the macabre sensation provoked by the
epitaphs, this usage of personal letters feels like the work of a
Resurrection Man. Dissected and splayed on the page, the fragments of
personal letters, whatever else they may designate, remind the reader that
graves have been exhumed, tombs wrenched open.
The poems in this lengthy and bizarre
collection resemble those of Ezra Pound in the early Cantos. Her expansive
range of subjects and allusions is familiar from the High Modernism of
David Jones and James Joyce, yet she lacks the grand architecture of the
epic through which to establish larger thematic presences (Ivan Argüelles,
for instance, another contemporary poet classicist, allows his bewildering
succession of allusion to be ordered against the scaffolding of an ongoing
multibook epic, Pantograph). Nearly every poem in Men in the Off
Hours—excepting the cryptic epitaphs—is moored to something
outside of itself: historic events, iconic figures, methodologies,
technologies, other poets. Despite given themes, such as the diminution of
complexity in the television’s gaze and the act of writing itself, the
many poems fail to hang together without considerable exertion. The themes
that do continue to appear do so in different guises. The intricate
recurring lines of the poems resemble the fugal passages of J.S. Bach’s St.
John's Passion. A fragment of a line from Emily Dickinson, previously
embedded in another poem, can re-emerge in another to reinforce its
propulsion. Though the poems may be marked as "Freud (1st draft)," and
"Freud (2nd draft)," the poems are different, perhaps precariously
poised on the same thematic base, but different all the same. The book
begins to work like a kaleidoscope and as such is prone to bestow, again,
both wonder and headaches if one stares too long into its colors. This is
Moby Dick over Portrait of a Lady, The Bride Stripped Bare
By Her Bachelors, Even over Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,
extravagant multiplicity over cool harmony. Ranging from chalked graffiti
to Catullus’s Latin, the collection quickly becomes a dissertation on
poetic possibilities. This can be invigorating but also a bit
overpowering. There is, for instance, the grating shift, more or less
typical of the collection, from the staid poetic material of “Audubon
understands light as an absence of darkness, / truth as an absence of
unknowing” to a once-radical Concrete gesture (common to the repertoire
of Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose works, it should be noted, now appear almost
exclusively in galleries rather than on paper) a few pages later River.
Certainly, the word “river” is made optically to form the bend in a
river and also give the paradoxical sensation of recurrence and similitude
that Heraklitus pointed to, but there is no clear reason for it to appear
where it does or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, this could well
be the point, endless flux in the fixed linear body of language, the
individual motes of reality making up an experiential whole of a universe,
and so on, but it still feels like more of a series of bumps than an
incline.
Carson also includes her trademark
interviews, moments of surrealism and psychological analysis, which in
reality are nearer to antiphony than interview. These work very well.
There is also an unadorned poetic reminiscence of her father, built around
a memory of his blue cardigan: “Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen
chair / where I always sit, as it did / on the back of the kitchen chair
where he always sat.” This disarming simplicity is succeeded by a
sequence of imagined confessions by the American painter Edward Hopper
(each poem titled after a painting); although the confessions convey the
sad stillness of his paintings, they are paired roughly against excerpts
of Book XI of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Unity, long since
banished from the garden, has been forgotten, and a literary pileup of
sorts has begun.
It is only midway through the book that
the reader comes upon the heart of the adventure, "TV Men," a series
of scripts and production notes formed around, among others, Antonin
Artaud, Leo Tolstoy, Sappho, Giotto, Lazarus, Antigone, Oslip Mandelstam,
and Catherine Deneuve. It is as though someone standing in a room
cluttered with papers and books suddenly opened a door on a windstorm. So
much comes together in this central part of the book that, for a moment at
least, all previous offenses are forgiven. The poems that begin here are
of exceptional charm, noble capacity, and a genuine if sad humor. The life
and death of Antonin Artaud is a persistent concern. DIMANCHE…ETERNAL
"TV Men" is a fracturing of cultural history in the camera lens, a
strike at soundbite culture, with its simplification and thus distortion
of ideas intended for mass consumption. This is a valid project, but one
wonders if it is necessary to be so obscure and academic about it. As with
all higher arts, one is aware that the means of transmitting the
information is as susceptible to interpretation, perhaps more so, than
what is actually being transmitted, the medium being its own message, and
so maybe "TV Men" requires the thorny topography of Modernism in
order to be successful.
The final portion of the collection is
interpolated by an essay entitled "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the
Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," replete with endnotes.
The exhaustive compass of Men in the Off Hours recalls William
Carlos Williams’s failed epic Paterson and Charles Olson’s
highly-influential if little-read postmodern epic Maximus. There is
a very fragile border between the exhaustive and the exhausting in all
arts. Often, motivating ideas are transported above the actuating
materials of expression. One may be captivated by John Cage’s
compositional theoretics but lack the energy to sit through a performance
of, say, The Freeman Etudes, just as one may be in full intuitive
agreement with Andy Warhol’s exaggerated icons and logos but lack the
spirit to stand in examination before every soup can and Marilyn. Anne
Carson repeatedly runs this risk with her ecstatic overplay, which seems
sometimes forced and too clever for even most bright readers. As if to seek some claim to elevated difficulty after the highly accessible Autobiography of Red, Carson has published a book filled with astounding intellectual gymnastics, glinting fractiousness, and assuredly sinuous themes on the one hand; and with irresolution, gratuitously challenging ciphers, dry humor, and seeming lack of pitch on the other. It is a magnificent catastrophe. As for the unanswered allegation that readers may not be clever enough to accommodate her poetic pyrotechnics or be allowed in on her erudite jokes, it is sufficient to note that while a sixteenth-century carillon clock may be a fine and delicate instrument, it is as blunt as any other when swung overhead. In other words, allusions, though possessing elegant internal workings, can bludgeon when used without caution. Despite its nimbleness, there is something a bit musty and even Laodicean about her poetry. She leans heavily on her background as a classicist (much as did Ezra Pound). To infringe upon the Intentional Fallacy for a moment, it must be said that if her intention was to transcend the miscellaneous epochal styles that intermingle in her work (and therefore transcend the very aesthetic weight of history), she is only partly successful. Much as T.S. Eliot remarked upon seeing Upper Paleolithic cave-paintings that “art never improves,” the aim of a genuine high modernism (she is a postmodernist for many reasons and not by mere dint of the age in which she writes) would be to shuck off any tangible archaizing in favor of a timeless air, a sense that historical ligatures can be collapsed against a single creative field much as Pablo Picasso compressed multiple perspectives into a single plane. Although she avoids archaizing her material with her deep allusional soundings, she does allow their individual realities to become somewhat diluted. This transcendental quality could be one of the triumphs of Men in the Off Hours, but, for all its brilliance, it lacks the successes (and, one should add, excesses) of either Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Four Quartets (although it should be pointed out that these are hardly indisputable touchstones against which to measure a contemporary poet). Still, amid the fractured House of Fun cum House of Horrors, amid the ruins of an intermittently overtaxed poetic language and its linguistic spasms, there lie moments of what may possibly be genius. Still, the feeling that one takes away from this collection is one of unevenness and even a bit of contempt on the part of its author. Any detailed explication of Men in the Off Hours would necessarily occupy the whole of a book three times its size. It begs the question: what now? What lands left to conquer? For moments of scintillating beauty and rousing perceptiveness, there are others of inescapable boredom and disappointment. It is impossible to tell how history will judge this latest enterprise by one of the most widely-admired and intimidating of contemporary poets, but one wonders whether a book as intellectually incendiary to trained readers and wholly perplexing to general readers wouldn’t be more at home a half century ago with David Jones’s Anathèmata and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake than in the sprightly if feeble-witted TV world it attempts so ardently to assault. Editor's Note: This essay was originally published in Pleiades.
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