#mla13 – Katina Rogers

I received an absolute treasure of a book in the mail this past week: Anne Carson’s new translation of Antigone (called Antigonick). The hardcover book is hand-lettered by Carson, and many of the pages of text are preceded by sheer vellum pages with gorgeous and beguiling illustrations by Bianca Stone. It is a beautiful, beautiful book. (There’s a good preview of it here.)

And I do not fully understand it. I don’t really understand many of the illustrations; I don’t always understand the changes Carson has made to the text. The effect is no less captivating.

This feeling is not isolated to Antigonick; I often feel a sense of disorientation from Carson’s work. Looking through some notes on Autobiography of Red (which I simply loved), I realize the same feeling occurred there: I was utterly puzzled by certain elements and choices. (Especially the final “interview” with Stesichoros–I would love to know how people read that.)

But I relish this feeling of confusion. Carson’s work is so deliberate and intoxicating, that each choice she makes feels like a stone to be worked over in the palm of the hand–slowly, slowly. Not many writers make me feel this way. More often, readerly confusion is indicative of sloppiness on the writer’s part, or else of ego and purposeful obfuscation. The confusion I feel reading Carson draws me in, rather than pushing me away.

So, Antigonick. Why that red spool of thread unwinding over a page that lists “Kreon’s nouns” (“Adjudicate Legislate Scandalize Capitalize”)? Why the domestic images of stove, kettle, rug when Kreon sentences Antigone to death? Why Kreon’s arrival by powerboat? Why, for that matter, Nick? I’ll confess, I don’t know. But I will keep turning those questions over and over in my mind, as I do with so many of her works.

Luckily, I now have a great excuse to spend a lot more time thinking about Carson’s writing, since my paper proposal for MLA13 was accepted. I’m looking forward to giving her work the serious attention it deserves.

Feedback welcome on this one… I’m excited by the idea but not wild about how I articulated it here. I could use a title, too.

Photography and Mourning in the Poetry of Anne Carson and Jacques Roubaud

The attempt to render the unsayable in language is the unending craft of writers, and never is it more challenging than in cases of mourning, when such expression is both necessary to the healing process and painfully evocative of past suffering. Including photographs in elegiac texts is a common means of giving voice to the impossible gap between experience and language. As Barthes notes in La chambre claire (1980), photographs provide an immediacy and an authenticity that written text cannot match, while also suggesting a simultaneity of past and future that always bears the mark of death.

Moving beyond the inclusion of photographs as straightforward memorials or reflections on the passage of time, poets Jacques Roubaud and Anne Carson incorporate photographs into their work in ways that accentuate the profound disconnect caused by loss. In the visually stunning Nox (2010), Carson includes photographs of her late brother among myriad other original and borrowed scraps, creating a physical space that holds both her thoughts and her brother’s. The photographs are a part of her mourning process, which she conceptualizes as translation: she studies her brother fragment by fragment, trying to reach something whole.

Roubaud also makes use of photographs and diary entries in Quelque chose noir (1986), a haunting elegy to his late wife, Alix Cléo–and yet in this case, the fragments are notable not for what they show, but for their absence. Roubaud relies on the photographs as a framework for his text–even the title refers to a series of Alix Cléo’s black-and-white photographs–and yet the photographs are excluded, becoming another element of the unsayable.

I will explore ways in which Carson and Roubaud look to photographs as key elements of the mourning process, not as memorials in themselves, but as passageways to understanding and expressing the unsayable.