NYU Lecture upon the 25th Anniversary of "Autobiography of Red"

N.B. This lecture was written for students who had just read Autobiography of Red. If you have not read the book, for context I recommend a brief summary here. (Then do read it!)

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” 

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “Life had after all turned out well for him, and everything had a noble significance. The nervous tension in which he had lived for years now seemed incredible to him…absurd and childish, when he thought of it at all. He did not torture himself with recollections. He was beginning over again.”

Willa Cather, One of Ours

“But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.”

—Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

A POET IN 3D:
The drama of self-creation in Autobiography of Red 

It’s such a pleasure to be back in Dr. Mitsis’s class after his 10 years abroad and to get to speak with you about Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red upon its 25th anniversary. I had not read RED since graduate school in Santa Fe about 20 years ago when I wasn’t much older than you. It made a big impression at the time but one I had almost entirely forgotten. When I picked it back up this spring, I remembered having loved it but little more. Time can be funny that way. So it’s a pleasure indeed to be able to report upon this recent close inspection that Carson’s creation is aging beautifully. Phil has given me a great gift in entrusting me with your class on this sensational work.

Years after that first reading of Autobiography of Red, here in New York I became re-acquainted with Anne Carson through my theatre work, specifically her translations of Greek plays in production, first at Classic Stage Company—the theatre we saw black odyssey at together! Back in 2009 they produced An Oresteia, a unique retelling of the Atreus saga uniting the Big Three’s voices in a single work with Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Antigone by Sophocles—which you read for this class—and Orestes by Euripides. American Theatre magazine assigned me to cover the show, and I remember being simply blown away by the pace, the beauty but also the humor and sheer entertainment value of Anne’s translations compared with so many others I had ever read or seen.

In the years following, I covered several Carson translations in production, including Big Dance Theater’s Alkestis at BAM, but I hadn’t turned back to Autobiography until now. It is with her dramatic voice ringing in my ears that—although she has told me she lacks confidence as a playwright—I see just how wildly theatrical her “novel in verse” is. I noticed that although this is original poetry, the tone is similar to her Greek translations, offering the same immediacy and vivid economy of her playwrighting. I don’t think she can help herself—Anne Carson simply writes in 3D.

Before we get started, I want to quickly make sure we are aligned about approximately when and possibly where in the world our “play” is set.

WHEN: As for when, I think our story must be set anytime after TV and before cellphones. Apart from those cues, it seems safe to say that Carson was intentionally keeping her story atemporal. Flattening time from the 6th Century to the late 20th, so 2500 years, the work’s time-less-ness underscores the unchanging nature of the human condition, the arc of every human life from innocence to experience that is shared by every thinking being over all of time.

WHERE: As for PLACE, things get trickier. Does anyone have any sure feelings about where on earth Autobiography is set? 

“On an island in the Atlantic” Geryon tells us on page 37. But two pages later he meets Herakles getting off a bus from New Mexico. Further fragmenting our sense of place, when they go to Herakles’ hometown of Hades, they mention it’s “four hours away from the island.” And then Hades is within driving distance of a volcano. What Atlantic island would this be?! Perhaps trippiest of all is when, in Hades, Herakles tells Geryon, page 61, “My grandma is in Argentina again today,” much like we would talk about popping over to New Jersey.

So I think we can say that until Geryon goes to Argentina himself, we don’t know with any certainty where we are. Description of place plays a big role in so much of poetry and literature, which makes Carson’s blatant lack noticeable and even disorienting, with the ultimate effect of nudging or allowing us to focus on “interior matters,” on Geryon the character and his volcanic interior life.

So What’s Inside Geryon the Dragon?

It’s this interior life that I want to focus on today, beginning with Carson’s opening epitaph, the words she chose to set the tone for the entire piece through Gertrude Stein’s quote:

“I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.”

Stein’s declaration is consistent with how Anne speaks about language and genre, as if something inevitable possessing its own agency. In 2009 she told me for American Theatre that “Ancient Greek is like a big lion turning and turning in place before lying down, and English a little jumpy cat.” And on form Anne speaks often as if the morphe—a Greek word that means form or shape—almost pre-exists and must be discovered before a work can begin to “take shape” as essay, poem, play, or any other form. She speaks about these things with a sense of inevitability, as if a higher intelligence is directing the show, much the way in black odyssey we saw Deus and Pawsidon move mortals as mere chess pieces.

For Carson, then, might words have their own historical agency that we can’t do much about? We can wield them—rearrange through pairings—but they are dyed in their own etymological wool. So what does this mean about people? I wonder if Carson is to people as Stein to words, liking the feeling of PEOPLE doing as they want to do and as they have to do. Might that be why she chose Stein’s epigraph to open a story about an individual quite literally hell-bent on self-discovery?

This question for me strikes at the heart of Geryon’s journey and gives us the most to ponder as we reflect on WHO and HOW he becomes. Are we as wedded to our nature as etymology to words? Do we discover or create ourselves? 

This question has always been interesting, but in 2023, in our era of total self-creation and re-creation vis-à-vis IDENTITY, it becomes extraordinary to look at dear Geryon, an introvert in a minority group of one, and his brave coming of age.

The third mandate of the Delphic Oracle reads “Know Thyself.” Polonius tells Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” The American Dream has always told us we can “be anything we want to be.” To be a human today is to get the constant messaging from myriad sources to discover and embrace WHO WE ARE but also that it’s also never too late to change.

If individual words are fixed, then we are protean, like individual words strung together in infinite combinations. We are human sentences. As Carson says of Stesichoros’ extant fragments in the beginning, shake them in a dice cup and see what comes out.

To be human today is to be an eternal blank slate/tabula rasa, like a white eraser board or, and I may risk aging myself here, a sort of—also shakeable—Etch A Sketch…

So what about Geryon? We get few cues that he is struggling with who he is apart from his introversion. Do you remember any moments where there is any discomfort around his homosexuality? I can only think of the one scene with his beloved and doting yet will-less mother where she seems to be prying about the women he works with. It was only on my third reading of that section that I wondered for the briefest moment if she doesn’t know he is gay—or thinks he might be able to or even should change. Fighting adversity or worrying about being gay is not overtly part of Geryon’s narrative as Carson presents it to us.

Instead, in our story Geryon has to overcome three obstacles as a growing human: his introversion, the abuse of his brother, and his heartbreak from Herakles. (His father is alive and seems to live with them but is scarcely mentioned, a sort of shade, whose irrelevance is underscored by omission.) Some people may have never gotten over any of it, but Geryon stays the course, keeps taking his pictures, thinks his thoughts, “organizes” his interior life. I do think in creating him Carson liked the feeling of Geryon doing as he wants and has to do. And in following his muse, he surmounts the tragic autobiography of his story, his death by Herakles in the Stesichorus, even outliving his own myth.

Adjectives

Now, briefly but importantly, in the section introduced by the Stein quote, Anne goes on to teach us about adjectives as the “latches of being,” touting how Stesichorus gave the Ancient Greeks new latches by expanding the use of adjectives in his poetry. Carson then goes on to fill the big shoes of her source material by exploding the form of poetry as we knew it, giving us more new latches than we can count throughout Autobiography of Red, including no less than turning our senses on their heads. In Anne and Geryon’s world, colors have sounds (roses roar, grass clicks), and colors also have smells (“funny red smell”). Sounds have touch: “The cries took little nicks out of him.” Objects talk, “the lava emits a glassy squeak,” and voices draw (“her voice drew a circle around all the years he had spent in this room”). And even “Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”

If the chief function of a translator is to enable us to HEAR, that of the artist or poet may be to expand our perceptions beyond a singular purpose. With new latches, the poet becomes god, empowering us to see and to hear anew.

“Who Am I?”

In our remaining time I want to turn to the two key emotional turning points in the book where Geryon exercises self-inquiry then mastery, where he ceases floating and begins acting, begins to ask questions and make decisions about WHO he wants to be.

On Page 57, when staying with Herakles in Hades and Geryon asks, “Who am I?” it is a bolt out of the blue. He poses this most fundamental of questions in the wake of being heartbroken by Herakles’ suggestion that he “head home,” which Geryon knows means a break-up. I’d like to read this scene from Chapter XVIII “SHE” because it continues to puzzle me:

Back at the house all was dark except a light from the porch.

Herakles went to see. Geryon had a thought to call home and ran upstairs.
You can use the phone in my mother’s room
top of the stair turn left, Herakles called after him. But when he reached the room
he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hand out
groping for a switch—he hit it
and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors, he saw a slip
a dropped magazine combs baby powder a stack of phone books a bowl of pearls
a teacup with water in it himself
in the mirror cruel as a slash of lipstick—he banged the light off.
He had been here before, dangling
inside the word she like a trinket at a belt. Spokes of red rang across his eyelids
in the blackness.

This is Herkles’ mother’s room, but where is his mother? Her clutter and vanity seem to disgust Geryon, but I’m not sure why. He certainly doesn’t hate women, so is his nature simply averse to all feminine things? Does Herakles’ mother seem very different to his, who we know also dresses up and wears perfume. Or is there something monstrous about the woman who created the man who is breaking his heart. Maybe Herakles is emotionally deficient because of his mother who is clearly never around. He does tell Geryon (bitterly) at one point, “I don’t want to talk about my mother.”

It's a mysterious scene but important as a pause between Geryon’s ecstasy and ennui. He makes no progress on this “Who am I” question, then suffers publicly for several chapters in the company of Herakles and his grandma during their visit to the volcano. He exits this journey and makes his way home a confirmed “brokenheart.” Then we are told, “Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.” He gets a job, moves to the mainland, and before we know it our hero is suddenly 22. And then he travels!

Geryon Travels and Contemplates Time

Seemingly out of nowhere, Autobiography of Red becomes a thrilling travelogue. We go from having no clue WHERE we are to a viscerally specific experience of air travel and then Buenos Aires. Remember the delicious smell of roasting seal—how bored and hungry we get on planes even for bad food—and how then the seal “doesn’t taste like it smelled,” and finally his seat mate who conks out and “slumps over the armrest like a wounded seal.” This is as accurate a description of life in coach as I’ve ever read.

And as Geryon travels, I felt him growing human-wise as the plane gained altitude. The conditions of flying create angst, and we are introduced to Geryon’s relationship to time when on page 80 he asks:

“What is time made of?
He could feel it massed around him, he could see its big deadweight blocks
padded tight together
all the way from Bermuda to Buenos Aires—too tight. His lungs contracted.
Fear of time came at him. Time
was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.

He then calms himself down with a note of acceptance on mortality:

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”

The chapter on his flight ends metatheatrically,

“The Gaucho acquired an exaggerated notion
of mastery over
his own destiny from the simple act of riding on horseback
way far across the plain.”

The mastery of destiny or attempts to at least play a role in one’s destiny is the theme that carries us through the rest of the book. From here on out our sensitive little dragon’s maturity is fast-tracked as he adventures through Argentina, even including the briefest moment of lighthearted happiness in a wonderful passage on page 97:

They went on to discuss the nature of boredom
ending with a long joke about monks
and soup that Geryon could not follow although it was explained to him twice.
The punch line contained
a Spanish phrase meaning bad milk which caused the philosophers to lean
their heads on the table in helpless joy.
Jokes make them happy, thought Geryon watching. Then a miracle occurred
in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread
filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how
slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
He would like to discuss this with someone.
And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.

The intellectual comraderie he experienced at the café after the lecture led to this MOMENTARY “widening happiness,” not the youthful euphoria we watch him feel at the beginning of his romance with Herakles, but something more peaceful, personal, and grown.

He has one more adventure at the Tango Club and then we arrive at what I think is one of the most important moments in the book; it is the only time—I believe—that Carson has Geryon comment on who he does or does not WANT to be. Page 105 in Chapter XXXII “KISS” reads:

Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures
of his inner life. It may happen
that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing
molten matter sideways along
lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want
to become one of those people
who think of nothing but their stores of pain.

This is the turning point in life, and he’s probably around your age or mine when I first read this book, that self-discovery turns even more deeply to willed self-creation.

He has become strong enough in himself just in time to weather seeing Herakles and meeting his new lover Ancash. Together they raid Harrod’s and go to Peru in some sort of love triangle, and we feel the book beginning to rush toward its ending with the denouement of Geryon’s flying:

He has not flown for years but why not be a
black speck raking its way toward the crater of Icchantikas on icy possibles,
why not rotate
the inhuman Andes at a personal angle and retreat when it spins—if it does
and if not, win
bolts of wind like slaps of wood and the bitter red drumming of wing muscle on air—he
flicks Record.
This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty. He peers down
at the earth heart of Icchantikas dumping all its photons out her ancient eye and he
smiles for
the camera: ''The Only Secret People Keep”*

*This line references the Emily Dickinson poem that Carson quotes in entirety as epigraph

 Conclusion

The final one-page Chapter XLVII is entitled “THE FLASHES IN WHICH A MAN POSSESSES HIMSELF.” As with the earlier mention of happiness, is self-possession like happiness that some, or most, or all of us only experience “flashes of”? And is self-possession a different way of talking about doing as one “wants and has to do”? The book ends:

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back.

This is the passage that made me think of my epigraph from Marvel’s To His Coy Mistress, of which Carson would of course be aware: “But at my back I alway hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.”

But instead of TIME DREAD, Carson has Geryon triumphing over his fear of time, embracing sensations of immortality—of belonging to something larger than ourselves, which is one thing that the study of the classics gives us. Carson ends on a life- and classics-affirming note and brings full circle this matter of words and people doing as they want and they have to do. When it comes to people now,  it seems, that for a while as children we simply are who we are, then for a while we introspect to discover who we are—a journey that never ends—but somewhere along the way we begin casting a vote, reacting to what we feel and experience and then determining who we do or do not what to be. This is the cogito of Descartes. We think therefore we are; because we can think, we get to be more than accidents, we get to create and re-create ourselves, we get to do as we want and we have to do.

By the end of Autobiography of Red, we get to see Geryon surmount his own autobiography, his natural introversion and traumatic experience. He has come a long way since not being able to find his kindergarten classroom, from being powerless in his brother’s bedroom, from being crippled by unrequited love. He is a world traveler with lovers and friends. He is free.

Thank you.