Summary
XLI. PHOTOGRAPHS: JEATS
The photograph described is of Geryon’s pant leg below the knee. Geryon is preparing to take a photograph out of the rear window of the car as they drive up the steep mountain track that leads to the volcano Icchantikas. Herakles and Ancash are discussing Yeats in the front seat, which Ancash pronounces “Jeats,” and Herakles keeps correcting him. Ancash’s mother announces that “English is a bitch,” ending their discussion. Then four soldiers surround the car, and Ancash’s mother gently forces the camera out of sight between Geryon’s knees, at which point the photograph is taken.
XLII. PHOTOGRAPHS: THE MEEK
The photograph described is of two burros grazing in a field. Geryon is sitting in the back seat of the car beside Ancash’s mother, wondering “what it is about burros.” They’re waiting for Herakles and Ancash to return—the police vanished with them into a little house down the road. Geryon voices aloud his question: “What is it about burros?” And Ancash’s mother replies, “Guess they’re waiting to inherit the earth,” with a rough little laugh. Geryon thinks about her laugh all the rest of the day.
XLIII. PHOTOGRAPHS: I AM A BEAST
The photograph described is of a dead guinea pig on a plate, surrounded by cabbage and yam slices. Geryon doesn’t take a bite, and waits for the meal to be over. Herakles, Ancash, his mother, and the four soldiers all eat with gusto. Geryon looks around the room at the soldiers’ guns and the surviving guinea pigs. The soldiers tell them that Icchantikas is still an active volcano, as they’ll see when they get to Jucu. People use holes in the side of the volcano to bake bread. Herakles says he doesn’t believe that. Ancash’s mother says it’s true. Geryon asks what Icchantikas means, and Ancash starts to answer, but the soldiers interrupt. Ancash’s mother thanks the men and says that they’ll get going. As they say their goodbyes, they are all reflected in the eye of the guinea pig on the plate.
XLIV. PHOTOGRAPHS: THE OLD DAYS
The photograph described is of a man’s naked back. Herakles and Geryon have just made love. We learn that during sex, Geryon likes to touch each of the bones in Herakles’ back. When Herakles wakes up in the night, Geryon is crying. Herakles says that he hates it when Geryon cries. Geryon is crying because he realizes he used to love Herakles, but now he doesn’t know him at all. He doesn’t say this. He says he’s crying because of how people are together and apart in time at the same time. Herakles wipes Geryon’s tears, and says tersely, “Can’t you ever just fuck and not think?” He goes to the bathroom, and when he returns, he observes that it’s just like the old days—Herakles laughing and Geryon crying.
XLV. PHOTOGRAPHS: LIKE AND NOT LIKE
Geryon wonders if the photograph he took of Herakles’ back is actually just like the old days or not. He feels like there are thorns surrounding him, like in the dream he had of the dinosaurs whose hides were torn by thorns, but Geryon passes through the thorns “unhurt.” He goes outside, where it’s a red dawn. Ancash is sitting on a bench in the garden. When Geryon approaches him, asking if he wants to go get breakfast or some coffee downtown, Ancash hits Geryon as hard as he can. Geryon stumbles backwards and Ancash hits him again with his other hand. Geryon admires his ambidextrousness, and tries to swing at Ancash himself. Ancash catches Geryon before he punches the pine tree and breaks his hand. They sway together, and then balance, and Ancash wipes the blood from Geryon’s face. They sit together on the bench, and Geryon realizes he’d like to punch someone all the same.
Ancash asks Geryon if he loves Herakles. Geryon responds that he loves Herakles in his dreams of the old days, but now he doesn’t know. Then he admits that he knows he doesn’t love Herakles any more. Ancash asks Geryon what it’s like having sex with Herakles now, and Geryon replies, “degrading,” and then apologizes for saying that. Ancash turns to leave, but before he does, he says one last thing to Geryon: he wants only one thing from Geryon, and that’s to see Geryon use his wings.
Herakles bursts out brightly into the garden, before noticing the expression on Ancash’s face. Ancash disappears into the hotel. Herakles asks Geryon if it’s time to see the volcano. Geryon takes a photograph of Herakles’ face in this moment, which he later realizes is a “photograph of the future”—his face looks like that of the old man he’ll become.
XLVI. PHOTOGRAPHS: #1748
The photograph described in this chapter was never taken. But if it had been taken, it would have captured the moment when Geryon finally flies again. In the middle of the night, Geryon is standing over Ancash’s bed with Ancash’s tape recorder. He says he wants to give Ancash something to remember him by. He hits the record button as he takes off into the night sky above the volcano, calling to the earth below him, “This is for Ancash.” Looking down at the heart of the volcano, he smiles for a camera that isn’t there. If it had been there, and had photographed him in that moment, the photograph would have been titled: “The Only Secret People Keep.”
XLVII. THE FLASHES IN WHICH A MAN POSSESSES HIMSELF
Herakles, Geryon and Ancash are walking the streets of Jucu at night. Geryon walks behind the two men, his mouth full of acid from the tamales he ate. They stop at the end of an alley to watch three men shaping dough, and then shoveling it on long handles into a hole in the side of the volcano. Herakles looks at the men, and says, “Beautiful.” Ancash watches the flames. Geryon looks between the men and the volcano and thinks that “we are amazing beings,” for being “neighbors of fire.” They stand there side by side, facing the volcano, the night at their back.
INTERVIEW (STESICHOROS)
This fictionalized interview between “I” and “S,” where “S” is Stesichoros, is rife with fantastical illogic and humorous miscommunications. It starts out seriously enough, with the interviewer voicing one critic’s observation that there is a “sort of concealment drama” or “aesthetic of blindness” in Stesichoros’ work. Stesichoros replies that to talk about blindness, first he must talk about seeing. He says that up until 1907 he enjoyed seeing, and to talk about 1907 first he has to talk about what he saw. Then he demurs, “I saw what I saw,” and “I saw everything everyone saw,” because he was “in charge of seeing for the world.” He claims he could not blink or the world went blind, so he didn’t blink from 1907 until the start of the war, and then he forgot he wasn’t supposed to blink, but the world “went ahead much as before.”
The interviewer asks if they can talk about “description,” and Stesichoros gives several incoherent partial answers, saying that he likes red and that there is a link between “geology and character,” but what that link is he doesn’t know. The interviewer tries to change the subject to that of Helen, but Stesichoros claims “there is no Helen.” Then their time is up, and they thank each other for everything. Stesichoros says he’s glad the interviewer didn’t ask about the little red dog, and the interviewer promises, “next time.”
Analysis
XLI. PHOTOGRAPHS: JEATS
Two chapters prior, while Ancash and Herakles speak Spanish to each other, and Ancash and his mother speak Quencha to each other, Geryon speaks little and feels as though he’s disappearing. In this chapter, Ancash and Herakles are speaking English to each other, but a linguistic divide remains: Herakles unsuccessfully corrects Ancash’s pronunciation of “Yeats” and “yellow” as “Jeats” and “jellow,” until Ancash’s mother ends the conversation with the pronouncement: “English is a bitch.” The overt language barriers which stymy the conversations between these four people draw attention to the subtler ways in which communication fails them, things left unheard and unsaid. This chapter proves that even when they’re speaking English, a language everyone speaks, this doesn’t paper over the distance between them—in fact, it exacerbates that distance. When Geryon “utters a little red cry” each time the car bounces on the steep mountain road, “no one hears him.” Communication seems to depend more on the will of the speaker or listener to understand the other person than the linguistic tools at their disposal. These four people speak five languages between them, but communicate poorly, with the exception of Ancash’s mother, “stating her mind boldly today,” (XLII) whose declaration that “English is a bitch” puts an end to Herakles’ nattering. When she draws attention to the pointlessness of their semantic debate, they fall silent, and the silence makes clear their failures to communicate, as Geryon in his discomfort remained unseen and unheard.
XLII. PHOTOGRAPHS: THE MEEK
Geryon, red-winged “monster” that he is, empathizes with the plight of animals. This is a trait of Stesichoros’ Geryon as translated by Carson too: Geryon owns cattle and a little dog, and mourns their deaths at Herakles’ hands. In this chapter, when Geryon watches the burros grazing in a field while he and Ancash’s mother wait for Herakles and Ancash to return, he wonders, “What it is about burros?” They seem to have a unique affective quality, but Geryon struggles to pinpoint exactly what it is: “Their necks and knobby knees/make Geryon sad. No not sad, he decides, but what?” Recalling the way that Geryon scrutinized his own “chubby knees” in the mirror in despair after his and Herakles’ break-up (XXIV), we can imagine that he might perceive the physicality of these docile animals through the prism of his own self-image. He sees himself as a beast: like burros, “beasts of burdens,” he is weighed down with baggage, yet his nature is as gentle and harmless as the herbivorous burro. (Indeed, as we see in the next chapter, he is the only one who refuses to eat a guinea pig.) If the burros don’t make him sad, then what? He recognizes something in them. Ancash’s mother suggests that “they’re waiting to inherit the earth,” as in the Biblical parable, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” He thinks about this notion, and her rough little laugh, all the rest of the day. For she puts a new spin on the characterization of the burros as almost painfully docile, resigned to their gentleness. If they are waiting—as Geryon once remarked that everyone in Lima seemed to be waiting (XXXVI)—to inherit the earth, then their long-suffering patience is towards receiving a just reward. This is a vision of the meek as deserving something for their meekness. Perhaps it foreshadows Geryon’s own revelation, in the penultimate chapter, that he is deserving of freedom.
XLIII. PHOTOGRAPHS: I AM A BEAST
This chapter continues Geryon’s troubled identification with the beasts of burden, the livestock, the prey animals of the world. After observing the burros in a field in the previous chapter, he ends up at a table for lunch with Herakles, Ancash, Ancash’s mother, and the four soldiers who had led Herakles and Ancash away. The photograph this chapter describes is of the guinea pig served to Geryon on a plate. He makes eye contact with the dead animal—“her left eye/is looking straight up at Geryon”—and he finds that he can’t eat her; he “sets the utensil down/and waits for the meal to be over.” He watches the “survivor guinea pigs…gamboling about near the stove.” This chapter doesn’t need to directly disclose what Geryon is feeling in order for us to know it: his behavior, and what he observes, paints a persuasive picture of someone troubled by his relationship to these animals. He is attentive to their suffering and their fate.
The title of the photograph—“I Am A Beast”—has an ambiguous and manifold meaning. It is straightforwardly true that the guinea pig being photographed is a “beast,” if beast means animal; it is also straightforwardly true that the photographer is a “beast,” if beast means animal. So there is a similarity drawn between the photographer and the photographed. Yet we also use the word “beast” as a derogatory term to mean “a contemptible person”; someone who has the brutality associated with an animal. If Geryon is a contemptible person, perhaps it is because of the brutality done to the animal he is to eat. This complex entangling of animality and blame clearly reflects on the behavior of the eight persons at the table, for at the end of the chapter, all of them “stand reflected” in the “cooling left eye of the guinea pig”: they are seen in a condemnatory light through her gaze. Her dead body is an accusation. As they leave, “the eye empties.” Evocative of her shedding a final tear, this image also suggests that the signification her body takes on is in relation to those who would eat her: her body in death becomes a cipher for human conflicts over their own nature as beasts.
XLIV. PHOTOGRAPHS: THE OLD DAYS
In the old days of Herakles and Geryon’s relationship, and once again in this chapter, Geryon likes to “touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles’ back/as it arched away from him into/who knows what dark dream of its own.” This imagery communicates a number of aspects of Geryon’s love for Herakles. He loves—or loved, past-tense—Herakles in his difference; lavishing attention on Herakles’ back, so different from Geryon’s back in its lack of wings, indicates a respect for the difference of Herakles’ body and self. Likewise, Geryon respects the mystery of Herakles’ consciousness—“who knows what dark dream of its own” Herakles’ body is dreaming—which is not incompatible with how he always wondered what Herakles was thinking. Geryon’s practice of love is deeply attentive to the mystery of another person. Repeating this gesture after so many years apart, however, Geryon discovers that he doesn’t have access to Herakles in a meaningful way anymore: “I once loved you, and now I don’t know you at all,” he realizes. But he doesn’t say this. It is one more thing that goes unsaid between them, as they prove largely incompatible as communicators.
When Geryon gropes for an answer after Herakles asks why Geryon is crying, he stumbles over the words: “I was thinking about time… you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time.” Like the cryptic message Geryon and Herakles once graffitied on the school wall—"SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING”—this rambling answer is especially potent for its lack of line breaks or punctuation, which blur together a number of potential meanings. The confusion of this idea—"how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time”—is precisely its truth. How people are together and apart at the same time and at different times is an idea that verges on meaninglessness in its vagueness, and yet after all of these chapters of Geryon mulling over what time is made of, we understand what he means. Geryon and Herakles could be right next to each other and yet psychologically distant from each other; miles apart and yet occupying each other’s thoughts and dreams. Time created distance between them, and time renewed their chance for intimacy. All of these things are true at once, which is why the lack of enjambment and punctuation only reinforces the sentence’s meaning.
XLV. PHOTOGRAPHS: LIKE AND NOT LIKE
Geryon’s reaction to Ancash’s angry outburst is fascinating. When Ancash hits him with one hand, and then hits him with the other hand, Geryon feels “admiration” at Ancash’s ambidextrousness. But this admiration is not in deference to Ancash; on the contrary, Geryon admires Ancash even as he “scrambled to his feet swinging/wildly,” trying to punch Ancash back. Ancash prevents Geryon from breaking his hand on the tree, and then they “swayed together and balanced,” and Ancash wipes the blood and snot from Geryon’s face. What can we make of this remarkably friendly fight? It drives home the two men’s similarity, even when they are at odds with each other—Ancash and Geryon have a remarkable synergy, and their fight can’t help but end in mutual cooperation. Another insight gleaned from this interaction is Geryon’s new willingness to express himself, even violently: “All the same, he thought, I’d like/to punch someone.” After years of self-repression, Geryon is energetically committed to his own satisfaction for the first time.
This willingness is a harbinger of transformations to come—the freedom Geryon embraces in the next chapter. And it is Ancash, perhaps Geryon’s most rewarding adversary, who enables it. Geryon is in some ways in Ancash’s debt; he has just slept with Ancash’s boyfriend, and admitted that it was a “degrading” experience, largely because of Geryon’s revelation that it was a loveless encounter. But what Ancash asks of Geryon is not to leave Herakles alone, or even to leave Ancash alone. Ancash says he only wants one thing from Geryon: “to see you use those wings.” So Geryon’s burgeoning desire to express and free himself is now bolstered by Ancash’s personal request. Geryon has always felt duty-bound to hide his wings, relinquishing his own freedom in his quest to love and be loved. One of the most loving gestures we see in this book is Ancash helping Geryon set himself free. A contrast is drawn between Herakles’ version of setting Geryon free, which means pushing him away, and Ancash’s version, which invites Geryon to free himself. Geryon recognizes in the next chapter that his flight is a mutual gift: it is a gift Ancash has given Geryon, and a gift Geryon wants to give Ancash in return, as “something to remember me by.”
XLVI. PHOTOGRAPHS: #1748
This is the first chapter written in the present tense, which gives its events a unique immediacy, and emphasizes that everything we’ve read has been leading up to this moment. It also casts the future into shadow, for a story written in the past tense has the stability of hindsight, but a story that switches from past to present tense has written itself into a present with no foresight as to what comes after. Switching to present tense at the end of a book, as Carson does here, creates the illusion that Geryon has been recounting to us from memory these past events in his life, and now that we’ve caught up to his present, the story necessarily has to end. This subtle shift in tense is one way in which Carson reifies the conceit of this work as an “autobiography.”
The title of the photograph described in this chapter discloses its meaning: it is named #1748 after “Poem #1748” by Emily Dickinson, which is the epigraph of “Autobiography of Red: A Romance.” In that poem, the final line reads: “the only secret people keep/Is immortality.” And so we understand this photograph’s alternate title—“The Only Secret People Keep”—as Geryon revealing, and reveling in, his own immortality. After largely “passing” as a human for the majority of the story, the Geryon of this penultimate chapter is an entirely mythic creature, flying above the “inhuman Andes” on his inhuman wings. Suddenly his constant inner conflict about who he is, and how he fits into the world, is immaterial: “He has not flown for years but why not.” Why not? This is the most carefree we have ever seen Geryon behave. After years hiding behind the camera, now he is in front of it, reveling in the prospect of being seen—“he flicks Record,” and “he smiles for the camera.” This photograph is for Ancash, “a memory of our/beauty.” Geryon finally sees himself as beautiful. And Geryon sees himself in relation to Ancash as beautiful, too; their relationship discloses a shared beauty.
XLVII. THE FLASHES IN WHICH A MAN POSSESSES HIMSELF
As Geryon, Ancash, and Herakles stand in front of the volcano, where the men are shoveling bread into ovens in the volcano wall, each looks at something different. Ancash looks only at the volcano, watching the flames. Herakles looks only at the men, thinking them beautiful. Geryon looks between the volcano and the men, and what his perspective reveals is that the beauty of each party illuminates the other. Geryon recognizes that we are “amazing beings” for being “neighbors of fire.” This interpretation of the beauty of the men as emerging from their proximity to fire is meaning which emerges out of relation. What we are neighbors to—and the kind of neighbors we are to them—reflects back on us, as the fire illuminates the men’s faces.
In the previous, penultimate chapter, Geryon embraces his individuality—his immortality and the wings which mark him as different. In this final chapter, Geryon’s relational consciousness allows him to see how the volcano shares its immortality with its human neighbors: staring into the fire, they have “immortality on their faces,/night at their back.” It is significant that Geryon’s arc does not end with the penultimate chapter, with him flying solo. If that were the conclusion of the story, that would endorse a unilateral freedom and a distance from others. While it is imperative that Geryon finally allows himself access to individual freedom, Carson chooses to end this story on a different note: with Geryon reveling in the relationship between people and the volcano. This ending is faithful to Geryon’s lifelong attentiveness to the relations between things, and satisfies his perennial longing to belong.
INTERVIEW (STESICHOROS)
In this 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’ blindness is related to the question that Carson poses to her readers at the beginning of the work: “What difference did Stesichoros make?” And it is answered in a tongue-in-cheek way in this interview, when Stesichoros asserts that to tell the interviewer about blindness, first he must tell about seeing. We learned at the beginning of Autobiography of Red that Stesichoros saw things anew. When Stesichoros saw Helen for the first time as something other than a whore, 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. So the “aesthetic of blindness” in this story may also be an aesthetic of transgressive seeing, and a “will to blindness” may also be a will to perceive the consequences of sight.
In this interview, Stesichoros claims he wants to talk about seeing, but continually dissembles about what he saw. He describes seeing a room which “glowed like a dogma,” only to retract his testimony: “but this is not what I saw.” In what reads like a joke, Stesichoros claims that up until 1907, “I was seriously interested in seeing I studied and practiced it I enjoyed it.” This claim at once affirms that “seeing” is a serious pursuit, and facetiously makes light of practicing “seeing” in a serious way. These equivocations continue: with a mixture of graveness and humor, he claims that “I was (very simply) in charge of seeing for the world,” and that he had to constantly keep his eyes open or “the world went blind.” This playfully pokes at the responsibility of writers to make the truth of the world visible, but it doesn’t repudiate that responsibility, until Stesichoros admits that when he finally blinked, “the world went ahead much as before.” In this way, the writer who thinks himself in charge of “everybody’s visibility” recognizes his own inconsequence. Carson here is providing a slew of contradictory answers to the question, “What difference did Stesichoros make?” The difference that a writer’s efforts to see the world anew can make remains an open question.
This interview refuses answers, almost as a matter of principle: it establishes a pattern in which Stesichoros puts forth an idea, the interviewer asks for clarification, and then Stesichoros replies that he has no idea. When Stesichoros asserts that there is a link between geology and character, for instance, the interviewer asks, “What is this link,” and Stesichoros replies, “I have often wondered.” This interaction reveals Stesichoros as a writer who is more interested in questions than answers; who breaks open the established norms of description, but not in order to establish a new set of norms: he wants to sow doubt, and invite wonder. He refuses oversimplification. When the interviewer tries to ask him about the truth of Helen, Stesichoros replies: “There is no Helen.” By this we might understand that he is refusing to participate in the mythmaking of this overwrought, overdetermined historical figure. Helen has been constructed by thousands of years of storytelling; there is no real person inside the crust of fiction. If there is no true Helen bound up in all the lies, then Helen is free.
