CHAPTER 34
Hannah Silverblank
In her 2014 poem “Pronoun Envy,” the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson asks,
What
can you do
with a piece of scrubbed-away air?
This “air” to which Carson’s speaker refers has been “scrubbed-away” by the noisemaking kazoos of 1970s feminists protesting the insistent use of generic masculine pronouns at the Harvard Divinity School. She subsequently responds that, “with a piece of scrubbed-away air,” you can do
Various things.
You can fill it with neologisms.
Or with re-analysis. Or with
exaptation. Let’s explore
exaptation. To exapt
is to adapt in an outward direction.
Whether this “exaptible” air is “scrubbed-away” by noisemaking kazoos or the ravages of time itself, such moments of linguistic obscurity, annihilation, and absence sit at the heart of Carson’s engagement with the Greek lyric poets Sappho and Stesichorus. This chapter considers her work on these two poets, whose songs were roughly contemporaneous, and whose reception histories are both characterized by profound damages to their poetic corpora. Although Carson is not the first poet to find aesthetic opportunity in the Greek fragment,1 her work on Sappho and Stesichorus conveys a sense of pleasure in the possibilities enabled by poetic loss.2 Beyond the fact that Carson revels in the “imaginal adventure”3 provided by absence, the kinship in her receptions of these poets’ work is also predicated on a particular understanding of time and desire in Greek lyric poetry. In what follows, I will trace thematic webs across Carson’s lyric receptions in order to draw connections between Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, If Not, Winter, and Autobiography of Red. In Carson’s receptions of these two poets’ songs, the subjects’ experience of erotic desire disrupts their naturalized experience of time such that the lover’s epistemic access to their mortality and their position within time itself is denaturalized.
Carson’s best-known literary engagements with Sappho come in the form of her prose discussions of the poetics of Greek desire in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and her poetic translations of Sappho’s fragments in If Not, Winter (2002). These two texts operate in a more traditionally academic register than does her adaptation of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis, as Carson’s writings on Sappho in these texts take the forms of academic meditation and translation. Carson’s verse novel, Autobiography of Red, is marked by its generic strangeness in its subtitle, “A Novel in Verse,” and in its varied contents, including a semi-scholarly introduction, various appendices (before the “novel in verse” begins), and the conclusion’s coy “Interview” with “S” (a letter which may represent Stesichorus, or perhaps even Gertrude Stein, or someone/-thing else altogether). Beyond its generic complexity, Autobiography of Red also sets itself up in ambiguous relation to the text of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis. Autobiography of Red recasts Stesichorus’ monster and hero antagonists as teenage lovers. The text also includes a section called “Fragments of Stesichoros” with verse that includes a blend of Stesichorean echoes and Carson’s own innovations.
But if, despite the apparent gulf between Carson’s more scholarly treatment of Sappho and more “exaptive” treatment of Stesichorus, we consider Carson’s work on these poets in concert, we hear thematic harmonies between the two Greek poets’ representations of time itself, and we may also gain insight into a larger theme in Carson’s writing. In a discussion of Carson’s juxtapositions of genre, Chris Jennings argues that Carson’s work stretches itself out beyond generic boundaries, with the result that “Carson’s poems, essays, and even interviews […inform] one another as though they were fragments of a single masterwork.”4 Carson thus engages in a multi-genre exploration of how desire transforms and fragments the lover’s experience of being in time, such that the lyric subject’s comprehension of their own mortality is threatened. Through a discussion of fr. 31 and 130, I will argue that Carson’s work on Sappho is preoccupied with temporal paradoxes in the erotic experience of the lyric subject, and these temporal paradoxes function as a piece of thematic connective tissue between her work on Sappho and her work on Stesichorus’ Geryoneis.
Desire’s Paradoxical Temporalities in Eros the Bittersweet and If Not, Winter
In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson articulates the relationship between erotic experience and time:
The experience of eros is a study in the ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.
Desire seems to the lover to demolish time in the instant when it happens, and to gather all other moments into itself in unimportance. Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the “now” of his desire and all the other moments called “then” that line up before and after it.5
Once eros overcomes the lover, the lover’s experience of time itself becomes charged with angst, impatience, and disorientation. According to Carson, eros invites a chaotic disruption of one’s own sense of chronology, since the lover’s “moments” are paradoxically infused with anxious impatience and rapturous patience. Time itself is “demolished,” and yet aggressively reasserts itself, in the lover’s “sharp” feeling of “the difference between the ‘now’ of his desire and all the other moments called ‘then.’” One of the central ways that this disruption manifests in Carson’s receptions of Sappho and Stesichorus is by means of the challenge that desire poses to the lover’s experience of their own mortality.
Sappho’s fragment 31 (fr. 31) illustrates what Carson refers to as the lover’s uniquely stereoscopic view of time itself, in that the lover gains access to a paradoxical double-vision of their own (im)mortality and death. Carson frequently calls upon the notion of “stereoscopy,” which she uses to indicate the doubled sensory experience in which two distinct experiences of time (now and then) are interposed on one another and comprehended simultaneously. Through this layering of vantage points emerges a more dimensional—albeit antichronological—glimpse into one’s overdetermined position in time.
First, I will discuss her translation of fr. 31 in If Not, Winter, and then her writing on the fragment in Eros the Bittersweet. If Not, Winter features Voigt’s edition of Sappho’s Greek on the verso page and Carson’s translation on the facing recto page.6 This textual organization is of course conventional in bilingual translations, but the juxtaposition of Sappho’s Greek with Carson’s English visually evokes the stereoscopy of sense, time, and readerly experience that Carson explores throughout her work: Sappho’s sixth-century song sits alongside Carson’s twentieth-century rendition.7 Both iterations of the poem emphasize, through the figure of κῆνος, or “that man,” how a doubled response to the object of erotic desire allows the kinetic processes of desire itself to come into focus:
Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν᾽ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάζιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει
καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ᾽ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν·
ὠς γὰρ <ἔς> σ᾽ ἴδω βρόχε᾽ ὤς με φώνη-
σ᾽ οὐδὲν ἔτ᾽ εἴκει,
ἀλλὰ καμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμακεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ὄρημμ᾽, ἐπιβρό-
μεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι,
έκαδε μ᾽ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτ└έρα δὲ π┘οίας
ἔμμι, τεθ└νάκην δ᾽ ὀ┘λίγω πιδε└ύης
φα┘ίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔτ̣[αι.
ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ καὶ πένητα
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
Carson underlines the man’s role in triangulating the drama, and writes (1986: 14) that “the man’s presence is somehow necessary to the delineation of that emotional event.” Carson also refutes the possibility that he “is not to be thought of as a real person but as a poetic hypothesis, designed to show how deeply Sappho is affected in the presence of her beloved” (15). She writes that the man’s presence facilitates “a disquisition on seeming” and “a poem about the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself” (16); and that construction of desire is “geometrical[ly] constituted by the man’s act of triang[ulation]” in the erotic moment of “seeming” conjured by Sappho’s speaker.
Although Carson does not wish to limit the man’s presence either to providing contrasted emotional responses to the beloved, or to creating an axis of jealousy, she affirms his role in drawing attention to the disparity of possible responses to the beloved girl’s presence (16):
The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind. Triangulation makes both present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language.
The production of stereoscopy is facilitated not only by the juxtaposition of “what could be” and the “actual” in the desiring mind; it is also constituted by the contrast between the man’s apparent immortality and the speaker’s devastating mortality.8 Carson’s analysis and her translation of fr. 31 hinge on this stereoscopy of immortal and mortal experiences of desire, as represented through “two poles of response” that inhabit “the same desiring mind.” That single mind belongs to the lyric voice in the moment it articulates the speaker’s and the man’s erotic responses to the beloved. With this provocative but elliptical discussion of fr. 31, Carson suggests that the speaker’s access to her own experience of desire is constituted by is dissonance with the man’s performance of stability, as Sappho’s “ruse of heart and language” plays upon the apparent mortification of the speaker in its with the apparent divinity of the man.
In both Sappho’s Greek and Carson’s translation, desire is a process that deforms and defamiliarizes the human experience of being in time, on the axes of immortal/mortal self-identification. The speaker in fr. 31 feels the processes of her mortal body vividly: she is dying; she is dead. She is “greener than grass,” or so it seems, in the company of the sensationally vital girl and the dispassionately stable man. The sole attribute of this man is his ability to withstand the fatal sensory inputs of the girl’s lovely laughing and proximity. In both Sappho’s fr. 31 and Carson’s, the man exists in a consistent and continual present (“he seems”… “to be”… he “sits,” he “listens”). As Gregory Hutchinson notes, the continuous aspect of the verbs emphasize the man’s “extension in time,” which later contrasts with the “instantaneous” physical effects that take hold of the subject.9 This man therefore triangulates the experience of poetic desire through a performance of physical and temporal stability that seems, to Sappho, divine.
Like the man, desire itself also operates in the present tense: “it puts the heart in my chest on wings”; “thin/fire is racing.” In its assertion of its presence and its presentness, desire arrests the speaker’s access to her own vitality: “no: tongue breaks.” In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson proclaims that “Eros is a verb”: eros is of course a noun, but the fact that it is responsible for the poem’s action renders it a verb for Carson. The activity of eros is thus contrasted with the immobility of the speaker.10 Carson understands eros in this poem as an active force that circulates between the lover, her beloved, and the space between them (here personified as the man himself): “triangulation makes both [poles of erotic response] present at once by a shift of distance,” and in this geometric arrangement, Carson points out that the characters in the poem themselves do not move. The poem’s movement belongs not to the people, but to eros itself.
When the speaker eventually becomes the subject of verbs in fr. 31, their tenses are variable, as are their relative levels of reality. The verbal action shifts from the man’s witness to the girl’s actions of speaking and laughing, next attaching itself to desire’s dominant movements, until intransitive action arrives back at the speaker herself, whose verbs are a temporal jumble. She asserts her existence in one word then shifts into a state of death in the next (“I am and dead”). In Carson’s reading, the speaker experiences a seeming simultaneity of both life and death, when she translates the δ᾽ as coordinating Sappho’s jarring temporal shift from being to having died. The drama of life and death is textured with a further layer of confusion, when the speaker announces that she is is actually almost dead (ὀ┘λίγω, “almost”), and this ambiguous morbidity emerges in the context of seeming (φα┘ίνομ᾽) rather than simply being. The feeling of seeming dead to oneself is voiced through symptoms of living flesh in the process of sudden, yet also eerily atemporal, deterioration. The speaker’s body no longer experiences vitality as a given; and yet, vitality is not wholly gone, for it is a precondition for her morbid physiological symptoms, as eros dissolves her limbs as well as her orientation in time.
Carson’s translation of the first line of the fifth stanza further adds to the temporal tension; after the perfect ring of φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος (line 1) to φα┘ίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔτ̣[αι (line 16), the poem juts into ambiguous, hypothetical futurity. The poem ends shortly after the poet sings, “all is to be dared,” and we are left wondering what desire might do next and what the lover herself might dare to do. Carson’s translation of this poem in Eros the Bittersweet omits the fifth stanza;11 but in If Not, Winter, as in Sappho’s extant Greek, the affect that the beloved provokes is split across the axes of immortality and mortality: the desirous body is emphatically mortal, and yet might endure this death (τόλματον, “all is to be endured,” line 15). This branching of affective response to the beloved—fractured through the prisms of the immortal-seeming man, the dying- and dead-seeming Sappho, and the poem’s vague gesture toward daring to live beyond this erotic death—epitomizes the strange ways that desire, as an embodied experience, causes something queer to happen to the lover’s perception of herself as both a subject and as an object within time.12
Carson also considers the overdetermination of the lover’s temporality in Eros the Bittersweet, and she draws special attention to the word dēute (“again”) as a microcosm of this temporal phenomenon:
Eros makes use of time to control the lover. The lover in Greek poetry views with singular candor and a degree of irony his own subjection to time. He sees himself pinned in an impossible double bind, victim of novelty and of recurrence at once. There is one very clear sign, throughout the Greek lyric poets, that these authors were concerned with the perversities of time. It consists of a single word which itself presents, in microcosm, the temporal dilemma of eros. It is the adverb dēute… The adverb represents a “crasis” … [which] is a common phenomenon in Greek, but crasis in this case produces an uncommonly stereoscopic effect: each of the two words that make up dēute has a different vantage point on time. Their intersection creates something of a paradox.
Dēute combines the particular de with the adverb aute… De places you in time and emphasizes that placement: now. Aute intercepts “now” and binds it into a history of “thens.” (1968: 118–119)
In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson uses Sappho’s fr. 22 and 130 as exempla of the lyric “perversities of time” (119) facilitated by dēute. She offers two different translations of 130 in Eros the Bittersweet and If Not, Winter, and thereby adds another layer of stereoscopy with which to consider Carson’s own different interpretations of this poem over time.13 Her 1986 translation of fr. 130 in Eros the Bittersweet reads as follows (119):
Ἔρος δηὖτε μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον
Eros – here it goes again!– the limbloosener
whirls me,
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
And in 2002’s If Not, Winter, she retranslates the poem thus (265):
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me –
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
The works in which the poems appear may contextualize certain lexical and thematic distinctions in the two translations of fr. 130. In the Eros the Bittersweet, Carson presents the poem in order to illustrate the emotional chaos imposed by eros and evoked by dēute. In If Not, Winter, Carson’s organizing project is to translate the extant fragments of Sappho’s corpus. In both of these translations of fr. 31, the consistent elements are “Eros” (which occupies the same primary placement as Sappho’s Ἔρος), the adjective “sweetbitter” for γλυκύπικρον, the word “creature” for ὄρπετον, but all the remaining verbal units in Carson’s English shift.
From the 1986 translation to the 2002 translation, we witness the translator’s voice change over time in her management of Sappho’s language of desire. We may observe a muffling of 1986’s “wild sigh” of dēute in “here it goes again!” to 2002’s parenthetical “(now again).” Perhaps Carson’s voice becomes wearier with the emotional ravages of time, through one too many dēute’s in 16 years of reading and desiring. The second translation is more resigned, more muted, less frenzied. We lose 1986’s exclamation point in exchange for 2002’s parentheses, punctuation which is less exuberant but more attentive to the parenthetical slips of erotic time that characterize Carson’s reading of the adverb dēute. The narrator is no longer “whirled” but now, somewhat more mildly, “stirred”: the lyric I is still moved by the procedures of eros, but in a way that is somehow more resigned to its ravages. In 1986, eros was/is “impossible to fight off,” and in 2002, becomes “unmanageable.” Across these sixteen years, the creature that is eros still “steals its way” in some prepositional relation to the lover, but in 1986, eros was sneaking up on her; in 2002, “it steals in,” as if breaking into a house whose security system it more readily knows how to dismantle.
In her notes on the translations in If Not, Winter, Carson offers further meditations on dēute that harmonize with her earlier writings. She explains her parenthetical translation of dēute as “(now again),” in the context of its first expression (fr. 1):
[T]he parentheses are not Sappho’s but I want to mark her use of the temporal adverb dēute. It is probably no accident that, in a poem about the cyclical patterns of erotic experience, this adverb of repetition is repeated three times… [Dēute] strikes a note of powerful alert emotion (sometimes with a tinge of irony or scepticism), like English “Well now!” Aute is an adverb that peers past the present moment to a series of repeated actions stretching behind; it intercepts the new and binds it into history, as if to say “Not for the first time!” Sappho’s “(now again)” does more than mark repetition as a theme of her poem, it instantiates the difference between mortal and immortal perspectives on this painful feature of erotic life: Sappho is stuck in the pain of the “now,” Aphrodite calmly surveys a larger pattern of “agains.”14
The use of dēute in fr. 1 bridges the gap between the mortal urgency of desire and the placid divine iterability of erotic experience. The word itself conjures the lover’s dismemberment into repetitive past and urgent present, but also the lover’s painful acknowledgment of a mortal experience of an immortal imposition: eros. Only a man who is “equal to the gods” can withstand the ways in which the erotic moment staggers under pressure of eros until it “splits.”15
In her discussion of the pressurized splits facilitated by eros, Carson also observes the frequency of the adverb in conjunction with the repetitions in descriptions of Aphrodite: “Also repeated are the adjective that characterizes Aphrodite’s relation to time—“deathless,” occurring twice; Aphrodite’s questions to Sappho, refracted four ways; and Aphrodite’s final erotic rule, given three formulations.”16 In Carson’s reading of erotic time in Sappho, Aphrodite’s fluent trafficking in erotic desire is facilitated by her divinity, both in terms of her power and also in terms of her deathlessness. Mortals cannot play her game without provoking vividly-felt encounters with death itself, even if that death is somehow withstood, as by the subject in fr. 31. Although fr. 31 lacks an explicit dēute, the poem conveys this same temporal over-determination in the physiological and ontological experience of eros; our speaker finds herself living in the present; dying in the present; having already died; and being about to die; or seeming to; and, nevertheless, gesturing toward a virtually immortal survival of desire’s violent effects on time and the mortal body.17
Refractions of Immortality in Autobiography of Red
The lover’s stereoscopic experience of their own immortality/mortality serves as a connective tissue between Carson’s receptions of Sappho and her work on Stesichorus in Autobiography of Red. Whereas Carson’s work on Sappho in Eros the Bittersweet and If Not, Winter offers imaginative but lexically-focused readings and translations of Sappho’s fragments, her work on Stesichorus engages in a rather more radical mode of adaptation in relation to the fragments of the Stesichorean poem, as well as the space between the fragments. Autobiography of Red transforms the relationship between the mythical triple-bodied, winged Geryon and Herakles into a story of teen passion, heartache, and abuse, and the events of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis undergo major expansion, contraction, and transformation in Caron’s novel. By placing Geryon and Herakles into a romantic relationship in Autobiography of Red, Carson’s novel transposes her previously discussed engagement with eros as a force that disrupts one’s temporal orientation. In Autobiography of Red, eros produces a vertiginous timescape that finds its ancient antecedent in Geryon’s own uncertain immortal/mortal status. Carson’s monster finds himself pursuing elusive philosophical questions about the meaning and material of time itself, in the midst of his own temporal paradoxes and erotic passions.
It may be useful, before discussing the ways in which Carson’s Autobiography refracts Stesichorus’ Geryoneis, to clarify the relevant aspects of the Stesichorean poem on which my analysis builds.18 The text poses serious epistemological barriers to any clear understanding of Stesichorus’ plot: the significant lacunae in the text have generated extensive debates about what the text actually communicates, and in what chronology. In fr. 15, Geryon urges Menoites (or an alternative interlocutor) not to attempt to frighten him with a fear of death. Scholars typically presume that the concerned Menoites endeavors to dissuade Geryon from entering into confrontation with Herakles, who has come to steal his cattle.19 This fragment contains what is referred to by scholars as “Geryon’s dilemma,” wherein Geryon responds to Menoites with a set of conditional statements about how his mortal status might inform his decision to fight Herakles.
The actual nature of these statements—what they mean for Geryon’s decision, his understanding of who Herakles is, his understanding of his own status as either mortal or immortal, and his own sense of nobility—has vexed scholars since the late 1960s.20 W. S. Barrett has given an outline of Geryon’s gap-ridden statement as such: “if I am going to be immortal and unaging in Olympos, it is better … [lacunose]; but if I am destined to old age amid mortal men, it is a far finer thing for me … [lacunose again, but without doubt ‘to take my chance of death rather than incur disgrace’].”21 It is unclear whether Carson takes on a uniform position about the contents of fr. 15, since her “translations” of Stesichorus (in the section entitled “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros”) contain no conditional statements and give only vague indications of Geryon’s thoughts about Herakles’ attack. The closest passage to the Greek of Stesichorus’ fragment 15 seems to be “IV. GERYON’S DEATH BEGINS,” which reads as follows:
Geryon walked the red length of his mind and answered No
It was murder And torn to see the cattle lay
All these darlings said Geryon And now me22
In fr. 15 of Stesichorus’ poem, Geryon is asked to avoid the confrontation with Herakles, and he then imagines possible outcomes for himself if he is in fact mortal, as opposed to immortal. In Stesichorus, Geryon’s mental processes are equally elusive; scholars have not come to consensus about the mental process posed in Geryon’s dilemma in Stesichorus. In Carson’s fr. IV, the text generates uncertainty about his mental processes: Geryon traverses an internal place, “the red length of his mind,” accessible only to him, and comes up with an answer at the end of his travels: “No.” Thus when reading both fragments, we must supply for ourselves the imaginative or rhetorical experimentation that Geryon pursues verbally or in his mind. The moment in which “GERYON’S DEATH BEGINS” is characterized by nonspecific agency (how does the death begin, and who is acting here?): Carson elliptically evokes Geryon’s dilemma when Geryon says “No” to an unknown interlocutor, and then turns our attention from the fate of the cattle to the fate of Geryon (“And now me”).
Throughout the novel, Carson interposes echoes of various Stesichorean fragments in different phrasings and at different moments in the text. In this multiplication and dissemination of the fragments of Stesichorus, Carson destabilizes readerly expectations about narrative time in both Autobiography of Red and Stesichorus’ Geryoneis. Although many elements of the Stesichorean fragments recur at multiple moments within Carson’s novel, fr. 15 and 19 (which features the poppy simile used to depict Geryon’s death) take on a particularly prismatic multiplicity in Carson’s Autobiography of Red.23
In Autobiography of Red, Geryon’s dilemma itself takes shape in Geryon’s elongated anxiety about his experiences of time. His death itself is translated into multiple moments in Carson’s translation, not solely in the except quoted above: in each rendition, Geryon’s death is expressed with distinct language, imagery, and narrative context. Carson uses and reuses the original Stesichorean fragment that describes Geryon’s death, such that Geryon seems to be able to die but also to live on beyond his death. Like the speaker of Sappho’s fr. 31, Geryon gets to experience dying while living—and thus Carson’s Geryon is marked as both mortal and immortal, in a paradoxical stereoscopy of overlapping conditional possibilities.
Within this ragtag bunch of temporally unstable characters, Carson also includes Herakles, a hero who faces his own mortality question throughout his literary exploits. In the preface to her translation of Euripides’ Herakles, Carson describes the troubled experience of time that arises in beings whose (im)mortality is uncertain: “Herakles is a creature whose relation to time is a mess: if you might be immortal you live in all time and no time at the same time.”24 Geryon and Herakles share a dilemma25 that revolves around time and uncertain (im)mortality: they both “might be immortal,” and therefore have, to quote Barrett, “no means of settling the question before the conflict.”26 They both occupy a mythic timelessness that can be understood as “all time” and “no time,” opposites paradoxically experienced “at the same time” that pose a challenge to their ability to make decisions and to access certain knowledge about themselves.
In Autobiography of Red, the initial meeting of Geryon and Herakles is electrified by an immediate and uncanny connection between the boys:27
Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
At the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.28
The adolescent boys come into contact in a scene charged with attraction and force, during the dead of night, in settings of transition. Herakles arrives in Geryon’s town at “three a.m.” while Geryon is about to make a phone call, but this time Herakles rides the bus from New Mexico rather than driving the cup of the Sun.
The flow of the narration in this scene is riddled with odd juts of time such that it resembles the disjointed action of the ravaged Geryoneis. Immediately after Herakles steps off the bus, he turns “fast around the corner of the platform” and catches Geryon unawares, and Herakles’ manner here thus evokes his stealth in Stesichorus’ fr. 19 (πολὺ κέρδιον εἶν | … οντα λάθραι πολεμε[ῖν | … κραταιῶι, “It seemed to him to be much better … to fight by stealth…against the strong man,” 7–9):29
…there it was one of those moments that
is the opposite of blindness.
The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice. Other people
wishing to disembark the bus from New Mexico
were jamming up behind Herakles who had stopped on the bottom step30
In the middle of the anonymous Bus Depot in the middle of the night, two mythical figures lock into an atemporal exchange of the entire “world.” The intensity of their mutual epiphany disrupts the travel of the “other people” who seem to live in a more mundane metaphysical time zone. Time flashes forward again and finds the new lovers in another transitional setting: this time, along train tracks. In one another, Geryon and Herakles recognize a mutually troubled experience of time, brought into focus by the uncertainty surrounding their respective mortalities. Like eels, like italics, like bus routes, like train tracks, like “two cuts… in the same flesh,” like time travellers who “jump[…] forward onto the back of night,”31 these adolescent boys exist in parallel timelines that mark their difference from the rest of the world and its mundane timeliness.
Peculiarities of time and chronology are also provoked by the unresolved, yet overdetermined nature of the relationship between Carson’s characters and those of classical myth. Carson’s novel is titled Autobiography of Red, and “red” serves as a metonym for Geryon in a way that suggests that the novel may be interpreted as Geryon’s self-writing of his own myth.32 This suggestion is complicated by the fact that Autobiography of Red makes reference to a seemingly different “autobiography” of Geryon, and the latter autobiography is quoted, and at times withheld, in the text. Once Geryon learns to write and receives a notebook from his mother’s friend Maria, he claims his notebook as his “Autobiography,” and writes in it about the relationship between Geryon and Herakles:
On the cover Geryon wrote Autobiography. Inside he set down the facts.
Total Facts Known About Geryon.
Geryon was a monster everything about him was red…
Some say Geryon had six hands six feet some say wings.
Geryon was red so were his strange red cattle. Herakles came one
Day killed Geryon got the cattle
He followed Facts with Questions and Answers.
QUESTIONS Why did Herakles kill Geryon?
The scene then immediately cuts to a parent-teacher conference between Geryon’s mother and his elementary school teacher, who asks, “Where does he get his ideas?”
This is a fraught question for readers of Autobiography of Red.34 How are we to understand the relationship between the young Geryon who has written these words and the Geryon of Stesichorus’ poem? Beyond the passage above, the text offers no suggestion that Carson’s Geryon “knows” the myth as such and associates it with himself. There is never any explicit indication within the narrative section of the novel (called “A Romance”) that a poem called the Geryoneis exists, much less that it is a poem that Carson’s Geryon has read.35 Yet there is something playfully confusing about the fact that a juvenile Geryon nevertheless writes down the “Facts” about himself, followed by “Questions and Answers”—a gesture to render a reader slack-jawed in bafflement about the points of contact between the mythical Geryon, the Stesichorean Geryon, and the Carsonian Geryon. Despite the plurals in “Questions and Answers,” there is in fact only one question written, with three distinct answers to it: one answer, perhaps, for each of Geryon’s three heads.
In Stesichorus’ Geryoneis, Herakles kills Geryon one head at a time, using three different weapons to do so. Carson supplies us with multiple deaths in her novelization of the myth, as well as three reasons “why… Herakles kill[ed] Geryon.” The third reason is printed in upright text that stands aside from the other two italicized “Answers.” Just as we do not know how Herakles despatched Geryon’s third head in the Geryoneis, we find a similar lack of resolution in Carson’s third answer. How did Herakles “[get] the idea that Geryon was Death,” and what opposition does the word “otherwise” create here? Does Geryon’s syntax imply that Herakles considered Geryon an embodiment of Death itself, and if he should turn out to be otherwise, that Geryon would live forever? Or that Herakles would? Whose immortality is at stake here? The non-specified pronoun “he” takes the two mythic characters and jumbles their identities into a whirlpool of uncertain immortality.
Should we read Geryon’s “Facts” and “Questions and Answers” as juvenile writing? mythical episodes? scholarly analysis? prophetic visions? This scene, in which Geryon makes his first verbal autobiography entry, predates the first meeting between Geryon and Herakles in the novel—so how can it be that Herakles’ violence against him is recorded as one of the “facts,” if that event has not yet occurred? Where does he get these ideas? Autobiography of Red seems to laugh in the face of a reader who seeks to place the novel within a chrononormative logic.36
Geryon spends many chapters of Red chasing his “time question” (“What is time made of?”37), and he experiences traumatic bursts of non-linear time and fragmentary consciousness. He shifts from mundane moments into full-bodied, overwhelming onslaughts of memory, moving too slowly, then moving too quickly. Geryon’s sudden shifts through time, like his sudden lapses into illegibility, evoke the fragmentary quality of the Geryoneis, but are also a manifestation of his dilemma’s ambiguities. In Stesichorus’ poem, Geryon’s uncertain mortality fragments his decision about contact with Herakles into multiple modes: if this, then that; but if this, then that. When, in Appendix C of Red, our narrator makes a sardonic gesture toward “clearing up the Question of Stesichorus’ blinding by Helen,” we meet a series of similar dilemmas, formulated in terms that evoke Geryon’s own mortality dilemma.
Several options later:
14. If we are fooled because now that we are in reverse the whole landscape looks inside out either we will find that we do not have a single penny on us or we will call Helen up and tell her the good news.
And two more possibilities, at the end of our list:
20. If we are taken downtown by the police for questioning either we will be expected (as eyewitnesses) to clear up once and for all the question whether Stesichorus was a blind man or not.
21. If Stesichorus was a blind man either we will lie or if not not.
In this Appendix, Carson takes the question of Stesichorus’ blinding by Helen and pursues a playful labyrinth of bifurcated logical turns in a way that anticipates Geryon’s childhood attempt to collect a range of reasons why Herakles killed Geryon (with that peskily unclear “otherwise”).38
This appendix does anything but “clear up” the question of Stesichorus’ blindness. Any clarity concerning Geryon’s mortality dilemma in Stesichorus is complicated by the verbal moods, the missing pieces, and the scholarly expectations of what sort of sentiment Geryon might be expressing in fr. 15. Carson’s sardonic manner of “clearing up” questions operates by adding further layers and further possibilities in the form of explicit or implicit “if not” statements. By the final chapters of Autobiography of Red, Geryon is introduced to an alternative mythic tradition, in the form of Quechuan legend, within which to consider his identity: this alternative tradition enacts Carson’s Stesichorean “unlatching”39 of mythic fixity into fragmentary possibility.
Years after their painful breakup, Geryon unexpectedly encounters Herakles in Buenos Aires, accompanied by a new partner named Ancash. Ancash initially appears as a figure of erotic triangulation between Geryon and Herakles, but this third party eventually becomes a more serious interlocutor with Geryon than Herakles manages to be. Although Geryon’s wings serve as a marker of his embodied otherness throughout the novel, Herakles never draws attention to them; only Ancash indicates an awareness of the wings’ existence, when he sees Geryon undress on the roof of Ancash’s mother’s house. Ancash responds by contextualizing Geryon’s wings within a tradition that is ancient yet distinct from the ancient Greek mythic tradition that positions Geryon and Herakles as antagonists: in a mountain village called Jucu, inhabitants worshipped the volcano as a god in “ancient times” and “threw people into” the volcano,
looking for people
from the inside. Wise ones.
…
The word in Quechua is Yazcol Yazcamac it means
the Ones Who Went and Saw and Came Back –
I think the anthropologists say eyewitnesses. These people did exist.
…
Yes. People who saw the inside of the volcano.40
Ancash thus provides an alternative mythic tradition in which Geryon can be reborn and reconceptualized: Geryon can witness himself not as a flightless winged monster who dies at the hands of a hero, but as a “wise” one who flies into the volcano—toward death—and emerges as an eyewitness, or “One Who Went and Saw and Came Back.” Later, in “Chapter XLVI. Photographs: #1748,” Geryon decides to film himself giving a performance that mimics Ancash’s description of the Yazcol Yazcamac, in order to leave Ancash with “something to remember me by”:41
He has not flown for years but why not
be a
black speck raking its way toward the crater of Icchanktikas 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.
…he
smiles for
the camera: “The Only Secret People Keep.”42
This quotation belongs to the Emily Dickinson poem, #1748, embedded in Carson’s text at the beginning of the verse section of the novel: “the only secret people keep is immortality” (22). If “the only secret people keep is immortality,” then Geryon’s title for the recording implies that the piece itself is “immortality,” the implied predicate. What is the precise link between this verbal description of videography and immortality? Is Geryon gaining immortality through his flight? Through his association with an alternative mythic tradition? Through his ability to go and see and come back? To record himself flying into a volcano “and retreat when it spins—if it does/and if not, win…”? This last phrase echoes the if-nots inscribed in Geryon’s mortality dilemma in the Geryoneis, yet also redirects the dilemma not toward an encounter with Herakles—as in the Stesichorean tradition—but an encounter with a volcano, with his own wings, and with a new way of reading and writing his own autobiography. Ancash has told Geryon that “the Yazcamac return as red people with wings, / all their weaknesses burned away – / and their mortality” (129); and so, perhaps Geryon’s romance with Herakles can be read as a series of deaths that burn Geryon’s weaknesses and mortality while securing his immortality for a mythic afterlife that transcends his Stesichorean limitations.
Is Geryon immortal? is a question that Carson plucks out of the uncertainty surrounding the elusive text of the Geryoneis, and this question takes on new urgency in Autobiography of Red. Carson’s Geryon does not know the answer to his own “time question,” let alone what his mortal status is. He does not express a clear understanding of his relationship to his mythic antecedents, Greek or Quechua, because he is distracted by a bug bite and then the arrival of Herakles on the roof. Geryon grows frustrated with Herakles and thinks to himself, “I have got to get out of this place… immortal or not” (130), thus echoing the mortality dilemma but resolving to retreat.
Just as his dilemma recurs and reworks itself throughout Autobiography of Red, so too do the scenes of Geryon’s death, which seem repeatedly provoked by excesses of erotic passion. In the scene of his death from the Geryoneis, Herakles shoots an arrow through Geryon’s head, which is then described as leaning, like a poppy shedding its petals. The imagery of this scene is reanimated (at least) twice in Autobiography of Red. The first instance occurs in Carson’s delivery of the Stesichorean fragments (13):
Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze
The second iteration of the poppy simile occurs when Geryon sits between Herakles and Ancash on a plane to Lima. While Ancash sleeps, Herakles touches Geryon’s thigh, kisses him on the mouth, and reenacts his death (118–119):
He felt Herakles’ hand move on his thigh and Geryon’s
head went back like a poppy in a breeze
as Herakles’ mouth came down on his and blackness sank through him. Herakles’
hand was on his zipper. Geryon gave himself up
to pleasure as the aeroplane moved at 978 kilometers per hour
Our mythic antagonists fly through the sky at superhuman speed, locked into a pleasure fatal enough to recall the Geryon’s prefigured death. Although Carson repeatedly stages Geryon’s death through the multiplication of the poppy simile and in his frequent disappearances throughout the novel, Ancash provides an alternative to Herakles’ recurring morbid impositions on Geryon. As he flies over the volcano, Geryon feels himself disappearing into a possible third death, only to appear in the next chapter in a bakery with flour in the air settling on his shoulders, smiling with Ancash and Herakles (146):
Herakles grins in the dark. Ancash watches the flames.
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.
Geryon swerves between mortality and immortality on an ever-developing loop of pain, pleasure, curiosity, and finally, awe at his own mythic resilience. Time—the obstacle which, for Geryon, is more than “forever on the verge of becoming itself the object of inquiry and contemplation”43—continues “rushing” around this trio, but it is Carson’s addition of Ancash that unhinges Geryon from repetition of pure death and infuses his myth with immortality.
Conclusion
Carson’s conceptual work on eros and time stretches across her works on Sappho and Stesichorus in a way that amplifies their unlikely temporal connections. Carson identifies in Sappho’s fragments a subject position that resembles Geryon’s own mortal uncertainty, and as such, Carson’s work on Sappho and her work on the Geryoneis both explore the ways in which desire refracts time’s chronologies. In Autobiography of Red, though, the narrator of the work infuses the characters, the book’s chapters, the fragments, and the events of the “plot” into temporal disorder and mortal confusion that evokes the lover’s experience of time. The narrative’s strange jumps through time work to imitate the confusions and dislocations that emerge as a symptom of eros’ challenges to time itself.
Carson works and reworks her translations of Sappho across multiple texts and genres, and the spaces between her multiple different translations and writings on Sappho’s fragments act as a distancing force that allows multiple possibilities to ring out of the multiple engagements. Similarly, in the triangle formed by Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash, Geryon’s dilemma is fully realized in all its possibilities. Through Carson’s triangulated eros, Geryon acquires his own eternal dēute, in a way that aligns his experience of desire and mortality with that of Sappho’s enraptured speakers. Carson’s explorations of erotic time in Greek lyric provokes epistemic vertigo within her narratives, which are filled with volcanoes, photographs, and aeroplanes as representations of “time’s stacked strata.”44
Rather than working to resolve time’s questions or to dissect its “stacked strata,” Carson playfully allows multiple answers and timelines to coexist. Unlike the scholars who seek to “clear up” the questions of Sappho’s sexuality and Geryon’s mortality, Carson offers an overabundance of possibilities and allows them to coexist in an exuberant, confusing, and illogical fullness. The questions and difficulties associated with the fragmented corpora of Sappho and Stesichorus turn into opportunities for plurality, invitations to overabundance of meaning. The difficulties posed by time’s ravages on texts intersect with the texts’ own questions about time, and Carson’s work seems to delight in the dance between the questions that call out from the texts themselves as well as the questions that hover over their gaps and absences.
FURTHER READING
For more of Carson’s work on Sappho, see Decreation. See also Carson 1980 and 2005. For those looking for more of Carson’s work on Stesichorus and Geryon, Red Doc> revisits and expands the adult lives of the central characters from Autobiography of Red. On Carson’s engagement with antiquity, see Jansen 2021. For discussions of eros in Carson’s work, see Battis 2003, Fisher 2009, Jennings 2001. On Carson’s engagement with Stesichorus, see Georgis 2014, Murray 2005, Schade 2015, and Scranton 2014.
Notes
1 duBois 1995; Prins 1999; Gabriel 2018.
2 Carson 2002: xi expresses delight in the “adventure” posed by Sappho (and Stesichorus), but a “sinking feeling of oh no here we go again as the bleakness closes in” upon reading Euripides (Carson 2006: 89).
3 Carson 2002: xi.
4 Jennings 2001: 924.
5 Carson 1986: 151–152.
6 All of the fragments referenced in this article share consistent numeration in the editions of Voigt and Campbell.
7 See Jennings 2001: 929 and passim for a discussion of Carson’s evocation “in her readers [of] a desire for a stereoscopic vision.”
8 Cf. Jennings 2001: 926, who interprets the “ideal” as “union with the beloved” and the “actual” as “the beloved’s absence.”
9 Hutchinson 2001: 171.
10 Carson 1986: 17.
11 Carson 1986: 13.
12 See Carson 2005: 161–162 for a discussion of the poetic possibilities of the fifth stanza.
13 Carson’s work on Sappho generally takes on a stereoscopic dimension: as Greenwood 2005 notes, Carson 2002 echoes and revisits aspects of Carson 1986 without cross-referencing her own discussions, and there are slight transformations in the translations of fr. 31. Similarly, Carson 2005: 158–162 revises and transforms aspects of her discussion of fr. 31 in Carson 2002.
14 Carson 2002: 357–358, on 1.15, 16, 18.
15 Carson 1986: 4.
16 Carson 2002: 357, on 1.15, 16, 18.
17 For more incarnations of these temporal strains, see Sappho fr. 94.
18 For a general summary of all of the plot elements in Stesichorus’ representation of the myth, see Davies and Finglass 2014: 240–243.
19 On the identification of this figure as Menoites, see Davies and Finglass 2014: 241 and 269, Barrett 2007: 25–26.
20 Page 1973; Barrett 2007: 1–37; Rozokoki 2008; Davies and Finglass 2014.
21 Barrett 2007: 25–37.
22 Carson 1998: 10.
23 Numeration as in Davies and Finglass 2014.
24 Carson 2006: 13.
25 See Carson 2006; 14, where Carson uses the phrase “Herakles’ dilemma” to refer to the fact that the hero, in Euripides’ tragedy, has “reached the boundary of his own myth.”
26 Barrett 2007: 27.
27 Cf. Matzner 2016b: 187–189 for a similarly uncanny erotic encounter between a PhD candidate and living incarnations of his dissertation subject (Heliogabalus) in Jeremy Reed’s 2005 novel Boy Caesar.
28 Carson 1998: 39.
29 Budelmann 2018b: 167 on 5–9.
30 Carson 1998: 39.
31 Carson 1998: 45.
32 The novel’s frequent references to Gertrude Stein also invite an interpretation of the book’s title as a reference to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—another queer narrative where the author of the autobiography and the subject are different. See Murray 2005: 101–103 and passim on the nature of “autobiography” in Carson 1998.
33 Carson 1998: 37.
34 Murray 2005: 102–103.
35 In “Chapter XXVIII. Skepticism,” a philosopher named Lazer asks Geryon if he knows ancient Greek, to which Geryon replies, “No but I have read the skeptics” (Carson 1998: 86).
36 See Freeman 2010: 1–19 on Bordieu’s notion of habitus and “chrononormativity.”
37 Carson 1998: 93.
38 The phrasing also evokes the elliptical δ]ὲ μή, χείμων of Sappho’s fr. 22, or in Carson’s English, “if not, winter.”
39 Carson 1998: 3–7 describes Stesichorus’ literary import as partly constituted by the fact that his inventive use of adjectives “unlatched” nouns from fixed epic epithets and allowed them to “[go] floating up.”
40 Carson 1998: 128.
41 Carson 1998: 145.
42 Carson 1998: 145.
43 Butler 2016: 15.
44 Butler 2016: 1.