The Obsessive Orbit

Anne Carson. Nox.
New York: New Directions, 2010.

“When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book,” Carson says on the back of the box containing the book called Nox. “This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.”  It’s impossible to talk about Nox without describing the physical object that it is: a book-shaped box that opens up to a stack of paper, an accordion-fold of paper that reproduces a handmade book with photographs, letters, drawings, and text pasted into a collage. I was very excited to take it out of the shipping box and open the box of it and lift it—see it begin to unfold.

Anne Carson’s Nox is more of an artist’s book than a poetry collection, but Carson has always crossed genres. A friend suggested that this was a great example of where publishing ought to go in this world of increasingly virtual text: the book as an object, a thing, not just (just!) words floating in a virtual space. There can be no equivalent to the object that is Nox on a Kindle, an iPhone, a web page, or, for that matter, a large-format paperback.¹

A poem? An essay? A memoir? Carson calls it an epitaph, an inscription on a tomb, suggesting that her brother Michael (or what remains of him) lies within. Certainly there are photographs of him as a boy, and scraps of the one letter he wrote, and Carson’s fragmented memory narrative of him, interwoven with a meditation on the writing of history, since, as she says, “History and elegy are akin” (1.1). There are also broken pieces of what might be a poem or poems (“Single motion which departed, leading itself by the hand")² and a translation of Catullus’s elegy (101) for his brother. Some sections are marked (as in 1.1 above) but there are no page numbers.

Carson has translated Catullus 101 before, in Men in the Off Hours. The version here is quite different, and much more literal. That matters, because here Carson interrogates the literal, tells us literally what she knows of her brother (not much) and leaves us to translate that to—grief, perhaps. Which may not be translatable.

Carson’s process of translating Catullus’s Latin interleaves this other text. The original of Catullus’s poem is the first sustained text in the book, and then the verso of each page has a “dictionary” entry for every word in Catullus’s poem, in the order in which each occurs in the original, leading eventually to a complete translation on the recto, though that’s not the end of the book. The reader participates in the process of translation and engages in a meditation on each of Catullus’s words along with the translator.

 “Nothing at all is known of [Catullus’s] brother except his death,” Carson writes. “I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends” (7.1).

Carson’s book does end, of course, leaving us knowing something of her brother, but not much, leaving us with a fascinating object to which I was compelled to return again and again. This isn’t a book that one reads so much as experiences, and the experience it compels us to enact is very much the analogue of the experience of loss that Carson herself must have gone through. It isn’t simple, it both confronts and evades feeling, and it orbits obsessively around certain facts, just as the experience of grief does.

The title points to the manner in which the text performs its subject. Nox is the Latin word for night. Given the way the Catullan elegy is woven through the book, you might think the title would refer to that text, but the word nox does not occur in Catullus 101. However, if we look at the dictionary entries for each word in Catullus’s text, we begin to notice that nox (or a variant) occurs in each entry, and if we compare the entries to, say, the standard Lewis and Short Latin dictionary, we notice that Carson isn’t quoting that dictionary, but rather writing one. Nox is a dictionary of grief and loss, where every word has some reference to the night her brother has gone away into.

I started to look at the exchange between the entries on the verso and the text on the facing recto. For example the entry for the word atque contains the phrase “just like him I was a negotiator with night.” On the recto there is a quote from Herodotus: “I have to say what is said. I don’t have to believe it myself.^"3 And that having to say and not having to believe is exactly the negotiation with night that grief entails, the denial and disbelief of grief, the path of it, which this book shows us and involves us in.

Grief  doesn’t end. And I’m not sure exactly how to wrap this up. Endings are difficult. I should say something about the images pasted into the book, and the way text is effaced and hidden and revealed and revised, how text becomes image and both cross-fade, but I’m not sure I have the critical vocabulary to do it justice. This is an astounding work. It goes beyond text to create experience, and as such is a book that can’t really be quoted but must be.

Notes

¹ There's a fascinating description of the making of this book, involving photocopies of scans with the lid of the photocopier half-open, in a profile online in Publisher's Weekly.

² recto following 4.1.

³ opposite atque, 7 folds from the end