Nox [Hardcover]

"No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history."

More an experience than a read, "Nox" by Anne Carson splices abstraction--definitions, quotations, lessons in ancient Greek history--with the concrete specificity of family photographs, handwritten letters, and personal recollections that attempt to contain a fragile and fragmented relationship. Carson's brother, who led a transitory and difficult life, has died in Copenhagen. And now Carson, in the manner of Catallus (poem 101), must go to see her brother's widow, the city where he lived, and the church he was brought to when he died. In words and images, and in words as images, Carson creates a landscape that mirrors memory--a continuous accordion-folded page that backdrops black and white snapshots, yellowing letters, cancelled stamps, and cut-out text. Most striking are the photos that include shadows, and texts that Carson repeats, strikes out, or blurs. Also haunting is the way this collage seems so very real on the reproduced page: edges of paper-on-paper look sharp and true, or wrinkled from too much glue; staples seem raised, shiny and cold; even the reverse-embossing of handwriting forces this reader to touch and expect to feel the raised imprint of a ball-point pen, as if, in feeling, the question is asked: is this real?

Carson explains, "History and elegy are akin." In questioning, "are these staples real?" or "who was this brother?" we share in the act of asking, of composing the story and creating history. In her distilled and disjointed--yet accessible--way, Carson compels questions, collects facts--or shards of them--and assembles a beautiful, tactile, white-space filled elegy that honors a brother who, later in life, she barely knew. "You have survived it, " Carson writes, "and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself." Carson has fashioned a thing that carries itself, a work of poetry and prose that stands on its own as book and non-book, object and message: an account of one's life as an extraordinary ordinary thing.

Stunning. Carson is a poet and classicist who is truly sui generis. Her new work, Nox, is a scrapbook of pictures, drawings, stamps, scribbles, anecdotes and definitions of the words comprising Catullus' poem No. 101 ("for his brother who died in the Troad") that coalesce into a profoundly haunting, moving and surprisingly vulnerable elegy for the poet's brother. Ignore the obnoxious and narrow minded poetic purists, such as Robert Potts, who deride Carson's work as "doggerel". Her unique and eclectic voice is a breath of fresh air in a medium too often stifled by orthodoxy.

This is an astonishing work. To speak cursorily, the work begins with a latin poem of Catullus' and then goes on to provide a dictionary translation of each word over its course, with anecdotes and pictures interspersed throughout either abstractly or explicitly depicting her mother and more often her brother. Her goal, I suspect, is to show the plurality of language, and the numerous possibilities for any word and thus the infinite possibilities should they be put side by side and reified in another language. As she says "the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of [words] that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate" will appear when attempting to translate. When she finally does translate the poem, it is evasive, inexact, and, most importantly, entirely subjective. Just as we (at least in Northrop Frye's estimation) create works anew in our mind, so does she, concretely, in transmutating Catullus' words to English and Carson's grasp thereon. The book ends, finally, with her translation more vividly rendered inefficient in a bleeding, crumpled fragment (a rip at the top, its medium reasserted at the bottom of the page; that is, a blank piece of paper concluding the book) expressing her inability to translate that original poem and thus asking us to individualize the poem in her directed latin lesson constituting the work.

This is not an easy work to understand, and, as one previous reviewer said, it is not, in the conventional sense, a 'book.' It doesn't follow an expected path--she lays her brother to rest in its cascading first words
"NOX
FRATER
NOX"
overlaying a cursive, similarly cascading inscription of her brother's name--and thus concerns herself with how language associates with emotions, and the utter subjectivity of words which we often believe to express universal pains and joys. She is often terse, often distended, expatiating on matters of which she has little material (her brother's demise) and passing over experiences over which she presided (her mother's passing) but this is all to an overall goal, which is inextricably linked to that poem of Catullus' which opened the poem.

To consider its form for a moment, as it is unconventional. Whereas a normal work of literature is printed on a series of glued or sewn together pages which, if ripped out, don't disturb its physical sequence all too much, this is printed on a series of folded together panels, which, if separated in any way aside from first to last, would render the work a mess, with no page numbers to reorder it by. This work is a sequence of thoughts, a linear meditation driven by its material form and complemented by its content. Another note on this is an opening line of Carson's "I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds." You'll find this to be a rather dark work, but should you unfold the work and flip it over, you will find nothing but light; vacant, vacuous whiteness. She relegates that light to the obverse, acknowledging its insufficiency to express her purpose.

The work is elusive in spite of its subject matter--I don't feel that I know Carson for having read this--and it reminds me of a number of theorists I've read, who bicker between one another the ability or inability of words to express intangible things, but I don't know that any of them did such so capably as Anne Carson does in this work. She individualizes the work to herself but finally leaves it to her reader for conclusions, understanding the inability of words to universally reify what they nominally signify, and I cannot recommend this work enough to anybody, as I feel she realizes her goal beautifully.

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