Art and Life, Life and Death

Abstract

In 2011, the American-Canadian writer Anne Carson published an unusual work she called Nox. Nox is a book based on a collection of texts, notes, and photographs of material mementos—postcards, letters, images—that Carson put together and glued into a notebook to remember her brother who had died shortly before. In this essay, I offer a reading of this memory book as a mental representation of absence: the absence of a person who the more he is remembered the more he is lost. But it also is a representation of the absence of many aspects of the life of the author herself, the life she lived with her brother and, even more, the life she lived without him. Nox is a work of art, but it also reflects a mind in mourning under real, nonfictional conditions. A hybrid of art and death, Nox gives a form to the simultaneity of presence and absence, words and images, past and present, characteristic of all our attempts to understand human life.