Instrumentalizing the book: Anne Carson’s Nox and books as archives

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces an experimental mode of contemporary writing and bookmaking that I call multimodal book-archives, an emergent mode of contemporary literature that constructs narratives and textual sequences through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts. In multimodal book-archives the book-object is presented as a container designed to preserve and transmit textual artifacts. In this article, I examine Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) as a case study in archival poetics, exemplifying the “archival turn” in contemporary literature. My analysis draws attention to how writing, subjectivity, knowledge, history, and memory in the digital age are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces, demonstrating how Nox functions not only as an instrument of psychological rejuvenation, but as an aesthetic instrument for documenting, ordering, listing, and juxtaposing disparate bits of information and memory into cathartic self-knowledge. Carson’s archival poetics is deeply personal, laden with private symbols and metaphors that readers are asked to collocate, cross-reference, and translate as part of the archival reading process. If grief is a kind of chaos, then Carson’s archival poetics instrumentalizes the book as a tool for ordering that chaos into something manageable, useful, even beautiful.