The expression of that behind I and me and you, and the expression of expression. By expression, in whatever mode expression takes or calls to take, to express the I and You, as these are the pronoun-names of the same self, a single person — here, of a single woman. Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma presents an attempted singular, united, expression of the individual, the self, the speaker and the character, the poet and her figures traced in words, amidst the sweepings and ravishings, the gluttonous oppressions, of history and society — the effect of these, by Carson’s claim, is the self’s alienation from, neglect and leaving of the social world which is the only world, and in this leaving a seeking of the self past meaning, past name and word, and so a return of the self to itself, to the nature by which it is natural for the self to be a self, and so a saving of the self. 

An expression that is just an expression, neither intended nor oriented nor planned nor determined in its end, an expressive impulse of the only natural expression of the self which is the self’s selfness, finds its form in Wrong Norma between prose and verse, between narrative and reflectional prose, between lyric and dramatic verse. There is a space or a blurring — as the physical blurring of the typewritten verses that divide section from section — between what is said and what is wanted, that which is said and that which desires expression, between form and the matter which, here, is words, and which, everywhere, signified by words, is human body — that exists, and knows not how it exists, and for that how there is expression, and this expression, Carson’s, here, is for that how. 

Carson, a poet, writes in Wrong Norma in a prose divided with itself: in prose fragments and images of the self and gaze, the self-probing and self-reflecting experience of Norma Desmond, who, at the last is declared, along with the image-fragments of her experience, with the objects she saw and knew she saw and so knew herself to see them and so knew herself, to be wrong. The fragments of prose — for they seek to express the singular subjective experience of their object (Norma) by third-person omniscience — begin narratively and, in self-undermining way, tritely minimalist-descriptively and — by way of statements and questions that by their lack of narrative stylistic unity with the writing preceding them, by their brute and unyielding declaration of the content of their expression, and by their consequent self-assertion as the pure, unmediated expression of the self — thus develop into an austere and melancholic, vivacious and total questioning and the expression of questioning of selfness. 

Carson writes: 

“What to say of the entirety. The entirety should be smaller. Small enough to say something about. Humans? What if the guy you’re hanging up by his thumbs already has a razorplague of pineapple roaming his chest inside. Do you regard that as his own fault? Do you really need to make it worse. Do you think of yourself as a well? Of course these are separate questions. Like dead salmon and coppermine tailings, separate.” 

Carson thus progresses from a questioning of subjectivity’s concepts ( the “entirety”) to a formal and substantive transition to the particulars of the social and self-aware situation of the object of narration (Norma, the object of narration,) through anti-grammatical, reflectively conversational prose (as in “Small enough to say something about. Humans?”). Reaching from self-abstraction in “entirety” to an authentically expressive, melancholic self-questioning of the self in “Do you think of yourself as a well,” the fragment intones a descriptive movement, present throughout Wrong Norma, whereby the despairing self-expression of the protagonist (despairing for the self, as the self see itself, is portrayed to be constrained by social order, by the rigidity of mundanity, hence Norma’s flight to the crags) is accompanied in contrapoint with the implication of the self’s vivacity — for in questioning itself and toiling to express itself, the self retains activity and life and a non-melancholic return in questioning to the origin, the terms, the meaning of its being. 

Carson ends with a narrator’s assertion that seeks to rend the narrative terms of the book and so is self-aware of its finality (“Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond…”) and with an unexposed, pure and brutally presented image: “Daybreak greenish and cold and on a rooftop across from me the legendary water towers of New York City, the giant white smoke Miltoning to heaven.” Carson’s is a work of beholding, of living after the image beheld, and of expressing that living. The poetic form — formally absent in Wrong Norma though pointed at and traced in its potential by the pointing, as it presents an image innocently, without pretension anddetermination of meaning, but with the unthinking liberty of movement possessed by the wandering glance and flight of human gaze — in its absence and in the desire expressed by Wrong Norma’s substance for its proper (poetic) form, paints a desponding, though living, image of the futility of the language upon which social order is constructed, the language to which we are reared and yoked — from which yoke only minute tearings, by grave and great efforts, we cattle are able to make, from which tearings we bleed ourselves, our selves, the images of our visions and our poems of being.