Word: carsons
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Other than her mother, Carson elegizes three historical women in the titular essay of the volume, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God.” The intense intellectual consideration of these women and their conceptions of decreation (what Weil articulates as the necessity “to undo the creature in us” and what the other women demonstrate is the expulsion of self in order to accommodate a deity) leads to a mediation on their merits and martyrdom in an opera of the same title, “Decreation...
...Culture Project in New York City, the opera is less a literary experiment than a testament to the profundity of Carson’s work. Dark, deep, and clear, the opera and the essay both manipulate their dramatis personae into the same act of destabilization that Carson observes in the characters of Virginia Woolf: “the narrative voice shifts from ‘we’ to ‘one’ to ‘you’ to ‘they?...
...author herself defining a quotation as “a slice of someone else’s orange.” Less tactful, her definition of the verbal equivalent is to “suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.” But risking perilousness, Carson writes that “Brittle failure occurs / of course / when stress on a material exceeds its / tensile force...
Sustaining such energy seems improbable, Carson herself ostensibly admits so in the book’s conclusion: “As usual she enjoyed the sense of work, of having worked. / Other fears would soon return.” But, Carson’s is the business of creative biography, of documenting selves, of finding a historical persona in which she can be comfortable, so this shuffling of personalities is necessary. However intrepid the search for and the destruction of self, Carson’s writing remains circuitous, employing the language of quotation and experiment to arrive...
...borrow a word from Lowell’s volume, Carson is the difficult “paramour” who returns now, five years overdue. Her style, though unsettling and unseen for half a decade except in a few journals, becomes familiar as “Decreation” unfolds in lamentable seriousness, producing a book that intimates its few faults and overwhelms all of its readers’ objections...