Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition – Anne Carson.
British comedian Richard Herring‘s acclaimed show The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace saw the comic attempting to recreate the mythological figure’s great labours in contemporaneous fashion; from dating fifty women in fifty nights, cleaning out an elephant stable, taking part in a celebrity Boat Race, and attempting to defeat his nephew at tennis. Herring’s show dealt ostensibly with depression and his attempts to overcome it, using the Greek myth as a clever framework. Canadian poet Anne Carson, meanwhile, takes a slightly different approach to the Hercules/Herakles myth, and yet one which ultimately bears something in common with Herring’s comedic odyssey – an attempt to humanise the legend, to explore the humanity behind it. Carson’s “novel in verse”, published in 1998, begins with Geryon, a victim of Herakles, a red, winged monster whose cattle was slaughtered before being slain himself. Carson takes up where the Greek poet Stesichorus left off; fragments remain of a text in which Stesichorus attempted to fill in details of the life of Geryon, and Carson – in idiosyncratic fashion – takes up this mantle, and presents the reader with her lyrical vision of the life of Geryon, the Autobiography of Red.
The book is no mere re-telling of the Herakles myth, however. In Carson’s touching and beautiful book Geryon is both the winged monster of old, and at the same time an uncomfortable shy boy growing up in the modern world. This device allows her to both engage with Greek mythological metaphors and tropes, as well as presenting us with a contemporary growing-up story. Herakles enters Geryon’s life not as a violent beast, but a handsome rugged drifter whom Geryon falls hopelessly in love with. As Geryon becomes a man and takes up photography as a passion, Herakles breaks his heart and the two lovers break up. Years later, Geryon is holidaying in Argentina and runs into Herakles again, this time with someone new in his life. Now Geryon must confront his destiny.
The book begins with information and ruminations on the life and works of Stesichorus (in particular, his wresting away the power of the adjective from the heroic form that had domimated Greek epic poetry), before presenting us with Geryon’s story in a series of short chapters of narrative poetry. An “interview” with Stesichorus concludes the text. Carson’s writing is beautiful throughout, both straightforward and elliptical, shot through with the sadness and yearning of Geryon; the “cracks and fissures of his inner life”. Bus passengers “stream on board like insects into lighted boxes”, the Andes dominate the landscape with their “long white gouges tracing the red sandstone like a meringue pie”, and when Geryon first meets Herakles “the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches”. Autobiography of Red is easy to read and yet leaves a deep impression, and does so on many levels – as a tender story of a delicate young boy growing up, as a rumination on love and heartbreak, as a touching and unhappy gay love story, as a consideration of the place of Greek myth in the modern world and the treatment of “dead” cultures and civilizations by contemporary culture (Carson engages with the Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego). Like all the best poetry, Autobiography of Red is both beautiful and unsettling, shifting uncomfortably and refusing to be pinned down. It both glides and fidgets, and leaves a substantial mark upon the reader.
