The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse by Anne Carson
Nicole Cooley

Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. Knopf, 1998. 149 pp. $23.00.

Translator, poet, and professor of classics Anne Carson has written a work which challenges many long-held literary oppositions: prose vs. poetry, epic vs. lyric, ancient vs. modern. This text retells the story of Geryon, a winged red monster, moving from his childhood to his love for and loss of the young boy Herakles. A parallel narrative follows the career of the ancient poet Stesichoros, original author of the myth. But the narrative appropriates myth only to reinvent it. Notably, the book begins with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein: “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.” Here we are immediately alerted to the fact that Carson’s “autobiography” has a Steinian twist: it is less an exploration of individual subjectivity than an explosion of the conventions and codes on which autobiography as a genre depends. Geryon composes his own autobiography (which begins before he can write, as a cigarette glued to a tomato), but it is his camera that becomes increasingly important to him as the text proceeds. The sections of the text that concern photography are the book’s most compelling and beautifully written moments. When Geryon photographs Herakles, Carson writes: “It is a photograph of the future, thought Geryon months later when he was standing in his darkroom / looking down at the acid bath and watching likeness come groping out of the bones.” And, despite all its masterful formal innovations, what I admire most about this book is its emotional power. Autobiography of Red is an extremely moving story of love and loss and the powers and failures of language. [Nicole Cooley]