The Smallest of Errors and the Greatest of Wrongs
A Conceited, Presumptuous, Failed Review of Anne Carson's Wrong Norma, part 2 of Part III. The Conclusion.
The Greatest of Wrongs
Wrong Norma is about injustice, state violence, and atrocity. Why is it hard to see that?
My first excuse is that my way into this book was via “Saturday Night as an Adult,” which makes no reference to state violence, or any kind of violence. Wrong Norma contains many short works that are similar in this way: a translation from Plato with the briefest of war anecdotes, mostly about the food and the cold, several dream-like narratives full of odd anxieties but no horrors, and personal poems—some comical, some touching—on youthful recollections or the death of the author’s mother.
Most of these apolitical works have been slotted into the middle pages of the book. If we browse selectively, and if those are the Carson poems we’re looking for, we might miss the larger theme.
My other excuse, one I imagine I share with many readers, is that I have been distracted and desensitized by the news from Gaza. The bloody, grotesque, apocalyptic videos and photos. The maximal expressions of outrage and sorrow. The outrageously barefaced lies and prevarications from the states committing and abetting the atrocities. It has a dulling, confusing effect.
There are other sites of state and state-sponsored violence, of course. Congo, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, Ukraine. On and on. (Yemen, Pakistan, and more obliquely Sudan do get mentioned in the book.) But no atrocity is as broadly intrusive on our lives now in the global West as what is being done in Gaza.
We’ve become inured, those of us who can stand to follow the daily details, to extremes, to raw footage. It has not been an ideal time to be reading a book that takes a subtle, tentative, experimental approach to the wounds of history.
Neither Gaza nor Palestine is directly mentioned in Wrong Norma. Yet Gaza and Wrong Norma have been side-by-side in recent months. Simultaneous. They were just a semi-colon apart in Bookforum’s headline for their April 17 news summary: “Writers withdraw from the PEN Awards and World Voices festival; Anne Carson on her new book.”
As it turns out—as the months drag on for Gaza, as the counted dead are buried in shallow graves and the uncounted lie dead or dying under ruins—Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma only gets more relevant.
I am well past the publicity tour in writing this, so I’ve been able to read a wide variety of earlier reviews. Some are cursory, many are more thoughtful. Almost all are positive. What’s striking is how few have stressed the theme of our dire global political situation.
Reviewers have praised individual works for critiquing war, especially “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” where Carson has the sky itself observe that “warfare is mostly a history of death-bringing stuff flying through the air.” Or for acknowledging social inequality, especially “Poverty Remix (Sestina),” which riffs on the ancient poet Hipponax and the perpetual problems of the destitute class, shame, and scapegoating. But wrongs writ large, the violence of states, is almost never suggested as the unifying theme of Wrong Norma.
The exception is Adrian Lu’s “A Presence Solved by Its Own Absence: On Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma” in Cleveland Review of Books. Here is his description of the central theme:
Call it politics (crudely), the varied and various extent of human suffering (broadly), or perhaps the dim awareness that the material comforts of one’s seemingly atomized existence are inextricable from—worse, dependent upon—the routine maintenance of said suffering (slightly more precise).
He frames the audience as ”the American who reads poetry while their tax dollars fund atrocity,” but the dilemma is just as relevant for Canadians, Brits, and the whole collective West.
Lu sees in Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma a turn. Previously, critics might say: “If political subjects do appear in her work, they come wearing the clothes of allegory.” Lu argues: “Wrong Norma presents Carson’s first attempt to strip them bare.”
As early as 2020, looking at individual works as they appeared, poet and critic Annette Skade noted this same turn in Culture Matters. “Recently, perhaps because of her involvement with the Human Rights Organisation, Reprieve, Carson has been writing about specific human rights issues.”
Arguably, this turn toward a direct view of contemporary politics is related to the other turn in Wrong Norma that I discussed in Part II, away from her usual “clothes of allegory”—i.e. sustained classical parallels and retellings.
At the book’s opening scene—making or not making the best of a solitary swim—and at its very end, in the title poem, with the speaker lamenting “Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue…” Wrong Norma is bracketed in minor wrongs. But in between, especially in the longer works, there is a gradual build toward the greatest wrongs and the greatest suffering.
At each stage of the build, Carson articulates the problem of what might be called ethical contrast: between wrongs as suffered—which are very hard to convey—and wrongs as perceived from a certain remove, by imagined, imaginary, or indirect witnesses.
***
In the book’s opening piece, “1=1,” the wrongs are, at first, private and selfish. But the theme of state violence on a global scale intrudes nonetheless. In “the newspapers, front-page photos of a train car in Europe jammed floor to door with escaped victims of a war zone further south…uncountable arms and legs, torn-open eyes…a scene so much the antithesis of her own she cannot think it.” Later, the train is a boat: “a makeshift plastic boat so crowded with passengers they are stacked in layers and dropping over the sides. She had seen this picture.” By using the third person, Carson shifts the burden to a character. We are made to “think it,” but only briefly, and like “her,” we move on.
***
The opening lines of “Clive Song” perform a turn away from the classics (while still invoking them, of course), a turn that I’ve suggested complements the turn toward contemporary politics:
If I were an early person / I’d look for the limits of human wisdom / by going to sacred oak trees / or the local blind man with lips on fire. / But this is now. This is NYC.
Character again allows state violence to be distanced, to reside this time with the first-person narrator’s lawyer friend, a defender of Guantanamo inmates. We are amused by minor details of their conversation, and in the end, with a tricky grammatical knot, Carson stresses “limits,” including her own—
the limits of human wisdom remain / (as we who confuse the greetings of dogs and gods / prefer limits / do) more / or less / where they were.
***
In “Dear Krito”—a fictional letter from Socrates (it references Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop)—we get another consideration of state violence, more immediate than refugees in the headlines or Guantanamo in that it’s a death penalty imposed on the speaker himself. But it’s distanced by the fact that he’s a larger-than-life figure from another historical era. Thanking Krito for the hemlock, Socrates observes:
…it’s better than the other way, the so-called bloodless crucifixion, with the stakes and the iron collar. No one wants to see another person die like that—Krito, you’d have nightmares for years.
The suffering of the death penalty and the suffering of the witness are presented side by side. Even if Socrates is exaggerating.
States are said to have what’s called a monopoly on violence—a claim that is aspirational at best. What it means is that states can make their own violence technically legal. “Dear Krito” reminds us that even legal violence damages its witnesses—if we see the victim as “another person,” a friend and fellow citizen, our equal.
***
In “Eddy” we come closer to bloodshed, but are kept at a distance by genre and by the problem of writing, representing. The narrator is again in the third person, but the flow is very internal. Her lover is a crime scene analyst. She’s a poet, hired to do his emails. Incredible?
It feels like a pulp novel. Terse, conversational. Like the ceiling Eddy samples, the story is spattered with blood: actual blood for Eddy and imagined for the poet.
Thinking sonnets. Thinking other people’s suffering. Who has a right to it. The masters don’t ask. Just lift the knife and cut.
Her subject, “a subject she didn’t feel able to—raise the knife and cut?” is a boy in a photograph “she’d seen once and couldn’t find again.” (I think of the photos I’ve seen recently that I wish I could not find again.)
The boy’s plight is approached gradually, at intervals: “Think exact about the stitching. She could not, she stopped.” “What right had she? His day, his lips, his instruments.” “Two big bloody stitches on either side of the cupid’s bow.” Our suspense is drawn out. She researches:
She read up on poetry of witness and telling the truth to power and thought, no. Sassoon, Celan, “you told me how you butchered prisoners…” all that, no.
She discusses it with Eddy: “what would he use for thread” “any old piece of wire from around the cell” “why not have a needle smuggled in.” Until finally we get the full fail:
She never did finish the sonnets, never did find out more, enough, about the boy who sewed his lips shut in a refugee camp because he was out of his mind with pain and rage, or what happened after.
At this peak of horror, the story backs off. The voice drifts into the first person via dialogue:
So give me the Eddy method. For sonnets?….I mean the world, the blastedness, your work every day, the blood on the walls, the ruined people, how do you get on with it?
In this piece reliant on clichés, Eddy gives the stock answer: “Define the task, complete the task.”
In the final pages the boy in the refugee camp and the possibility of sonnets fade from sight. But the trauma of witnessing resurfaces as she contemplates, as if by proxy, the “whole suffering” of a squirrel with a “bum arm” (arm?) and hears “packed into one sound, calling out to gods and justice, a moan that did not stop.”
It’s a difficult piece to read. The crime genre tone, though it wavers, is a help.
***
You could argue that “Fate, Federal Court, Moon” is one of the weaker works in Wrong Norma. Formally, it’s just a list. Carson uses anaphora, ancient Greek for “carrying back” (like a hard carriage return, if you remember manual typewriters). She places “The fate of…” before each of what appear to be personal notes made around and during a court proceeding. This is part of the work she has done with the non-profit advocacy group Reprieve, mentioned above.
Like finding out that Carson created her own book-cover illustration, finding out that she is a participant in an activist organization was a further humbling moment for me. So much for my assumption that her classicism might mean she took an aloof, dispassionate, “nothing’s new under the sun so why get involved” view of contemporary politics.
There was a moment in reading “Fate, Federal Court, Moon” where I did a sharp double take, a double take that changed how I saw the whole book. In my own world news, al Shifa hospital, like so many others in Gaza, had been besieged and then destroyed. The evidence of atrocity was streaming out for all to see. At the same time in Wrong Norma I came across this:
The fate of proportionality, a matter of context. The fate of what is or is not a political question. The fate of the precedent “al Shifa,” with which everyone seems familiar.
Every work in Wrong Norma was written before the current crisis. “Fate, Federal Court, Moon” came out in early 2017. How is Carson seeing the future?
A memory came back to me. Somewhere around the millennium, I was unsettled—but also energized—to read Noam Chomsky on President Clinton’s 1998 destruction of the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by a cruise missile attack. The bombing was ostensibly to stop an al-Qaida chemical weapons program. But it was based on evidence falsified by the CIA and served no military purpose. Only spin, and empire. The factory made affordable medicines for malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases, as well as a range of basic veterinary drugs. Its destruction drove Sudan deeper into poverty, illness and agricultural failure, causing widespread indirect casualties.
In Chomsky’s sarcastic words: “the fate of [my italics] probably tens of thousands of African victims did not matter.”
The factory in Sudan, like the hospital in Gaza, was called Al Shifa. It’s Arabic, meaning medicine. Healing. The remedy.
Legal claims brought against the government by the owners of the factory were rejected by American courts. This became the “al Shifa” precedent.
Carson follows a similar case in “Fate, Federal Court, Moon.” Faisal is also asking for the American government to take responsibility for a military “error” and potential war crime: a drone attack on a wedding party in Yemen that killed his nephew and brother-in-law, and traumatized his daughter, who witnessed the attack up close.
In part because of the “al Shifa” precedent the case is eventually deemed “nonjusticiable.” Accountability and responsibility for the attack are considered “political questions,” not questions of law.
In keeping with Carson’s device of approaching but also distancing atrocity, we don’t get the grim details of the deaths, but rather peripheral and procedural glimpses, musings from her experience during the court case.
No piece in Wrong Norma sent me into a deeper rabbit hole than this one. “Fate, Federal Court, Moon” appears firmly grounded in documentary truth, but it’s also very sparing of context. A little research seemed to be called for. (I used to work in legal publishing.)
Primarily I wanted to identify and read the judgment. If there was one. Trials that go nowhere sometimes don’t require recorded judgements. Without a citation, or even Faisal’s full name, it took a while to find Bin Ali Jaber v. United States, No. 16-5093 (D.C. Cir. 2017).
Carson does name one of the panel of judges:
The fate of the pearls worn by Judge Tollard…which curve like teeth below her actual teeth.
This name could not be found among judges of the Federal Courts. Checking the original publication in London Review of Books, I saw the name was different:
The fate of the pearls worn by Judge Dillard…which curve like teeth below her actual teeth.
For whatever reason, Carson was altering the judge’s name. Maybe even now I’m breaking some rule of publishing etiquette, or law.
The judge’s name wasn’t Dillard either. But among the judges for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals there was a Judge Pillard in a case known as Bin Ali Jaber v. United States. The case concerned a deadly drone strike on a wedding party. And Judge Pillard characteristically wears pearls.
In “Fate, Federal Court, Moon” Judge Pillard (aka Tollard, aka Dillard) comes across as quite sympathetic. Her Wikipedia entry notes that she is “one of the most liberal nominees to the federal bench in decades.”
During the proceedings, Carson is encouraged as Judge Pillard [Tollard] presses the defendants rhetorically:
The fate of how all this may depend on her pearls, her teeth. The fate of the words “We are really sorry, we made a mistake,” which Judge Tollard utters in a hypothetical context but still it’s good to hear.
Carson drops the prefix “The fate of” for emphasis when the judge queries the government lawyers about Faisal’s supposed options:
“Where would he go?” Judge Tollard asks with apparent honest curiosity. “If you were he where would you go?”
Down in the rabbit hole, I tried to find out more by perusing the text of the final judgment. It’s “filed” by another judge, but significantly there is no dissenting opinion. All the judges agreed:
Our democracy is broken. We must, however, hope that it is not incurably so…. The spread of drones cannot be stopped, but the U.S. can still influence how they are used in the global community—including, someday, seeking recourse should our enemies turn these powerful weapons 180 degrees….
The judges reference Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons and the metaphor of the forest of law being clear-cut (“d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”) They conclude:
…the spindly forest encompassing the political question doctrine provides poor shelter in this gale. But it is all a Judiciary bound by precedent and constitutional constraints may permissibly claim. It is up to others to take it from here.
None of this judgment text is in Carson’s poem, but one wonders if Carson might have read this herself, and if she wondered whether some of her nerdier readers would end up here as well.
In what is perhaps the most “Canadian” note in all of Wrong Norma, the piece ends with a plaintive repetition: “Where would he go? Sorry?”
The potential downside of Carson’s pursuit of justice for an American war crime is that she remains a Canadian. We’ve seen pushback before, at the pop culture level (and Carson is very popular), with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 reply song “Sweet Home Alabama,” dissing Neil Young for lecturing the US about racism in “Southern Man.” Or when Chomsky rattled radio host Peter Gzowsky’s smugness re America’s war in Vietnam—also back in the 1970s—by suggested on air that ex-Prime Minister Pearson could be considered a war criminal, since Canada was making big money selling America the bullets for its guns.
***
“Lecture on the History of Skywriting” was originally a performance, commissioned by Laurie Anderson for a NYC event in 2016. There are videos of later performances online, but I think Wrong Norma is the first print publication. It has been called the centerpiece of the book, and it is the longest of the longer works. It’s an ambitious monologue by a witty immortal—“I am the sky”—recounting the seven “days” of the universe.
The lecture is also a further expression of Carson’s involvement with issues raised by the Faisal Bin Ali Jaber case. By watching the videos and reading the publicity for them, you can find out that Faisal himself was the speaker of the section in Arabic.
Readers of the book version alone, however, aren’t told anything about the block of Arabic text and will not know that it is immediately repeated in English in the pages following. So it stands there, incomprehensible for those who don’t know the language. A good reminder of our limits.
The section in Arabic and English is from “Saturday,” whose topic the speaker has been putting off:
there remained one vast area of self-experience as yet unexplored and unexplained, viz. sky as a medium of annihilation.
Her historical overview of aerial weaponry concludes at:
a soldier in Nevada can push a button and have five people in Pakistan burst into flame. Without the face, no ethics: this is an old idea.
Old ideas phrased anew is kind of Anne Carson’s thing. There are long scrolls of quotes and hundreds of quote-memes online. Until recently there was an Anne Carson thought-bot on X (it may still exist elsewhere) that posted a new gem every two hours. But Wrong Norma shows her skill at the long talk as well as the short, at sequencing (credit to editors as well, of course), gradation, recurrence, and keeping a variety of imponderables equally airborne.
An instance: earlier in “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” way back on “Monday,” we have the closest approach in Wrong Norma to one of the greatest of pains: witnessing the death of one’s own child. The trauma is distanced by a fiction—i.e. that an immortal is speaking and can feel “more” than mortals. The sky (as Zeus, sort of) spends an epoch (or day) “coupling with nymphs and engendering heavy elements.” Herakles is the sky’s child, but is vulnerable to death, so “if Herakles were to set himself on fire”:
I have no instant. I am at all times. I have to watch my most beloved child burn to death at all times. And I always will.
Carson tilts the myth enough that we see a child, not a middle-aged superhero. Some may see a child of Gaza. Some may see Aaron Bushnell. Synchronicities aside and staying within the text, we also are forewarned of the later moment when “five people in Pakistan burst into flame.”
***
“Thret” might seem to escape my parameters. The violence it contains centers around gangsters and small-town corruption, not the actions of the state. A blackmailed judge. Rival crime bosses. Absurd details. It stands out for the enormity of the violence it includes, though.
“Thret” is a dreamlike venture into noir fiction, with a loner—except for her crow(s)—protagonist who is, like Eddy in “Eddy,” a blood stain analyst and expert witness. She is motivated into detective work and an improvised program of harassing local gangsters after a mass killing is exacted on the town for failing to pay protection money:
It led to a Wednesday in March when the entire student body, give or take a few kids home with colds or flu, was mowed down by machine gun fire as it emerged for recess. Those chubby advancing knees.
The entire student body? Impossible. Dream logic, pulp genre pace, humour (sort of), a tangential ending involving a fragment from the poet Hölderlin…Carson piles up all the distractions and mediations she can muster to get us past this.
Looping back to the mysterious opening words after we’re told of this “event” gives them horrible new sense. “Little tough ones, little tall ones, like little tall trees, others yellow as hay, their tiny blades falling across the cracks, the stones.” Mowed down.
The protagonist’s mostly-failed threat-attacks seem to be a kind of rational insanity, an extreme coping mechanism for an extreme crime:
…it was all so inadequate, so DIY. Nothing I did matched what they had done or tied off the loose ends of sin. I was flailing at trauma.
In a nation cursed by mass school shootings, not one of them has been committed by gangsters. (Confirming this we are forced to look at the stats.) So it can’t be real, right?
The blood-stain analyst calls her revenge campaign “a sociopolitical action program.” The crows are “coactivists.” Small town corruption might be about state violence—in the sense of a violence unique to a particular state—after all.
***
“We’ve Only Just Begun,” in which a couple are carjacked, kidnapped, and tortured in their own home is, in a way, the most violent of all the pieces in Wrong Norma. Not so much because of the grievousness of the violence as the immediacy, the point of view. It’s the only story where the victim of violence—rather than the witness or the sufferer of grief—narrates their own experience. Weirdly credible (despite the “hero” role of the couple’s pet python) the story conveys the shocking quality of the attack by alternating mental avoidances and high-res snapshots, like a frenetic action film played at half-speed under strobe light.
Again, we’ve got gangsters, not politicians or soldiers, but again it has a resonance with my thesis. There is a very 2016 (when it was first published) allegory going on in “We’ve Only Just Begun” that maps the craziness onto world politics. The boss of the two gangsters—they have a bizarre S&M/mind-control relationship—looks like Putin, and is called Putin by the narrator. The narrator’s partner is named Washington. He gets the worst of it, as a selection of snapshots can show:
At one point Washington raised his arms to me and blood ran down both arms to the floor…. Even when they had Washington dance in the red-hot shoes, I wasn’t imagining analogies….Washington had blacked out…
As for the speaker, “I was on the floor with little holes burned in me but otherwise okay, pretending my hands were still tied….”
Whether Carson was convinced of the “Russiagate” affair and concerned about it, or unconvinced and making fun of it, is hard to say. And probably irrelevant. Her real concern is empathy, imagining into the state of mind of the victim. She enacts the exclusion of normal thinking:
Above all it was boring. In the sense [that]* it was all actions and all bad, there is no life of the mind available amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear….
*This word is present in the original publication in Harper’s, but omitted, possibly in error, in Wrong Norma.
***
At the serious end of wrongness there is the wrong we do to each other, the wrongs of abuse and violence. These are things that can’t actually occur within a book—the way a typo or a missing word can, or a metaphor, or a classical reference—but may only be represented. At the extreme, perhaps not even representation is possible.
“What to Say of the Entirety” is the third last poem in Wrong Norma. Its title and position suggest we might look here for a clue—or confirmation of my bias—regarding the meaning of Wrong Norma as a whole.
The author is expecting us: “The entirety should be smaller. Small enough to say something about. Humans?” That’s as close as we’re going to get.
And it’s too close. We’re hit with the fact of torture, both in action—“the guy you’re hanging up by his thumbs”—and in retrospect “where…the torture report ended up after all those years of work.” Two different jobs?
We’re reminded that “entirety” has value despite the problem of its boundaries, especially if the alternative is culpable separateness: “Like dead salmon and copper-mine tailings. Separate. So these separations, this anesthesia, we should ponder a bit. Humans.”
“What to Say of the Entirety” ends with comical, humanized gods. Final words: “They’re soaked, the gods, they’ve tucked their toes up on their thrones as if they don’t know why this is happening. Poor old coxcombs.” They’re rendered powerless against disaster—New York flooded by global warming?
The “entirety” is all about the humans. The ones who torture. The ones who write reports on the torture.
***
The penultimate piece in Wrong Norma, “Todtneuberg,” is a ten-page work of collaged sketches with minimal poetic text. It has the same title and topic as a famous, short, cryptic poem by Paul Celan about his visit with Heidegger. About whom he had what you might call impossibly mixed feelings.
Carson’s “Todtneuberg” was subtitled “a comic” in its original publication in Jewish Currents, a progressive Brooklyn NY-based journal. Jewish Currents is anti-Zionist, unafraid of calling Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories genocidal. And also unafraid of dark humour. Their three subscriber tiers are, in ascending order: Globalist, Illuminati, and Elders of Zion.
Isolated collage images with text do appear elsewhere in Wrong Norma, but this is the only work composed entirely of them, and they are bigger and brighter. It’s a big gesture, and not funny. Or rather, you might find a cartoon of Heidegger with red lips puckered tight like a flower funny (a flower from Celan’s poem about their meeting perhaps), but it’s an awkward funny, Carson-style. She captions the image with “He kept whistling.”
There’s no evidence for Heidegger whistling in what little is known of Celan and Heidegger’s walk on the mountain. Carson is alluding (if I didn’t need to look all this up, I’d say “of course” ) to Celan’s other very famous poem with death in the title and the Holocaust in view, “Todesfuge”
…he whistles his hounds he whistles his Jews dig a grave in the ground he commands us strike up for the dance
(trans. Dean Rader)
Nothing is gained in “Todtneuberg.” The opening text block, “The story so far” about Heidegger’s Nazi complicity and Celan’s suicide, is all there is. Nothing is gained, but an entirety is reiterated and sustained. I am reminded of all I have learned of the genocide committed by the Nazi regime and by its collaborators. I am reminded that my knowledge remains incomplete.
“Todtneuberg” is not only the culminating work in Wrong Norma, it is also the most recently composed, and by a wide margin. It appeared in 2021. Whatever retroactive deliberations went into the sequencing of the various earlier works for book publication, this one was presumably conceived—and placed—as a conclusion.
After “Todtneuberg” the short final poem “Wrong Norma” is an epilogue. Unemphatic, banal in a welcome way. Like house-lights coming up.