The Smallest of Errors and the Greatest of Wrongs
The Smallest of Errors and the Greatest of Wrongs
A Conceited, Presumptuous, Failed Review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma, part 1 of Part III
The Smallest of Errors
Approaching Wrong Norma I have so far been taking a “micro” view. In Part III I want to consider the “macro” view. What is Wrong Norma about as a whole? Is there a sequence? A through-line? A big theme?
To begin from where we’ve already been in Parts I and II, let’s consider the shortest pieces in Wrong Norma. “Saturday Night as an Adult” is one of them. There are three works with identical lengths of 17 1/2 lines, well under a page. The final poem in the volume and the title work, “Wrong Norma” is another. The poem “What to Say of the Entirety”—also located very near the end of the book—is the third. (I’ll have more to say on this work in part 2 of Part III, with regard to the “entirety.”)
Word counts for the three pieces differ. In their original magazine appearances their formatting and line counts differed as well. Via the tweaking of the margins and the justification, the three pieces have been made to come out equal in look and line count for inclusion in Wrong Norma. This does not necessarily make of them a structural key, but it is an indication that Carson has given some attention to the form of the whole.
Do the three pieces have anything in common beyond their format on the page? “Saturday Night” is a linear narration of one event. The speaker of “What to Say of the Entirety” wanders widely but lands at a microcosm that often stands as a macrocosm: “New York City, actually. Here we are.” “Wrong Norma” has a few digressions—“Thoughts trickle in and out”—but also ends in NYC: “West 3rd” to be exact. These are the final lines of the book:
Daybreak greenish and cold and on a rooftop across from me the legendary water towers of New York City, the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.
You might say “Saturday Night as an Adult” ends up in NYC too, as it appeared in the New Yorker and led many to assume (I certainly did) that NYC was the site of the failed dinner at the noisy restaurant.
(With respect to the peculiar coinage “Miltoning,” there is likely a biographical root. Wikipedia notes that young Carson withdrew from the University of Toronto in part because of the duress of a required course on Milton (she later returned and finished several degrees). Asked about this anecdote in 2012, Carson replied: “I still don’t read much Milton….” Maybe, like the grandeur of NYC smoke plumes, Milton has been a slow-to-acquire taste.)
I’m not suggesting that “I Wanna Go to New York City”—to quote the punk classic from The Demics—is a unifying theme of Wrong Norma. “Saturday Night as an Adult” could be about a dinner in Anne Arbor, Toronto or Montreal. And if two out of three of the shortest-form pieces—both positioned at the book’s conclusion—land in NYC it’s more an inevitability than a message.
In the same way that a Hollywood movie about an alien invasion is bound to open or conclude in NYC, a somewhat autobiographical poetry collection by a Canadian poet at the height of her international publishing career might well centre around that same metropolis. All roads lead, etc.
On the back cover Carson calls Wrong Norma “a collection of writings about different things,” and advises the reader that “The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.” Fair enough. Most of the works did appear first as free-standing entities. Like several other Carson volumes, Wrong Norma can be considered a miscellany.
American educator and author Ruby Payne in her short Goodreads review—while avoiding spoilers—insists emphatically on the opposite:
Read it in order, it is not an anthology, the threads get thicker and stronger as you go through and the universe all winds up and everything is explainable and this is the best book ever for now
The more time I spend with this book, the more I agree with her.
Liliana Greyf in The Brown Daily Herald, homes in on the “different kind of novel” so earnestly desired by “Carson-disguised-as-protagonist” in one of the longer pieces, “Flaubert Again.” Greyf concludes that: “Wrong Norma is not only thematically coherent but masterful.” The coherence she describes, though, is largely a matter of reiterated motifs: “linkage that creates a refrain, binding the whole work inextricably to itself.”
Readers cannot help but seek continuity. Having started with “Saturday Night as an Adult” I followed the references to overcoats. Many have noted the various appearances of the fox motif. Kate Dwyer in the preface to her Paris Review interview sees “bread, blood, pebbles” as well as “the word wrong, and various flavors of wrongness.”
Carson speaks of wrongness in Wrong Norma in two separate ways in the interview. I think both are red herrings. There’s the Canadian-ness angle that I discussed in Part II—“polite but wrong.” But Wrong Norma is not about being Canadian.
There is also this:
something you always feel in academic life is that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being “not wrong” every time you speak.
For readers, Carson’s anachronistic mixing of scholarship and fabulation is appealing in part because error—at least in the academic sense—is abandoned, transcended.
For the author this anxiety apparently persists.
You would think that literary success would have put Anne Carson past caring what stickler classicists might think of the liberties she takes. She’s in her seventies now, and moving to Iceland. Can she still be worried about getting tenure? If the Paris Review had used a contemporary photo of Carson at the top of their recent interview, instead of the same one they printed twenty years ago—winning as it is, with a big, candid smile—this cagey explication might not have sailed by so easily.
Granted, early anxieties are tenacious, as “Saturday Night as an Adult” attests. And the pushback against the success of Carson’s classical-modern mashup was real and harsh, notably in her own home country. The most outspoken reactionary was David Solway, the Zionist curmudgeon and literary hoaxster, who published an extremely nasty and repetitive screed in 2001 entitled “The Trouble with Annie. David Solway Unmakes Anne Carson.”
The insult most frequently cited at the time—it’s become bad taste to conjure with it now, so…sorry—was this: “she is a phony, all sleight-of-hand, both as a scholar and a poet.” Here's another of many from the same source, again with both edges of the blade sharpened:
Carson constitutes a special case in which the double lack of fibre and talent is exemplified by a charlatanism more readily ascertainable in the academic work than in the poetry; the latter, as we know, can always take refuge in murkiness.
Keep in mind that, in Canada at least, or Montreal at least, Solway passed for decades as a “man of letters.” It would take a thick skin for this not to hurt.
Wrongness, then, is the prime suspect for a governing theme in Wrong Norma. But when we’re speaking of Anne Carson’s work, “wrongness” doesn’t narrow our focus much. A number of her books could be described as having wrongness as a theme. Translating loosely or mixing together the ancient and the modern strikes some readers (notably those who have a doctrinaire attachment to certain ancient texts) as inherently erroneous. Men in the Off Hours, published in 2000, contains an “Essay on What I Think About Most.” The first two lines are “Error./And its emotions.” Immediately following is a short poem called “Essay on Error, 2nd Draft.” She has spoken about this preoccupation, almost an obsession, in interviews over the years.
Canadian poet Gillian Sze’s 2015 PhD dissertation, “The Erring Archive in Anne Carson,” details and analyzes the theme as a method, which she calls a “poetics of error.” She opens with a chapter on the reluctance of many critics to admit its validity.
Wrongness has an enormous range, from the typo to the unforgivable insult to the capital crime to the crime against humanity. At the trivial end, take the kind of wrongness that can arise from revision. I’ve submitted poems to publishers after what I thought was a last-minute fix, only to realize too late I’d done more damage. It happens. On the other hand, I’m convinced I had a poem accepted into an avant-garde journal—alongside Charles Bernstein no less—because I did not catch a typo, and allowed “quilty” to stand where “guilty” should be, tipping the stylistic scale in my favour.
Many of the pieces in Wrong Norma have been revised, and despite all efforts by the author and the editor, I think at least one small hitch has been introduced in the process. Having many first publications online for comparison is useful.
In 2018—again, in the NYer—Carson’s “Short Talk on Homer and John Ashbery” contained the perfectly fine phrase “past various underworld landmarks, the white rock of Leukas, etc..” In Wrong Norma this has been tinkered with: “past the white rock of Leukas other underworld landmarks.” There’s no need to know what Leukas is (a white rock, apparently) in order to see that an “and” is missing. Or at minimum a comma? Having done some copyediting of contemporary poetry I can confirm that, save for maybe grids of numerical data, experimental poetry is the worst sort of text to proofread for error.
To be slightly less trivial, at the level of erroneous word choice there was one instance in Wrong Norma where, instead of the far more frequent “wait—I don’t understand,” I stopped and thought, “wait—that’s not right.” It was at the lovely phrase “clock the comet” on the very first page:
to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path, to be in the perfect place to hear the nightingale sing, see the groom kiss the bride, clock the comet.
A few years ago I spent some time—at my leisure and missing no climax or nuance—staring at comet NEOWISE, a fuzzy motionless virgule in the night sky. I think the word actually needed here is “meteor.”
But it is very easy to be wrong about something being wrong. Maybe what we have here is a character point, a deliberate move on Carson’s part and no error at all. The events do proceed in the third person. The woman is focused on swimming, and herself—“one of the most selfish people she has ever known”—and not on star-gazing.
There is a moment in Wrong Norma that serves as a perfect example of Carson’s preoccupation with error, sometimes even for its own sake. In one paragraph of “An Evening with Joseph Conrad” she includes a meticulous transcription of random digital junk.
Reading Lacan (poor fellow’s already famous for difficulty) “for help,” because she was “doing badly,” she comes to something she “can’t construe” so
I flipped to the endnotes and found:
ab1y 1b view ad w11t w111 ie. Ib
ar1er ta d1b1 11d.
In this more-obscure-than-usual moment, we are presented with a new and exorbitant kind of error. By capturing it and drawing our attention to it, Carson is arguably prioritizing the author’s fascination above the reader’s pleasure.
Now that I think about it, though, this very trade-off might be something we learn to love in her work.
Still, I resent the fruitlessness of the search this sent me on, and I have to call—respectfully, hesitantly—BS. What I object to is not the aesthetic use of junk text. It’s that Carson says she “flipped” to the endnotes, when she presumably “clicked.” In support of my trivial accusation I note that the first published version reads “flipped to the footnotes” [my italics]. We’ve all encountered similar glitches in digital media and online. Footnotes and endnotes appear from the same limbo now. Bad OCR, weak wifi, failed image loads, misrepresented diacritical marks, sloppy e-book coding. Who knows. But even we boomers should know by now it’s nothing personal.
The least of these errors I only noticed while re-reading the pieces of Wrong Norma that I found the most difficult and skimmed the first time around. The ambiguous ones caught my eye early, and lingered as problems. With most books such observations would be passed over. I mention them here because the theme of wrongness has been set before us by the author. And to clear the deck (or desk) for more serious things.
Carson’s experimental streak is wide and variegated, as surprising in her seventies as it was at the turn of the century. More so. It may be a necessity that she always embrace wrongness, work with it, welcome any new form of it, in order not to cease experimenting.
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