Narrow People, Second Thoughts
A Conceited, Presumptuous, Failed Review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma, part II
When I was a grad student in English lit, I focused on a period called the Long Eighteenth Century. There were a lot of classical references, so I picked up some knowledge of those texts and personages, and internalized the idea that such knowledge was useful, even good for you. So I’m drawn to Carson’s idiosyncratic inter-animation of ancient and contemporary.
Carson’s style can create a liberating spaciousness, a sense of being in the company of an academic at her leisure. We’re reading for pleasure—there won’t be an exam. We get inside jokes outside office hours, but also serious speculations and insights and what feel like entirely new genres and forms.
Those who don’t know the classical texts—they’re not routinely taught any more—and resent the implication that they should, may feel differently. I can sympathize here, too. Toward the end of the 18th century the Romantics rejected ancient Greek and Latin models and looked closer to home, and I’ve taken that turn to heart as well.
Carson does sometimes write without reference to ancient gods, poets, monsters or philosophers. There are lyrics in a contemporary mode: imagistic, conversationally speculative, even personal and elegiac. When I first encountered one of the latter—in the NYer, of course—“Father’s Old Blue Cardigan,” later included in Men in the Off Hours, I realized just how widely her powers ranged. Indeed, she had ranged right into my own literary space. I’ve published direct-voice personal poems myself, including on the death of a parent. After that I could no longer think of Carson as a poet working in an academic niche far away.
Wrong Norma contains a higher proportion of works that do not reference the classics than either Sweetwater or Men in the Off Hours, two earlier books that also contain a wide variety of parts and styles. For many readers this may be a recommendation in itself. It’s one reason I enjoyed the book so much, but it doesn’t mean the work is lighter, less strange, or less challenging.
Not that it’s all—or even primarily—personal lyrics or semi-autobiographical short stories. Intellectual by nature and profession, Carson continues to bring in the canon, but draws more from the moderns: wondering about William and Dorothy Wordsworth, dressing as Joseph Conrad, remembering John Ashbery, following Paul Celan up a mountainside to visit Heidegger.
When I purchased Wrong Norma (OK, before I purchased it) I was struck by the cover art—because it’s beautiful and because I didn’t quite get it. The first thing I saw was a wing. Attached to what, though? A fox, sort of. Jagged, exhausted, lying on its side. Wearing tattered opera gloves? Wrapped in black driftwood? Gripped by disembodied talons?
Then the head became a Janus head (yes, that’s a classical reference), with a euphoric cartoon profile opposite the fox, facing upward and away.
Wow, I thought, Carson is working with an amazing designer.
The front matter is ambiguous: design by “Anne Carson and Laura Lindgren.” But the promo on the website of the author’s literary agency is clear: “a stunning edition with images created by Carson….”
One more achievement to envy.
A few days later, part way through Wrong Norma in a story called “The Visitors”—where the narrator appears to be an artist—I read this: “I’d like to draw Freud with his fox. I’m not good at wings….”
In “1=1”—the opening piece in Wrong Norma—the swimmer/speaker explains “Every water has its own rules and offerings. Misuse is hard to explain…. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it?” Her question is not answered, except partially in the final sentence, as she gazes at a chalk drawing her neighbour has made: “The fox is stroking splashlessly forward. The fox does not fail.”
We humans, of course, fail often. Not just our tests, but our pleasures as well. Swimming, we fail the water. Dining, we fail our dinner companions and the occasion. Reading, we fail the author—not personally, of course, but as an avatar of our ideal self. As in “Saturday Night as an Adult,” we really want her to like us.
“Saturday Night as an Adult,” like “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan,” is a personal poem, and contains zero classical references. But it doesn’t have the thematic simplicity and direct personal voice of Carson’s elegiac poem. Like “1=1,” it is about a failure, and can be read as an attempt not to “fail” that failure. The poem tries to “swim” it, to write about it in a way that recuperates it, like the speaker (or the fox—the drawing of a fox, that is) in “1=1.”
Even though in 2023 I listed “middle age/[young]” among the uneasy binaries exposed by “Saturday Night as an Adult,” I meant at the time—as did others in the X comments—two ages of reader: inexperienced youth who took the poem as direct personal speech and experienced age who saw its ironic double perspective.
These two points of view, though, are not so much two groups of readers as they are two ages of the author. There is a double perspective, two confessings and critiquings of an event—as lived but also as remembered—compressed into a single short text.
In 2017 Anne Carson was 67. The speaker of the poem, by contrast, is young, young enough that the evening’s tribulations are barely navigable, young enough in her relationship with her partner that “neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it.”*
The poem tries to make art out of an old shame. Why else would the speaker “weep” if not from shame—at deboning fish, at the failure of the event. And what else does the closing sentence mean—“But you can’t stop it that way”—with its sudden turn to the second person, if not that these moments of shame live on and demand some kind of address, perhaps decades later.
The co-presence of the judging older poet and the judged (or so she thinks?) younger narrator is tense, however smoothly the poem may read. I tried (more than once, actually) during the X kerfuffle to see something of Carson’s nationality in this tension:
You can see by the slim uptake no one was much interested.
I doubt that the online flurry last June ever reached Anne Carson herself. Regardless, she does seem to have had second thoughts about “Saturday Night as an Adult.” There are a number of changes between the 2017 version and the 2024 version. Most are minor: shifts in punctuation, added italics, an ampersand for an “and.” The original is left-justified, more like a poem; the book version is fully justified, more like prose.
One change in particular touches on my own first reaction to the poem, which was that for all its awkwardness and comic pathos, it also has an element of deep offense.
In the original second line we get this pointed sentence: “They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens.” In Wrong Norma we get instead: “They are narrow-boned people (art people), offhand, linens.”
Under the Twitter post that went viral in 2023, Hannah Williams singled out the phrase “narrow people, art people, offhand, linens” without comment, implying it was important to her appreciation of the poem. In retrospect, this was a clue (another classical reference—you can’t escape them, really).
This short quote from the poem prompted only five replies, and while these did range from cheers to disses, the viral escalations were happening elsewhere.
Thanks to Twitter’s stunning search capability (I’m still impressed by these things) I discovered afterward—and I’m sure some of Williams’ followers would have remembered at the time—that she had posted this same Anne Carson poem and this same line before, back in 2019, with some choice praise:
She returned to the post the next day to amplify:
What’s more, these 2019 comments appear under a repost of her initial reaction back in 2017, calling it a “perfect short story” when the NYer issue first appeared:
These earlier posts were all received without debate or disturbance.
You can see why Williams might have been dismayed, even shocked, by the negativity stirred up in 2023. It must have seemed like Twitter—perhaps public discourse itself—was sinking into a morass of knee-jerk reactions and stubborn quarrelsomeness.
I “can’t” help agreeing that this line in particular is “exquisitely, beautifully cutting,” and I readily second Williams’ implication that this sharpness is key to the success of the whole micro-narrative.
How can the reader not hear “narrow” as “narrow-minded” and apply it to “art people”? Carson puts them immediately side by side. Are they related, even synonyms? And who are the non-narrow people? The speaker and her partner? Are they “literature people”? Or narrow, art people themselves?
You might say “narrow” is just a quirky word for “thin.” This might resonate with “casual,” and “linens.” Fashionable thinness would enhance the shade of envy that tints the whole piece. Not all art-people, readers might assure themselves—not even all thin art people—are narrow minded. But the insult abides.
“Saturday Night as an Adult” is a character piece about a young woman who doesn’t know whom she has greater disdain for: herself or the friends she hopes to impress. The poem opens with “We really want them to like us.” What follows is a complex, comical and painful account of what this youthful desire—call it cultural social climbing—can entail in practice, “as an adult.”
The perfection, I think, is in the carefully controlled co-presence of two ages of narrator. A stereoscopic aura is in force that allows “we really want them to like us” and “narrow people” to sit at the same table.
What is gained by changing 2017’s “narrow people, art people” to “narrow-boned people (art people)” for the Wrong Norma version? For one thing, we get a new—if strained—resonance with the bones that appear later in the fish entrée. It also adds a degree of vulnerability to the other couple, more than just calling them “thin” would have done. The use of the phrase is normally literal: a less robust skeletal structure, either of individual people or breeds of animal. At the same time, the use of the round brackets makes for an even stronger equation with the adjacent “art people.”
What is lost? Not only does the new phrasing muddy the logic and the metaphor, it feels like a dodge, a walking back, a dulling of the poem’s “cutting” edge.
The only other change in actual wording is the addition of an adverb in the third-last line: “We decide not to go for ice cream and part” becomes “We decide not to go for ice cream and abruptly part.” For me at least, abruptness was already—and preferably—inferred. It’s almost as if (surely I’m seeing things now) the offensive edge lost by using “narrow-boned” near the beginning is being recouped to some degree by adding “abruptly” near the end.
To find that an author you admire—famed for composure and eloquence—had second thoughts about a published work and fussed with the details before publishing it again is an eye-opener. First, there’s a slight relief that they are indeed fallible like ourselves. But the real pleasure is the insight into method and motivation.
It would be presumptuous and very likely wrong to conclude that the revisions have made “Saturday Night as an Adult” somehow less perfect. After all, there is a strong bias operating here, a bias that’s familiar to most of us from our musical preferences: we tend to like best whichever version of a song we heard first.
Maybe there’s something unfixable about “Saturday Night as an Adult,” something that arises from there being no perfect way for the two narrators to speak at once.
Young Anne Carson and middle-aged Anne Carson (let’s just assume the fiction is autobiographical) have different priorities in the narrative and in the word choices. Young Anne Carson gets the present tense. Middle-aged Anne Carson gets the final say.
Which one thinks the dinner companions are narrow-minded, and which one doesn’t want to give that impression? Was there a third point of view somewhere between youth and age, a time where the event was remembered with self-defensive contempt, sour grapes? As in: “Sure, I failed that dinner big time, but those people were probably narrow-minded anyway.” Did that point of view need to be purged?
Most reviews of Wrong Norma have something to say about “Saturday Night as an Adult.” It is one of the most accessible pieces in the book, and has a snappy, jump-cut pace you don’t get in her more desultory, associative texts. For Kate Kellaway in The Guardian it seems the beautifully cutting aspect of the 2017 version is not completely lost. She quotes the revised text and yet still feels, if not a sharp edge, at least a “gleam:”
She writes with a gleam in the eye, in a shorthand. The friends her narrator meets are: “narrow-boned people (art people), offhand, linens.”
Carson’s fussing over detail here may not be evidence of anything but fine degrees, like the adjusting for level of a small framed picture that must hang on an unsquare wall.
Maybe the revision of “Saturday Night as an Adult” can be traced to the same impulse as its creation, a kind of psycho-social fussiness that cannot simply let go of early and ultimately trivial embarrassments and failures. (Who doesn’t have a bit of this in them, eh?) Here I make one more bid to introduce the matter of Carson’s Canadian-ness, the culture of her upbringing—keeping in mind that I don’t believe in such things in the abstract.
(National character does not really exist except as a set of stereotypes, or at best generalizations, that are seldom useful. This just might be one of those useful moments.)
I did not notice a single explicit reference to Canada or the author’s Canadian-ness in Wrong Norma. And yet when asked recently in the Paris Review about the book’s title, Carson—out of the blue—brings it up herself:
When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong.
“Wrong” I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing.
The politeness part is familiar, and as a Canadian I get a slight glow at the possibility that Carson’s wrongness might be our wrongness. But I’m also not sure what she means.
Polite but wrong. How is that “one characteristic” not two? Is it wrong to be polite? Arguably that’s the moral of “Saturday Night as an Adult.” The young couple should have been rude enough to say “bag it” and leave the restaurant. Is it too much, then, to say that Carson should have been rude enough to let “narrow people, art people” stand unrepentant as it stood in 2017? In softening it for 2024, is she being Canadian: polite, but wrong?
*An interesting (I think) side-note re “bag it.” One of the sub-debates in the viral moment last year was over the meaning of this idiom. I was on the side of those who heard it as a variation of “skip it,” “to hell with it,” “let’s blow this popsicle stand,” or better yet the classic “Fuck this noise” (which does capture a major complaint about the restaurant’s ambience).
In the Wrong Norma version, “bag it” is set off by a comma, capitalized and italicized as “Bag it.” Making this change, the author seems to be moving “bag it” toward the other camp, who thought it meant asking the waiter to “bag” the food so the diners could leave. Either way, the young couple are impaled on their timidness and can only continue to endure their meal—and the noise.
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