Interfacing grief: haptic autotheory & performance as afterlife in Anne Carson’s Nox

Abstract

This essay examines Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) – a mixed-media elegiac and autotheoretical work in which Carson mourns the death of her brother, Michael – and its afterlife in a movement-based performance choreographed by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. Whether a matter of ever-enlarging scales of space, digital and otherwise; the dissolution of bereavement practices or, more broadly, a poststructuralist favoring of abstraction, the contemporary displacement of the body in grief creates new creative demands of mourning. In the pages of Nox, Carson underscores the ongoing nature of loss by uniquely assembling an array of intimate ephemera: photographs, drawings, and letters are paired alongside textual fragments and translated lexical entries. By depathologizing the durational work of mourning and reclaiming its haptic dimensions, Carson reimagines an ancient impulse of the elegiac tradition – to materialize the abstraction of death into form – within a contemporary culture that so often leaves death unsubstantiated. Through critical analysis and personal recount, this essay considers how Carson taps into the longstanding feminist impulse to approach embodied experience as a location of theoretical inquiry. Beyond a phenomenology of grief, Carson’s engagement of autotheory is a haptic encounter: a proximal scene of feeling and contact site that presses us to expand our cultural frames for avowing loss.