Backwards is north

‘This is the Nile and I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be ‘hollow or void’, and for a moment Carson’s speaker takes exactly this line. The voice continues:

Those are both true.
Are you confused yet?
The play is a tragedy. Watch closely now
how I save it from sorrow.

If we are reading the play rather than watching a performance, we may have been confused a little earlier, when the ‘scene’ is said to be ‘Troy and Los Angeles’. But then we are often in two places (or more) in the theatre, and there is no reason why one of them shouldn’t be imagined or mythical. Saving a tragedy from sorrow is a much more difficult conception, and also satisfactorily puzzling.

The play is, among other things, a version of Euripides’ Helen, which tells an alternative story of Helen of Troy, first floated in a lost work of Hesiod and best known in accounts of its (also lost) iteration by Stesichoros, who plays a large part in Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), a ‘novel in verse’. This Helen did not go to Troy but was sheltered in Egypt for the duration of the war and then brought back to Sparta by Menelaus, her husband. The Helen visible in Troy was a phantom. Legend had it that the better-known Helen, who did run off with Paris, rather strangely disapproved of the story of her Egyptian evasion. She preferred to be guilty than to be a nobody, perhaps. In any event she objected to the revision, and cursed Stesichoros with blindness until he apologised. That is, a mythical figure took away and restored the eyesight of a historical poet. Are you confused yet?

The title of the play is Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. In Carson’s transposition of Euripides to Los Angeles, Helen becomes Norma Jeane Baker, alias Marilyn Monroe, about to act in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), and Menelaus becomes Arthur Miller, ‘king of Sparta and New York’. He brings Norma Jeane back from whatever war ‘Troy’ represents in the 20th century, only to find she has evaporated, as magical figments should. The non-phantom Norma Jeane, meanwhile, saw no action of any kind since she was shut up in a suite at the Chateau Marmont learning her lines for the movie – her version of life on the Nile. Although she ventriloquises Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, hers (or that of the actress representing the actress) is the only live voice we hear in the play.

There are plenty of stellar candidates for the role of wrong (or right) Norma, such as the early Hollywood actress Norma Shearer, or the even earlier actress and producer Norma Talmadge, or the heroine of Bellini’s opera. But Norma Jeane Baker, for some people, will seem perfectly wrong in just the same way as the Helen who didn’t go to Troy, and it’s hard to believe this isn’t the person Carson is thinking of. She herself suggests another Norma, though. This is how the title piece – the last of 25 – in the new book begins:

Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond, what could be more wrong she’s the same age as me this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin, I turn it off, eat soup and read a novel.

The piece continues as a fast prose poem, tracking memories, asking questions and bringing the speaker to a state of mind where tomorrow has its attractions:

No cars. Branches stark. Daybreak greenish and cold and on a rooftop across from me the legendary water towers of New York City, the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.

Doesn’t sound so wrong after all. But then what about Norma Desmond? And is she wrong because of what she is saying or because she is the person who says it? She could be pronouncing any of her lines in Sunset Boulevard, of course, but the most famous seem to be the best fit, wrong in just the right way: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’

Wrong Norma is both a text and a picture of a text. We read what the publisher presents but we also imagine we are peeking at a sort of scrapbook. The title page has an orange background with the name Anne Carson printed in the middle. Below the name are the words ‘wrong norma’ in slightly cramped handwriting. Above the name, in larger letters, loosely written and upside down, are the words ‘wrong norma’. Throughout the work there are nearly blank pages – sometimes coloured, sometimes not – showing tiny, typewritten phrases. This is where the idea of wrongness finds a perfect home, since the phrases are often hard to read, just too faint or faded. Fortunately, they are often repeated in clearer form on other pages, but the idea of their elusiveness remains. Here are some examples:

what is your philosophy of time
backwards is north
what is your philosophy of time
just smile

what is your philosophy of time
me and D switching beds

what is your philosophy of time
I am not familiar with this tool

how do you sustain morale during a long project
Lutheran guilt
how do you sustain morale during a long project
bourbon
how do you sustain morale during a long project
no mirrors

The printed pages offer essays, reflections, poems, stories – constituting, as Carson puts it on the back cover, ‘a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night’. She adds: ‘The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ They are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found in the idea of wrongness, which appears not as a fact or a verdict but as a feeling. A figure who likes to see the world through the eyes of Conrad says: ‘Once I began wondering about history, I couldn’t escape the feeling that we only call it history when things go wrong.’ Another character thinks of wrongness as an invitation to reparation or intuition. ‘She and Eddy do not live together. But when not with him she feels a bit wrong.’ She has a dream:

       I kept opening the wrong half of the door to the porch, the half with no screen on it …
why open the wrong half
well I guess that would be the question but
but what
but the air, the air was lovely coming in

Those are the last words of the piece: no full stop.

The speaker in a short poem, ‘What to Say of the Entirety’, thinks about the idea of entirety: ‘Humans. What can you control? Wrong question. Can you treat everything as an emergency without losing the reality of time, which continues to drip, laughtear by laughtear.’ The recourse to the punning method of Finnegans Wake works perfectly here. It allows an apparent spelling error to find us a bit of the truth.

There is a sort of motto for all this in the first piece in the volume, titled ‘1 = 1’. A woman who likes to swim sees herself as an expert in different waters:

People think swimming is carefree. Just a bath! In fact it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering … 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 … You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it?

Later the swimmer says that ‘some questions don’t warrant a question mark,’ and describes a chalk drawing on a pavement as ‘escaping all possible explanations’. The interesting moment, we may think, occurs just before we take the question mark away or reach a conclusion about possibility. Several of the pieces in Wrong Norma seem to have this thought in mind: a letter from Socrates, a new translation of Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, meditations on the multiplication of words and, most brilliantly, an entry called ‘Lecture on the History of Skywriting’, where the meaning of the term shifts before our eyes:

This is a lecture on skywriting.
Mine.
I am the sky.
Here follows a brief history of my life as a writer.

The history has a preface and divides itself into sections named after the days of the week, ‘on a sort of biblical model’, as the writer says. ‘At first I wrote for only myself, nothing else existed.’ But then the Big Bang occurred and humans entered the frame.

Linear time, a human and mortal invention, makes no sense to me … But I recognise that humans find a temporal framework helpful in grasping larger ideas.

Clouds are a problem because of their ‘ceaseless transitions’, though string theory, when it arrives, is a help. The writer is especially surprised by the moment when ‘Reason prevails’ among humans, and more at home during a long conversation with Godot. Godot boasts that he has a talent for waiting (as distinct from being waited for) and the sky movingly responds: ‘Me too actually, being the sky involves a fair amount of just hanging there.’ The piece ends with a comment on a regrettable ‘vast area of self-experience’, namely the fact that the sky is now so often a war zone: ‘That’s who we are.’ Just before this conclusion, however, the sky offers a reading of ‘a wonderful and forgiving aspect of Hindu thought’ that helps us to see why the idea of wrongness itself may be both wrong and indispensable. The aspect concerns

the notion … that, if someone did make a mistake in a ritual, a witness who noticed the error and who knew the correct text could mend the mistake on the sky of his mind and so make the cosmos perfect again, microphysically.

Wrong Norma ends on a beautifully blurred evocation of a famous failed event, Paul Celan’s encounter with Martin Heidegger. A version of the piece appeared in the LRB of 6 January 2022 as the first of ‘Four Talks’:

Celan came up the mountain to visit the philosopher. He came on a wooden cart and was surrounded by a snowstorm. He felt ashamed. Shame is unreasonable. The philosopher was unashamed. He kept whistling. Snow was blinding them both. In the Hütte (hut, cabin, refuge, shelter, small house built of readily available materials) there was only one chair, a hard chair. Snow. I destroy, I destroy, I destroy, sang Death, dressed and ready. Celan loaded his cart and started back down.

The book version keeps most of these words, typewritten and apparently pasted in, but each page has a coloured drawing – of a mountain (in white), a cart, a wrapped-up human figure, the philosopher, a chair, an abstract figuration of death, the mountain again (in blue) – and one of them covers up a piece of text describing a walk the poet and the philosopher took. The combination of images and words becomes a sort of performance of Celan’s poem ‘Todtnauberg’, the name of the mountain village overlooked by Heidegger’s Hütte. Celan had given a reading in Freiburg the day before, and Heidegger invited him to his retreat. The poet wrote some lines in the visitors’ book and wondered whose name came before his. The lines express

a hope, today,
for a thinker’s
word
to come,
in the heart

and the rest of the poem describes the return journey in a car, ending on the enigmatic words: ‘humidity/much’.

The older and perhaps still more natural reading of the enigma is that it represents the poet’s disappointment: the great philosopher who was also a Nazi had nothing to say to the person whose parents died in death camps. Recent readings are more sceptical. What could Celan really have expected from Heidegger – or perhaps from anyone in this situation? What exactly is the poem doing? Carson’s drawings move it subtly towards satire. The poet is a wraith, and the philosopher is a nasty-looking cartoon. This fellow hasn’t got a heart and isn’t going to offer any kind of thinker’s word. Unless, of course, tempted yet again by the attraction of wrongness, we imagine the cartoon might do better than the real person ever could, stuck in an old self as he is. This would be the Nile and Norma Jeane would not be lying.