Autobiography of Red: Monstrous Beauty

In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson resurrects Geryon, the doomed winged boy in the classical Greek myth Geryoneis by Stesichoros, in a contemporary verse novel on homosexual love and coming-of-age. On one hand, the “novel in verse”, composed of an array of literary genres, seems as much a monstrous and self-conflicted offspring as its winged protagonist of infrared vision. Yet on another hand, the ability of these disparate genres to coalesce together highlights how art provides a platform for the individual to contest, transgress, and reinvent categories. It is in this space that the individual is able to actualize his selfhood, testifying to the remarkable power of art to remake the self.

The protagonist Geryon, a winged human with red vision, is represented as a freakish amalgamation of human and monstrous traits: “Geryon was a monster everything about him was red / Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red” (9). Described with a “snout,” Geryon is an emblem of aberration and oddity, half-animal and half-human. His red vision depicts a traumatized psyche fraught with the pervasiveness of danger and treachery—a product of early sexual abuse by his brother, and irresponsible parenting by his chain-smoking, self-absorbed mother. The derogatory term “monster” shows the speaker playing the devil’s advocate, punitively and playfully reinforcing upon him a label of difference as well as suggesting Geryon’s internalization of his own difference.

Like its monstrosity of a protagonist, the book is composed of conflicting genres and characterized by a violent cataclysm of the classical and contemporary. The novel opens with a postmodernist essay on language. Its second section is composed of reconstructed excerpts of Stesichoros’ original poem. The three appendixes that follow are prose musings on language and art. The fourth and longest section, “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” re-imagines the myth of Geryon through a contemporary gaze. Like a monster, “Autobiography of Red: A Romance” eludes mastery and classification by genre. Its narrative contains echoes of the picaresque novel, the epic tradition, a Künstlerroman and the romance novel. Composed of loosely structured episodes, the narrative follows a picaresque structure bound by the uniting motif of a journey. The aphoristic line, “sometimes a journey makes itself necessary” (46) captures the importance of the physical journey for the arrival at selfhood, highlighting the convergence of the spiritual, artistic and emotional in the emblem of the journey. Like an archetypal picaroon, Geryon moves through various cities, meets a succession of strangers, and through these encounters with the Other, moves towards the discovery of himself: “up against another human being [his] own procedures take on definition” (42). In the epic tradition, the poem celebrates of the deeds of the legendary hero: Geryon performs numerous feats, including making his journey to the volcano in Huaraz. His flight to the center of the crater of the volcano becomes a moment of trial as well as a crowning moment of strength:

He has not flown for years but why not
Be a
Black speck raking its way towards the crater of Icchantikas on icy possibles
Why not rotate
The inhuman Andes (145)

The metaphor of flight suggests an artistic triumph. Geryon is depicted as defying nature: “rotat[ing] / The inhuman Andes.” He reinvents the metaphor of his wings—a painful reminder of aberration—into a metaphor of strength. His status as a homosexual and an artist—moves from being a signifier of Otherness and exclusion into a signifier of individuality. The long, ragged line, “black speck raking its way towards the crater of Icchantikas on icy possibles,” dramatizes the protracted struggle against the elements and nature through its length and its harsh consonants, suggesting that Geryon’s flight is as much a triumph as it is a trial. Significantly, this transformation only takes place after a protracted period of shame and self-loathing: “he has not flown for years.” The book thus documents, in Künstlerroman style, the struggles of the artist to articulate selfhood.

The seemingly contradictory impulses of the text are to simultaneously preserve, destroy and recreate. The short lyric fragments in the text each freeze-frame and preserve specific moments, like Geryon’s artistic photographs. The text is a bricolage of different artworks, making it an extended ecphrastic poem, with each artwork compressing moments within a single moment. In the concluding lines of the section “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” Geryon and Herakles become frozen in time by the poet’s gaze:

And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back. (146)

Time, “rushing towards them,” is presented as an assaulting force on a battlefield. Yet they form a solid fortress against time, “stand[ing] side by side with arms touching.” The line “night at their back” suggests their leaving of a temporal zone behind, attaining “immortality,” and resisting time through art. However, the narrative structure marks an arc of progress: by ordering each still frame into a larger sequence, the narrative structure places each lyrical moment within its larger temporal logic, thus destroying the timelessness of each moment. Similar processes of preservation, destruction and recreation manifest in Carson’s treatment of Stesichoros’ text. Carson preserves the characters and language of Stesichoros text, but simultaneously destroys and reinvents them. In the opening poem of the text, “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” we see how Stesichoros epic narrative is shattered into short lyric pieces, transfigured into a numbered poem, and loses its original, fluid unity. The disruption of end-stopped lines by jerky enjambments, the absence of punctuation, the use of italic and the novelistic all serve as modern interventions of tradition. The reference to “red meat” in the opening title “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros” suggests the offspring’s eating of his father and the artist’s liberation from the anxiety of influence.

The metaphors become remade in Carson’s imagination of the original Greek myth. In Stesichoros’ writing, the central event of Geryon’s history is his death by Herakles. In Carson’s re-write, the defining event of Geryon’s selfhood is his encounter with Herakles:

Have you ever seen a volcano? Said Herakles.
Staring at him Geryon felt his soul move
in his side. (46)

Like a volcano, Herakles is a metaphor of sexual energy. He initiates Geryon into the world of the bodily pleasure, inspiring an awe that is likened to that of a religious revelation: “staring at him Geryon felt his soul move.” When the face of death becomes humanized, the encounter with the death is not feared but desired because of the sheer eros of the moment:

Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd angle sideways as when a
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze (13)

In a reaction-formation, the “arrow” is transformed from a metaphor of death into a phallic symbol penetrating Geryon’s body. The piercing of the skull by Herakles becomes an allegory of sexual encounter becoming branded into memory. The physical wound becomes displaced in Carson’s re-imagined myth. The arrow’s grazing of his head is depicted as a lover’s caress: “part[ing] Geryon’s skull like a comb.” Geryon is depicted as actively seeking death, rather than being a passive victim of death: “The boy neck lean[ed] At an odd angle sideways as when a / Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.” The contortion of his posture becomes a self-willed, deliberate act. Here, art succeeds in emptying out the signified Death, from the signifier of Herakles. Carson’s text is thus is a palimpsest of sorts—while retaining the language of myth; it is simultaneously the site of the erasure of myth and the birth of new meaning. The processes of recreation and destruction of the genres in the text show how categories are not sacrosanct. This allows Geryon to break away from being the demonized product of myth and achieve his final epiphany: “We are amazing beings, / Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.” (146) He moves from the monster that he has been labeled, into a supermensch.

Autobiography of Red is a study in self-contradiction. It marries different types of genres to create monstrous progeny that defies tradition and categorization. In the remaking of the generic categories, Carson provides a statement on how art is the site of contestation of meaning. It is because art is not a closed system of logocentric meaning that it is able to provide a space where the individual can remake himself and actualize his selfhood. Parading as a monster of sorts, Autobiography of Red celebrates its own rupture of totalizing systems of meaning.

Works Cited
Carson, Anne. The Autobiography of Red. New York: First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 1998.