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An Interview with Anne Carson
In 1997, Scrivener spoke with Anne Carson on the telephone. On the heels of her 1996 Lannan Literary Prize win, Carson discussed anthropology, Heidegger, fragments of classical manuscripts, James Laughlin, and patronage in Canadian arts.
In 1997, Dean Irvine of Scrivener spoke with Anne Carson on the telephone. On the heels of her 1996 Lannan Literary Prize win, Carson discussed anthropology, Heidegger, fragments of classical manuscripts, James Laughlin, and patronage in Canadian arts.
SCRIVENER
I wanted to start with the way you preempt the interviewer, particularly in your “Afterword” to “Canicula di Anna.” You say “Perhaps it is something about me you would like to know—not that you have any specific questions, but still, that would be better than nothing.” Then you introduce the death of Sokrates from Plato’s Phaedo, basically evading confession, and so preempting the interviewer’s question. What sort of interviewing strategies are you engaging?
ANNE CARSON
Basically just that. It’s not a particular strategy, just a gesture to close the door.
SCRIVENER
In the same way that in the “Interviews” from “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings” where you say “I can’t give you the facts I can’t distill my history into this or that home truth and so go plunging ahead composing miniature versions of the cosmos to fill the slots in your question and answer period.” I found it fascinating that you’re anticipating this moment. What are your anxieties about interviews? Experiences?
ANNE CARSON
Not really experiences, just the structure of the event. It’s an invasion. That is its structure.
SCRIVENER
It’s an interesting term to use, invasion, especially with your interests in anthropologies of all sorts. Of course invasions are the anxieties for the anthropologist upon entering an alien culture.
ANNE CARSON
And anthropologists have a lot of trouble justifying that. They do so, but at the cost of rhetoric which change from school to school of anthropological theory. I think that's mainly what they argue about among themselves, how to justify what they're doing.
SCRIVENER
On the other hand, you're interested in various anthropologies—the anthropology of pleasure, the anthropology of water, the anthropology of language. Obviously you have certain reservations toward anthropology, yet it's an extended trope in your poetics.
ANNE CARSON
It's an intriguing idea that there could be such a thing as a science of the human. Certainly anybody who writes is entering into that activity, even if they don't call themselves an anthropologist, they have to try to think through the questions involved in being human. So it's a tantalizing notion that there's a science and a method of this in the world that one could learn and take up and go ahead and figure out the human. Of course that's a delusion, but it's the delusion upon which anthropology is constructed. Given that this delusion exists in the world, it's interesting to use it as a metaphor for what anybody does who writes.
SCRIVENER
Your essay “The Anthropology of Water” reminds me of Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams. Do you know Bachelard?
ANNE CARSON
Yes.
SCRIVENER
The subtitle to Water and Dreams is An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. But he's written for books, or essays, on the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire. Out of these essays, he develops a concept of the “elemental imagination.” How do you respond to the phrase?
ANNE CARSON
Elemental imagination? Frankly I think that’s beyond what I’m doing. It seems to me a deeper question to try to figure out the nature of something as Bachelard does fire. I think he has one called The Psychology of Fire, doesn’t he?
SCRIVENER
Yes, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, that was his first one in the series.
ANNE CARSON
It takes you back to the pre-Socratics and their theories about “everything is water,” or “everything is air.” I think maybe in my old age I'll get around to that level of investigation, and calling the whole thing “The Anthropology of Water” may be a gesture toward that deeper sphere of investigation. But I don't think that I've got there yet.
SCRIVENER
Bachelard calls his methodology phenomenological. I find that interesting since you have a number of reservations toward phenomenology and phenomenologists in “Canicula di Anna.” Obviously in the 20th century, we've had to deal with the ethical questions of Heidegger's work. How do you engage such questions?
ANNE CARSON
Well, my acquaintance with phenology was through the conference of philosophers described in “Canicula di Anna.” They don't seem to be very different from any other school of philosophy in that they have a jargon that they use to the exclusion of anybody not of their school. So when I was there listening to them, I don't think I penetrated what they were saying, nor did they wish it to be penetrated. So the main problem, the main emotion, in that piece, is the frustration of trying to get through the fog of other people’s way of thinking. And I guess that's true of Heidegger. I mean Heidegger is certainly someone who went about dispelling fog, but in a way so idiosyncratic it seems to set up a new kind of fog. If you want to study hide, or you have to get inside his jargon, which is sort of a jargon of jargon. You know what I mean?
SCRIVENER
The being of Being, you mean?
ANNE CARSON
[Laughter] Everything taken to one further inside degree of what philosophers usually use.
SCRIVENER
And yet, where did Heidegger end up—the pre-Socratics.
ANNE CARSON
Yes, he kept on rolling himself backwards, and he ended up in poetry. I believe he was writing poetry in the latter decades of his life, pretty regularly, and recommending it as a superior way of thinking.
SCRIVENER
In “Kinds of Water,” for a change of thinking, there’s the Japanese travel narrative, the utanikki.
ANNE CARSON
Yes, I read a number of those Japanese pieces. It's an established genre in Japan, the pilgrim narrative, and the mixture of verse and prose. It's very interesting to me, that's why I put those epigraphs from Japanese writers.
SCRIVENER
There is your prose pilgrim narrative, going from France to Spain, and then there's the Japanese lyric as an epigraph for each section of the narrative.
ANNE CARSON
I was very interested in that tradition at that time, because it's centuries old in Japan. And the conception of pilgrimage, going walking to a place for holy reasons, and recording the event. So I took that tradition as a model of what I was doing both because of the similarity and the dissimilarity. What I was doing, making a pilgrimage in Christian Europe, has a different tradition behind it than the Japanese, from the religious point of view. And I was interested in exploring that difference. I guess that's why in that essay one of the topics that emerged was the conception of pennants, which is a uniquely Christian concept, and one that is, therefore, interestingly, lacking in the Japanese kind of pilgrim narrative.
SCRIVENER
You've explored travel narratives elsewhere as well. You’re invoking the travel narratives of El Cid, that is, travelling with “My Cid” in “Kinds of Water,” and there's the travel narrative on camping with the “Chinese Emperor” in “Just for the Thrill,” and also, there's narrative of Anna Xenia in “The Fall of Rome: a Traveller’s Guide.” I thought you might comment on your compulsion, let me call it, for travel narratives.
ANNE CARSON
I guess it's a compulsion to find that quality, that structuralists called estrangement, which is a way of getting slightly outside the membrane of your own normal life so you can look back at it. Travel physically displaces you and puts you in a context where you don't know the rules. I think in my writing I tried to do this in other ways—grammatical, syntactical, and so on. But the largest structure of estrangement that one can find is travel, just going somewhere other.
SCRIVENER
On the other hand, there’s “The Life of Towns,” an intimate sense of place or person, or text. It works well in counterpoint to your travel narratives.
ANNE CARSON
That’s true, “The Life of Towns” is full of things or locations—I guess you’d call them mental locations, where I feel at home, and that's why they're poetic subjects for me. But at the same time in that work, there is that necessary displacement arising from the punctuation, so that the subject matter is quite familiar, yet that sentence-break forces it into an unfamiliar texture. So both aspects seem to be present there.
SCRIVENER
I might point to Gertrude Stein, calling attention to the materiality of language. For you, it's the excess of the period, estranging the reader from a normal comfort zone in reading the text.
ANNE CARSON
Yes, the estrangement, the discomfiting of the reader, has some deep purpose I'm not quite aware of. It comes and goes in my writing; it comes and goes as an emotion. I think that's true also of Gertrude Stein, as you said, but in the other direction: I shorten sentences, and she lengthens them, to put the reader off balance. But maybe the overall intention is similar: to defamiliarize, and therefore cause a friction of mind and spirit in the taking up of the page into the readers mind.
SCRIVENER
One effect of defamiliarization occurs in “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings,” and that’s by way of the fragment. Also, in “The Glass Essay,” the long poem about Emily Brontë, the speaker regards the final five pages of annotations at the back of the text as the most fascinating aspect of the book, the commentary on the fragmented text. What is it about the fragment as a form that engages you so?
ANNE CARSON
I think two things: the fact that it has an unreal border, that is, it's broken off something that was bigger or intended to be bigger, and when I describe a fragment that way I'm thinking of the ones that I study in Greek or Latin manuscripts, which are literally just shreds of some thing that was originally a bigger text. So that border which for us is a border of space, or silence, and quite unnatural, gives an immediate defamiliarization, and also a framing, which strengthens the context of whatever's left there on the page, or on the fragment, on the shred. So that's interesting to me. Also, the fact that in my discipline, these fragments, when they exist, always come down to us, embedded secondarily in a commentary of some kind, or in an editing. Somebody has found the fragment and decided what it is and made decisions about the text and then put that information around the fragment, somehow, so that when I read it as somebody opening a classics text, I see the original thing with this frame of silence, which is not its own choosing, and then outside that another frame of all the thoughts of the editor, or the commentator. So all that for me adds layers and angles of thinking about the thing that it wouldn't have if it were in its original form. Now a lot of my writing is an attempt to re-introduce those sorts of levels and angles to it is actually a flat surface, because what I am writing in my own text is not a fragment, and I have to artificially create angles and fragmentation to make it more like those ancient pieces.
SCRIVENER
Again, it almost sounds like early modernism, that is, Gertrude Stein, creating the verbal, effective cubism, trying to represent in a two dimensional space, as many perspectives as possible on the same object.
ANNE CARSON
Yes, I think it has something in common with that, but my understanding of that sort of cubism in language is that it is an attempt to describe a real object or a real event. What I’m trying to do is to describe an object or an event that could never exist, or more dimensions than are possible, or more angle division than a person could take. So that the fictional rises up through the factual and adds angles that go off into dotted lines because there are not real lines there.
SCRIVENER
Earlier I had asked you about a different kind of invasion. We had discussed invasions in the work of anthropology, but what I’m also interested in is the invasion of television into our homes and minds in your sequence “TV Men.”
ANNE CARSON
I wrote it because I was in TV. I was part of a PBS thing and we filmed some of it in Paris. I was really astonished. We went with the cameras—there were four cameras, two sound men, two actors, and three directors—and we just invaded —literally, that’s the only word you could use—this library in the Collège de France and it was full of people working on manuscripts, you know, bent over their books, and the camera crew just barged up the middle isle and set up their lights and started filming this program. And it was astonishing to me how the TV, and the event of TV, feels justified in taking over other people's reality. That's true in the filming of the program, and it's also true in the viewing. You switch on the TV in your living room and it does fill up your house. People are distracted from doing anything else. It just takes over. It seems to me the nature of that medium is to take over space everywhere it is.
SCRIVENER
“TV Men” comes from Glass, Irony and God. “TV Men” seems to speak to the irony in your title. By using irony, is that a way of setting up a certain kind of ironic distance between yourself and the TV subject?
ANNE CARSON
It's more an angle than a distance. I think of irony as a fold in the surface, where you have one surface and then you can choose to fold out another surface that observes it. So the way the narrative voice in “TV Men” approaches the event of TV, it has a kind of fold in it. And that certainly deliberate. But I'm not capable of writing a straightforward essay critiquing TV; they are profound, the imperfections of the medium, too profound to approach directly. But that folded way is the way I can manage.
SCRIVENER
You work in other media. You just mentioned television, but furnishing the covers of your books or your paintings. There's Volcano Talk on Glass, Irony and God, for instance. And I thought maybe we could segue to the absent photograph in “The Anthropology of Water,” though that’s a question in itself.
ANNE CARSON
The absence, yes. I like my work to be full of absent photographs. The painting on Short Talks is a photograph, actually. It's a painting that has been photographed against the background: a volcano set up on a calendar, a picture of a New York skyline, so it looks like a volcano erupting up through Manhattan. That one turned out pretty good. The other one on Glass, Irony and God is just a photograph of a painting. But it's kind of a double surface. It was an old piece of paper that had an engraving on it I did a long time ago in art school. I found it one day and painted on top of it so it has the engraving in the background going horizontally, there are some markings, and then I turned the paper and painted on it vertically so that the volcanos are rising up through the other lines, and the lines look like some sort of language passing from one volcano to the other. That’s why I called it Volcano Talk, because it looks like an unwritten language inscribed in the air between the volcanoes. Largely accidental, too. That’s what I like about art that you make with your hands, that it’s full of accidents. And those things to be smoothed out in the written media.
SCRIVENER
Something improvised, something aleatory.
ANNE CARSON
Aleatory, that’s a good word.
SCRIVENER
One of my favourites, whenever I can, I use it.
ANNE CARSON
It always impresses people.
SCRIVENER
Yes, it’s part of the jargon. Not to imply anything negative, but I wanted to ask you about a phrase in your essay “The Gender of Sound,” a phrase that has been thrown at you, namely ethnographic naiveté. It has, you say, been used to describe some of your work as a classicist with cultural anthropology. I thought you might try to defend or expand upon the possibilities of such practices.
ANNE CARSON
It's a justified evaluation. The phrase appeared in a review of something that I had written about women and pollution in which I had mingled anthropological evidence from different cultures with literary evidence from classical text. The person who reviewed it was probably a cultural anthropologist, I don't remember. Anyway, it's something that always happens in the standard academic disciplines when you cross boundaries between them because people assume that you are trivializing or simplifying the data. It's justified, that critique, and the reason I go ahead and do boundary crossing anyway is one, temperament, because that's the way I think, and I can't do much about it, and two, if no one ever did it, the disciplines would remain incommunicable, which I think is probably a loss.
SCRIVENER
Of course your books are interesting objects in themselves, in that you can move anywhere from the prose poem in one section to the annotated essay in another section. It seems that you are enacting interdisciplinarity in the construction of your text, which, I would think, must create something of a problem when you take that manuscript to a publisher and say, “Would you like to publish this potpourri?”
ANNE CARSON
They don’t really like potpourris. Well, they don’t really know what they like.
SCRIVENER
Only insofar as it’s going to make money.
ANNE CARSON
That's interesting that it does make some money, that this mixture is appealing to people. Not to say that my books have made me rich—but more people have read them than I thought would, which indicates there is a readiness and some people to move outside their narrow band of training into a wider, speculative, humanistic thinking. But there isn't much scope for that in the way we do things in the academy. It's pretty territorial there. I think that's a mistake. People are quite ready to accept more mixed up things.
SCRIVENER
You went to American publishers with the last two books, Glass, Irony and God and Plainwater. Were American publishers more receptive to interdisciplinary approaches?
ANNE CARSON
Yes, I think they are a little more flexible. In both cases, the editors were people who approached me, rather than I them. So I guess they knew what they wanted when they asked me to do the books. I'm not sure why, but they seem to be a little more advanced, a little more radical. Canadian publishers are still pretty conservative.
SCRIVENER
Why do you think that might be?
ANNE CARSON
I don't know, really. It's a slower culture, just moving differently in time than America. Americans are rushing. Americans have been rushing since they established their colony, and they're still faster at everything than we are. And there's more of them. Cultural mass makes the thing move forward quicker.
SCRIVENER
I would say that small presses in Canada might be more willing to publish an eclectic collection, but the fundamental problem is that the economic conditions of book publishing in Canada, especially for poetry, are terrible.
ANNE CARSON
Yes, it's rock bottom. It's pretty bad in the States too. You have to be able to indicate to them a market before they will take up anything the least bit strange or unconventional. But it's worse in Canada, sure, because the pot was so much smaller to start with.
SCRIVENER
It must've been exhilarating to publish Glass, Irony and God with New Directions, especially if you look at the book list and consider the company that you're now keeping. There's Ezra Pound…
ANNE CARSON
And T.S. Eliot and Nabokov. Yes, it's nice. I got involved with them because I wrote letters back and forth to James Laughlin for a number of years. He's the person who started New Directions back in 1919, or whenever it started. He's quite an old man now, but he's just a wonderful gentleman, and he likes to write letters. So we corresponded for a number of years, and then we did my book. It is a dignifying experience to be connected to somebody like that. He was lucky enough to come into a fortune in his adolescence, and he just decided to use it for books, so he invented New Directions and then started to publish people who wouldn't have been published otherwise. Among them, Ezra Pound and Nabokov. It's it's a great company.
SCRIVENER
We need patrons for the arts again. I think Marianne Moore was another one.
ANNE CARSON
Well they still have some of it in the States. There are a few millionaires around who do that. But I don’t think we’ve ever had the tradition of patronage in Canada, at least to an extent that makes any difference.
SCRIVENER
Yes, there aren’t the Guggenheims or Rockefellers in Canada.
ANNE CARSON
There doesn’t seem to be anyone around doing it. Well, maybe you and I can get rich and make the change.
SCRIVENER
Maybe by way of closing, I wanted to ask you about your “perfect listener” in the interviews supplementing the fragments and poems of “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings.” I’m also thinking about Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, which is subtitled Fragments. There’s something about the interviews that suggests what you’re looking for is a dialogue, a conversation. Is the reader somehow a lover in dialogue with the text? Can you configure the reader of the listener in that way?
ANNE CARSON
I don't think I imagine a specific person there. I came to the interview form out of frustration with the historiography of the project. I was trying to translate the fragments of Mimnermos, which are real fragments, and he is a real person, and my ability to translate them depended on historical knowledge of his time and who he was and what people think about him and all sorts of information that I couldn't get into the fragments anyhow. And I wanted to create a context, a historical or pseudo-historical context, so that the reader could approach the fragments with some of the data that I had when I read them, which enriches them. I couldn't think of any way of doing that except in the normal academic way, which is to have a commentary at the back of the book where you give facts about the writer, and that's kind of boring. People don't usually bother considering it until after they've read the stuff, so I thought of the interview form as a way to keep the reader involved in the subject matter, while giving them information of a historical nature about Mimnermos. So out of that attempt came, the two people, the two consciousnesses, in the interview, which must be some kind of bifurcation of me. I guess I call one of those people, the ideal reader. It must be half of me, or maybe not half, but some percentage.
SCRIVENER
I wanted to call this interview “Sokratic Dialogues.”
ANNE CARSON
It falls short of the Sokratic dialogue in that we don’t really know what we’re asking about.
SCRIVENER
I’ll be Thrasymakos.
ANNE CARSON
But then I don’t think I’m capable of being Sokrates, that’s the thing. We need we two and then somebody else to be Sokrates.
SCRIVENER
And we need wine.
ANNE CARSON
And a bit of wisdom.