Beggars and Ladders
Brent Raycroft reflects on Anne Carson's "Poverty Remix (Sestina)," the inter-connections between ancient scapegoating rituals and modern homelessness, and the problem with Emily Wilson's critique.
“Poverty Remix (Sestina)” is the piece in Wrong Norma that gets the most attention from Emily Wilson in her essay “Fox and Hedgehog.” It concerns the ancient Greek poet Hipponax, whom I had never heard of. I confess I skimmed it in on my first read, a bit intimidated. Wilson’s essay—maybe inadvertently—helped me see its importance.
Hipponax spoke an obscene, bitter, insulting poetry, from the point of view of the poor undesirable, the about-to-be-outcast, the pharmakos. Not much of his work has survived.
Carson draws an extended parallel between the ancient Greek scapegoat and the homeless and destitute of today. The sestina (a medieval form, oddly) and the prose “appendices” that follow stir together Hipponax’s fragments with Carson’s voices, both her unguarded interior voice and her helpful scholarly voice.
The blurring of the ancient beggar-scapegoat-poet with the contemporary unhoused is enlightening but also shocking:
…some with a hand-written cardboard, some with a dog or dogs…some mad haters, some tending an inner world, some saying “God bless you” to all who pass, some very funny….Buy a homeless person a cup of coffee. Offer him a meal of barley cakes, cheese, black and white figs, then flog him on his genitals and drive him out of the city.
Purification rituals from millennia past are still active, we realize, in the awkward etiquette of street charity and the violence of “cleared” encampments.
Wilson acknowledges that Carson “does wrestle seriously with the political and moral questions underlying Hipponax’s poems,” but ignores the politics and simplifies the morality. Carson asks: “Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does…” and though she admits “We are all stingy,” she also cites “macro-economics, ” “the law of demand-and-demand” and the “shameless grabbing at profits.”
Wilson projects onto Carson a psychological take that simply doesn’t fit, and may reveal more about herself:
She worries about her own prejudices: Who is “the poet,” and can a poor person really be one, just as much as a comfortable white Canadian lady on her way for a nice swim?
Surely there are some poor poets?
No?
Not even poor Hipponax?
Carson mentions Wordsworth’s stinginess. Wilson says:
This could be a partial acknowledgment, on the part of the MacArthur-winning author and her literary persona, of her own privilege—although maybe Carson wiggles off the hook by skewering Wordsworth much more unambiguously than herself.
Surely the lady doth protest too much.
After considering “Poverty Remix (Sestina)” Wilson suggests that the longer works in Wrong Norma are too long. Her culinary “reduction” metaphor—"I often wished Carson had found a way to boil them down, like fruit into jam”—would have sufficed. But it’s not just length or over-explaining she has in mind. She follows up with a more elaborate figure:
the means of production do not always need to be preserved in the finished product. You can throw the ladder away after you make the climb.
This ladder metaphor is worth a close look.
For one thing, it’s not on point. Explanations, personal or academic, of how or why a given piece was made are minimal in Carson’s work. I often wish there were more footnotes, not less.
Wilson’s “you can throw the ladder away” begs (!) comparison to “pull up the ladder,” a working-class trope familiar in the UK especially. And Wilson is originally British. It’s the “unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others” (Wikipedia).
It comes from navy lore—the last man on board a ship would yell: “I’m all right Jack; pull up the ladder!”
You can hear it in Pink Floyd’s “Money”—“I’m alright Jack, keep your hands off of my stack!” and read it in this meme:
Is the similarity of Wilson’s “throw away the ladder” to “pull up the ladder” an unconscious repurposing or a deliberate political signal? Her wink at Marx’s “means of production” terminology suggests it’s a signal.
Wilson seems to be saying: “Pull up the ladder, Canadian lady. Don’t worry so much about the underclass. It only draws attention to your own privilege.”
As Wilson said earlier when discussing “1=1,” “There is a price for everything.” No point indulging in buyer’s remorse.
On the various rituals and shames of poverty, Carson remains realistic:
Sometimes I get used to seeing a certain homeless person on a certain street corner, then one day that person is gone. Giving rise to anxiety. And a measure of relief. I keep my dollar. Avoid shame.
She doesn’t sentimentalize or idealize the poor (or herself):
We don’t know if Hipponax was really poor (the poor can be tricky).
So…if the poor might actually be not poor, who is being “tricky”? Carson confronts us with an absurd rationalization that I think most of us have used, shamefully, as we pass by those in need. A “Catch-22” for the 2020s.
I have no idea where Emily Wilson and Anne Carson might rank on the ladder of economic class, beyond being in the middle somewhere. Or how they would vote. In most Western countries the electoral spectrum seems to be narrowing anyway, becoming more a choice of scapegoats than a choice of collective goals.
Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma—not just when she writes about the beggar/liar poet Hipponax but throughout—shows a persistent, conflicted concern for the destitute other. An excess of concern, perhaps.
In Emily Wilson’s “Fox and Hedgehog,” this excess generates a pushback as revealing of the critic’s anxieties as Carson’s writing is of her own. Carson’s anxieties, though, are more self-aware “…we are thrown into turmoil about whom to give a dollar to….”
Despite her resistance to Carson’s experimental classicism, Wilson does at one point get into the spirit of the project. Having conceded early on that
Carson’s comparative method opens up the possibilities for literary insight in readings not shaped by historicism.
she concentrates afterward mostly on Carson’s errors and excesses. But while reading “Poverty Remix (Sestina)” Wilson discovers something “comparative” that intrigues her, something only visible because of her own expertise as a classicist:
Hipponax’s poetry is printed without the breathings, as if the impoverished ‘Ipponax had a funny Hollywood-style Cockney accent….
I had to look up this “breathings” business. Text for ancient Greek requires an intro apostrophe to denote an aspirated “H” sound.
Carson, too, studies error: its inevitability and its generative power. Did she omit the intro mark by mistake or on purpose? Wilson hedges, but lumps the omission in with Carson’s other “basic errors.”
What’s especially interesting here is that the original publication in Kenyon Review has the name written correctly: “ Ίππῶναξ” (pronounced Hipponax). The Wrong Norma version has a tiny omission: “ Iππῶναξ” (pronounced ‘Ipponax). Carson’s clever late revision? Wilson’s clever recuperation of a typo? Does it matter?
What’s Cockney for “It’s a mystery”?
Bits of ‘Istory?