Following the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize to Anne Carson, let us read what Sam Solecki has sent us. It is a chapter he wrote for his book
The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. Montreal. McGill University Press, 2022.
Anne Carson: “Canicula di Anna” (1984) and Norma Jeane Baker in Etruria
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up / Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup. (Robert Lowell, “Beyond the Alps”)[i]
The few Etruscan instances in Carson are as suggestive and elusive as the three in Emily Dickinson’s poems and the one quoted above from Robert Lowell. There is a thin bronze boy with elongated arms—a figure still not fully understood by Etruscologists—in the early “Canicula di Anna.” The noun “Etruria” is dropped dead centre into “Wrong Norma,” (2016), a very different poem, published thirty - two years later. And there are Etruscans in dialogue with Marilyn Monroe in a recent poem, “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail.” I begin with “Canicula di Anna,” the most substantial of the three, an academic fable which circles around a Perugia - based phenomenological conference concerned with the nature of the self and freedom.[ii] Anna walks around old Perugia after seemingly failing to register for the event. (If I use “seem” more than usual in this chapter, I can only plead that Carson, like Mallarmé, Rilke, and Stevens does that to readers.)
Within the medieval walls are considerable remains of the lofty terrace walls of the Etruscan period. Some old Etruscan calling, “Ah . . . ,” in the rain, is it possible? Doubled and fell off the parapet, gone by now in the sea.[iii]
Since Perugia is far inland, it is unlikely that someone might fall off the walls into the sea. But since the poem takes place in several time periods and is without a fixed narrator, it is best to keep one’s mind open to art as well as geography. As Paul Meyer points out, there is a painted sea - side Perugia in Benedetto Bonfigli’s (1420 - 96) Miracle of the Merchant Who Found his Purse Lost during a Shipwreck in the Stomach of a Fish on view in the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia. Perhaps the impossible image of Perugia on the sea—a deliberate confusion of the real and the imagined—stayed with Carson. But there is more. In Carson’s archive there is a postcard of another painting by Bonfigli, Totila’s Siege of Perugia and the Burial of Saint Herculanus. The painting shows Herculanus, the Bishop of Perugia, being hurled from the ramparts by Totila the Gaul in 549. That takes care of the sea and the fall, but why an “old Etruscan”? Meyer suggests that much of poet’s information about Perugia comes from the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), which explains some cruces: first the encyclopedia; then Carson’s version.
PERUGIA (ancient Perusia), . . . situated 1444 ft. above sea - level . . . upon a group of hills nearly 1000 ft. above the valley of the Tiber. Its outline is very irregular . . . This is the extent enclosed by the medieval walls; within them are considerable remains of the lofty terrace walls of the Etruscan period.
Perugia (ancient Perusia) is situated 1444 feet above sea - level on a group of hills overlooking the Tiber: 1000 feet below. Its outline is irregular. Within the mediaeval walls are considerable remains of the lofty terrace - walls of the Etruscan period. (8)
The “old Etruscan” may be a way of introducing the Rasenna past, a synecdochic way of evoking the ghostly Etruscans who were silenced in mid - sentence, so to speak, by the Romans when their world was absorbed into Rome’s.
Having invented “Anna,” the author whose name is Anne now plays with textual freedom, temporal freedom, and phenomenological freedom, shifting through the various time periods available in Perugia: Etruscans, Perugino’s (whose paintings dominate the local gallery), her life, and the conference. The narrator exercises the freedoms available to her and in the process embodies and enacts the conference’s topic. Since this is Anne Carson, the situation is not without its sly humour.
Famous phenomenologists of tutta l’Italia have foregathered here. They take things back to the sophists then climb the stone stairs for a heavy lunch. Their foreheads are not so tall as the foreheads of the French phenomenologists but they are much more good - natured. (53)
The humour has a light touch, closer to David Lodge’s Changing Places than to Laurent Binet’s recent philosophical novel La Septième fonction du langage. Of course, the French phenomenologists would have the tallest foreheads, just as they have the most original, if questionable ideas, and write the longest books. The Etruscans are good for one more turn in the poem. The National Archaeological Museum of Umbria has its own L’Ombra della Serra, (Evening Shadow) one of the tall, very thin elongated bronze figures that some suggest have been resurrected by Alberto Giacometti and which I related earlier to Picasso and David Smith. Anna stops in front of it:
Her wings gleam and fold shut.
She pauses
before an Etruscan boy
of green bronze. Leaves
nod heavily on his head.
He looks down, just
discovering
that his arms, if he lets them,
extend to the
soles of his feet.
his delight is total (75 - 6)
Carson is fond of wings as we see later in her career. Here I assume that they are Anna’s imagined angelic wings, similar to the numerous wings in Perugino or the wings of the Etruscan female spirit Vanth since she is interested in the Etruscan boy or, perhaps, Geryon’s red wings in Autobiography of Red (1998)? But the question is, to what point? Which may be precisely the wrong question to ask a writer who avoids points altogether, preferring several simultaneous points of view or layers or themes or genres. Her normal procedure is to retreat from a single viewpoint toward a set of possibilities. She acknowledges the boy and nothing more. With his giant hands he is almost a lusus naturae, a violation of realism, and a challenge to phenomenological descriptions of reality. In the conference’s descriptions of the lebenswelt (the world we live in and try to describe) where does he fit in (“belong” is too humanising) with his leafed head, his anorexic body and arms stretching like plasticine to the ground? Is he like Geryon, Foucault might ask, an exception to the totalizing explanatory claims of philosophy or our classifying systems? If we turn to the past: where did he fit into the more flexible often bisexual Etruscan cosmology? The publication of Nox (2010) two decades later allows a sliver of possibility that the mysterious, distant, unapproachable boy is in part an Etruscan version of her troubled brother Davey who seemed never to fit in anywhere. If only Nox mentioned Etruscans instead of Athenians and Spartans, there would be a more explicit link.
Names in Carson are always in question, under pressure. Why “Canicula,” why “Anna,” and why the shifty Italian “di”? If in doubt, Gérard Genette suggests, squeeze the names. The Latin “canicula” is a diminutive for dog and the Dog star, the herald of the season of oppressive heat in Italy. Packs of dogs wander the streets in the poem’s Perugia, though not in the city I have visited several times to see the museum’s Etruscans and to pay homage to Piero in the National Gallery of Umbria. But “canicula” can also refer to “a violent woman” and the poet Persius extends the meaning to the “worst throw of the dice.” If we keep on, we find that Anna is “grace” in Hebrew, but it is also a slippery name: Anne, Anna, Hannah, Ana, Anita. Anne isn’t mentioned in the Bible, but somehow became known as the mother of the Virgin Mary and therefore the grandmother of Jesus. Anna is mentioned in the New Testament (Luke 2:36) as Hannah in the Greek original. If the “I” is hiding behind a name, she has chosen an unstable one, which would be appropriate for a conference on being and freedom whose three main texts sound like Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, and Maurice Merleau - Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and “Cézanne’s Doubt.”[iv] Behind everything one senses the problem of presence: Greek “Parousia” is almost a homonym for Perugia / Perusia and also has the theological meaning of “the second coming.” One asks, “Who is present?” The poem itself is as unstable and as impossible to pin down as Anna, as identities, as perceptions, as judgments, as philosophical searches after meaning, as searches for influence . . . and, finally, as the Etruscans. How can we comprehend a people who produced an elongated statue, with arms that reach to the ground, whose function we don’t understand? Is the dying Etruscan’s last not – quite - word—“‘Ah . . . .’ in the rain,” a summons to Anna to, to do what? Remember me? Write about the Etruscans in a poem about death and dying? This makes sense if Paul Meyer is right that “It is a poem, without a story, about death.”[v] Perhaps Freud should have the last word, again, when he suggests that even in “the best - interpreted dreams, one often needs to leave a particular passage obscure, having become aware, during the work of interpretation, that a knot of dream - thoughts rises there that refuses to unravel.”[vi] Carson, like Lowell, has many such moments that remain knotted, polysemous and ungiving while suggesting not just more but perhaps too much. So far as I know, no one has given a satisfying interpretation of Lowell’s couplet at the head of this chapter. It sits like a singularity in physics, so densely compacted that its component parts are not available for inspection. Like Lowell’s polysemous lines, Carson’s poem seems to bring together multiple origins related only by their presence in the poet’s consciousness. I’m not complaining.
Carson returns to Etruria in “Wrong Norma,” a weary and intensely introspective poem about remorse, aging, and death by way of pre - dawn reflections on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard or, more precisely Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson / Marilyn Monroe. Our questions begin with the title: If this is the “Wrong Norma,” who is the right one? When I reread the poem, I imagine a triptych by Edward Hopper titled Woman Smoking at Night Window, New York with each of the panels focussed on one of the women and Carson reflected in each. In the work of both artists, precariousness is a felt presence. The poem’s setting is a murky New York City which at this moment and for this woman is a trope for Hades with “the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.” In other words, New York is hell, and the female speaker is at this moment a fallen angel remorseful about a “wrong” choice.
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. Thoughts trickle
in and out. No one phones. I am safe but that
won’t last. I drift to the past, even 20 years ago
wasn’t it possible to be pure? To just close the
door and think about one thing, the moon, curbs,
Etruria. The self wins anyway. The “s” in self
wins. I used to love making “s” in cursive style on
the blackboard in school, it’s different every
time, every shell on the beach, do they even have
blackboards, teach cursive anymore, I can’t wait
for morning, Sunday morning on West 3rd my
favourite time, 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.
Each time I come to the “giant white smoke” of the ending, I’m sure that there is an earlier line setting this one up in which she holds a cigarette and watches the smoke rise against the window like a woman in a film noir. There isn’t. A nervous sardonic agitation is the poem’s motor. Everything is in motion, even the absent cars just outside the frame. The speed of thought is both electric and slow motion. The mind is in panic, scurrying to list everything that is wrong: night, city, movie, ambulances, but if these are the wrong ones, which ones would satisfy? Perhaps all those in the past, “even 20 years ago,” when it was perhaps “possible to be pure” and when one “was safe,” when “curbs” (Thou shalt / Though shalt not) were respected, perhaps most attentively when violated. That period is the antithesis to this one in which there is a vertiginous “smoke Miltoning to heaven,” though many readers will think both Hell and Eden into the frame and Proust’s suggestion that the only paradises are the lost ones. Even as she expresses the desire to “think about one thing” she fails with three and seems to be in vertigo towards absolute desolation. Her sleeplessness recalls Pascal’s eternal night of waking. The moon as an image of singularity is almost commonplace, the stark gleaming elusive circle in the sky at once an image of perfection, purity, and nothingness. To think about Etruria is to reflect on something that no longer exists, like memories less vivid with each passing moment. But if “the self wins anyway”—that is, even if it fails to “think about one thing”— it does so because of what might be called life’s existential cunning: in seeming to lose we win. The “s” in “self” points in two directions, Janus - like, to the past and into the future. My guess is that the speaker is poised between the named “wrong” Norma of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the “right” but unnamed actress [Norma] of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), the poem’s absent presence: Marilyn Monroe (née Norma Jean Mortenson) who plays Sugar Kane Kowalczyk.[vii] Twenty years ago the speaker looked in the mirror and saw Marilyn—the right Norma; today the same mirror shows Gloria, the wrong Norma, unwelcome because old and washed up. Gloria Swanson was born in 1897 and was 53 when she starred in Sunset Boulevard in 1950. Anne Carson, born on 21 June 1950, would have been 53 in 2003. Marilyn [Norma] Monroe, born in 1926, is the absent presence in this poem, waiting to make her entry in “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail” where she meets Etruscans.
Carson is a master of unobtrusive numerical forms and cadenced space. In “Wrong Norma,” “Etruria,” appears dead centre in the poem: eleven lines from the first line and eleven from the last. The loosely arranged content is held in place, like filings, by the antithetical magnetic pulls of Etruria (is it “pure”?) and New York. The poem begins in New York, flows toward the lost Etruria of the mind and then back again to New York and the wisp of deferred hope in the poem’s last word, “heaven.” The poem moves toward “Etruria” and then away, an equal distance in each direction. Hollywood to Etruria to New York. Etruria seems called up by the echo in “to be pure,” just as perhaps Milton may come to mind because of “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades / High overarched imbower” (Paradise Lost 1. 302). Etruria is the anti - type of New York, historical but also sufficiently unknown to be a sort of never - never land—a haven—for anyone looking for a place of escape, a “somewhere” onto which a writer or reader can project whatever they wish. Etruria is also aurally close to Perugia / Perusia in her mind, the site of “Canicula di Anna,” her first longer work, published in 1984 when the world lay all before her and Eros the Bittersweet was forthcoming from Princeton University Press two years later. Like the poem, the book from Princeton will be spare and clear but also layered, learned, playful, witty, unpredictable, elusive and a genre - bender (or “curb” breaker). Neither gives anything away to the lazy reader. Though there is always the possibility with Carson that “Etruria” holds some random association for her in her dictionary of private meanings. That leads me to wonder whether the hinge or connection is “red”. If Etruria has a colour in our imaginations, it is probably the red of terra cotta and the red - coloured males of the tomb paintings, like the musician in the Tomb of the Triclinium. Red is also the colour of the several volcanoes in Carson’s work—see the cover art for Autobiography of Red (1998). I’m surprised that alizarin or madder doesn’t appear in her work, both words have rich poetic possibilities. Eros the Bittersweet (1986) had a red cover as did Grief Lessons, terra cotta again. The colour may have associations we won’t understand until the biography. I sense a deep emotional syntax binding together what seem scattered motifs.
The Paestum diver in the two poems titled “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) first detail” and “Detail from the tomb of the diver (Paestum 500 - 433 BCE) second detail” is also red and therefore probably Etruscan, though the painting itself isn’t. It is Greek and has been dated to c. 470.[viii] A similar diving figure occurs in the Etruscan Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (Tarquinia c. 505 - 500). The Paestum diver is in a tomb made of five limestone slabs with a painting of an all - male banquet. The poem suggests that each of its two sections is related to a detail from the painting. The first section begins with what might be a sketch of the ceiling (or in another interpretation, the underside of the lid of a chest) which leads to Marilyn’s entry into the poem, though at this point only the reader who remembers the songs she sang in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot will realize that the star is in the room: “Through with love she sings Naked except for a.” Two lines later the poet appears as herself—“swimming at noon always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe / Etruscan saying.” I take this as both a personal detail—I’m a Monroe fan and I too am through with love—and as another example of Carson’s humour. First, however, we need to ask, is this an Etruscan “saying” (as in an apothegm) or is it an Etruscan (man or woman) saying something about swimming at noon? Or is it both? If we don’t quite understand the meaning intended, Carson might shrug and remind us that the Etruscans are as “mysterious” as she is, and we have only a partial knowledge of the language. The reader also has only partial knowledge of the poet / speaker and inevitably wonders what is her relationship to Monroe beyond swimming? What aspects of the actress’s life overlap with the speaker’s?
The remainder of the poem is a dialogue between “Etruscans” and “Marilyn,” though these “Etruscans” are more closely related to Queneau’s “Etruscoches” than to Etruria. The doomed movie star confesses that she likes to “go underwater” when “blue,” inquires why the Etruscans bother with language when they don’t write anything, and is about to dive underwater or go under, either literally or metaphorically, as the poem ends. The poem’s colour is blue, the temperature is chilly, and the language is minimalist. Language is needed, the Etruscans tell her, because of inscriptions on tombstones (another Carson smile). I wonder whether Carson and her Etruscans know that at Monroe’s death there was a copy of Etruscan Places in her library of approximately 400 books.[ix] Though Marilyn is “a little blue” and refers to her “pain self,” she also asserts in an echo of Gone with the Wind that “Tomorrow will certainly be.” That may be true, though Hume warned us not to bet on it if we’re doing logic. The diver at Paestum is just a diver and we assume that after entering the water, he will resurface and swim. Monroe and the “Etruscans” are ghosts communing in another dimension. Both went under never to return. Did Carson remember the well - known colour photographs taken in 1962 on the set of the ill - fated Something’s Got to Give showing Marilyn swimming naked? In the most famous one she holds on to the pool’s edge with one leg up against the background of the pool’s water of many shades of blue. A few days later, on June 8th, the studio fired her. On August 4th she committed suicide. Blue is by far our most popular colour. [x]
The “me” in the “Etruscan saying” suggests the elusive poet who likes to write autobiographically but without showing herself, like a fan dancer of Marilyn’s era, Sally Rand or Fay Bacon or Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s worth keeping in mind Carson’s warning in “Essay on What I Think about Most”—“I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poem means to say.”[xi]
