Glass, Irony and God

"That’s an interesting point actually, because Anne Carson is a stand-in for the revolution in feeling that occurred for me when I found Hughes and Dickinson. So she stands for Dickinson, she stands for Plath, she stands for Adrienne Rich, she stands for Jorie Graham and Sharon Olds and Karen Solie and Alice Oswald. It’s a piece of perfection. I’ve never studied it and I know a lot of people have now, in America particularly where everyone is, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I wrote my thesis on it,’ or, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve got ‘The Glass Essay’ tattooed on my butt.’ I didn’t realise it was such a thing . I discovered Anne Carson about ten years ago, and was alone and desperately trying to get people to read her. And then suddenly she seems to have had this explosion. “I remember reading a psychoanalytic study of Louise Bourgeois’s work and feeling like, Where’s the rubber? Where’s the smell? Where’s the shock of seeing a seven-foot phallus swinging at you when you walk into the gallery” Now I find when I read Anne Carson I’m extremely disappointed – contemporary Anne Carson does nothing for me, it leaves me very cold. And I recognize that that’s partly my problem – I mean, the work is still good, I think, and interesting, but there was something about the timing of me reading ‘The Glass Essay’ that made it right. I was coming out of academia and had done all this stuff with psychoanalysis and feminism, and I felt that so much of the theory lacked a real engagement with the actually work it was being applied to. I remember reading a psychoanalytic study of Louise Bourgeois’s work and feeling like, ‘Where’s the rubber? Where’s the smell? Where’s the shock of seeing a seven-foot phallus swinging at you when you walk into the gallery?’ And then I read Anne Carson – particularly ‘The Glass Essay’ – and just thought, ‘That’s how to do it.’ It is the most astonishing piece of work – I thought it was the best novel I’ve ever read. I could read it 100 times and still not fully see how she’s done it. You could write a checklist of what ‘The Glass Essay’ does: it’s an amazing piece of writing about the relationship between a mother and daughter. If you took those bits out of it, it would maybe only be about a dozen lines but it’s hugely complex. It’s a hugely complex relationship. It’s also an amazing book about dementia and about caring for a father. It’s probably the most interesting thing I’ve ever read about Emily Brontë. There’s a library full of stuff about Brontë, but that thing in Carson’s poem about her hanging the puppies – ‘She knows how to hang puppies, that Emily’ – makes it the most insightful and empathetic borrowing of Emily Brontë’s energies. It’s phenomenal. I did an interview with her once where she described writing as climbing around in the branches of a tree. She said her interest in Classics particularly comes down to the idea that we have, in the Greek classics, a foundation. All you’re doing as a writer is leaping around and repurposing. Everything is translation and fiddling around. That’s a very Riddley Walker -ish comment: you have this vocabulary handed down to you and it’s just a question of the rules of collage. But I think that so much work in that mould relies on a series of outside support structures, i.e. the reader’s understanding, or the reader’s academic engagement with the source texts, or in-jokes, or an erotic vocabulary, or whatever. The perfection of ‘The Glass Essay’ is that it is totally self-reinforcing, it props itself up all the time. The character that Carson has created there – with the erotic vocabulary that she brings into the story, and this enormous raging, flaming pain that is the centre of the text – is its own justification. It has its own engine, and the more you read it, the more it yields. It’s precisely like Angry Arthur . The work needn’t be long. It’s something to do with the craftsmanship; it’s built in such a perfect way. ‘The Glass Essay’ need only be 20 pages or so long; it has to be as short as it is because otherwise we’ll walk into it and bring our own Emily Brontës with us. It feels surgical – as an act of textual analysis it has the precision of very stressful surgery. The God sequence is amazing, and I love the TV Men poems, too, with Hector, and then with Artaud. And there’s that little poem at the end, where she talks about a TV interview with Sylvia Plath’s mum and how what she didn’t say was “JUNGLE! FEVER! PAIN!” And there’s that one – it’s called ‘Introduction,’ I think, and it’s in smaller text – that says something like: ‘I just woke up one morning and language was gone.’ And then at the end of the stanza it says: “You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough”. It’s just phenomenal; an astonishing manifesto of intent for language. It’s very Dickinsonian. I find Carson’s book really exciting still, after all these years. It’s miraculous. I also wanted to talk about it as one of these five books because of the door it opened, the permission it gave me as a reader. I read academic books differently after Anne Carson. I read them as an invitation for play, whereas before I read them as a prism of misunderstanding – a bit like poetry, I suppose, where if you’re reading a poem, you’re probably reading it wrong and there’s a certain set of people – an elite – who can unlock the poem for you. What Anne Carson teaches you is that you can always be clever enough, you can always work harder, you can always train yourself to understand more. But more than that: reading is like an erotic encounter, you only need to be committed, you only need to give the thing your attention. I think that’s right. I mean, am I, as a 21st century English person, inclined to look in the Odyssey for certain things rather than others? Yes, I probably am; and I recognise that my vision, my social and economic background, as well as all the baggage I carry around with me – good or bad – are affecting that. The way Carson approaches a text, and the past as a whole, I think, is a much more radical proposition. For her it’s all about reinvention or vandalism. Those things are the true mark of distinction for a reader, and, eventually, for a writer. The question is: ‘How well are you vandalising what you’re reading? How well are you keeping it alive?’"