Instead she atomizes the world, leaving it broken down, refracted, and glinting. Yet Carson doesn't so much tell the story of Geryon's love as mediate his very being through semiological surfaces: cafes, video stores, lipstick, a library where he shelves government documents with a "forlorn austerity, / tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war." Carson seldom satisfies herself with an image of the world. We feel the pain of learning the most elementary things, and then the volcanic intensity that comes with that more advanced thing, love. After all, the monster's instincts have not been numbed by civilization. By choosing Geryon as her central character, Carson can bring up the questions of existence as if they hadn't been asked before. In Carson's very contemporary retelling, he merely inspires, but does not return, the monster's passion. In the original version, of course, Herakles killed the red-skinned, winged Geryon. A classicist by profession as well as a poet, Carson has drawn on antiquity for her cast, updating the myth of Geryon and Herakles. Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse, the author's first.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |