“Anne Carson’s Misstep”: A Review of Anne Carson’s Red Doc>

 

Anne Carson is a cold matador of a poet. At her best. As in “Epitaph: Zion:”

[tab10]Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives[/tab10] [tab15]Were fragile, the wind[/tab15] [tab10]Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather[/tab10] [tab15]Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.[/tab15]

This is the first poem from Men in the Off Hours. Before it, she readies the reader like a bull. As is her habit, she prefaces the book with a finely crafted essay that ranges widely and reads proactively. This pushes the already proactive reader—why else come to Carson?—into full proactive-reader mode. Then she delivers a poem like this right off the bat. The language and music are precise, elegant and clean, completely under her control. Notice the subtle music: “OB-jects” = “GA-zes,” the proliferations of w’s, the way the ‘e’ and ‘a’ sounds surround the ‘o’ sounds in the last sentence. The first two sentences make a nicely phrased, but not remarkable, set of propositions: murder begins with the ability to perceive the perception of others, and within that murderous world we move like cracked glass. The last sentence, though, is jabbed in the reader’s back like a sword as the poet slides one step from the red cape. The “our” of this poem is as huge as can be: it is humanity. The “refugee breather,” then, stands in for the same, and is to blame. We may be fragile, Carson suggests, but we’re not innocent, for it was we who “drank the bowl of elsewhere” and condemned ourselves to this fate.

This is vintage Anne Carson: understated and subtle but with both eyes on the grandest themes. This is a precarious balance, and she does not always pull it off in her shorter poems. When she does—as in “Hopper: Confessions,” or most of Decreation and Glass, Irony, and God—the results are fantastic. At these times, she retains her cold, distant voice, yet she somehow wrangles depth, warmth, and even humour into that vise.

While obviously different in many ways, her best narratives do the same thing. “The Glass Essay” finds the speaker visiting her mother and contemplating the Brontë sisters. Sounds boring and scholarly, but it is only the latter, because as Roger Gilbert has written, Carson “deploys her scholarly voice as a dramatic instrument whose expressive power lies partly in its fragility.” Likewise, in Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband, Carson is a scholar, poet, dramatist and novelist—often simultaneously. And as in her non-narrative collections, the mixture usually works.

Still, it can be difficult to know what to do with the scholarly aspects of Carson’s work. The Beauty of the Husband, for instance, is interspersed with fragments from John Keats; they bear no obvious connection to the main plot of the book, which follows a dissolving marriage. Gilbert (in the same essay) has an explanation for them, but even if one skips over these fragments, the main narrative is compelling enough on its own. The same could be said of the introductory material to Autobiography of Red. Compared to that of Husband, it is much easier to grasp. It is also an interesting example of creative scholarship, and in a roundabout way it gives the reader just enough background information to prepare for the main thrust of the book: the novel in verse. Again, it is this main narrative that makes the book worth reading, with the scholarly framing material acting as a take-it-or-leave-it bonus.

Unlike Husband, Autobiography carries the scholarly/poet split through the main narrative. It is easy to forget Geryon and Herakles’s mythic roots due to the depth Carson injects into her modern day characters and narrative, but that narrative is still built on the classical tradition she specializes in as a scholar. And the fact that she simultaneously builds and dissolves the tension between the classical and modern is a key element in her success.

It is not, however, the reason the book succeeds. Instead, its value lies for the most part in the quality of its narrative and the portrayal of its characters. Geryon may have red wings, but we care about him because he is a sensitive and shy little boy with a mean older brother and a caring and open, if a bit distracted, mother. I was reminded of those early scenes—Geryon making his collages while his mom half watches TV and smokes cigarettes—by the early scenes in the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. Both are vaguely otherworldly yet touching portraits of innocence on the verge of potential ruin. With that innocence so well established, Carson can then take Geryon out into the world, where he fights to keep it alive despite Herakles’s cold love and the world’s disinterest. Geryon makes it in the end, kind of. At least he flies, giving some sense that his bildungsroman is complete. That matters to us because we have been made to care about him.

Notice that I have not mentioned style or form. That is because Carson’s “novel in verse” is more novel than verse. It is written with a lyrical tilt, allows itself more associative leaps and relies more on imagery than your typical novel, but as Eliot claimed of all free verse, it must in the end be judged by the standards of prose. As such, it holds up, for all the reasons I’ve described above. That said, an in-depth examination of Autobiography’s prose-verse style—including a look into exactly what the line breaks are doing there, or anywhere in her work—would be welcome, but there is not time for that now. Suffice it to say that Carson’s prosodic success in the narrative pieces is similar to that described in the short lyric discussed at the top. That said, it is against all the strengths of her previous work that the much anticipated Red Doc> would inevitably be compared.

Based on the early reviews, the comparison has not flattered the new book. Not that all the reviews have been negative, but it is telling that the negative reviews have tended to be more specific than those praising the book. Vague praise is not trustworthy and, as is the case here, it is often unearned. As much as it disappoints me to write this, Red Doc> does not approach the success of its predecessor. Its narrative structure is haphazard, its characters are undeveloped and its style is stark in a bad way: not crisp and devastating like Beckett, but plain and dull.

This is all the more disappointing because the concept and intent of the book are so promising. Geryon, now just G, is older. The romance of life has worn off, leaving G to fend off malaise. Herakles, now Sad but Great, or just Sad, has been to war, which has left him mentally scarred. Before Sad shows up, G is tending his herd of red cattle near an overpass, while his mom’s grown old, adding to G’s mid-life crisis.

Then someone named Ida comes along and ultimately sparks a journey. Ida is unconvincing. She appears in the story when she knocks G out with a 2X4 under his overpass. For no apparent reason. Then afterwards she sticks around, again for no apparent reason. Of Ida and G, Carson writes, “she puzzles him he/ puzzles himself.” Neither puzzle becomes remotely solvable throughout the book. The lines that follow—“her old/ plaid sportscoat his/ tendency to befriend/ catastrophe. She is/ innocent and filled with/ mood like a very tough baby”—are quick to befriend abstraction, and typical of the book’s unsatisfying characterizations. We already know of G’s “tendency to befriend catastrophe” from Autobiography, and all this tells us of Ida is that she’s one tough lady. We don’t get much beyond these simple descriptions throughout Red Doc>.

Very soon after Ida arrives, Sad’s “BIG GOLD LION head/ comes loping along.” Sad bumps past Ida, causing her to ride Io, the white-haired heart of G’s red Oxen herd, in a typical moment of Red Doc>-ian silliness that fails to move the plot forward and carries little meaning aside from silliness itself. With Ida gone, G is alone with Sad. “The man had been his/ oxygen once. When he left/ there was no oxygen,” Carson writes, again applying a thin critical gloss on Autobiography. We are also told, in reference to a cut on Sad’s hand, that “we all make good use of/ separate digits in our life/ but then (so Proust) catch/ sight of an old glove and/ burst into tears. G weeps/ thinking of Proust.” Really? He’s thinking of Proust? That name lands like a dead fish on the ground, being wiggled via string to convince us it is alive and caught fresh from the sea. Almost needless to say, it would be more convincing if he were thinking of Sad, although Sad would then have to be portrayed with depth enough for us care about him. In any case, Carson is lazily letting Proust stand in for G’s emotional state. Carson does somewhat save this scene, however, when she ends the poem with one of Red Doc>’s rare moments of grace, as “the/ oxen arrive softly round/ him.” That typically Carson-esque final line leaves an indelible image in the reader’s mind. It is direct to its point, and spare, yet depicts a convincing sensitivity.

Then Ida meets Sad in a hospital, after she sees Sad knock a medical tray out of a nurse’s hands (think the way people meet in Saved by the Bell episodes). Turns out they both know G (who would’ve thought?), and they share a bit of background information. Sad’s been in the army, where he got his new name, while Ida’s name means “Idea,” or, as a “Greek guy” told her, “the way/ you see inside your mind.” The former information is largely wasted, as we get scant additional insight into Sad’s condition, while the latter comes off as an admission that these characters, and Ida in particular, are not fully realized characters, but ideas for characters.

Not that Carson cannot make ideas interesting. The idea of G’s herd, for example, and what G gets from his contact with it, is nicely drawn out. For instance:

TYPICAL NIGHT- HERDING SONGS gallop their rhythms and tell of love.  G  doesn’t  usually sing to the  herd at  night. He may talk to them listen stand in the herd. Listen. That Community. A low purple listening but with a height to the sound.

This turns into an extended meditation on the herd, which G understands: he can “balance the topheaviness of/ their bodies by plaiting/ their feet as they walk.” Carson contrasts that to human wisdom, such as Sad’s notion of “warplay,” which he says, “had me pumped those years.” He goes on to tell the story of a woman who “hit the ground/ 75 saw the white bag 75/ bullets tore her head off.”  This has left him to conclude “so much/ human cruelty is simply/ incidental is simply/ brainless,” which leads to another of the handful of classic Carson endings in the book: that “you could/ take the entirety of the/ common sense of humans/ and put it in the palm of/ your hand and still/ have room for your dick.” This is followed by a poem from Io’s perspective, which adds depth, without overtly trying to, to Carson’s idea of animals’ indifferent wisdom: “Rackety/ every day to hear the every/ day forgets … The heavens are perfect./ Perfection sounds round./ Good morning good Io.”

The book’s central journey begins after Io’s meditation, with a call from Lieutenant M’hek, Sad’s one-man “warrior transition team.” When G asks about Sad’s condition, M’hek responds with one of the few interesting passages referring to Sad’s trauma: “if a man is ruined/ like a ditch don’t keep/ washing your hands in/ him.” In the next poem, G’s suddenly fighting a winter storm, and we eventually figure out they’re now on the road. G is upset he brought a Daniil Khrams book instead of Proust. “Why didn’t I bring Proust?” he asks. It is unclear why this matters, but it is also emblematic of the journey section of the book, which is where the uneven beginning needs to be justified, but instead is where the book falls apart. G and Sad share a largely dull road trip. G idly thinks about Proust and Khrams some more and notices his reflection has lost its “beauty impact.” Sad, meanwhile, remains grumpy and remote, and at one point tells a boring story about Spam and his dad. Finally, they enter a glacier. Behind an “ice fault” they approach is a “humanlike form” that “shimmers faintly/ and pauses.” There is also the smell of laundry. Turns out to be a psychiatric clinic. Lacking descriptive detail, the reader might imagine Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Before they can be admitted, G panics and flies, but this flight does not carry significance like that at the end of Autobiography. Instead, this one involves “ice bats,” which arrive and help him to his destination, an auto-garage behind the clinic. There he meets the clinic’s CMO, who’s also a car mechanic. This allows us to know as much about the CMO as it does about any car mechanic in the world. As in, not much.

While at the ice-clinic, which the book’s chorus (so Carson) tells us is “beside a glacial lake run,” some more stuff happens. A mystic-ish veteran named 4NO is added to the ragtag cast. He claims to “see Seeing Coming,” which is like seeing “all white all the time.” This is not explained; it is hardly developed at all. Instead it just sits there on the page: a metaphor’s empty vehicle. This is a veteran’s clinic, and thus most patients suffer from something like PTSD. This would seem perfectly suited to Carson, given the detached and scientific, yet forgiving and generous, character treatments that have made her name so widely known. But these wounded vets come and go from Carson’s screen without leaving much more than a first impression. There are a few conversations over meals. They involve mundane topics like battlefield food, or “those pesky traumatic/ memories,” in the CMO’s words. In the end, these do not add depth to the characters or move the plot forward, but instead come off as typical cafeteria talk among a mix of strangers and old friends, with a few dropped hints at larger themes that fail to develop into much.

Meanwhile, 4NO is putting on a play in which he plays Prometheus. In one scene he practices this while Sad sits in the room in a traumatic trance: “What things/ are like for him physical/ things this blacker and/ blacker spiral down it goes.” Eventually 4NO turns his speech, ostensibly addressed to the universe, to his old army buddy, Sad, saying “get your head out of your butt.” Finally, “they waltz.” This scene gestures toward a more meaningful examination of their pasts, and the recovery they seek, but the moment is not built upon. It is instead interrupted when Ida appears out of the blue again, in a cab (the normality of which, one supposes, is meant to stand out against the book’s general surrealism). Later, more references are made to the specific memory Sad is trying to get over—involving a dead woman and a white plastic bag—but this is mostly lost amid Ida’s intrusion.

Immediately upon arrival at the clinic, Ida is thrust into the middle of the action. She is in conversation with the CMO about her stealing habit, which he claims she has because it is “the opposite of feeling.” Like the CMO’s mechanic hobby, this detail of Ida’s personality is not returned to. Then she begins having sex with Sad, while G mopes nearby over his Daniil Khrams book (he’s also witnessed “THINKING ABOUT/ PROUST to pass the time”). Ida also draws a picture of Sad, among other things. Ida draws throughout, but unlike Geryon’s collages and photographs in Autobiography, Ida’s drawing never takes on any meaning beyond itself. “Drawings of Sad so far are/ minimal,” we’re told, while at another point Ida “brought/ her drawing book but/ found it hard to do/ anything in the dark.” Her drawing is never detailed more than in such passing references. This could be a metaphor for Red Doc>’s characters as a whole, and one that Carson, oddly, seems aware of, as when she writes, “you/ could never learn enough/ about Ida.” Well, I could stand to learn more than is given here.

Finally, as the time for 4NO’s play arrives, Ida instigates a riot that is caught on TV. 4NO and the CMO, we are told, have been conducting interviews about the former’s prophecies, and now the cameras are there to film his play. Ida arrives at the performance holding a plastic bag 4NO gave her earlier to carry props. The plastic bag ignites Sad’s repressed war memories, which 4NO had hoped to avoid. Sad snaps into a rage as his repression lifts; he attacks Ida and is rebuffed by another clinic inmate. A riot ensues, during which Ida leads the room in a song. Later, we’re told the event has gone viral, and the video shows Ida leading the song, but when Sad attacks her again, “She kickboxed/ him flat and kept singing.”

This is the height of Red Doc>’s action, but it is also one of its weakest moments. Not only is this very roughly sketched musical-riot lacking believability—it is but one tack in a series of tack-ons in the plot—but it also undercuts the serious examination of war-related trauma that Carson had just scratched the surface of. Just as Sad’s trauma is given some tangible form, Ida arrives in her clown car to dropkick the book back into the light-random-goofiness zone. It is as if Carson is mocking Sad’s trauma, and in the process her own book. And while humility and self-mockery can be useful, this book cannot withstand the assault it mounts on itself.

After the riot, G, Ida, 4NO and Sad, now in a straightjacket, escape the clinic with the same frivolousness with which most things happen in the book. They just suddenly “ESCAPE [the] SAME/ night” as a new poem begins. On they way they see Hermes, who’s been lurking about for a while in his silver tux, and pick him up. This ensures they “are headed for death.” The five head down the road until they reach a volcano; or, as the chorus sarcastically announces (again the book is mocking itself): “don’t say you weren’t/ expecting a volcano.”

All the while, M’hek has been watching the herd. This at first angers G, but it doesn’t cause any serious plot tension (which the reader is desperately looking for throughout the book’s middle section). M’hek is one of the only characters here with anything approaching the charisma of Carson’s past successes. Sadly, he has only a few poems, and one gem, on p. 124, in which he sits in a field with Io. As night falls, Io “leans her/ horn against M’hek’s knee. A hush carries itself up/ her sigh. Late stars watch them.” Despite his vividness as a character, his role in the plot highlights the book’s narrative deficiencies. Aside from his vague role as a kind of post-war therapist for Sad, M’hek has turned out to be a decent substitute shepherd, making G’s earlier fight with Ida about leaving the herd with M’hek completely pointless. But then again, there are a lot of pointless scenes here, and in a pretty short book, too.

The escape from the clinic brings G back to his M’hek-led herd, as both somehow converge on the aforementioned volcano. Io has eaten a hallucinogen and attempts to fly just as the car passes below. The Ox instead falls and is caught by G, with help form the ice bats, but not before she “Lets loose a/ great fart and poops/ gloriously just missing his/ head.” No one can accuse this book of lacking goofiness. One may wonder, however, at the point. On a related note, they are now inexplicably back at the clinic, in the shadow of the volcano, where a note informing G of his mother’s deteriorating condition is waiting for him. So they go to her.

As others have pointed out, the scenes including G’s mother stand out among the rest of the book, and her glow sheds some additional light on Sad and G (though Ida, the CMO, M’hek and 4NO remain, for the most part, closed books). The mother sections begin and end the book, and both play on a wistfulness for Autobiography. At Red Doc>’s open, Mom is asking G about Sad, and at the end Sad and Ida join G at her bedside for some touching moments between mother and son that close out the narrative. When his mother insists she looks terrible, and G responds, “No you look/ like my Ma,” a glimmer of the old Carson magic emerges. The poem goes on: “now she/ winces. In later years this/ is the one memory he/ wishes would go away and/ not come back” because “dying puts the two of/ them (now) into this/ nakedness together that is/ unforgivable.” But it is far too late in the game for G’s mother to save Red Doc> by giving it the heft its other characters lack.

That’s because between the mother sections lies a haphazard journey, thinly told and with an over-reliance on allusions. Carson has always thrown around classical and literary references like Nerf footballs, but in Red Doc> her characters are so thin that her depictions are forced to rely on these allusions all the more. But evoking the mythical Hermes or Prometheus—or Proust or Daniil Kharms—without investing anything particular into the allusion does not make up for a lack of character depth. In fact, because the reader is forced to look to these haphazard allusions for meaning, and finds little, the lack of real character development is more depressingly exposed. Even were I a Proust expert, would the mere mention of his name, or of a scene in his work, make any significant contribution to my understanding of Carson’s character?

Then there is the fact that this haphazard journey is told in mostly unremarkable prose scrunched into arbitrary forms. Here’s a short and incomplete summary of Carson’s prosodic history up to this point, written in the dominant form of Red Doc>:

Anne was once a matador goading she was we were the bull sometimes we knew we had her and again the knife in our back but now her poems are just like this loping sentence written on a thin  column that is just very direct and not deceptive.

This form is not without potential. As you write, the spaces adjust as you tempt the automatic line break. It does this when reading, too. It makes you think in small chunks, even if the semantics are in bigger chunks. At its basic function, that’s what the line break does: it disrupts semantic flow. Or it enjambs it, not with a specific semantic reason in mind, but usually for musical or visual or rhythmical reasons. Carson’s line breaks, however, are arbitrary, so they serve no such purpose. They are so random and accidental that they cease to really matter. Even the visual effect is cancelled due to the consistency of the form (the book is dedicated to “the randomizor,” a reference to Carson’s husband, but surely also to the gods of randomness themselves).

Random and accidental can be the work of matador poets, if those characteristics prove to be a ploy. If, for instance, Carson was filling her skinny descriptive columns, slash-separated dialogues and middle-justified chorus texts with eloquent descriptions of dynamic characters, the arbitrariness of the formal choices (some of which Carson claims to have resulted from computer errors), could be forgiven, along with her lightly tossed-in and meaningless allusions. But they’re not.

Carson has never been the most ear-catching lyricist, but even the deadpan Beauty of the Husband uses silence, pacing and sound more deliberately than Red Doc>, which despite the skinniness of the text, is the prosiest of her extended narrative works. Here are two typical examples of Red Doc>’s ultra-deadpan:

YOU SPELL IT number 4 letter N letter O no space all caps: 4NO / is it a nickname / no babycakes it’s functional the fucking army being a fucking fulcrum of fucking functionality / they called you 4NO in the army / are you going to repeat everything I say / sorry    / pass the sugar / so you knew Sad in the army / indeed I did / … TWELVE   FOIL PACKETS arranged on each tray in three rows of four. Ration is a beautiful word or so the CMO thinks. Key to a disciplined life.  Latin ratio “reason.” Rationality. Principle of order.

This is minimalist to be sure, but it is also incredibly dry and everyday. Carson is avoiding lyricism here. Thus, in Red Doc> Carson has crossed over (significantly) from novel in verse to verse novel in prose: the associative leaps and minimalism are there, but the language is plain, and the accidental enjambment that rules Red Doc> inevitably comes to feel like a shallow speed bump around which you easily learn to maneuver. Thus, we judge the book by the merits of prose, by which, again, it fails.

To return to the opening metaphor, if the reader is a bull, Red Doc> is a non-deceptive matador. Jason Guriel certainly took a charge at it, and aside from a few oversteps, he seems to have hit his mark. As he claims, the voice here is unmistakably Carson, but it is like she is badly imitating her previous work. The attempt is there, but lacks follow-through. For instance, Red Doc> is surreal, as many have pointed out, but it is not surprisingly so; weird things happen, but Carson does not inject her strangeness with enough detail to make it convincing. It remains an outline of the surreal, not its actualization.

The same lack is found in her poem “Wildly Constant,” which appeared in the London Review of Books, was included in The Best American Poetry 2010 and reads like an imitation of “The Glass Essay.” Like Red Doc>, “Wildly Consonant” is curt but dull, where its predecessor was slow but patient enough to develop complexity.

Red Doc> and “Wildly Consonant” may make one wonder if Carson is mailing it in, needs a better editor or a more critical fan base, or has simply lost her touch. And her admission to New York Times Magazine that the computer glitch that gave her the centre column form also sprung her loose from a bad bout of writing block could be taken to mean that she never really had anything to go on when writing Red Doc>—and it shows in the reading. The book feels thrown together, as if it were built on its plot points rather than its plot points emerging from its characters’ conflicts or interests. The characters’ motivation comes off as externally driven and internally random. It’s one thing to use randomness, but it’s another to rely on it. Red Doc> not only relies on randomness, but it relies on its reader making sense of that randomness, which is simply too much to ask, especially because the language itself is not nearly capable of carrying a substandard plot and thin characters.

I wouldn’t count Carson out just yet. This could just be one failed experiment, or it could be genius beyond my current comprehension (I doubt it, but would be happy to be proven wrong on that count). But some of her recent magazine poems are well worth reading. “The Eras of Yves Klein” and “Epitaph for Ben Sonnenberg” in particular are intriguing and add new elements to Carson’s body of work. It’s not too late for a successful comeback. But even barring that, there’s plenty of other poetry out there to read (like Louise Carson’s), and anyway, Anne Carson’s already given us far more great work than we could ever have expected. And no one’s perfect. Even Gretzky had his off games.