Six Short Talks: Reading in, around, & on (& on) Anne Carson’s “Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of fifteen minutes”

Abstract

SHORT TALK on Drinking Since May 2009, six excerpts (Recipe, of Addressing Oscar Wilder' Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony Pt 3, Reticent Sonnet; Isolate, and Drop't Sonnet) from Anne Carson's Possessive Used As (Me) have been installed as a curated series on the University of Michigan's Play Gallery website. According to Carson, when she was commissioned by Harvard University to write a lecture on pronouns, she penned the sequence that serves as the backbone of this performance event. Although Carson's use of the term sonnet privileges the literary, the event that unfurls in the virtual gallery space celebrates the operatic potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. The process of creative interventions involved in the creation of Possessive Used As (Me) certainly embodies the kind of interdisciplinarity Linda Hutcheon has identified as inherently operatic: the performance is the product of the collaborative work of a librettist [Carson], who writes the dramatic or poetic text, and a composer [Stephanie Rowden], who sets that text to music, and a host of other artists [three dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company], whose task is to bring the dramatic texts (the libretto and the score) to life on the (1366). As embodied, time-based events in word, sound, and movement, Carson's sonnets, moreover, represent opera as a performative text through which writing and reading, listening and looking, doing and un-doing, meaning and mis-understanding decline to the same verb: drink. To drink is a particularly apt metaphor for the operatic event: as a verb, it privileges both the eye and the ear and thus can be used to illustrate a syncretic experience of visual spectacle and spoken word. To drink is the physical act of swallowing a liquid. To drink is a physical sensation, an immediate experience, the act that occurs before digestion, before the liquid is processed into smaller components the body can use To drink is also, in the Shakespearean sense, a mental act of listening, gazing upon, or contemplating with rapture or eager delight: My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words of thy tongue's uttering (II.ii.58). To then, is also a romantic act, an intoxicating experience involving the ears, the eyes, and the nose, as well as the mouth, in the transformation of physical sensations into emotional responses. To drink is operatic in its potential for melodrama: the risk of being overwhelmed, of sucking in the landscape in its entirety and drowning. As a way of experiencing language, moreover, to drink represents an ecstatic recuperation of the relationship between reader and text. As the thing that is drunk (in the double sense), the text becomes--rather than a solid, enduring artifact--a substance that can't keep its own shape, that adapts to fit its container, that flows through holes and is subject to water-slide ... plummet sheer descent amnesia vertical dive this fast drainpipe ... this streaming downspout (Carson Drop't Sonnet). The reader, as the one who drinks, is changed by the act and thus is, in turn, drunk. The performance, in other words, drinks its reader. As subject and object of performance's transformative potential, both text and reader belong, as Carson recognizes, in parenthesis: Drink (Me). Short Talk on Operas and Outlaws In contrast to the melodramatic potential of drink, life on Carson's operatic stage is minimalist and markedly un-spectacular. Three dancers (two women and a man) in non-descript, androgynous, identical costumes move methodically across a cool, ultra-clean, ultra-modern, Beckett-esque stage while, somewhere offstage and beyond the camera's gaze, the poet reads her sonnets in a sonic landscape that is stark and suburban: elevator bells, a sporadic typewriter, creaking door hinges, and chairs scraping the floor. Neither stage nor dancers nor speaking voice are dressed up: their performances, though polished, have a quality of the everyday--that un composed, anonymous, un-fixable performance we re-iterate unwittingly, in accordance with the assumed social norms. …