Verglas: Narrative Technique in Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”

Abstract

Anne Carson published Glass, Irony, and God in 1995, and although collection was not showered with prizes like some of her later books its opening poem, Glass Essay, has come to define narrative technique. The place of Glass Essay in Canadian canon seems secure, having been republished in such standard anthologies as Gary Geddes's 15 Canadian Poets X3 (2001) and Sharon Thesen's The New Long Poem Anthology (2001). The poem's international reputation is also growing, having been singled out for praise by American classicist Guy Davenport in his introduction to Glass, Irony, and God (ix), as well as opening an Anglo-American collection of women's writing, Wild Workshop (1997). The Hero section of Glass Essay has even made its way into 2006 version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2864-67). Yet Carson's genre-averse approach to creates a good deal of confusion for critics because it mixes poetry with essay, literary criticism, and other forms of prose, and her style is at once quirky, inventive, and erudite (Kuiper). Many critics worry that her writing fails as poetry, simply because it shows either crashing inability or an unbecoming contempt for medium (2), as Richard Potts says of The Beauty of Husband (2001). Several Canadian critics share Potts's objections (Solway, Heer) and compound them by wondering how to situate poetry within context of Canadian literature when her writing features few explicitly Canadian settings, characters, or homages to Canadian artists. I addressed some of these concerns in From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada (2008) by demonstrating how Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) might be situated within a Canadian tradition of poet-novelists, whereas American critics have countered accusations of chopped prose in writing by positioning it as exemplary case of a hybrid and increasingly prominent genre, (D'Agata and Tall; see also Carson, Woman 32). In this article, I will explicate narrative technique in her signature poem by demonstrating how Carson employs logic of lyric essay to produce an extended, bilingual pun on multiple senses of English glass (transparent material, magnifying lens, mirror) and French glace (ice, mirror). (1) Furthermore, I will measure achievement of combining paratactic qualities of modernist lyric (in which poem leaps from one topic to another without transitional matter) with hypotactic logic of essay (in which essay develops an argument using classical techniques of rhetorical persuasion) by reading Glass Essay through a distinctly Canadian compound term, verglas, which can be translated literally from French as glass-ice and is akin to English terms silver thaw and black ice. However, it is easier to begin analysis of bilingual puns by demonstrating how other half of title plays on differing senses of English essay and French essai. Critics frequently observe that poems use term in French sense: An essay, etymologically, is an 'attempt,' a 'test' or 'trial' (Stanton 36). John D'Agata pursues this line of thinking in an interview with Carson, and he attempts to situate her essays between autobiographical explorations of Montaigne and public concerns of Cicero (Carson, Talk 20). Although many critics align writing with open-ended musings of Montaigne (Carson, Gifts 17), in D'Agata interview Carson prefers to think of herself as an heir to Cicero, who maintains an urbane interest in rhetorical form, hypotaxis (hence her frequent use of a scholarly introduction to frame her narrative poems), and what Carson calls, in nearly every interview, the facts. Yet work clearly moves between these two poles, counterbalancing raw confessional verse with academic enquiry into cases analogous to speaker's emotional state, which gives speaker a better perspective on his or her own condition. …