Summary
Autobiography of Red begins with this slim essay, just eight paragraphs long, titled “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” Writing with a poet’s expansive curiosity and a scholar’s rigor for historical detail, Carson grounds us in the historical, linguistic, and mythological roots of her project. She calls this section her “proemium,” a Latin word derived from the Ancient Greek meaning “preface or introduction.” While it functions straightforwardly as a preface, providing historical context, it is also a lyrical work of prose, to be considered as part of the poetical project of this novel in verse.
The first two paragraphs situate Stesichoros within his historical and literary context. We learn that he was born a couple of centuries after Homer, and two dozen centuries before the poet Gertrude Stein, which Carson—in typical sly humor—deems “a difficult interval for a poet.” He was evidently a prolific writer, whose work was collected in twenty-six books, but only a dozen titles and several collections of papyrus fragments remain of his writing. Though he was highly regarded by the critics of his time, no passage longer than thirty lines has survived in quotation by other writers; most of his work is lost. The overarching theme of contemporaneous critics’ praise for Stesichoros’ writing is of newness and change. His reputation is for originality and inventiveness.
The next several paragraphs take their direction from Hermogenes’ words of praise for Stesichoros. Hermogenes called Stesichoros “a sweet genius in the use of adjectives.” Carson analogizes Gertrude Stein’s quotation about Picasso—“This one was working”—to Hermogenes on Stesichoros: “This one was making adjectives.” Carson digs into the subject of adjectives, whose Greek etymology means “placed on top,” “added,” “foreign.” Carson asserts that adjectives are the “latches of being” which connect the nouns or beings of the world to their specific particularities. The adjectival tradition of Homeric epics is one in which nouns are regularly described by the same adjectives. Women are “glancing,” the sea is “unwearying,” cowards’ livers are “white.” The adjectives of Homeric poetry affixed every noun to its most “accurate” attribute.
Stesichoros was born at a time when the Homeric tradition saturated the world of poetry and storytelling. He studied the established connections between certain nouns and certain adjectives, and then, in his writing, began to undo those connections, and replace them with new associations. Carson writes that Stesichoros “released being.” In his writing, a river could be “root silver,” a planet “middle night stuck,” a killing “cream black.” Carson hones in on the adjectives traditionally ascribed to Helen of Troy, the legendarily beautiful woman whose kidnapping is said to have “launched a thousand ships.” Describing Helen as a whore dates back beyond Homer, but Stesichoros did not describe her that way. Carson writes that “when Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowered out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment.” The matter of Stesichoros’ blinding by Helen will occupy the later sections of Appendices A-C.
Finally, Carson delves into the most pertinent work by Stesichoros, his Geryoneis (“The Geryon Matter”), which was a long lyric poem of which 84 fragments survive. The Geryoneis is ostensibly the tale of Herakles’ tenth labor, the killing of a winged red monster named Geryon in order to steal his magical red cattle. The conventional way of telling this story is from Herakles’ perspective, as he was a celebrated Greek hero. Yet Stesichoros tells the story from Geryon’s point of view, painting an empathic portrait of the monster as someone with a mother, who owned a “little dog.” Carson calls Stesichoros’ Geryoneis his masterpiece, and introduces us to the next section, “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” which offers her translations of some of the fragments of Geryoneis. She provides some historical detail about the translation history of the Geryoneis fragments, noting that they have been published 13 times in 13 different orders, and that the fragments read as though Stesichoros ripped his long poem into little pieces himself and buried them in a box. Carson invites us to “shake the box” and see in what order the fragments fall, making and re-making Geryon’s story, as she herself is about to.
Analysis
Anne Carson is known for her unorthodox modes of synthesis, weaving together unlikely references across time and context. This essay is no different, peppering a discussion of Stesichoros, the lyric poet from 650 B.C., with quotations from Gertrude Stein, a 20th-century Modernist poet. The Gertrude Stein quote which is the essay’s epitaph, “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do,” quickly resurfaces in the context of Stesichoros’ lifetime, amidst Sicilian refugees “hungry for language.” What is it that words want to do and have to do? Stesichoros, according to Carson, had a “passion for substances.” He wanted to know what things were made of. His words—his adjectives, in particular—wanted to express the particularity of substances. Like Stein, Stesichoros liked the feeling of words doing what they want and have to do. That likeness is connection enough for Carson, whose singular gift lies in collapsing the distance of centuries to point out what is shared.
Homer is known as the “blind bard”; blindness was a part of his legend from the beginning. Yet there is no proof that Homer was blind, nor even that he was a real individual. Many scholars believe there was no single (blind) bard, but a group of poets whose work was transmitted orally through the centuries, and came to be known as the work of one man. Keeping in mind the mystery of Homer and his supposed blindness, we see how the speculation surrounding Stesichoros’ potential blinding by Helen is part of an ancient mythological tradition. Blindness in the ancient Mediterranean world held great metaphoric significance. In the final section of Autobiography of Red, which is a fictional interview with Stesichoros, the interviewer comments on a “sort of concealment drama” or “aesthetic of blindness or even a will to blindness” in this work. The question of Stesichoros’ blinding, also taken up in Appendices A-C, is related to this section’s titular question, “What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” It is answered in a tongue-in-cheek way in the interview, when Stesichoros asserts that to tell the interviewer about blindness, first he must tell about seeing.
Carson writes that adjectives are the “latches of being,” which connect the things of this world to their particularities. Through those particular characteristics, we approach their meaning. When Stesichoros rejects the traditional adjectives for specific nouns, undoing the latches between beings and their typical descriptions, he is asserting that the meanings of things aren’t only what we think they are. His adjectives saw things anew. Take the example of Helen. After centuries of being described as a whore, Stesichoros chose to describe her differently, and what flowed from her was “such a light as may have blinded him.” Blindness here is not the absence of seeing, but a consequence of seeing. This is in line with other ancient myths of blindness, like the prophet Tiresias, whose blindness has many origin stories, but most of them involve the gods punishing him with blindness for having seen something secret. We might say that an “aesthetic of blindness” in this story is also an aesthetic of transgressive seeing.
All this leads, finally, to Geryon. Stesichoros saw Geryon anew when he wrote his epic poem Geryoneis, telling the story of Geryon’s deadly encounter with Herakles from Geryon’s perspective for the first time. His “passion for substances” kept him from dismissing the monstrous Geryon as the one-dimensional target of Herakles’ wrath. He dug into Geryon’s character, telling of his “red boy’s life and his little dog,” his mother’s “scene of wild appeal,” Herakles’ callous murder of the little dog. Stesichoros’ practice of seeing was inadvertently a practice of compassion, and the Geryon of his imagination infected Carson’s imagination, some 2500 years later. It is not only Carson who keeps Stesichoros’ inventive poetic spirit alive. Carson’s Geryon shares certain traits with Stesichoros too. Stesichoros’ passion for substances, and the adjectives which link “everything in the world to its place in particularity,” is present in Geryon’s studious attentiveness to the relationships and distances between things.
