Repeat the Important Words Until You Understand Them: Metaphor, Memory and Meaning in Anne Carson’s Essaying

ABSTRACT This paper considers essays from Canadian author Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God (1992) and Plainwater (1995). Carson has spoken of these as reshapings of her life experience and recollections on the page. I suggest that it is the essential quality of plasticity—inherent to the essay genre, evident in the workings of memory, and displayed in Carson’s hybrid and experimental writing—which makes these works so powerful and expressly suited to their purpose. By working through contemporary definitions of the essay, touching on the neuroscience of memory, and analysing key examples of Carson’s life writing, I will also suggest that the particular qualities of lyric essay, such as its reliance on metaphor, elision and allusion, echo the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent to identity, interpersonal relationships and autobiographical memory. Thus, this paper shows Carson as reaching beyond traditional textual practices of remembering to develop a unique mode of life writing ideally suited to reshaping and thus handling emotionally and ethically charged material, in order to bring the experimental personal essay to its fullest expression.