Lennon, Brian. "What It's Like to Be Red." Review of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. The Boston Book Review 5.4 (May 1998): 42.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Sometimes, being avant-garde means that one is overpraised and then quickly forgotten; at other times, it means one is ignored, and must count on being born posthumously. Anne Carson is enjoying a surfeit of attention, these days. Her slim, hypnotic volume of lyric scholarship, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), is devoured by poets and other creative writers with little training or interest in (or patience for) the philological mode as such, while her poems and lapidary prose pieces appear with productive regularity in The New Yorker and in the elite little magazines, and extracts from her two volumes of poetry and essays, Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Plainwater (1995) turn up as epigraphs in literary folks' e-mail signatures, as much as in their own work in the Carsonesque "lyric essay." In any university English department or creative writing program, today, it would seem, you can find someone who will tell you breathlessly that Carson's work has "changed my life."

Why all the fuss? Perhaps more emblematically than any other contemporary writer of her class position in recent memory, Carson obviates the entrenched division of the academic from the artist, thereby proffering hope---wild hope---to those of us who find ourselves unintentionally planted on one or the other side of that line. Hence the breathlessness: for the harassed and cynical dissertator, Carson represents an alternative to cloistered specialization; from the writer's point of view, she subverts the anti-intellectualism that continues to define mainstream U.S. American literature. Here is a properly trained classicist (Canadian by birth, Carson teaches at McGill University in Montreal) who keeps two desks in separate rooms of her house, for scholarship on the one hand and "creative" work on the other; who, in both modes, deadpans such equally considered and whimsical utterances as "Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros" and "Pilgrims were people who got the right verb"; and who doesn't flinch at, who indeed courts, the collision of study with so-called real life.

In so many ways, all this successfully rehearses the jazzy, sexy idealism---in Carson's own words, "flailing at holiness"---of disestablishmentarian North American writing of all stripes, which yet shares a common project in the blend of highbrow culture with a real life of erotic and anti-academic enthusiasm. Carson's work invokes nothing if not the élan of Bildung itself, in its best forms, which prohibit the segregation of reading, and reading's abstraction, from the lived personal consequence of reading. If Carson has definitively transformed the contemporary form of the literary essay, it is, we might say, by suggesting routes that lead away from memoiristic self-expression without ending in journalism.

Autobiography of Red is offered as a "novel in verse." As with the scholarly treatise of Eros the Bittersweet, the poetry of Glass, Irony and God, and the essays in Plainwater, this work conforms only nominally, or ironically, to declared genre. Opening the volume, one encounters a proemium in the form of a brief and jocular essay introducing us to Stesichoros, a Greek of the seventh-century B.C. who "came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet." Stesichoros, Carson declares, was a poet who liberated Being by using complex adjectives, breaking the Homeric tradition of fixed connotation: "When Homer mentions blood, blood is black... into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born... Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless." Stesichoros more or less wandered around in both historical and literary space, as Carson tells it, "unlatching epithets" in just this way, until he encountered Helen of Troy.

Helen's blinding of Stesichoros is addressed briefly, here, in parts III, IV, and V: three short appendices that contain classical "testimonia," something that purports to be Stesichoros's palinode, and a kind of mock-dialectical recapitulation of the story. But first, we find, in part II, a selection of sixteen from the eighty-four surviving fragments of the Geryon poem, archly entitled "Geryon's Reversible Destiny," "Geryon's Weekend," "Geryon's War Record," and so on. Carson's translations are quite free, accumulating neologism after anachronism, and here, as as elsewhere, a tensile syntax amalgamates idiomatic and vernacular everyday language with purposefully grotesque or baroque expression. Carson is inordinately fond of the arresting or startling image: "... The sound / Of the horses like roses being burned alive"; "... as when a / Poppy shames itself in a ship of Nude breeze"; "He could feel his eyes leaning out of his skull / on their little connectors." And yet, if it were possible to align the poetry of these fragments (and of Carson's poetry in general) with a particular center of energy in contemporary North American poetry, it might have to be with some or other of the "Wittgenstein poetics" mapped out by Marjorie Perloff in Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996). It is a poetics that begins, for Perloff, with the writings of Gertrude Stein---a debt to whom Carson acknowledges, characteristically waggishly, in her proemium:

...the fragments of the Geryoneis read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box. You can of course keep shaking the box. "Believe me for meat and for myself," as Gertrude Stein says. Here. Shake.

En bloc, these English transformations of an extant or simulated Greek do own a linguistic immanence that owes something to Stein, to Beckett, to the "telephone sentences" of Ingebord Bachmann, to the speakerless voicelessness of so-called Language poetry. Here is "III. Geryon's Parents":

If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table

Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up

Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms

To the ticking red taxi of the incubus

Don't want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

In its own way, this is a startlingly lovely quintet of sentences--- if one fails to recoil, perhaps, at the utter dependence on the familiar of such striving defamiliarization. Part VI, which comprises the greater part of Autobiography in Red, comprises the "novel in verse" itself, chronicling Geryon-the-red-monster's elementary school days, his oppression by an older brother, his writing of an autobiography, and his doomed affair with a boy named Herakles---an encounter with what the narrator, in a rare unironized lyrical moment (or is it?), terms "the human custom of wrong love":

Geryon was going into the Bus Depot

one Friday night about three A.M. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped off the bus

from New Mexico and Geryon

came fast around the corner of the platform and there 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 step

with his suitcase in one hand

trying to tuck in his shirt with the other. Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say.

The flamboyantly arbitrary lineation of this text, too, speaks to a certain over-reliance on convention. Carson might be said to have more or less dissimulated such a strategy, in an interview recently published in the literary journal The Iowa Review: "[The novel] was all prose at first and very thick. Then I thought, 'What if I break these lines up a bit? Maybe they'd move along more smartly.' So now the novel's in verse." Such breakage in itself slows reading, and echoes in form the pseudo-critical and mock-scholarly ideological apparatus Carson assembles in and through it. That this "novel" unfolds in concentrated, epigrammatic episodes that are rather like essays will surprise none of Carson's admirers (or her detractors, for that matter). Its narrative engine forms a kind of spiral instead of a straight line, configuring and re-configuring the core dynamic of erotic loneliness that animates Carson's body of work at large. Geryon, the red monster, grows quickly from a harassed younger brother into an abandoned adolescent lover, and from there, into a global traveler who carries, as we say, many sorrowful secrets:

Geryon watched the top of Herakles' head

and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing. He looked at this fact

in mild surprise. Once in childhood

his ice-cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty cone

in a small dramatic red fist.

Which is a figure, in itself, perhaps, for Carson's project here: to reach, through a kind of calculatedly simulated banality, those fine ironies of enchantment that dehydrate and reconstitute literary convention at one stroke.

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