Wrong Norma
Anne Carson
New Directions, 2024
Review by Samantha Neugebauer
“All novelists,” remarks Anne Carson in Wrong Norma, “share the fantasy of a different kind of novel.” Yet most novelists–albeit not Carson, a Renaissance Woman known for her astonishing ability to malleate literary forms–end up writing into the tried-and-true formula. The next novel, these other writers promise themselves, will be better–will be different! However, time and time again, as Carson says, they fail to ‘abolish’ the novel and instead, simply ‘renounce’ the novel’s familiar indicators: “plot, consequence, the pleasure a reader derives from answers withheld, the premeditation of these.” While Carson’s speaker may humbly align herself with the broader herd of novelists, Carson the writer–the poet, novelist, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator–has been singularly upending these conventions of prose for some time.
Wrong Norma is Carson’s first collection since 2016, containing elements of many, if not all, of her previous works; like Nox (2011), it experiments with collage and memoir, like Eros the Bittersweet (1986), it embeds ‘characters’ from antiquity and various literary arts, including, as in Autobiography of Red (1998), her beloved Herakles, and like Float (2016), the pieces are deceptively disconnected. Carson says they are “not linked” and “that’s why I’ve called them wrong.”
I was first introduced to Carson several years ago through Men in the Off Hours (2000), her first widely celebrated hybrid work of essays, poems, epitaphs, and translations. Immediately, I relished her range of knowledge, gnomic observations, voracious imagination, and ability to surprise me. Her forms and subject matters are idiosyncratic. If you read Carson long ago, you come to expect and find pleasure in the way her work will shift, blend, obscure, and spin-off into unexpected terrain. In Wrong Norma, for example, one encounters blocks of Arabic text within a sea of English. If an individual has no fluency in Arabic, the section is incomprehensible, though one could always look up the translation. The Arabic passage is a different kind of surprise, of course, for folks who speak and read Arabic.
Lately, I’ve had the concept of surprise on my mind. At the moment, two of my best friends are pregnant. One, a journalist, has declared that she will not seek to know the sex of her baby before delivery because there are “so few surprises in life.” Meanwhile, the other, a novelist, has told me the exact opposite, that she will know as soon as she can because there are “so many surprises in life.” Paradoxically, Carson can speak to and affirm both of my friends’ worldviews. Surprises, Carson seems to say, do exist, can be pleasing, and yet surprises are only surprises because we do not know, and sometimes refuse to know, the full minds of others, including other life forms. “Every water,” she writes, “has its own rules and offering.”
Surprises can be real or temporary. Surprises can also be acts of self-deception. I, for instance, often get caught in the rain, because I almost never seek out the morning forecast. Many times, being caught in the rain is kind of exhilarating, but if I need to be somewhere important and look presentable, arriving drenched is undesirable. This is my choice. Being swept away in a flash flood, however, is rarely a choice. Collectively, our ability to predict and warn of flash floods is still insufficient. Understanding the difference between the limits of our own knowledge/susceptibility to surprise, and the limits of our collective knowledge/susceptibility to surprise is interesting to Carson. Many folks are victims to thinking that their own limits are everybody’s limits. Or a group’s limits are signaled by a group’s most uninformed or deranged members.
Carson, notably, is more invested in tackling our collective limits. She enjoys resurrecting and dialoguing with ancient figures as if to remind us that there is nothing new under the sun and that if we want to understand why we are the way we are, we need only to revisit and investigate what, collectively, we already know, or used to know. This can be applied to the non-human too. At one point, she interviews rocks. In general, acknowledging life’s many surprises can suggest our humility (good), while avowing to life’s lack of surprises may indicate our study of humanity (also good), or, in extreme cases, our cynicism. The same can be said of our relationship with novels. Wanting to create a ‘different’ novel can indicate erudition and mental fatigue. On the other hand, it might imply hubris, weariness, and disenchantment. In Wrong Norma, you get a bit of all the above.
Additionally, Carson remind us, say, as she does in “Essay on What I Think about Most,” that:
“Lots of people including Aristotle think error
an interesting and valuable mental event…
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself
in the act of making a mistake…
From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be learned.
Not only that things are other than they seem,
and so we mistake them,
but that such mistakenness is valuable. “
Not only is this excerpt a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for eager budding writers and lovers of figurative language, but it’s also a fine example of Carson’s gentle nudging together of life’s surprises with life’s lack of surprises. What is, one might ask, the relationship between surprise and metaphor? Surprise and willful, correctable misunderstanding? Maybe the difference between people can be measured in how long they hold on to their resistance to understanding.
Furthermore, Wrong Norma gives the sense that Carson, in her search for wisdom, takes to following unknown roads, hoping to surprise and engage herself. In “Getaway,” the speaker, who is grieving both heartbreak and the loss of her mother, “is reading only books written by people named Margaret so as to feel close to her mother.” In one of the book’s most captivating pieces, “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” the Romantic speaker takes aim at the “so-called Enlightenment.” At a certain junctor, the speaker becomes cloud:
“Tuesday I became clouds. Possibly a defensive measure –
everyone loves clouds, they lift the heart, they lift the eye.
Actually they lift the heart because they lift the eye. Cog-
nitive scientists say that people place gods in the high blue
sky because looking up causes a rush of dopamine in the
brain. Yet clouds do more than draw your eye upwards.
They invent your imagination.”
This lengthy piece concerns the life of a writer told through cosmic grandeur. As the above passage shows, science occasionally serves as its backbone; and yet, science is also its enemy. The cloud-speaker later laments that during the Age of Reason:
“I had to replace the shapeless caprice of
my atmospheres with 4 basic cloud types. I had to edit the
indecipherably fluid filigree of my language into a dry-as
dust classificatory system replete with Latin terminology…”
It seems that in Carson’s mind, science is one source of freedom, and Romanticism is another. We, or at least, she, can have both.
The American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens once stated that we admire something in a poem long before we understand it. This is often my experience of falling in love–or reading Carson. While I might become confused by her work at times or find myself unfamiliar with one of her references, my first instinct is to edge even closer to Carson, rather than to seek outside sources to make sense of what she is trying to convey. This in itself is a reason to read her.
Wrong Norma, like all Carson’s work, contains worlds. More importantly, these worlds feel very much like unique places that exist firmly within her, digested and formed from her lifetime of reading, personal experiences, and reflection. She draws from them like a woman at a well to create her pieces. The internet has profoundly changed humanity’s relationship to knowledge to a degree not seen since the dawn of widespread literacy and the printing press. We have more access to information than ever, and yet, so much of this information passes through us unabsorbed. Much of the prose I encounter nowadays feels like some monument constructed from disparate scrapyard finds (the scrapyard in question being the vast expanse of content and hive-mind opinion available online), rather than from the inner self, i.e. the soul, of its author. Plato warned us of this, They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. Not so with Carson. Her work is personal yet informed and assimilated within her, unaffected by our times. Wrong Norma is both fresh and deep; it’s Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head and also, it’s Zeus’s head.
Throughout Wrong Norma, regular text is interspersed with small typewritten notes, many of which are faded in a facsimile style. In the later half of the book, Carson’s own illustrations appear.
Like a jolt of intimacy, Carson’s notes and pictures bring you staggeringly close to their creator, reminiscent of zines and children’s crayoned drawings. As an editor for the literary magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, I love looking back at our archive, from the years before I was born, before the magazine was sleek and ‘professional.’ It’s the same pleasure I get from diving into Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, The Restored Edition, where we can witness the poet’s intuition and decision-making process as she cuts lines, alters, punctuation, and changes titles. In all these examples, the imperfections bring the human to the forefront. Carson’s gift is that even when she is hidden behind regular typefaces, you feel the living force of her, so alive and singular, like a cloud above, willing to bestow us with its accumulated bounty.
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU in D.C., a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, and co-host of the short story review channel Short Story Boudoir. Visit her at, samanthaneugebauer.com.