“A room I can never leave”. Trauma e memoria in “Nox” di Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s “Nox” (2010) is a book-object, a collage of traces and memories of her dead brother. The paper analyses the dynamics of temporality at work in this iconotext, which is both an epitaph and an inquiry on mourning. The obsession to understand who her brother really was collides with a void that calls out to be pursued. Writing about grief, for Carson, means endlessly reworking new ways to cross the absence. The persistence of things alludes to a haunting Nachträglichkeit, which lets the past float, in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s words, in a third dimension between being and non-being. The recurring images in “Nox”—stairs, doors, windows—are shaky thresholds between the living and thedead, a paradoxical absent presence.