Anne Carson has read more than I have. Anne Carson is much smarter than I am.
I do think those statements are true–about her being smarter and more well read–but I also think they’re kind of bullshit excuses that everyone dips into on occasion when reading and dishing Ms. Carson. Everyone loves “The Glass Essay.” Everyone says they love Anne Carson because they’ve read “The Glass Essay” and think it amazing. Everyone says they love Glass, Irony and God but not Men in the Off Hours, but they’ve only read and loved “The Glass Essay” in Glass, Irony and God and, in retrospect, do not remember reading any of the Irony or God parts or remember not caring a fig about the Irony or God parts. You people know who you are.
I, because I am crazy and some wonderful sort of mashochist, decided it would be good fun to lead a class discussion (with Todd and Rachel, hey) on “TV Men,” the central poem sequence of Men in the Off Hours, precisely because I did not get a single thing that happened in it when I read it in Glass, Irony and God. Now, Anne Carson significantly rewrote (really, you can’t call how radically she changed the piece “revision”) “TV Men” for Men in the Off Hours, and I’m happy to say it makes more sense, or a sublter more graceful sense, in its latter incarnation.
I’m also happy to say that after reading that motherfucker (oh, yes) somewhere around six times and using me some mad Wikipedia, Google and even the microfilm machine in the library, I get it. I don’t exactly mean that I fully grasp all that “TV Men” has to offer, but I get how Anne Carson put it together and took it back apart, and I get how I’m supposed to do the same to figure out what she’s up to. The entirety of “TV Men” is a grand, literary allusion-fest. Once you start following the threads of the ultimately random assortment of people Carson decides to include–Antonin Artaud, Lazarus, Anna Akhmatova–the connections become ever more dense and satisfyingly click into place like legos or jigsaw puzzle pieces or the straps on velcro sneakers.
I will give you one example, which is the only connection I made entirely on my own after stumbling into the collected works of Antonin Artaud, edited by Susan Sontag, by way of googling “kilzi trakilzi faildor” (just go with it). OK, bear with me.
1. Anne Carson starts off the first section of “TV Men,” TV Men: Sappho, with a lovely line of French (from Ingeborg Bachmann), “avec ma main brulée j’écris sur la nature du feu,” which translates to something like “with my burnt hand, I write on the nature of fire.” There’s a whole nother story behind that quote, but I’m gonna let it go, because a blog can only withstand so much arcane information before it folds in on itself.
2. The next TV Man in the sequence is Antonin Artaud, an opium-eater, madman-type French guy who wrote a little of everything–ok, a lot of everything–poems, theater, letters, oddments, check him out on Wikipedia for a better idea than I’m giving you here. From his poem “Here Lies”:
For it is the end which is the beginning/
And this end
is the very one
that eliminates
all means
3. Lazarus cuts quite the figure in “TV Men,” as well, showing up, as he does, the subject of a documentary on his resurrection from the dead. In fact, doubleness and resurrection show up all over the sequence.
4. From the endnotes on Artaud’s “Here Lies”:
The repeated portmanteau word “jiji-cricri” (also “jizo-cri” jizicri, ji en cri, jizo cri, ji et cri, etc) is a play on the words meanins “Jesus Christ” “I cry” and “I cry there”.
So, holy cow. Anne Carson weaves together Sappho and her obsessions with fire and desire, with Lazarus, who comes back from the dead, by way of Antonin Artaud’s puns on Jesus Christ and a quotation of Ingeborg Bachmann, left in the French I’m sure for this purpose, that includes the word “j’écris,” which sounds a lot like “jiji-cricri” and could certainly be read as another pun on Jesus Christ.
Did you catch all that? I can hardly keep it all in my head and I’ve thought about it for months now. As far as I can tell, nearly everything in “TV Men” operates like this. The most wonderful thing about this puzzle, though, is once I figured it out, I realized that Anne Carson isn’t necessarily more well-read than me (she is smarter, though); she’s just read all of Sappho, Artaud, Tolstoy, Akhmatova, the Bible and Greek antiquity. Once I read all of those things–random and taste-driven at their core–I will understand “TV Men” as well as Carson herself.
And, I bet if I spent enough time, I bet I could write my own “TV Men” using Rufus Wainwright, Ntozake Shange, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V.C. Andrews, and William Carlos Williams.
