Summary
I. JUSTICE
The narrative portion of Autobiography of Red begins with Geryon in kindergarten. He follows behind his older brother on the way to school. His brother is aggressively unkind—he throws rocks, calls Geryon “stupid,” and refuses to lead Geryon to his kindergarten classroom. Geryon, in his sweet naiveté, understands his brother’s rock-throwing as something that “makes my brother happy,” and “had no doubt that stupid was correct.” A dynamic is established where Geryon’s brother bullies him, and Geryon accepts that treatment. We learn that Geryon has an attentive and empathetic nature: he stops and imagines the lives of every stone he sees on the way to school. He is also easily made anxious—he experiences the school hallway as “a hundred thousand miles/of thunder tunnels and indoor neon sky slammed open by giants.”
Abandoned by his brother at the Main Door to the school, Geryon struggles to remember the route down the corridor to kindergarten. He’s angry at his brother, but he doesn’t express it—he just runs away. This is how he eventually finds his own way of getting to the classroom: he avoids the Main Door entirely, and runs around the school building, waiting quietly in the bushes outside the kindergarten windows until someone outside notices and lets him in. He doesn’t draw attention to himself even when he becomes covered in snow.
II. EACH
This chapter begins at a time in Geryon’s life when everything is how it should be: Geryon and his brother each have their own bedroom, their own space, and Geryon sleeps well each night and wakes up happy. His mother teaches him the word “each” in the context of each brother having their own room, and this feels right to Geryon. But then his injured grandmother moves in with them, and Geryon and his brother have to share a bedroom. This is when the problems begin.
Geryon’s brother continues to bully him, and Geryon, a little bit older, has a better sense of his brother’s intentions now: “He knew the difference between facts and brother hatred.” But he’s still a child, and easily manipulated by his brother. His brother manipulates Geryon into a sexually abusive situation through promising him a cat’s-eye marble, “and so they developed an economy of sex/for cat’s-eyes.” Later, his brother threatens him into silence. No longer feeling in control of his own body, Geryon decides that the difference between “outside and inside” is that “inside is mine.” The next day they go swimming, and Geryon starts writing his autobiography, in which he “set down all inside things,” and “coolly omitted/all outside things.”
III. RHINESTONES
Geryon’s mother is dressed up to go out. When she leaves, Geryon feels like all the air is sucked out of the room, because he’s forced to stay at home with his abusive brother and the ineffectual babysitter. Geryon’s brother puts the empty fruit bowl on Geryon’s head, and then grabs his neck from behind in “the silent death hold,” until the babysitter’s approach scares him away. Geryon asks the babysitter what time it is, and when his mother will get home. She answers that it’s a quarter to eight, and that his mother won’t be back for hours. This causes Geryon to panic.
The babysitter asks Geryon if she can read him a book, and Geryon suggests the loon book, an instruction manual for calling loons, to keep her from reading any of the books Geryon’s mother usually reads him. His brother interrupts their reading of the loon book, snapping a rubber band on Geryon’s leg, to ask them all what their favorite weapon is. Geryon’s brother says his favorite weapon is the catapult, because it can cause so much destruction. The babysitter says her favorite is the garotte, because it’s “clean and neat,” causing a “quick but painful death.” Geryon says that his favorite weapon is a “cage,” and his brother insists that a cage isn’t a weapon, because a cage doesn’t destroy the enemy. Finally, Geryon’s mother comes home, and Geryon runs downstairs to greet her.
IV. TUESDAY
Tuesdays are Geryon’s favorite day because his father and brother are gone at hockey practice, so he gets to be alone with his mother. Their ritual is to turn on all the lights, and eat their favorite meal of peaches on buttery toast in the living room. Geryon’s mother sits with her magazines, cigarettes, and the telephone, and talks on the phone to her friend Maria. Geryon sits beside her and builds an autobiographical sculpture out of found objects: a tomato with shredded money for hair. When Geryon’s mother gets off the phone, she compliments his sculpture, and asks him affectionately to use a one-dollar bill instead of a ten-dollar bill for the hair next time.
V. SCREENDOOR
His mother at the ironing board lights a cigarette and looks at Geryon, who is peering through the screen door. She tells him for the third time that it’s time for him to go to school. The narrator foretells that even when Geryon is “past forty,” he will remember the “dusty almost medieval smell” of the screen door as it pressed into his face. His mother tries to build up his confidence by telling him that this would be hard for him if he was weak, but that he isn’t weak. She straightens his “little red wings” and sends him off to school.
VI. IDEAS
Geryon has learned to write. His mother’s friend Maria gifts Geryon a fluorescent notebook from Japan. Inside it he begins to write his autobiography, setting down the “facts.” These facts pertain to the Geryon of ancient mythology: that his mother is a river nymph, that he had red cattle, that Herakles came to kill Geryon and steal his cattle. After his short list of the “Total Facts Known About Geryon,” he writes a “Question and Answer” section with the question “Why did Herakles kill Geryon?” For which he provides three possible answers: 1) Just violent. 2) Had to it was one of His Labors (10th). 3) Got the idea that Geryon was Death otherwise he could live forever.
Then he writes one final addendum to the facts about himself: “Geryon had a little red dog Herakles killed that too.” When his teacher reads all this, she gets worried, and tells Geryon’s mother about it on Parent-Teacher Day at school. Geryon’s mother asks the teacher whether Geryon ever writes anything with a happy ending. Geryon fishes the paper out of his teacher’s hands and writes a “New Ending,” in which “All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand/in hand.”
VII. CHANGE
Geryon is now a teenager, and spending time away from home. He meets Herakles at the Bus Depot at 3 AM one Friday night and when they first spot each other, they share a moment of mutual recognition which is “the opposite of blindness.” Herakles stops and stares at Geryon as he disembarks the bus. Geryon asks him for change for a dollar, and Herakles says no, but that he’ll give Geryon a quarter for free. Hours later, they’re loitering on the railroad tracks in the dark, and Herakles notes that Geryon’s hands must be cold. Herakles puts Geryon’s hands inside his shirt.
VIII. CLICK
Geryon is back home in the kitchen, and his mother is questioning him about Herakles, the new kid that he’s spending all of his time with. Geryon has recently stopped speaking, and communicates only through photography. He’s focusing his camera on his mother’s face while she speaks to him. She asks him how old Herakles is, whether he goes to school, whether he lives in the trailer park, and whether Geryon visits him there at night. Eventually she gives up trying to get an answer, and tells him that “if I say anything intelligent you can take a picture of it.”
She continues talking, almost to herself, about how she doesn’t trust people who stay up all night, but she does trust Geryon. She muses that he probably knows more about sex than she does. And she recalls how he was an insomniac as a baby, who would lie silently in his crib in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. He would fall asleep instantly if she brought him into the TV room. His brother enters the room, and invites Geryon to go downtown. Geryon pockets his camera and follows his brother outside, ignoring his mother’s question about whether he has his lens cap.
IX. SPACE AND TIME
Geryon is amazed by the feeling of falling in love. He sees Herakles almost every day, and is discovering new things about himself through their relationship. It is sunset, and Geryon and his mother are standing in his bedroom, as Geryon prepares to leave to see Herakles. His mother says that she feels like she hardly knows him anymore. Geryon thinks to himself that being in love has not made him “gentle or kind.” He fills his pockets with the things he’s bringing with him—money, keys, film. His mother says that she put clean t-shirts in his dresser. Geryon replies that his t-shirt is clean; it’s supposed to be ripped. His mother asks when he’ll be home, and he replies, not too late, longing to be gone. His mother asks him what he likes about Herakles, and his mind is filled with a thousand things that he cannot tell her. After pushing back on all the overtures that his mother has made to understand him better, Geryon suddenly recognizes the distance between them, and makes a gesture himself to overcome that distance, asking her whether he can light her cigarette. But she turns away, saying that she really should quit smoking, and the distance between them remains intact.
X. SEX QUESTION
Geryon and Herakles are sitting in a parked car along the highway at night. Geryon is 14, and Herakles is 16. Geryon says he should be getting home, but they make no move to leave. Herakles muses that he’s someone who will never be satisfied. Tingling with nerves, Geryon asks him what he means by satisfied, but Herakles says he doesn’t know. Geryon thinks hard about how he can ask Herakles the “sex question.” Geryon knows that people need “acts of attention from one another,” but he wonders if it matters what acts. Herakles has told Geryon before that “sex is a way of getting to know someone.” When Herakles notices how nervous Geryon is, he says reassuringly, “It’s ok.” Geryon finally decides to ask Herakles his question: “Do people who like sex/have a question about it too?” But the question comes out all wrong, and he asks Herakles instead, “Is it true you think about sex everyday?” Herakles stiffens at this accusation, and it’s like a curtain drops down between them, separating them. Herakles turns on the car, and they drive away into the dark.
Analysis
I. JUSTICE begins with the ironic statement that “Geryon learned about justice from his brother quite early.” This and the following chapter make abundantly clear that Geryon’s brother is hardly just or kind. Yet the verbal irony here isn’t merely an inversion—“justice” when “injustice” is what is meant. When Geryon’s brother calls him stupid and leaves him standing in front of the Main Door of the school, the narrator says: “Geryon had no doubt stupid was correct. But when justice is done/the world drops away.” What “justice” has been done here? Geryon’s brother has imposed his own rules, and Geryon has accepted them. Likewise, when Geryon goes to school alone after that, he doesn’t approach the Main Door ever again because “justice is pure.” What’s “pure” here is how strictly and totally Geryon adheres to the parameters his brother imposed. The meaning of “justice” is at least twofold: there is “justice” as a moral value, whose synonyms are right, fair, impartial; and there is “justice” meaning the administration of law, and the quality of conforming to the law. Geryon learns about injustice from his brother, but he also learns about justice as in rules to obey.
This chapter also introduces us to the volcanic metaphor for Geryon’s inner life. There are “fires in his mind” and a “deep glowing blank.” This motif will be continually developed throughout Autobiography of Red. We also see here that Geryon is not volcanic in an explosive sense. Even when his “anger was total,” and “the blank [of his mind] caught fire and burned to baseline,” Geryon’s reaction is not fight but flight: “Geryon ran.” This establishes early on a fundamental tenet of Geryon’s volcanism: he may seethe with inner turbulence and pent-up passion, but he doesn’t express it violently. Indeed, he doesn’t advocate for or assert himself at all. Waiting be let inside to the kindergarten classroom, “He did not gesticulate./He did not knock on the glass. He waited. Small, red, and upright he waited…” This is one of a number of important patterns for Geryon’s behavior set up in the first chapter. We learn that he is gentle, unassuming, and that he conceals his inner turmoil. We also glimpse early evidence of his perennially low self-esteem.
II. EACH continues the theme of Geryon’s brother’s “justice,” and his increasingly devastating manipulation of Geryon. Geryon is struggling to learn to read and write—words disassemble themselves into letters when he focuses on them, unless his mother explains their meaning to him. Then their meanings stick. When she explains the word “each” to him, as in he and his brother each have their own room, Geryon “clothed himself in this strong word each.” We see Geryon forming his own vision of justice—one in which individuality is respected, and each person has what they need.
Right as Geryon discovers the justice implicit in the logic of “each,” he is robbed of it, moved into his brother’s bedroom to give his bedroom to his grandma. Sharing a bedroom gives Geryon’s brother the opportunity to coerce Geryon into sexually abusive situations night after night. Geryon is robbed of his “each,” as in his separate self. He thinks about the “difference between outside and inside” and decides that the difference is that “inside is mine.” His brother can’t rob him of his inner life, though he has robbed Geryon of agency over his body. In contrast to the systemic justice of each to their own, Geryon’s brother establishes an exploitative economy in which he takes what Geryon is unwilling to give, and gives Geryon petty prizes—a marble, a dollar bill—in exchange.
This chapter also shows Geryon’s first effort towards creative self-expression: the day after his brother sexually abuses him, he begins his autobiography. His autobiography, in which he “set down all inside things” and “coolly omitted/all outside things,” emerges out of this trauma. Manipulated by his brother not to tell on him to their mother, Geryon finds an outlet for his repressed feelings in his autobiography. And by telling his own story on his own terms, he regains a measure of control over himself and his life.
III. RHINESTONES continues to track the relationship between Geryon and his brother in their youth. This is the last chapter with substantive interaction between Geryon and his brother, and it sets up how his brother’s abuse affected Geryon’s development. Geryon’s brother is obsessed with violence—he asks Geryon to wrestle, puts the fruit bowl over Geryon’s head when he refuses, grabs Geryon’s neck in a “silent death hold,” snaps a rubber band on Geryon’s leg, and asks Geryon and the babysitter what their favorite weapons are. Geryon endures the fruit bowl stoically, which we know by now is in-character for him. What the babysitter calls “sulking,” we understand as Geryon’s method of coping: “Geryon turned all attention to his inside world,” where the cruelty of others cannot fully penetrate.
The conversation about weapons is charged with broader meaning. Geryon’s brother’s favorite weapon is the catapult, because “you can wipe out the whole downtown/with a catapult surprise attack.” His brother, restless with destructive energy, is interested in maximizing damage. The justice he advocates is that of a terrorist. The babysitter is an ineffectual caretaker, as exemplified by how she tries to grab the rubber band from Geryon’s brother’s hand and misses, but she prioritizes efficiency: her favorite weapon is the garrote, “clean and neat,” for its “quick but painful death.” She embodies a cruelly efficient justice system that neglects its most vulnerable citizens. Geryon’s favorite weapon is “a cage.” His brother insists that a cage isn’t a weapon, because it doesn’t “destroy the enemy,” but Geryon knows he’s wrong. He knows from experience how destructive the feeling of being trapped can be. His “justice” is alive to the fact that imprisonment is a weapon, a terrorizing form of punishment. This is the justice that his brother has taught him; his brother’s blindness to the cruelty of cages reveals his willful blindness about the suffering he has caused Geryon.
IV. TUESDAY is our first reprieve from the cruelty of Geryon’s brother. Geryon’s father and brother are away at hockey practice, and Geryon is home with his mother, who is his safe harbor. In contrast to the darkness of Geryon’s nights lying sleepless in the bunk bed in his brother’s room, Geryon and his mother “turned on all the lights/even in rooms they weren’t using.” The symbolism of light and safety as well as intimacy reappears in the context of Geryon’s mother, as we later see in the ninth chapter. The light of the house here evokes the warmth and protection of his inside world; while outside “a black January wind…hit the windows hard,” inside the “lamp flared” but stayed lit. Geryon’s first autobiography is a sculptural self-portrait of found objects: a tomato with shredded money glued to it for hair. We learn from this childish self-depiction that Geryon is aware of his redness from an early age; a fact that will be significant in coming chapters. It is interesting that his autobiography, which “coolly omit[s]/all outside things,” is made from “stuff he finds outside.” This suggests how Geryon views the difference between internality and externality: that his body can be made of “outside things” without it affecting his inner world, but also that outside influence is unavoidable; even a portrait of the inner self is shaped by others.
This chapter is also imbued with a sense of humor that previous chapters lack. Geryon winks at his mother “using both eyes,” an endearingly childish image. His mother suggests to him that “maybe next time you could/use a one-dollar bill instead of a ten for the hair,” an affectionate suggestion whose humor is inseparable from its generosity. This chapter reveals how loving Geryon’s mother is, and how safe she makes him feel, when his brother is out of the equation. But this safe harbor only exists on Tuesdays when his brother and father are gone. The “cling peaches from the can” that Geryon and his mother eat with toast—“their favorite meal”—is an image suffused with love, and it stands in contrast to the empty fruit bowl which Geryon’s brother puts on his head, and which Geryon later confronts his mother about as having always been empty (XXII). While these peaches embody his mother’s nurturing capacity, they are limited to Tuesdays. When Geryon later despairs over the empty fruit bowl, he is despairing over the limits to his mother’s love; her inability to always protect and be there for him.
V. SCREENDOOR is one of the briefest chapters in the book. This fifth chapter is also one of the few that steps back from the present moment of the narrative to foreshadow Geryon’s future. “He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell/of the screen,” we are told. Suddenly we know that Geryon lives past forty, and looks back at his childhood with a nostalgia for certain particularities. Given that we have already received one version of Geryon’s life story based on Stesichoros’ fragments, where Geryon is killed by Herakles as a boy, this chapter gives reason to wonder if and how Geryon and Herakles’ fatal encounter will be different in the plot of Autobiography of Red. We now know that there are at least two divergent stories of Geryon and Herakles being told in this work, and we can expect some sort of parallelism to be established between mythological Geryon’s death at Herakles’ hands, and the confrontation between the two men that Carson has in mind.
This chapter also offers us the first glimpse of Geryon’s wings. His mother “neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.” He is red and winged in the previous section “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” and the first chapter of the novel in verse describes young Geryon as “small, red, and upright,” but now we have our first confirmation that he is winged, which marks him as “other” than human. This chapter raises a number of logistical questions about the novel's mythos of Geryon—how it differs and resembles that of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis—and we carry these questions with us into future chapters.
VI. IDEAS may be considered together with the previous chapter, for it expands this conflict between the Geryon of Carson’s imagination and that of Stesichoros’ imagination, and of previous myths. Geryon is an older child now, and has learned to write. He begins writing his autobiography, in which he sets down the facts of his life. Only, who are these facts according to? Are they Stesichoros’ Geryon’s facts, or Carson’s Geryon’s facts? They echo Carson’s translation of certain Stesichoros fragments—“Geryon was a monster everything about him was red” is both the first line of Fragment 1 and the first line of Geryon’s autobiography—but as discussed in Part 2, determining the authorship of the translated fragments is a difficult task. Carson is playing with the impossibility of determining historical fact in how she constructs Geryon’s autobiography; even though he’s writing about himself, he surrenders to speculation like “some say Geryon had six hands six feet some say wings.” And although he’s clearly a child, he writes that “Herakles came one day killed Geryon” as if it has already happened. The conflicting interplay of narratives about Geryon’s life and death muddies the “facts” of this fiction as we’ve come to know them.
Likewise, Geryon gives three possible answers to the question “Why did Herakles kill Geryon?” The answers are: “1. Just violent. 2. Had to it was one of His Labors (10th). 3. Got the idea that Geryon was Death otherwise he could live forever.” The way that these answers are written implies that they can’t all be true, which in turn implies that the answer isn’t known, or perhaps even knowable. As we’ve previously seen, this is a recurrent theme in Carson’s work: the creative potential of gaps in knowledge. Here we also see the creative potential in the gaps of knowledge about oneself.
VII. CHANGE details Geryon’s first encounter with Herakles. Contrary to the immediate violence of their mythological encounter, Geryon’s first instinct is inquisitive, and Herakles is generous—he gives Geryon a quarter because he “believe[s] in being gracious.” Yet there remains an element of danger, and the unknown, to their encounter; they meet at 3 AM at a bus stop and end up standing together on the railroad tracks in the rain in the dark. But this darkness is an opportunity for intimacy: Herakles notices Geryon’s cold hands, and tucks them inside Herakles’ shirt. The horrible “night life” of Geryon’s childhood has been replaced by something utterly new.
The way that Geryon and Herakles “recognize” each other here is instructive. Carson writes that they are like “two superior eels/at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.” They recognize the similarities of their position: young, queer men traveling anonymously by night. That the eels are both “superior” and at the “bottom of the tank” insinuates that both of them are undervalued and misunderstood; they are in some way “other,” at the fringes of society. This metaphoric reading suits the peripheral and anonymous location of their encounter, late at night at a bus stop. Their recognition of each other is wordless, and yet “the world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.” They are able to communicate their view of their world and their place in the world just by looking at each other, and it seems as though their vantage points are similar. This gives us a window into understanding the attraction between Geryon and Herakles, who we eventually discover are quite different as people. Their personalities might be opposed, but they’re in a similar position, and the “world pour[ing] back and forth between their eyes” is what they share.
VIII. CLICK is the first chapter in which we see Geryon as a photographer, and learn that he has “recently relinquished speech,” eschewing words for pictures as his method of communication. While his mother speaks “at” him, he focuses the camera on her throat, on her mouth, and then on his brother when he appears. In the context of the previous chapter, we might understand why Geryon finds speech unnecessary; Geryon and Herakles’ mutual recognition doesn’t rely on words. Geryon’s choice implies that he is interested in other, perhaps more complete or reliable forms of communication. Chapters V-VI, which dramatize the conflicted, fragmentary and unknowable truths of Geryon’s life and story as written and passed down over centuries, provide all the more reason for relinquishing speech in favor of other modes of communication.
Yet Geryon also uses his silence as a way to avoid answering his mother’s questions. While he and Herakles may have a wordless connection, refusing to speak to his mother guarantees that she is left in the dark about his new relationship. As she asks him question after question about Herakles, he provides no answer. She tells him, “if I say anything intelligent you can take a picture of it,” and it seems that she’s offered him a way to communicate with her through his photography. Yet he never takes any photos as she continues speaking, a subtle slight against his mother’s intelligence, or more aptly insinuating her lack of her insight into her son. The title of this chapter, “Click,” draws attention to the photo that Geryon never takes—the photo which might have offered a chance at communication between his mother and himself.
IX. SPACE AND TIME begins with the sentence, “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.” People make sense of themselves in relation to other people. This is what Geryon is discovering as he’s falling in love with Herakles: how their relationship helps him see himself anew. The attention he’s paying now to their relationship will eventually fan out into years of studying the relationships between people and things; it becomes an ingrained habit of sight for Geryon. But right now it is a revelation for him that individuals can be known through how they fit with each other.
Again we see that words are insufficient for Geryon. Basking in the mutual recognition between himself and Herakles, he has “nothing to say to anyone,” and when his mother asks him what he likes about Herakles, a “thousand things he could not tell flowed over his mind.” But here we can draw a line between communicating with Herakles and with everyone else, for one of the things he loves about Herakles is that “we have good discussions,” but this is something he refuses to tell his mother—something he cannot or will not say. The “space and time” this chapter is concerned with is the distance between people, physical and emotional, and how that distance evolves over time. Geryon is preparing to leave home to be with Herakles, and is filled with a “pure bold longing to be gone.” Yet just before he leaves, he recognizes the distance that has grown between himself and his mother, and tries to pull closer to her. He offers his mother a light for her cigarette, but this time she is the one who pulls away, saying that she really should quit.
Geryon asks himself the question, “How does distance look?” Though it’s a simple enough question, the answer he comes up with is vague, equivocal, metaphoric: “It extends from a spaceless/within to the edge/of what can be loved. It depends on light.” What immediately follows this answer is Geryon’s question for his mother: Light that for you? This evocative play on words leads us in a number of directions. In photographs, the distance between foreground and background, or between different subjects, depends on lighting. In Geryon and his mother’s relationship, light has always played a part in the intimacy and safety of the environment they create together, as when they used to turn on all the lights even in rooms they weren’t using. Geryon’s maturity is evident in the pack of matches he pulls from his pocket and offers to her, and the distance that has grown between them since his childhood is visible in her reply—No thanks dear—as she turns away. The distance between them depends on light in manifold ways.
X. SEX QUESTION takes place late at night in a parked car along the side of the highway, Herakles in the driver seat and Geryon in the passenger seat. They’re trying to have a conversation about sex, but both of them are unable to articulate directly what they mean. Both of them see sex as a way to get to know the other person—Herakles says so directly, and Geryon views sex as an “act of attention”—but it’s a loaded act, and even in their discussion of it they struggle to understand each other’s point of view. Geryon doesn’t know how to understand Herakles’ claim that he’s “someone who will never be satisfied.” With the benefit of the hindsight of later chapters, we can glean that Herakles is confessing something about his compulsive need for freedom; he’s a restless soul, unable to stay for long with the same person or in the same place. But here, trying to understand this statement in this context, it seems as though Herakles is expressing a dissatisfaction with—or unwillingness to be satisfied by—the sexual relationship they haven’t even embarked upon. This reading also foreshadows his eventual break-up with Geryon.
This is the first time that we see Geryon and Herakles struggle to communicate, and it won’t be the last. Sex is the first gap in shared experience that we see them confront: Herakles is 16, while Geryon is 14, and Herakles has prior sexual experience that Geryon lacks. Geryon wants to ask Herakles whether people who like sex can also have questions about it, but struggles to admit his inexperience. He ends up asking Herakles, “Is it true you think about sex everyday?”—a defense mechanism that draws accusatory attention to Herakles’ sexual experience in order to obscure Geryon’s lack of it.
Their misunderstanding isn’t resolved, but there remains some point of connection between them. As Herakles starts the car and drives away, the two of them are “not touching/but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.” The fact that they’re not touching means that the sex question is unresolved, but the description of them as “joined in astonishment” suggests their mutual apprehension when it comes to the topic of sex; they’re both in over their heads. Their shared immaturity might be reinforced by the image of the two “parallel” cuts, except that the violence of the “two cuts… in the same flesh” metaphor disturbs the innocence of the image. This passage, rife with evocative metaphoric language, insinuates that what “joins” Herakles and Geryon isn’t simple. Violent, wondering, erotic, innocent—their relationship will be all of these and more.
