“Carson’s Last Tape”: Red Doc> and the Influence of Samuel Beckett
The evolution of Anne Carson has taken peculiar turns. From the poetic scholarship of Eros the Bittersweet to the surreal landscape of Red Doc>, Carson has assembled a remarkably eclectic body of work. Her first full-length book of poetry, Glass, Irony, and God, moves from heartbreak in “The Glass Essay” to theological speculation and satire in “The Truth About God” and “The Book of Isaiah,” on to gender commentaries, both classical and modern, in “TV Men” and the book’s only essay, “The Gender of Sound.” Such diversity is not unusual for Carson, whose subsequent collections—Plainwater, Men in the Off Hours, and Decreation—contain everything from poems and dialogues to essays and opera. She has also produced two full-length books of scholarship, as well as translations of Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Sappho. Her most popular books, however, are her narrative-driven poems: Autobiography of Red, The Beauty of the Husband, Nox, and, most recently, Red Doc>, which serves as a kind of sequel to Autobiography of Red.
If readers buy Red Doc> expecting a simple continuation of its predecessor, they will be disappointed. As I wrote in my short review for The Rusty Toque:
One of the joys of reading a new Anne Carson book is savouring its ground-breaking originality, and Red Doc> is no exception. Written mainly in narrow columns of sporadically punctuated verse, it continues the tragicomic, mythology-inspired romance of Geryon and Herakles, now named ‘G’ and ‘Sad But Great.’ Like Autobiography of Red, the plot of Red Doc> is fairly episodic, driven by elliptical waves of language rather than dramatic incident, but the overall tone has changed. Emotion has been largely traded for thought, immersion for detachment, realism for absurdism, mythology for modernity. Whereas Autobiography of Red was a heartbreaking portrait of the artist as a young red man with wings, Red Doc> is an equally painful (yet surprisingly funny) snapshot of the disillusioned artist as a not-so-young man, who has come to prefer Proust to philosophy, comfort to adventure, irony to grief.
On the whole, readers may find Red Doc> less accessible (and less inspiring) than Autobiography of Red, which balanced its pathos with flickers of hope. Red Doc> is a darker, denser, and more difficult book, despite its occasional playfulness.
As a classicist, Carson typically draws inspiration from such usual suspects as Homer and Sappho, and lesser-known poets like Simonides and Stesichoros. However, her primary influence in Red Doc> is not an ancient Greek, but a modern Irishman: Samuel Beckett. As I further noted in the same review:
Carson’s epigraph from Samuel Beckett (“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”) not only foreshadows the central characters’ hopeless attempt to rekindle their relationship, but also sets the stage for the world of the novel as a whole. The barren landscapes, the absurd interactions, the surreal characters—everything seems to have wandered out of a Beckett play.
Whereas Autobiography of Red was about thriving, Red Doc> is about surviving. In fact, an alternate Beckett epigraph for Red Doc> could be the last lines of The Unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Stoic endurance in the face of absurdity is G’s new motto, having relinquished his earlier dreams. Like Sad, G has not become stronger with experience, but damaged, possibly beyond repair; he has been forced to retreat into a protective shell of irony in order to bear the burdens of existence.
G’s progression from hopeful young artist to embittered adult mirrors the devolution of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. However, Carson does not provide a Leo Bloom to save the spirit of her book; Red Doc> is populated only by lost souls, various kinds of Stephens. This gradual shift from Joycean aspiration to Beckettian disintegration signals a sea change in Carson’s perspective, not only in relation to the world but also to the possibilities of representation as such. Some might argue that, after Joyce and Beckett, literature (especially fiction) has nowhere left to go. Joyce had pushed language to its limits in the maximalism of Finnegans Wake, and Beckett had done the same (albeit from the opposite end) in the minimalism of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Even Beckett’s theatre eventually moved from the full-length, two-act structure of Waiting For Godot to the minute-long, micro-play “Breath.” Perhaps Red Doc>’s epigraph (“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”) is not simply a commentary on the narrative to come, but also on the perpetual struggle of the artist trying to express the inexpressible, trying to celebrate the potential of language while painfully aware of its limitations. Or perhaps Carson simply views Autobiography of Red (despite its popularity) as a kind of failure, and Red Doc> is her attempt to fail better.
Beckett’s influence has become increasingly transparent in Carson’s work. Her earlier books were shaped mostly by the ancient Greeks, but occasionally poets such as Paul Celan, John Keats, and Emily Brontë snuck onto the page. In her more recent work, however, Beckett’s fingerprints are everywhere. In Decreation, she includes a series of poems related to Beckett and an essay on his teleplay, “Quad.” In Antigonick, the first lines reference Beckett directly, and the overall tone and rhythm of her dialogue sounds more like Endgame than Antigone. Although inspired by Herodotus and Catullus, Nox reads like Carson’s version of Krapp’s Last Tape, addressed to her recently deceased brother. Aside from Joyce, Beckett’s main influence is arguably Marcel Proust, whose search for lost time dominates Krapp’s Last Tape and drives Beckett’s recurring obsessions with memory and repetition, mortality and decay. In Red Doc>, Carson shares Beckett’s fascination; Proust becomes G’s new favorite author and consequently the book’s most noticeable allusion.
If Beckett forms the intellectual core of Red Doc>, Proust forms the emotional. If Autobiography of Red is about looking forward, Red Doc> is about looking back. Throughout the novel, G oscillates between his desire to remember (or, ideally, relive) his relationship with Sad and his need to forget it. Like all meaningful pain, Sad has become an inescapable part of G’s past, and thus, for better or worse, a part of his psyche. As G admits to himself, “whether you keep this man in your life or put him out equal trouble.” Forgetting is impossible, remembering is torturous, and reliving is problematic at best. G knows that Sad has “outlived his myth,” that whatever they shared in the past could not be reproduced in the future, and even if it could, it would only lead to more heartbreak. However, like Krapp, G has become fixated, trapped in his bittersweet memories, unable to recover and connect with others, despite his best efforts. “Fail better” is the most G can hope for; success is no longer an option.
Sad, however, is not the only object of G’s affection, nor the only source of his regret. G’s mother frames the narrative and reminds readers of Autobiography of Red that G was once Geryon, an innocent boy with wings. The most devastating moments in Red Doc> arrive near the end when G abandons his aimless road trip and visits his dying mother in the hospital: “No one should see me like this is her main worry […] a handful of twigs under the sheet […] Her voice thin enough to see through.” A few pages later, they have their final, touching conversation (“I look awful don’t I. No you look like my Ma.”), followed by her funeral: “his mother is lying out there in her little soaked Chanel suit. The weeping has been arriving about every seven minutes. In the days to come it will grow less.” Such emotional passages in Red Doc> are the exception, not the rule, and Proust’s influence becomes peripheral when compared to Beckett’s pervasive presence.
In Red Doc>, Carson’s characters are little more than tramps and lunatics, solipsistic wanderers and chronic sufferers. They embody the most bizarre and pathetic aspects of human nature, at once pitiful and amusing, like the outrageous characters in Beckett’s earlier works, Murphy and More Pricks Than Kicks. They are frequently assigned letters and symbols instead of proper names (G, Sad, 4HO, CMO), reducing their humanity to its most basic, nihilistic components, akin to Beckett’s later dramatic figures. In general, however, Carson’s characters resemble the inhabitants of Beckett’s mid-career plays, Endgame and Waiting For Godot. They talk in circles and argue. They hate to be alone yet despise company. They wander and wait, without ever achieving their goals. They are disgusted by life but afraid of death. They are doomed, in other words, to keep living. At one point, Sad asks, “Whatever happened to your autobiography […] I gave it up says G. Nothing was happening in my life. They look at one another and start to laugh.” G and Sad have finally chosen to trade their idealism for cynicism, to laugh at their misery instead of cry. Those who cry mourn the life they have lost or the life they should be leading; those who laugh know that such lives are unobtainable. By laughing, they mourn the part of themselves that used to be able to cry.
Carson may emulate Beckett’s style, but she never imitates. Her quick staccato dialogue is separated by slashes without reference to settings or speakers, as though the characters were talking in a Beckettian void: “Goodlooking boy wasn’t he/ yes/ blond/ yes/ I do vaguely/ you never liked him/ bit of a rebel/ so you said.” Likewise, Carson’s meditation on time—“Time passes time does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes”—echoes the beginning and ending of The Unnamable, as well as Clov’s opening lines in Endgame: “Finished. Nearly finished. It must be nearly finished.” Even Carson’s minimalistic punctuation resembles Beckett’s. Her use of periods and line breaks seems almost haphazard at times, as though she is trying to undermine her poetic authority by deconstructing her own language, piece by piece. Before a recent public reading of Antigonick, Carson quoted a letter from Beckett, on his aspirations toward language: “I want to bore hole after hole in it until what cowers behind it seeps through.” In Red Doc>, she comes closer than ever to achieving this goal.
Even Carson’s landscapes, both literal and philosophical, recall Beckett’s strange universe. From deserted volcanoes to mental hospitals, Carson’s settings are emptied-out wastelands, drained of meaning. Sad not only recognizes this world for what it is, but even seems to relish its hollowness: “He loves driving into this emptiness. Place that is nothing else but what it is he says.” Landscapes are thus reduced to their bare bones, stripped of beauty, exposed to the elements:
Another town slapped silly by wind it doesn’t matter where. Towns are all the same. [...] No tree no bush no barrier no edges or scale just a huge flat hand that sweeps where it will and wrecks what it wrecks. Why didn’t I bring Proust. G lays his head on the table it sinks into the table.
This brief passage captures the essence of the book: bleak, sad, and strangely funny. Carson’s world (like Beckett’s) is lifeless, purposeless, and miserable, but it retains an absurd form of dignity. Its inhabitants huddle together for spiritual warmth—quietly, desperately, hopelessly seeking transcendence. At best, they find small doses of pleasure; at worst, they suffer immeasurable pain. Usually they settle for boredom.
Although Beckett’s voice creeps more and more into Carson’s work, it never dominates the text. Their unique imaginations blend so seamlessly, in fact, that his influence is always complementary. However, if Carson continues to move from affirmation to negation—from the pathos of Autobiography of Red to the tragicomedy of Red Doc>—her work may collapse (like Beckett’s) under its own philosophical weight. Where, for instance, can Carson go from here? How does one locate redemption in her recent work? Or is she no longer concerned with such things? Is redemption illusory to begin with? Could this be Carson’s final point?
“Not every day can be a masterpiece,” claims the final lines of Red Doc>. “This one sails out and out and out.” Where it sails, however, and to what purpose, remains to be seen.
