Hedgehog and Fox
Gloves On, Knives Out: New and Old Developments re: Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma
A few months before “Gloves On!” was published, Emily Wilson’s review essay “Fox and Hedgehog: The Myths of Anne Carson” appeared in The Nation. It’s a dazzling effort to both praise and dispraise Carson, employing a wide variety of tones—many with shades of sarcasm—and laced throughout with both insight and animus.
Reaction to Wilson’s essay focused on the ratio of admiration to hostility. Most readers saw more of the latter. The best collection of comments I’ve seen is the Reddit conversation under r/classics. BrianMagnumFilms sets it up with “Most famous woman in classics [Wilson is the new translator of Homer] reviewing other most famous woman in classics, relevant here I hope.”
The Reddit conversation is a good read. (Apparently Mary Beard is the actual most famous woman in classics.)
On Twitter, author Zito Madu has an eloquent thread that starts “I opened up the Emily Wilson essay on Anne Carson and this is all about to ruin my day, week, and month. I wanted the year of the hater, but not like this.”
Madu’s later assessment gets it just right, at least from the Carson fan point of view:
I think she [Wilson] takes the classics so seriously that it feels annoying that someone who also likes them uses them as aesthetic and poetic tools….[Carson’s] project is just different, and there’s so many unnecessary personal insults here.
Reacting to these negative reactions to her negativity, Wilson posted a Twitter thread in her own defense, while at the same time relishing the fuss:
Me: writes long appreciative essay in praise of Anne Carson’s charming strangeness, humor, curiosity and courage. Includes a light sprinkling of nuance.
Twitter: OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THE BEEF, WOO-HOO, CAT-FIGHT!
For the record, the online activity did not reach a viral level.
The folks at r/classics did notice Wilson’s Twitter response, though, and girleuripides gave the non-Carson-fan point of view:
…i don’t really understand why she’s shying away from what she wrote— a pretty damning, but valid, critique of carson’s entire career and personal character. if by ‘nuance’ she meant criticism, it was most certainly not a ‘light sprinkling’; that was genuinely the entire essay
Wilson shows some genuine surprise in her follow-up Twitter post, and backpedals ever so slightly:
I was going for a thicker kind of description than I’ve seen in many essays about Carson, which tend to be along the lines of “brilliant genius, sublimely moving,” which is fine, but tells you very little about her actual artistic project.
Wilson may be acknowledging in retrospect how hard it can be to disentangle our reaction to Anne Carson’s writing from our reaction to the (real or perceived) over-generosity of her reviewers.
My main interest in “Fox and Hedgehog” is not with Wilson’s reading of Carson’s “actual artistic project” or with defending Carson from the “nuance” that skews that reading. I’m concerned with Wrong Norma and the way Wilson evaluates that book, especially its political aspects.
I’ll need another installment for that. Here, though, I want to consider the framing metaphor for Wilson’s essay, which provides its title and its closing theme.
Most of us have heard that the fox knows many small things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. It’s almost a cliché.
One possible reason for Wilson choosing this aphorism despite its being shopworn is that she gets to inform us it comes from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (I did not know that). The expression survives as a fragment only, so we’ve lost the context. Be like the fox? Be like the hedgehog? A bit of both?
Carson, with her vast range of allusions, disguises, and mixtures, is a fox—a canny one, whose ability to curl up and hide inside her own creations may also owe something to the hedgehog.
Wilson does not measure herself against the aphorism. I, for one, expected some sort of division of roles. Fox and hedgehog are predator and prey after all.
I call Wilson’s essay “dazzling” above to describe her fox-like multiplicity of approaches—credit where it’s due, corrections, rhetorical attacks, snark and innuendo—a multiplicity that’s collectively impressive, like fireworks. But she has a hedgehog side just as much as Carson does, maybe more so. Namely her single-minded academicism.
Negative judgments of Carson as a scholar of the classics are reiterated well beyond what would be required to make Wilson’s point. Disproportionate time is spent on decades-old books where Carson’s translations were most prominent. Wilson starts with “playfully inventive,” but it becomes “an ambiguous relationship to the…discipline” and soon: “anti-academic.”
Eventually she gets to Wrong Norma, where “Carson treats the Greek in her characteristically slapdash fashion.” And in the same paragraph, in case we needed to hear, “other scraps of Greek in the volume…are riddled with basic errors.”
Even when demonstrating fox-like breadth of knowledge, Wilson sounds like she’s marking a grad paper:
The first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality had been published in English by 1978…. But in her Eros, published nearly a decade later, Carson makes no mention of it.
B+ then, right?
Academic decorum doesn’t apply in general interest magazines, apparently, or at least doesn’t prevent Wilson making unprofessional personal judgments:
…despite her generous willingness to collaborate with peers, or hide behind them, other people are still not really her thing.
Or (a tad ableist, this one):
In “We’ve only just begun,” the speaker notes, devastatingly, “There comes a moment you realize other people are not interchangeable.” Carson limps slowly toward this understanding, but she is moving in that direction.
So…Carson should have listened to her “speaker”?
I guess I do want to defend Anne Carson after all, or at least yellow-card these fox-bites.
One more—this bit of low elitist gossip: “…no surprise that Carson, for all her literary fireworks, did not get tenure at Princeton.”
It makes you want to curl up into a spiny ball.