The Blaney Lecture: Anne Carson

I'm Frances levy at recession and I are co-directors the Philip Teddy Center and welcome to the second part of this really exciting event that we want to thank the Academy of American poets for organizing we were originally actually going to be showing one of my most favorite films contempt which I think epitomizes a certain element of an Carson's work through the New Wave imagery and the classic the classical imagery and unfortunate we're not able to show the movie but I understand they'll be a four-minute segment from the movie being shown during the course of the lecture before we begin I want to also thank Alex dimitrov Kristina Opry's and Billy Merrill who have been instrumental in making this happen now for those of you who've just come up there is seating on floor two here so you can go down and simulcast and it's a cozy place to be let me tell you so don't and you come up afterwards and talk to Anne Carson so before we continue I want to just make a couple of announcements tomorrow we have a roundtable called the imagination of Hamlet and it's being hosted by Paul Frey from Yale and Robert Brustein the distinguished theater scholar will be here along with a number of others including christian camargo the actor laura levine from nyu eugene Mahan the psychoanalyst and Susan Wilfred the Shakespeare scholar now on November 6th we have seeking finding equilibrium not seeking but find the equilibrium in Hitchcock's vertigo another of my favorite films of all time and we are showing the film that day so come for the round table and for the film showing other events include from Muse to music exploring the craft of the American art along with Stephanie chase on the 14th of November and then a very exciting panel on December 5th called the art of the graphic novel and on that panel we have Linda Barry Hilary shoot Christopher couch Ben Couture and France was muli so without further ado I want to introduce Christina where are you Christina la please thanks so much sorry Thank You Francis and thanks to Adam and Edward nurses the end of the selected E Center my name is Christina Reese and I'm the publicity and events coordinator for the Academy of American poets and on behalf of our staff I want to thank everyone for coming out and joining us this afternoon and I'd also like to extend special thanks to the members of the Academy of American poets who are here tonight or this afternoon rather about your support we wouldn't be able to do events like the poet's forum so thank you so much all so much gratitude - on the New York Department of Cultural Affairs and the Department of humanities as well their support is invaluable to all of our programming if you're interested after the reading you can purchase books for mobile Libre so to know and I think there's also going to be a brief signing as well but without further delay I am honored to present an Carson homeric kind of event in and of itself and Carson is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed artist classicist composer and author of numerous works including Knox which was recently released by New Directions and her work resists or rather transcends the confines of traditional classification a feat that allows the reader and viewer to acts access to an uncharted yet seemingly familiar landscape one feels perhaps an invitation to serve as co-creators and maybe even co-conspirators in the invention of a moment and the reinvention of a past and it's within these moments that one senses the intense intimacy and starting startling objectivity of Carson's work her boundless imagination and intellect challenge challenge convention while also delighting confounding and inspiring audiences around the world and I've no doubt that we'll find anything less in her talk today please join me in welcoming and Carson um hi thank you for coming I is kind of weird it's like giving a lecture in a living room and I apologize to people I'm got my back too and also people who will get a stiff neck you don't have to look at me a public announcement I think guys was mentioned we're going to show a little bit of a movie which I'll be talking about now then at the end so after I finished talking they'll be just I think it's about a four-minute clip of Brigitte Bardot naked which is a reason to sit through all the paragraphs in between now and then so I was in Berlin a while ago and I went to an art opening of a very famous very celebrated very wealthy American artist and we were all there like milling around looking at the art drinking wine chatting and a man came in from the street made his way through the crowd stood in front of the artist and engaged him in conversation for a few moments and then hauled off and socked him in the nose yelling you sellout so I began to get interested in this concept of the sellout what does it mean to be a sellout nowadays because most of us sell pretty much anything pretty much all the time what's the difference between mere selling and selling out seems to be a very thin border and yet one that we're intuitively aware of all the time so anyway I was pondering these things and more pertinently since I'm a classicist and I like to trace everything to Homer I was wondering if the ancient Greeks had this concept of the sellout and this concern for the very thin border so I did some research and sure enough Homer turns out to be the very first artist in our tradition the Western tradition to build a work of art around the question what is a sellout and to purge his hero on that very thin border the work of course would be the Odyssey and the hero Odysseus who I'm going to argue is a person who comes very close to selling out and then at the last moment transcends himself and his own materialism and is saved by the power of true love but let's go back to the distinction between selling and selling out selling is quite common selling out allegedly more rare we cherish this distinction we worry about it certainly Homer cherished and worried about it - although in slightly different terms and with a slightly different tonality I would like in this lecture to try to map our distinction between selling and selling out on to the economic values of a diseases world and then to explore it further in to 20th century works based on Odysseus and his adventures namely Alberto Moravia is novel yield is spread so published in 1954 and jean-luc godard loom a pre a movie based on Moravia z-- novel and filmed in 1963 both of which works come over into English as contempt Homer himself was in all likelihood a poet who sang for his supper that is a professional bard and although it's hard to say anything definitive about Homer because scholars can't even agree on whether or not he existed they do believe that we can see what his life would have like from characters in his poems who are themselves professional entertainers in particular the character named phoebius who appears in the Odyssey as a poet attached to Odysseus own household Femi is's name means simply teller or storyteller and his function is to make up stories poems songs to entertain the company at dinner each evening in return for which he receives food drink lodging and honor here is a passage from the first book of the Odyssey where Odysseus is son Telemachus is instructing femi as the bard on how to please his audience you know the song most honored and praised among men is the one that sounds new and fresh that the ears of its listeners I'm pretty sure Homer also felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound new and fresh to an audience who had loved his previous bestseller The Iliad The Iliad was a hard act to follow a war story unlike any other so Homer made the Odyssey a post war epic it idealizes survival rather than death and features Odysseus a hero for whom survival is pointless unless profitable Odysseus is a hero of acquisition he could have made it home from the Trojan War in a month and a half but he travels the world for ten years soliciting guest gifts and hospitality from everyone he meets there's a strange scene in Odyssey book 19 where Odysseus himself explains this behavior to his own wife at this point in the story he has finally arrived home to Ithaca and is talking to his wife Penelope but doesn't want her to know who he is yet so he has disguised himself as a traveling salesman from Crete he tells her he recently ran into her husband of this is on his journey and he adds in fact your Odysseus would have been home long before now but it seemed his mind more profitable to go to many lands acquiring stuff for Odysseus knows profit over and above mortal men nor could anyone else alive rival him at this Penelope does not question this explanation she knows her husband as well as he knows profit and she knows the economic system in which he is a player Odysseus is a land owning wife owning slave owning aristocrat within a highly controlled aristocratic economy of mutual reciprocity and gift exchange this is a society of noblemen who passed their wealth around to one another in the form of hospitality feasting favours and gifts in order to reify their own noble status they are at pains to make a distinction between their own wealth which is honorable and traitors gain or commercial profit which is not aristocrats give and receive gifts they do not buy and sell merchandise the distinction is both physical and metaphysical gifts are not measured calculated or priced profit is not the point to use marks as terms an item of merchandise is an alienable object exchanged between two mutually independent trans actors their relationship is impersonal and it stops with the transfer of goods a gift on the other hand is an inalienable object exchange between two trans actors who recognize a reciprocal dependence you give a gift to an ally a kinsman a friend to put yourself in debt is the point gift and merchandise represent two different notions of value embodied in two different sets of social relations the sets ought to be mutually exclusive in fact historically and psychologically they share a very thin border and sometimes overlap although the profound conservatism of a gift economy is inclined to defend that border fiercely in homers diction then aristocratic wealth the stuff of gift exchange takes the form of treasure or the Greek word is came a Leone which is a noun derived from the verb came I that means simply to be situated to lie to lie there and do nothing the noun chameleon is defined as something to be laid away or treasured up in other words something that its owner does not need to use for his own survival chameleons in epic poetry usually takes the form of bronze iron gold silver fine cloth or sometimes women these objects of treasure have some direct use and give aesthetic pleasure but their real importance is as symbolic wealth or prestige wealth they have definite economic value and yet they are in some absolute sense beyond price in theory then Odysseus does not wander the world for ten years racking up stuff out of motives of avarice or greed he brings precious things home in order to store them as treasure or give them away as gifts nonetheless as NES toot reader of the Odyssey will observe Odysseus's own economic practice differs somewhat from this theory it's true he inhabits an economic order where the parameters are set and the rules are clear yet he does like to test that very thin border more than any other hero of ancient epic Odysseus seems to enjoy gaming the gift exchange system for all it's worth and sometimes takes a lenient attitude toward that pesky distinction between honourable and dishonourable there is a certain irony in his tendency whenever he's in a tight spot and needs a fake identity to pass himself off as a commercial salesman no such irony distinguishes the hero of Moravia 'he's novel yield espresso which I'll quote from below in that English translation of Angus Davidson or hadera's movie version of it LeMay Prix both contempts tell the story of a writer who is 100% humorless his name is Ricardo he's hired by a big American movie producer to come up with a script for a film of Homer's Odyssey Ricardo is educated narcissistic and neurotic about money he's taken the screenwriting job because he needs to pay off an apartment he bought for his wife but he feels the job is utterly beneath him he refers to screenwriting as merely a stopgap refers to his existence as tainted and crippled by money refers to screenwriting as a kind of rape of the intelligence and says of his script now I shall have to submit the Odyssey to the usual massacre reduce it to film while he's working on this massacre his marriage falls apart at the end of the story Ricardo's wife speeds off with the American producer in his sports car and is killed in a freak accident both the novel and the movie and tragically Homer's Odyssey notably does not what saves Odysseus from tragedy is on the one hand his economic attitude this combination of gamesmanship and irony that Homer sums up by saying Odysseus is one who knows profit and on the other hand the fact that he genuinely likes his wife in fact I think this may be two sides of one coin but let's consider wives Ricardo's wife in more novel is Amelia a happy former typist not her husband's equal in education intellect or moral sensibility as he frequently reminds us he is the narrator of the novel instead of conversation Ricardo bestows on her long paragraphs of the self analysis of Ricardo which she receives with a blank stare or simply leaves the room the plot of the novel revolves around the mysterious contempt that Amelia begins to exhibit toward Ricardo shortly after he accepts the screenwriting job she acts Cole decides they should sleep in separate rooms and after nine chapters of his ceaseless interrogation admits she doesn't love him anymore that she in fact despises him he analyzes this for the rest of the book eventually deciding that he offended her the first time they went out to dinner with the producer by allowing the producer to drive her to the restaurant in his sports car while he Ricardo followed in a taxi that is Amelia presumed her husband was pimping her to the producer as part of the scriptwriting deal as if Odysseus had come home and told the suitors to do what they liked with Penelope it remains unclear to me whether we are meant to believe this explanation of Amelia's contempt or not it is only one of a number of hypotheses that Ricardo advances and Amelia placidly agrees with each of them in turn her motives her real desires her psychic depths remain opaque to the reader right through the end of the novel in Ricardo's view she is a person entirely unconcerned with self-knowledge of the accident that ends her life Ricardo says she died without knowing it this inscrutable person is played by brigitte bardot in Goudas movie a casting choice that changed certain quotients of the story and the production Bardo turn doubt to be what Proust calls his character Odette a trouble hallo not only because she was blond while the amelia of the novel is dark but because she cost five million francs was followed everywhere by paparazzi into phalanx of bodyguards and represented for the France of that time a consummate definition of the female Brigitte Bardot bent the story out of shape while ensuring its success at the box office kadar needed a box-office success his last two films had failed and no one could say where the French New Wave was headed he didn't like to see it headed for Hollywood and Hollywood's production values but when he took on Brigitte Bardot he took on all the complexities and compromises of a big-budget film he had to change his methods and surrender authority to an American producer named Joe Levine in many respects his situation was oddly analogous to that of poor conflicted Ricardo in moravia 's novel Oscar Wilde would admire the way art stepped forward to become life in this scenario but wasn't it also Wilde who said the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it Ghidorah yielded so thoroughly to the temptation of CinemaScope he created a movie that is a spectacle of compromise soaring past the ethical quibbles of the novel Lemaitre the movie celebrates its own selling out in a spirit of self delighted cunning that would make Odysseus proud Gaddar is a man who knows profit he is an artist who can make out of the theme of profit and epic imaginary and when he installs Brigitte Bardot at the center of his movie she takes it to another economic level altogether but let's return for a moment to Odysseus and the question of singing for one supper by far the best suppers Odysseus gets in the Odyssey are on the island of Calypso book 5 calypso is a minor goddess who falls in love with Odysseus and detains him for a number of years against his will he's fascinated for the first week then bored and gradually subsides into a kind of despair that I would call economic because Homer frames it in issues of supply and demand Calypso's island is magical it supplies every possible demand Odysseus might have for food drink clothing sex companionship or conversation he has only to pay over the coin of his self his entire self Calypso wants Odysseus body and soul she wants everything about him physical moral and verbal she wants the work of art that he has made of his own human being and she wants it for all time she promises to immortalize him when he rejects the transaction she's baffled why would anyone choose to abandon a consumer paradise where he could live forever with the ravishing divinity Odysseus's answer is I know you're a goddess and bigger and better looking than my wife for you are deathless and ageless while she is a mere mortal and yet I prefer Penelope and what I really longed for is the day of my return Odysseus his answer sets up a calculus he measures the infinite days and internet pleasures of Calypso against the single day of his homecoming and the mortal attractions of his wife the infinite comes up lacking neither Odysseus nor Homer ever tells us exactly what the infinite lacks that is we never get an objective description of Penelope we do not know if she is dark or fair Odysseus nowhere itemizes the qualities that make her more desirable than a goddess what becomes clear in the final stages of the poem however as husband and wife engage in a so-called recognition scene that extends from book 17 where Odysseus shows up in two skies at Penelope's house to book 23 where she falls weeping into his arms and calls his name is that these two people are a match for each other in wits and ambiguity we watch her throughout these six books seduced him by the simple tactic of never letting him know what she's thinking she dangles herself she dangles the prospect of homecoming before him in a series of tantalizing interactions she gives him clothing a meal a bath a bed in the courtyard and several deep conversations without ever letting on whether she's recognized him or not scholars still disagree on where exactly in the poem she decides that Odysseus is Odysseus and she should welcome him home Penelope's power is the power of a meaning withheld so to Amelia the wife in Moravia --zz novel seems to her husband Ricardo a moving locus of ambiguity he cannot grasp her since she is just a typist he attributes this to her being badly educated or corrupt or as he puts it unconscious of her own in her life we never find out if this is true Amelia's character is always out of focus seen through the lens of Ricardo's exasperation there are times she is so ungraspable she falls apart before his eyes this is a description he gives of how her face changes when they are arguing she looked at me and I noticed then a peculiarity which I already knew her beautiful dark serene face so harmonious so symmetrical so compact underwent through the ear resolution that cleft her mind a process almost as it were of decay one cheek seemed to have grown thinner but not the other her mouth was longer exactly in the middle of her face her eyes bewildered and dim seemed to be disintegrating within their sockets as though within a circle of dark wax when I first read this passage it struck me as horrifying and Riccardo as a pretty weird guy but on second thought it occurred to me he and his attitude would have been perfectly at home in Homeric Greece Greece was not only a patriarchal but a gynae phobic culture woman fearing whose nightmares chiefly featured examples of the female as a Content without form there's ample ancient evidence from medical philosophical and legal writings as well as from literature that woman was regarded as a creature whose boundaries are unstable whose power to control them inadequate deformation attends her she swells she shrinks she leaks she perforates she disintegrates think of the female lifecycle with its Bloods its penetrations its pregnancies its changes of shape think of the monsters of Greek myth who are mostly women with deranged boundaries likes gila Medusa the sirens the harpies the Amazons us Fink's self-control is a virtue physical mental and moral which in the view of the Ancients women categorically do not possess in order to achieve for more consistency the female must submit itself to the regulation and articulation of the male so it comes as no surprise that even death does not end Amelia's incoherence Moravia x' novel has a very strange dino mom in which directly after the traffic accident that ends her life the wife appears to the husband as a ghost and conducts a long conversation with him then evaporates afterwards he cannot decide if this really happened he says so in death as in life there was no true conformity and I should never know whether she was a ghost or a hallucination or a dream or perhaps some other illusion the ambiguity which had poisoned our relationship in life continued even after her death unlike Odysseus who falls in love with his wife a second time because she is so perfectly unknowable and who arguably abandons a goddess because he finds in Penelope's mortality the ultimate aphrodisiac Ricardo resents and begrudges Emilia both her death and her formlessness but in the last paragraph of the novel he lights on a plausible course of action for them both he will write down her story he will write in fact this very novel he will capture the trouble halo of Emilia within the measures of his prose she is not after all uncontainable he he can contain her in sentences she is not after all beyond price he makes her part of his own transaction with poetic immortality he sells her out when Jean Luc Godard undertook to repeat this transaction and capture this ghostly woman in the movie of contempt he found it difficult he explains in a 1963 interview why he failed to transform Brigitte Bardot into the Amelia of moray vias novel Bardo he says is a block you have to take it as a block all in one piece that's why it's interesting interesting is key I've read Moravia z-- novel four times and I can't manage to find Amelia interesting perhaps it's part of Moravia Zinn tension that Ricardo's rendering of his wife should flatten her like a coin run over by traffic whereas in the movie when the Bardot block takes over this character its ambiguities amplified so as to develop a depth and individuality flesh it doesn't ever achieve in the book she is no Amelia but she has one important thing in common with Odysseus's wife like Penelope brigitte bardot is a secret she remains a secret I can't analyze this I'll give an example of how it works in the movie of how she and God are collaborate to make it work to keep her secret there was a critical issue of profit involved Oscar Wilde again morality like art means drawing a line somewhere when he shot the film kadar had drawn a line at Bardot's body he did not exploit it there is a bathtub scene but it shows her lying in the bath with a very large book of film criticism obscuring her private parts when the American producer Joel Levine saw the first cut of contempt he flew into a rage he felt he'd been cheated he demanded nudity he was determined to get his 5 million francs worth out of that body so Gaddar added a scene at the start of the film before the credits it shows a naked Bardo lying on a bed with a man beside her they're talking she's asking him if he likes her body she itemizes every body part do you like my toes did you like my knees do you like my ass she asks which do you like better my right toes or my left toes my right knee or my left my breasts or my nipples meanwhile the camera Rove's around her body dwelling mostly on her backside the man answers each of her questions solemnly and at last says I love you totally tenderly tragically - which part Oh with majestic ambiguity replies moi aussi and the scene ends Bardo performs this scene entirely without contempt her gestures are simple transparent her tone of voice quietly banal her attitude as innocent as water and somehow from the pure center of this total and totally imposed exposure of herself she disappears even as she puts herself on sale toe by toe and nipple by nipple - masculine judgment - guitars camera to the moviegoers vase gaze she eludes the transaction she becomes something exorbitant as a secret must be as a gift must be we could never afford her and from this moment on she is the soft master of every scene by far my favorite of her tactics of soft mastery is the wrap gesture there are I think three places in the movie where Bardo puts on a bathrobe in each case as a single action she shrugs it on flings the belt around her waist draws it tight with both hands and leaves the scene it stupendous she wraps herself and goes she wins every time she does this she wins the movie are you and innately unbounded thing the movie asks her and instead of answering she wraps herself in boundlessness and exits brigitte bardot is the hero of this epic she finally is the one who knows profit from the opening shot she calm ports herself as a came a Leone as a treasure laid up and she seems able to retain and to impose on us a sense of this kami Leone as exorbitant as a gift beyond price as a knowledge beyond knowledge like Odysseus she has the power to possess it or give it away and in collaboration with Gaddar she manages to make us believe that of it for those who know it can have a transcendent face or at least a transcendent ass thank you

Channel: philoctetesctr

Views: 21,231

Rating: 4.9053254 out of 5

Keywords: Philoctetes, Academy of American Poets, Anne Carson

Id: jb6JW89EF5U

Length: 35min 15sec (2115 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2010