Kanyinsola Anifowoshe
Wrong Norma, by Anne Carson. New Directions, 2024, 192pp., $17.95
A woman is walking through a cluttered room, picking up objects and observing them carefully. It’s hard to say what she could be searching for, since no one object is quite like the next. And yet, you trail closely behind her, still looking for some sort of pattern. After some time, you forget the promise of a search and let yourself be carried by her gaze, unwavering as it pores over whatever is right in front of you.
When Anne Carson is thinking on the page, I want to follow her, but I’m not sure where to. In her latest book, Wrong Norma, the poet, essayist, and translator seems to be probing not for things, but for the relations between them. Wrong Norma —its title already having confessed to a failure to find what you’re looking for— collects Carson’s writings on an assortment of topics including swimming, Socrates, “Saturday night as an adult,” Homer and John Ashberry, and Norma Jean Baker. Carson charts renegade paths between these: she picks ideas up, then puts them down; lets them hang in the air or float out the window. What emerges is a wrong discourse, an imperfect yet illuminating attempt to think through the world and its absurd relations.
The collection begins with “1=1,” a story about a woman swimming in a lake somewhere in North America. When this woman gets back home, she opens the newspaper and sees images of migrants packed into a train car somewhere in Europe: “uncountable arms and legs, torn-open eyes, locked all night in a train waiting for dawn, a scene so much the antithesis of her own morning she cannot think it.” Here are relations between people and places which we know to exist in the world, and yet which remain unthinkable. Why is this? Maybe the tools that we use to do our thinking are not stretchy, resilient, or capacious enough for the thoughts that we need to think. Carson continues, “What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live – should this be framed as a question – would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or the shallows or deeps of her own mind, she fears.” (The story’s title, “1=1,” becomes an attempt to find a formula for the relations between elements.) What sorts of structures, then, could sustain thinking through such incoherent relations?
Throughout Wrong Norma, Carson’s characters are preoccupied with finding ever more expansive architectures of thought. In the short story “Flaubert, again,” a novelist aspires to write “a different kind of novel” that will abolish “plot, consequence, the pleasure a reader derives from answers withheld.” What remains is a novel that will hold nothing, reveal nothing, and thus conceal nothing. A novel as clear as water, “which is disinterested in itself.” In another chapter, “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” Carson writes an address from the voice of the sky itself, telling the “brief history of my life as a writer.” In this lecture—at turns precocious, hilarious, and incisive—the sky claims, “We think each other back and forth, your mind and me. We write one another.” We could read this as a reminder that thinking has constitutive powers in the world, and that the structures we use to do our thinking shape what thoughts are possible.
One of the structures that Carson uses to think through the world in Wrong Norma is the list. The sky makes a list of types of shade, “my favorite thing to look at with eyes downcast.” It includes “café shade, down behind the high school shade,” “shade in the icehouse (the smell of shade), and “shade at night (a difficult research).” This list is a way of watching the world; its rhythm reminds us that the world is a sensuous, thinking thing, with a logic of its own.
There are no two elements of the world that Carson will not draw together, and she is funnier than one might expect. In “Krito,” Socrates compares Krito of Alopece to Bob Dylan and declares, “My life is guys, you know that! guys and drinking.” Carson’s juxtapositions are always casual, never showy. She works like a painter, letting light fall on one object, then another, until an image emerges. In phrases like “the reality of time, which continues to drip, laughtear by laughtear,” Carson stretches language to fit her thinking, rather than the other way around.
As a collection, Wrong Norma is a sprawling assemblage, like a house built one room unexpectedly on top of another. There are prose poems in which thinking meanders from one room to the next, propelled forward by aphorisms and unanswerable questions. There are letters, interviews, and a sestina on poverty with pages of appendices. The book’s penultimate section is a story about Celan and Heidegger’s meeting, illustrated in pastel and captioned with blocks of typewritten text. Even when Carson pulls you in with the suggestion of formal structure, her writing never gives the satisfaction of total resolution. Stories resolve themselves, but thinking does not—the life of a thought continues after you’ve stopped thinking it.
Every moment of vivid clarity in Carson’s writing is shadowed by something more vexing. In “What to Say of the Entirety,” Carson mocks our desire to separate out the relations between things: “Like dead salmon and copper-mine tailings, separate.” Of course, she reminds us, between environmental devastation and extractive economies, everything is connected. That’s all well and clear but then comes blazing out of the woods a sentence like, “Trucks are louder in the rain, or was that another row of doors slammed by gods?” She’s a poet, so I expect her to move by force of surprise, but this sentence stuns me. I can’t quite think it. All I can do is give up being the creature that does the thinking, and let some of the thoughts think me for a moment.
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I’ve loved and read Carson for years, but I sometimes get exasperated watching her build a house then break it down, again and again. Her meandering can feel like navelgazing—inadequate for either the urgent crises or slowly unfolding decimations of our time. Is this the kind of house you build to hide in while the world unravels? What would be the shape of a thought (or a poem, or an essay) that you could live—not hide—inside? The way you live inside of a home with windows that open onto the world around you, and as air passes through the windows, the quality of that air changes you. Could language be a structure as open as a window, so that air, or water, could pass through? Air, water — these things are supposed to be formless. But, as Carson writes about swimming, “Every water has a right place to be but this place is in motion, you have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.”
I am surprised by Wrong Norma: how grounded it is in our unraveling world; how sincerely the characters attempt to make sense of indignity and injustice. In “Fate, Federal Court, Moon,” a prose poem that takes place at a court hearing, Carson’s narrator confronts the failures of the law itself as a structure for thinking justice, the balance between things. Carson compares the law to mathematics, “for they both pretend to objectivity but objectivity is a matter of wording and words can be, well, a mistake.” The poem is concerned with law’s grammar, and the kind of thoughts it can sustain about obligation, fault, and responsibility. Listening to a judge and attorneys construct worlds out of law’s thinking-tools, Carson’s narrator reflects on “The fate of ‘plaintiffs who have no chance of being harmed in the future due to being deceased,’ a wording which gives me pause.” Grammar, “the rules of the game” according to Wittgenstein, is the architecture of our thinking—it determines what sorts of worlds we might think. The narrator pauses because she senses that the grammar of the courtroom has played a dirty trick. While the judge’s sentence makes grammatical sense, it fails to make sense of the relations between the case’s elements: drone pilot “accidents,” “declaratory relief,” and long-dead plaintiffs.
I’ve been coming up against such incoherence throughout the past months, in sentences like, “military weapons manufacturing for authorized sales did not meet the threshold of grave social injury,”(1) or “It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.”(2) These sentences are technically sound, yet their grammatical fluidity belies the fractured set of relations they describe. What sorts of thinking does their grammar make possible; and what sorts of worlds can be sustained by it? In Carson’s writing—playful, willful, and difficult—she susses out the infelicities of our received grammar. This grammar may not be up to the task of thinking the unthinkable—thinking ourselves out of the architecture of this world.
At one point in “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” the sky tells of an ill-begotten love affair which resulted in Herakles, “born with a 2-fold nature, half mortal and half immortal — not a single incandescent clarity existing everywhere at once without regret like me –– Herakles was a thing of ordinary substance, a thing with specific life and limits in space and time.” Unlike the sky or water, we are human animals, Carson reminds us. No matter how expansive, we are stuck with our “ordinary substance,” stuck with our ego, stuck with our boniness, stuck with our thinking, which—if it ever becomes material—is limited in space and time. When we try to think the world, we have already failed—which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, of course.
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In between sections of Wrong Norma are fragments of Carson’s thinking, written by hand or typewriter and reproduced in facsimile. These interleaves—scraps of blue graph paper on top of the white page—often feature playful questionnaires, in which Carson poses a query over and over again, with different responses each time:
what is your philosophy of time
I’m quite sure we’ll surrender
what is your philosophy of time
how it’s sweet and how it moves
Carson repeats her questions not because she has failed to answer correctly, but because each answer thinks us into a new set of worlds—each of which is worth stepping into, if only briefly. When I read these scraps, I think of Dickinson, for whom verse was inextricable from the ripped envelopes, wrappers, and scraps of paper on which she wrote it. Dickinson, who asked, “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?”
I close Wrong Norma and let it pass from my mind.The next day, I am washing dishes and staring out the open window at the sky. Patches of gray are moving into flat whiteness over the tops of buildings. I see, floating just ahead, one of Carson’s sentences, “The fate of simplicity, of randomness, of homesickness, of dead ends, of souls.”
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1. “Yale Updates Divestment Policy on Assault Weapons Retailers.” Yale News, Yale University, 17 Apr. 2024.
2. Wood, Graeme. “The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense.” The Atlantic, 17 May 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/gaza-death-count/678400/.