The element of space in ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson, first published in The Alchemy Spoon 7

‘It is as if’, says Anne Carson’s narrator in the third section of The Glass Essay, ‘we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass’, where the French-Canadian context of Carson’s writing also animates ‘glass’ as ‘glace’ – ice. Almost nothing can move. It is a space where ‘Now and then a remark trails through the glass’, but little of substance is shared. The words which do escape map out the minutiae of daily life and its intrusions: ‘Taxes on the back lot’, or ‘Mice in the tea towel drawer again’. This scene of domestic confinement establishes for the poem the antithetical spaces of the mother’s house and wide moor outside, where

My mother’s kitchen is dark and small but out the window

there is the moor, paralyzed with ice.

It extends as far as the eye can see

In another shift of reference, the poem also accumulates the resonances of Emily Brontë’s domestic and imaginative life, set in a similar opposition, to create reflective surfaces and spaces by which Carson’s narrator might also hope to arrive at some kind of clarity. The Collected Works of Emily Brontë, are, she says, her ‘favourite work’ ('THREE').

In its English sense, a ‘glass’ is also used to magnify as well as reflect, and it is this shifting sense of scale, and therefore meaning, which concentrates so much of the energy of the poem. As lyric essay, it becomes a defining series of spaces in which Carson can develop an enquiry about self and love, about loss, absence and presence. The fourth section, ‘WHACHER’, also moves through the imaginative landscapes of the narrator’s memory, to show space not only as the territories she inhabits, both large and small, but those intervals of time and distance which define her experience subject aways to interpretation. In an image which makes time and space synonymous, Carson shows Emily making ‘her awkward way/ across days and years whose bareness appals her biographers’, where this ‘bareness’, as blank space in the narrative, is shaped party by her sister Charlotte’s control, but also by the narrowing of the public space which Emily’s consciousness is allowed to inhabit, for which ‘the parlour’ becomes the defining image.

Carson shows, however, that confining spaces not only freeze, but concentrate. By Charlotte’s account, 'Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet', and the biographers conclude that she spent ‘most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet’. Thus, in Carson’s intensifying repetition, this brushing of the carpet becomes an act of self-creation, cleaning as a polishing of surfaces, the tightly coiled energy of the scorpion ‘crouched on the arm of the sofa’ persisting as attendant daemon in the room. In another aspect, that potent energy meets its own image in the vast expanse of moor beyond the domestic territories, from which Emily, in the neighbour’s account, returned ‘with her face 'lit up by a divine light'’. In Carson’s poem it is the dimensions of lineation, of language and image, that are powerful enough to conjure ‘moor wind and open night’, undo ‘the bars of time, which broke’, and reveal ‘the poor core of the world’ which Emily ‘whached […] wide open’. Carson also shows, in pursuit of her narrator’s own enquiry, that the contradictory imagery of Emily’s poetry is defined by its tensions, its relationship with space,

…concerned with prisons,

vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,

locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

There is always for the biographers, however, a question: ‘why all this beating of wings?’ For Carson’s narrator too ‘there are many ways of being held prisoner’, an awareness of ‘the invisible cages that confine the heart and mind’, and all are changeable. Where Emily can come in from her encounter with ‘Thou’, face shining, the narrator of Carson’s poem finds in the expanse of moor a different kind of acuteness: the ‘bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April/ carve into me with knives of light’, all distance swallowed and closed, and a wind ‘which now plunges towards me over the moor’. Time too opens and closes to create different spaces - there is ‘the stalled time after lunch’, claustrophobic, loud with the words the fathers ‘never tell’, and the year repeating ‘its days […] that other day running underneath this one/ like an old videotape’. There is the tight proximity of memory, of time, which ‘still carries the sound of the telephone in that room’ as if it were present.

Other energies persist to define spaces ­– there is the ‘weather we may expect to experience/ when we enter Emily’s electrical atmosphere’, that space which will be, by her sister’s account, ‘ 'a horror of great darkness’ ’. For the narrator herself, ‘There was no area of my mind// not appalled’ by the submissive behaviour towards Law, the lover who has rejected her, which she watches in herself. However, watching also implies a shift of dimension, a space across which to observe or be seen, the ‘whacher’ who is both ‘Thou’ and ‘thou’, or the narrator herself looking down, in her state of erotic lucidity, on the objective bedroom scene below, bodies entwined there like Donne’s lovers in ‘The Exstasie’. These intertextualities create another space, where images and ideas reverberate to accumulate new meanings. The landscapes of the narrator’s own experience merge with those of Brontë’s fictional narrative and her biography, to develop a complex psychogeography,

two souls clasped there on the bed

with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.

This is a different kind of nakedness to that of the first of the thirteen Nudes that will be developed in the later sections of the poem, but expresses a similar objectivity, where ‘Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill’, has only space and wind to define her, flay her, ‘long flaps and shreds of flesh’ ripped from her body. By contrast, between Charlotte’s denial and the neighbour’s account of Emily’s ‘shining’ ecstasy, ‘is a space where the little raw soul// slips through.’ Carson brings to this image a powerful sense of poetic expansion in the image of that soul ‘skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,/ out of sight.’ The complex image of the storm petrel energises the sense of release, symbolic of a person who brings or portends trouble, but also known to sailors as ‘the gypsy of the waters’, a colloquial derivation of a name for the Virgin Mary, and a divine warning of storms, or their cause. The alliteration in ‘storm’ and ‘skimming’, and the assonance of’ ‘deep’ and ‘keel’ amplify the sense of length and breadth which counter both the narrowness of the containing space, and the opening ‘space’ through which the ‘little raw soul’ might make its escape, incorporeal, ephemeral.

The word ‘space’ here implies an infinite possibility, where an opening, even of a hair’s breadth, might be something by which a being might enter or leave, be penetrated or released. The section ‘WHACHER’ becomes a pivot in Carson’s lyric essay for the enquiry that comes before, and that which develops beyond it. The confinements of the domestic world recede as the portrayal of the thirteen ‘Nudes’, or visions, is brought to a resolution in the final one, Nude #13, which finds its corresponding spirit in the wide-open spaces beyond it. ‘Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it’, says the poet, in a closing of distance between subject and object; ‘it was the body of us all’ ('THOU').

Lesley Sharpe