Let us take a journey from the political realm to Macdara’s true native land: literature. As a starting off point for exploring the work of Anne Carson, legend of letters, let him begin with a digression relating to his other artistic mother, Joan Didion.
Reading Didion’s work, Macdara has experienced a kind of disbelief: while reading, he has found himself unable to accept that some intelligence has ordered words in exactly this way, this perfect way wherein the elegance of the text’s surface coheres with its content—which is to say that she has found the only correct form of words, within her style, to render that which she wants to say—forming this most precise and lasting thing. This writer has felt some relief that he is safe from Didion’s gaze: how could anyone ever have accepted a Gorgon as company? People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests, she said: why did Nancy Reagan think she could let Didion see her interact with the television crew that day? (This was the subject of the passage that caused Macdara’s out of mind experience.)
Carson’s work has similarly given him this sudden disbelief, pulling a not-here-ness right out of him like a magician’s streamers, though for a different reason. With Didion, there is the detail, the sentences, the care: she is the ideal writer. Macdara thinks of Carson as an artist instead, one whose medium is language. Didion’s style is flattening, sleek; Carson’s has lumps and edges, texture. This is by design. Her long engagement with Latin and Greek has taught her what it is to handle language as stuff. So she constructs a sentence in which perhaps she needs a word like stone. But she finds—because she is an artist—that she must replace it with another hard word like Monday or silence or blue. Her work always has that quality of works in translation that writers must wish for the words they write that are stuck in a single language only; the feeling of its having moved, its awkward display of its own dynamic credentials.
It would be easy to say that in her essays and lectures, she moves by way of metaphor; that the reason she slides from Homer to the trial of Joan of Arc to Francis Bacon’s colour is that this is like this is like this, but Macdara believes that that is not right. The text itself is the thing, and the movement within the text is between bits of the whole, each part of which stands in for the whole, though metonymy does not seem like the right word either. The words that make up the whole are like the colours of a painting perhaps. They stand in isolation from each other, although they correspond. Macdara imagines that the units of sense in her argument can be moved around, quite easily swapped perhaps for other bits during the drafting of the work, as an artist may choose colours. He might add at this point that he does not uniformly like Carson’s work: there are pieces, sometimes entire books, where he can appreciate that she is doing something without liking it much. This again is the consequence of her artistry; perhaps she herself does not always like what she does, but does it because she must. Or because someone must, and since the work has come to her, she must be the one to realise it. This is a contrast with Didion, any of whose non-fiction Macdara can read compulsively, more or less knowing how it will go, and enjoying the experience all the more for that fact.
The origin of draoi in Irish, and its counterpart druid in English (the English term comes from the Latin, having been borrowed from the cognate word in Gaulish) means oak-knower. The druid is a knower of oaks, those sacred trees. Carson is a knower of words, carrying them across—the literal meaning of translate—picking her way, let us imagine, across stepping stones set in some sacred river, words like a brick in each hand: she must recreate a temple, perhaps, on our side of the river, one she has seen on the farther shore. She can never remake it exactly, but that is not what the people on this side require of her. Honestly we require nothing of her, she has no debt to us, but she makes the temple for us, or she makes it, and we may visit. We may make our way over the quick river to the Greek remains: she spent decades as a teacher instructing people how to get there (if there is anything that causes one to doubt one’s own use of language, and even language as such, it is teaching). Carson as labourer, architect: this seems a better metaphor than that of painting: her consideration, her construction, her knowing the thingness of words left in, left out: their size, shape and weight.