Starting Over

re-reading Autobiography of Red

need 2 discuss is roasting house’s place to talk about what we’re reading, seeing, and listening to. we want your thoughts, too!

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I first read Autobiography of Red the week after a breakup. I was alone in an unfamiliar city and almost nothing brought me comfort. Autobiography was the only thing that held my attention and I read it in the relentless way of a bookish child who does not fit quite comfortably into this plane of reality. I have a vivid memory of standing in line in an Amtrak station with the book held in front of my face, eyes raw, brain fuzzy, not able to look at any of my fellow passengers lest they remind me of—and something about the clarity of Anne Carson’s prose, its absolute precision was able to pierce through.

Autobiography of Red is a strange book. It is a retelling of the minor Greek myth of Herakles and Geryon (Herakles kills Geryon for his magical red cattle) as a queer love story in verse. Geryon is a red-winged monster but also a gentle and traumatized boy who develops a love for photography. Herakles (you may know him by his Roman name, Hercules) is the sexy older boy who moves to town briefly and turns Geryon’s world upside down.

Time and place work oddly in the novel. There are anchors to the 80s and 90s (corded landlines, photography) and details that put us in a timeless, mythical realm, like the fact that Geryon has red wings folded under his oversized leather jacket. An island in the Atlantic—Geryon’s hometown—is somehow a bus ride away from New Mexico and a drive away from Hades. None of this feels out of place while reading it, which is to say that Anne Carson constructs the world of the book so well that it is easy to enter it completely.

I just reread Autobiography of Red 1.5 times, sort of by accident. I started it again in my friend’s bed in Berkeley and then finished it on the first afternoon of a two-night backpacking trip in Desolation Wilderness. I was a little panicked to reach the end but I also couldn’t stop; the book is arranged in little one-to-five page sections and it is so easy to “one more” yourself straight to the last page. Fuck, I said to my friend as we boiled water for dinner, what am I going to do now?

Well, the only thing. Start over. In the tent that night and the next I read, letting my headlamp wash out the sky as Geryon tells Herakles that some of the stars we see are long dead, their light just now reaching us. Herakles doesn’t buy it: “Let’s see someone touch a star and not get burned. He’ll hold up his finger, Just a memory burn! he’ll say and then I’ll believe it.”

i made my friend Kate take this picture of me

Reading it again, I was surprised to remeet the book’s frontmatter. The part of the book that sticks with me—the gay romance—is tucked after a short essay, fragments of poetry, and three appendices, all of which I had forgotten about. The essay, the first thing you read, is about Stesichoros, a Greek lyric poet who was born about 650 BCE. He wrote the poem Geryoneis, of which only fragments remain, which contains the myth of Herakles and Geryon that served as Carson’s inspiration. Then, there are fragments of Stesichoros’s Geryoneis, translated by Carson. These translations are imaginative, including anachronisms that—though I have not and cannot read the original Ancient Greek—I’m sure deviate from Stesichoros’s precise words. Then there are three sort-of beguiling appendices about Stesichoros’s blinding by Helen of Troy.

When I first read these, I think I glazed over them, unsure of their importance in the larger novel. But the more I revisit the text, the more I see what she’s doing. To take on just the introductory essay, “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?”: Carson’s main contention is that Stesichoros’s literary innovation was in his use of adjectives. I don’t know if you’ve read Homer lately, but The Odyssey is full of epithets: every character is described with precisely the same word every time they’re introduced: Penelope (in my translation, Emily Wilson’s) is “prudent”, Telemachus “thoughtful”, and chairs are “well-carved”. This fixes things in place; it delivers us epicness. Stesichoros (again, taking Carson’s word on this, as I cannot read Ancient Greek) is much more creative with his use of adjectives. He describes a child as “bruiseless”, a river as “root silver.” Carson describes this act as him having “released being”. By letting things be fluidly and creatively defined, he is doing something to the substances in the world. Carson is following in his footsteps with Autobiography of Red—the title itself implies that an adjective is worthy of an entire autology. And then she gets crazy with her own adjectives: “indoor neon sky”, “rotten ruby night”, “stale peace”, “glassy squeak”, “weak season”, “sweaty black cobblestones”, “helpless joy”.

If she’s arguing a theory of the world as constructed by language, then linguistic experimentation helps us see the world anew. During a breakup and a period of unsettled travel, these disorienting adjectives, this releasing of being, was so comforting to me. The world was strange and new and out of reach of the ordinary way of speaking; I could never say quite how I felt because I didn’t know. Anne Carson didn’t know, exactly, but showed me that knowing—or fixity, finitude—was perhaps not the point.

Revising gets a lot of airtime as the most important thing a writer can do, but I don’t think we talk enough about rereading. I think I’ve learned most of what I know about writing from rereading. The first time I read something really amazing, I’m too dazzled to see any of what it’s doing. Rereading allows me to start to see the construction of the thing, to see it even as a constructed thing. I start to notice the jumps in time and the structure and the patterning and the pacing, all the tricks that I try to steal for myself, squirreling away in some corner of my mind with the hopes that they’ll come out later in my own work.

I think I could (and I might) reread Autobiography of Red for the rest of my life and always see something new: a particular way she describes the light or a gestured-to feeling I had missed before. Beyond thinking that it’s good for me, I love rereading, both for this sense of forever-opening and for the way that it pushes against the need for every artistic engagement to be somehow optimized, a ticking off of the never-ending list of unreads. Also maybe, I’ll admit, I have a hard time letting go.