How to do things with literature in the digital age: Anne Carson's Nox, multimodality, and the ethics of bookishness

Abstract

This article focuses on Nox (2010), an experimental, multimodal work that is a replica of the scrapbook Anne Carson made in memory of her recently deceased brother, Michael. So far, Nox has received relatively little critical attention. This essay aims to redress this lacuna. First, it places the work in the context of the digital moment, discussing its material and memorial dimensions, exploring its citational poetics, and inquiring into the reading strategies it elicits. Nox indeed comes folded concertina style, and it contains photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, a letter her brother once wrote home, and bits of text composed, photocopied, and stapled, the textures of the handcrafted original painstakingly reproduced to evoke the analog. Translating and parsing Catullus's elegiac poem 101 into lexicographical entries, Nox embodies a theory of "moving words": carrying them across languages, transporting them to new contexts, making them convey meaning; but also, moving readers affectively, cognitively, and physically. Second, taking its cue from cultural material studies, the article explores the book's materiality as a medium of sociality. Attesting to its social agency, the many pictures of the book that can be found on the Internet are claimed to display at once the artfulness of Nox and the (un)creativity of its readers. Approaching the book from the angle of people-objects relations, the article concludes that the bookishness of Nox is ethical because its aesthetics entail an indebtedness to the other with which it is "intra-actively" entangled.