Abstract
Combining a media studies approach with the theoretical framework of new materialism, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth probes how Anne Carson’s folded book Nox puts its own mediality on display to reflect on the intertwining of its material and symbolic dimensions. Brillenburg Wurth shows that Carson simulates the hand-crafted authenticity of artist’s books through the use of technologies like Xeroxing and scanning, aesthetic methods like scrap booking and collage, and poetics that combine (auto)biographical writing with translation. Tracing the US avant-garde context in which Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” was first published, Brillenburg Wurth explores how book fictions and quasi-artist’s books like Carson’s Nox reintroduce a concern with authorship to contemporary literature while continuing to champion avant-garde practices of depersonalization.
This chapter is an extensive rewriting of my previous article “Re-Vision as Remediation. Hypermediacy and Translation in Anne Carson’s Nox” as it appeared in Image & Narrative 14, no. 4 (2013): 20–32.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the most multifaceted writers of our time, Anne Carson is a lyrical essayist, poet, translator, librettist, critic, and scholar, whose work has been shaped and framed by classical literature. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) explores the concept of Eros in classical philosophy and literature, while Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (New York: Knopf, 1998) reworks the legend of Herakles, his tenth labor, into a homosexual love story of a red monster called Geryon and a teenager called Herakles. Autobiography of Red includes Carson’s free translation of the Geryoneis fragment, just as Nox is a book about Carson’s remembrance of her brother Michael as much as it is about her translation of Catullus’s poem 101. Carson is also the translator of Electra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Knopf, 2002), four plays by Euripides, a triptych translation of Electra, Oresta, and Agamemnon, and Antigone (Antigonick). Nox can thus be seen as part of a writing history that integrates creation, invention, and translation, in so far as invention connotes dis-covery: the uncovering of dead languages.
- 2.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacrum et Simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981).
- 3.
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 85.
- 4.
Excerpts from Nox can be viewed online: “Nox [Excerpts],” Academy of American Poets, accessed December 15, 2017, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/nox-excerpts; Jörg Colberg, Jörg, “Presenting Nox by Anne Carson,” YouTube video, Posted March 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hBDitYQC-s
- 5.
Poem 101 by Gaius Valerius Catullus (c 84–54 BC) is an elegiac poem in which the poet addresses the remaining traces of his brother’s body. The brother died in a faraway land, just as Carson’s brother died in a foreign country, namely Denmark. Michael’s ashes already scattered into the sea, some pictures of him as a boy, and a letter are all that Carson has left as her mute objects of elegiac address.
- 6.
For a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of ghosts in Western and postcolonial cultures, see María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
- 7.
Carson, Nox, 8.1. Anne Carson does not provide page numbers in Nox. Indications are only given for sections. Accordingly, I indicate section numbers when I quote from Nox.
- 8.
For more on these screenfolds, see “Mesoamerican Screenfolds,” Mesolore, accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.mesolore.org/tutorials/learn/10/Mesoamerican-Screenfolds/122/Writing-and-Materiality
- 9.
The history of the book in a box can be traced all the way to Marcel Duchamp and Stéphane Mallarmé. In the 1960s, the book in the box was revived as a literary form. Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par sa célibataires meme (Boîte vert) (1934) can be viewed online: “Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box), 1934,” Tate, accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even-the-green-box-t07744/image-141692
- 10.
Carson, Nox, 2.2.
- 11.
Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Layton: Gibbs M. Smith & Visual Studies Workshop, 1985), 31–43.
- 12.
Carrión, “New Art,” 31.
- 13.
Carson, Nox, 1.3.
- 14.
Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004), 1.
- 15.
Drucker, Artists’ Books, 3.
- 16.
Anna Poletti, “Auto/assemblage: Reading the Zine.” in “Autographics,” ed. Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti, special issue, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 31, no.1 (2008): 85–102.
- 17.
Poletti, “Auto/assemblage,” 88.
- 18.
For more on zines and zine materiality, see the essay by Janice Radway in this collection.
- 19.
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4, no.3 (1996): 329.
- 20.
Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 329.
- 21.
Anne Carson, “Evoking the Starry Lad Her Brother Was,” interview by Parul Sehgal, The Irish Times, March 19, 2011, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/evoking-the-starry-lad-her-brother-was-1.577255
- 22.
Danielewski has remarked with regard to his novel Only Revolutions (which can be read front to back as well as back to front): “The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you’re exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that’s the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books.” See Motoko Rich, “Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules,” New York Times, June 5, 2006, accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/books/05digi.html
- 23.
Johanna Drucker, Speclab. Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 168.
- 24.
Celeste Olaquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom. On the Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 291.
- 25.
Olaquiaga, Artificial Kingdom, 292.
- 26.
Olaquiaga, Artificial Kingdom, 291.
- 27.
Olaquiaga, Artificial Kingdom, 292.
- 28.
Olaquiaga, Artificial Kingdom, 80.
- 29.
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (London: The Free Press of Glencoe/Collier-Macmillan, 1964), 102.
- 30.
Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgaben des Übersetzers,” in Gesammelte Schriften – Band IV.1, ed. Tillman Rexroth, Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), 11. For an English Translation, see Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).
- 31.
Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85.
- 32.
Carolyn De Meyer discusses this “literalist” translation of Jacobs—in contrast to the well-known and popular translation of Henry Zohn—as part of her doctoral dissertation on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake within the framework of Benjamin’s conception of translation and his “cabbalistic” notion of a Pure Language of which all languages are a fragment. See for this De Meyer’s description of her project “Translation/Fragmentation,” Centre for Translation Studies of the KU Leuven, Accessed March 1, 2019, http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/files/de-meyer.pdf. The link with Joyce is interesting in relation to Carson, whose literalist translation of Catullus—and her subsequent erasure of it—likewise revolves around the illegible.
- 33.
Carol Jacobs, “Monstrosity of Translation,” Modern Language Notes 90, no. 6 (1975): 762. In German, the text reads: “Wie nämlich Scherben eines Gefäßes, um sich zusammenfügen zu lassen, in den kleinsten Einzelheiten einander zu folgen, doch nicht so zu gleichen haben, so muß anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen, die Übersetzung liebend vielmehr und bis ins Einzelne hinein dessen Art des Meinens in der eigenen Sprache sich anbilden, um so beide wie Scherben als Bruchstück eines Gefäßes, als Bruchstück einer größeren Sprache erkennbar zu machen” (Benjamin , IV.1:18).
- 34.
For more on fragments and the afterlife of texts, see Emily Apter, The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s abilities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially 65–68; Michael Steinberg, Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 71.
- 35.
Carson, Nox, 7.1.
- 36.
Andrew Rothwell, “Translating ‘Pure Nonsense’: Walter Benjamin Meets Systran on the Dissecting Table of Dada,” Journal of Romance Studies 27, no.4 (2009): 261.
- 37.
Carson, Nox, 1.1.
- 38.
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, IV.1, 21.
- 39.
Carson, Nox, 7.1.
- 40.
Carson, Nox, 7.1.
- 41.
Michael North, “Authorship and Autography,” PMLA 116, no. 5 (2001): 1378.
- 42.
North, “Authorship,” 1382–83.
- 43.
North, “Authorship,” 1382.
- 44.
North, “Authorship,” 1382.
- 45.
North, “Authorship,” 1382.
- 46.
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, “Old and New Medialities in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes,” in New Perspectives on Material Culture and Intermedial Practice, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek et al., special issue, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1, no. 3 (2011): 2–10.
- 47.
Garrett Stewart, “Bookwork as Demediation,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 410–57.
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Wurth, K.B. (2019). Authorial Impression and Remediation in Anne Carson’s Quasi-Artist’s Book Nox. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_11
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