Summary
XXI. MEMORY BURN
Herakles returns from the video store in the midst of an argument. Geryon says he finds photography disturbing, and Herakles says that that’s because Geryon doesn’t understand what photography is. Herakles says that photography is “a way of playing with perceptual relationships,” and Geryon responds that that’s exactly why it’s disturbing. They continue arguing abstrusely about stars and men chopping wood in the forest, and Herakles’ grandmother interjects that she got lung burn once while photographing the famous skier Grushenk and it felt cold. Herakles goes back in the house, and Geryon continues to listen to Herakles’ grandmother’s meandering stories. They talk about her photograph “Red Patience,” and Geryon admits that he finds it disturbing. She agrees, and quotes a line from Yeats’ poem “Lapis Lazuli.” Their conversation bounces between a couple of topics before they fall into a meaningful silence. Herakles returns, and offers to carry his grandmother to bed, as her leg is hurting. She says goodnight to them both.
XXII. FRUIT BOWL
Geryon returns home from Hades on the bus, crying most of the bus ride, and when he enters the kitchen his mother is sitting at the table. She compliments his T-shirt, and he tells her that Herakles gave it to him, suppressing his agony at their break-up. He sits down and spins the fruit bowl in front of him on the table. Then he stops spinning the bowl, looks at it, and begins to rant about how the fruit bowl is always there and never has any fruit in it. He asks his mother, “How do you think it feels/growing up in a house full/of empty fruit bowls?” They laugh until they start to cry. Then they talk about ordinary things until Geryon grows sleepy. They part for the night, and the fruit bowl remains on the table, empty.
XXIII. WATER
It is pouring rain, and Geryon sticks his face out the window, letting the rain run down his face. He is a “brokenheart,” and his mind is whirring with snippets of things Herakles once said. He stands still and silent in the motionless living room, his mind buzzing with “a thousand ideas.” He goes to the kitchen, turns on the tap and starts to cry. Outside, the world is being battered by a storm. Inside, Geryon is crouched against the sink, a fist in his mouth to prevent himself from wailing aloud. Geryon wipes his face with his wings and fetches his camera. He goes outside into the storm and takes a fifteen-minute exposure of a fly floating in a pail of water. At the beginning of the exposure, the fly is still alive; at the end of the exposure, the fly is dead. The photograph is titled, “If He Sleep He Shall Do Well.”
XXIV. FREEDOM
Geryon’s life enters a “numb time.” He works in a local library, shelving government documents. He avoids contact with the librarians, who think him a talented boy with a “shadow side.” He takes careful photographs of the librarians’ shoes and socks, and doesn’t even know their genders because he never looks at or talks to them. He spreads his photographs of their feet on the kitchen table, and his mother asks him who a photograph of a naked foot belongs to. He replies that it’s the assistant head librarian’s sister. His mother asks if she’s a nice girl, and he replies, “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Then the phone rings, and it’s Herakles. They have a superficial conversation about the goings-on in Herakles’ life, while Geryon’s heart is in his throat. Herakles says that the reason he’s calling is to tell Geryon a dream he had about Geryon. In the dream, Geryon was an old Indian man on a porch next to a drowned yellow bird in a pail of water. The old man flung the bird into the air and it came alive and flew away. Herakles says it was a “freedom dream,” and that “Freedom is what I want for you Geryon we’re true friends you know that's why/I want you to be free.” Geryon stifles his instinctive response: “Don’t want to be free want to be with you.” Herakles gets off the phone, and Geryon goes out to walk along the beach until it’s late at night. When he returns to the house, he cries himself to sleep. He wakes up at 3 AM full of anger and sadness, picturing Herakles “on the other side of the world somewhere” living his life without Geryon.
XXV. TUNNEL
We jump forward a number of years. Geryon is now twenty-two, living on the “mainland,” and packing for a trip to Argentina. His phone rings, and his mother’s on the line. We catch snippets of Geryon’s responses to her questions, which seem to be full of concern about his safety on the trip, because Geryon’s tone vacillates between reassurance and exasperation. He gets off the phone when his taxi arrives, and tells her he’ll call her when he reaches his hotel in Buenos Aires.
XXVI. AEROPLANE
Flying in the plane through the clouds, Geryon decides to leave his past behind. He remembers a time when he watched a dog owner shoot his rabid dog, and how he’d looked away. Now he wishes he had “stayed to see it go free.” He opens his guidebook to Argentina and reads about harpoons, and the language and history of the Yamana people indigenous to Tierra del Fuego, who were wiped out by colonizers’ diseases. Waiting for the food cart, cramped in his too-small seat, he watches the plane’s progress on the map moving from Miami towards Puerto Rico, unable to get physically comfortable because of his bulky body. He asks himself, “What is time made of?” It feels like something heavy and solid wrapped around him. He’s filled with a fear of time, and a sense of the indifference of the world to human experience. He has the fleeting notion that a man moves through time like a harpoon—once thrown he will arrive. He falls asleep with his guidebook open on the floor beneath his feet.
XXVII. MITWELT
Geryon, described as a “red monster,” sits in the corner of Café Mitwelt writing bits of Heidegger on postcards to his brother (now a sports announcer) and his philosophy professor. Geryon has been studying German philosophy for the past three years at college. To his brother he claims that Buenos Aires is full of Germans who are soccer players, and to his philosophy professor he claims that Buenos Aires is full of Germans who are psychoanalysts. Geryon expects the waiter to throw him out for writing German and not Spanish. He can’t recall a single word in Spanish, only German. When the waiter comes to ask him if he would like another espresso, Geryon is already fleeing the café, afraid not of ridicule but of the strange blankness of his own mind. He fears he’s going mad. He used to have the same fear of going mad as a child, when no one understood what he meant by “the noise that colors make.” He remembers his science project about the screams of roses that no one else could hear, and the photograph he took of his mother’s roses. Then he’s jolted back to reality by someone colliding with him on the sidewalk in Buenos Aires.
XXVIII. SKEPTICISM
Geryon has been walking for an hour through the city at the cusp of dawn, waiting for the night to turn into day. He returns to Café Mitwelt, where he writes a postcard to his mother claiming that all the Germans in Buenos Aires are cigarette girls. Then a man described as a “yellowbeard” sits down in the chair opposite Geryon and strikes up a conversation. Geryon finds disturbing the man’s “pink mouth small as a nipple.” Geryon learns that this man is a philosopher from Irvine here for a conference on skepticism. The man studies ataraxia, the Ancient Greek concept of emotionless tranquility. He wants to study the “erotics of doubt” as a precondition of the search for truth, “provided you can renounce…the desire to know.” Geryon says that he thinks he can. The yellowbeard invites Geryon to hear his presentation at the conference, and they get into a cab together.
XXIX. SLOPES
Geryon attempts to be charming in the company of the yellowbeard, though he can’t stop thinking of the man’s mouth as resembling a nipple. They are cramped together in the backseat of a cab whose driver is joyfully arguing with and honking at the other cabs on the street. The yellowbeard finds this amusing. He asks Geryon how his Spanish is, and Geryon admits it is poor. The yellowbeard is actually fairly fluent from a year in Spain spent researching ancient law codes, which they discuss until their arrival at the University of Buenos Aires. The conference is being held in an abandoned cigarette factory because the university is broke. Inside there is a list of professors “detained or disappeared” on the wall. Geryon avoids looking at the list and thinking of their suffering, but can’t help remembering a time when he was a child and visited a pair of newly captured beluga whales in a tank. He often lay awake thinking of the whales and their plight after that visit.
Geryon suddenly asks the yellowbeard what he thinks time is made of, and the yellowbeard says it isn’t made of anything; it is an abstraction, a “meaning that we/impose on motion.” They go to the classroom where the yellowbeard is presenting, and Geryon squeezes into a tiny desk at the back of the room. Geryon tries and fails to pay full attention, thinking instead of time and remembering winter days with his mother, watching dusk arrive in silence. The yellowbeard discusses Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, and Geryon catches just a few stray words of Spanish. The lecture ends, and then someone asks a question and the yellowbeard starts speaking again. Geryon wonders whether the day will ever end, gazing at the clock, and falling into the “pool of his favorite question.”
XXX. DISTANCES
Geryon’s favorite question is “What is time made of?” He asks it of everyone, as he did the yellowbeard the day before. He mulls over the yellowbeard’s answer as he develops his photographs in the hotel bathroom. He notes how uncomfortable everyone in the photograph of the classroom looks, but this doesn’t interest him: “Much truer/is the time that strays into photographs and stops.” In the photograph, the clock says five minutes to six. Geryon remembers that five minutes after six the previous night, he went with the philosophers to a bar down the street.
At the bar, Geryon sits down across from a man named Lazer. Geryon asks if his name is Lazarus, but the man replies no, just Lazer. They strike up a conversation about philosophy, bouncing from atheism and skepticism and mortality to Lazer’s daughter, and how her childhood makes him pay attention to “distances.” Lazer feels like he’s standing on the top of a hill, about to go down the other side, watching his young daughter start climbing. Geryon and Lazer agree that life is like that: people are all moving on a hill at different and changing distances. Lazer tells Geryon that he enjoyed their conversation, and then leaves.
Geryon lets the philosophers’ conversation flow over him, and feels warmed by their company. He listens to their political jokes and smiles so hard his cheeks hurt. He observes how the jokes they’re telling make the philosophers happy. Then a plate of sandwiches arrives, and Geryon, hungry as always, feels that they’re a miracle. He decides he is a philosopher of sandwiches—“things good on the inside.” He feels for a fleeting moment a widening happiness. When he returns to the hotel, he takes a self-portrait, naked with his wings spread on the bed, humorously entitled “No Tail!”
Analysis
XXI. MEMORY BURN
Here, when Herakles asserts that photography plays with “perceptual relationships,” Geryon argues that that’s exactly why it’s disturbing to him. This quote illuminates the “why” of Geryon’s obsession with photography: he takes it seriously because of its capacity to add and subtract distance between objects, and to create new relationships between elements of the picture. As Geryon is concerned with the distance between people and things, photography is disturbing and liberating for how it transforms distance. A supposedly “documentary” medium, photography still has the capacity to make fictions, transforming its “real” subject into something altogether different.
Likewise, Geryon finds it disturbing that the stars we see in the sky may have burned out thousands of years before; that what we see in the sky may be, as Herakles puts it, a “memory.” Geryon struggles to understand that light is traveling across distances to meet our eyes, and that crossing that distance takes a lot of time. Thus, he posits that he’d like to see someone touch a star and not get burned, and say, “Just a memory burn!” Of course, if someone was close enough to touch a star, light would reach them in much less time, and the presence of the star’s light would coincide with it's lifespan. This rupture in Geryon’s logic is indicative of how subjectively he experiences time and distance. When Geryon discusses the photograph “Red Patience” with Herakles’ grandmother, she quotes a line of Yeats in her agreement that the photograph is disturbing: “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” The line is from his poem “Lapis Lazuli,” which begins with the premise that “hysterical women” are tired of “poets that are always gay,” when everyone knows that without drastic action, a war is certain to come. The paradox that Yeats puts forth is that even the most tragic figures are transformed by art into something life-affirming; that poets must be gay—that even the tragic “Hamlet and Lear are gay,” for art reifies human life and capacity. The context of Herakles’ grandmother quoting the line from Yeats becomes clear in light of the seemingly tragic nature of the photograph “Red Patience,” which shows the devastation being wrought by the volcanic eruption on the landscape. The gaiety of art-making can transfigure the dreadful subject of that art.
Another notable insight from Herakles’ grandmother comes in her observation that though all photographs are silent, this tells you nothing; what’s instructive is how they use that silence, given the limitations of the form. “Red Patience” is a fifteen-minute long exposure of the eruption. The extraordinary amount of sound that would have occurred in that fifteen minutes is not compressed, as the minutes are, into one frame, but is entirely absent from the picture. The challenge of the photographer is to make the viewer attentive to that missing sound—to what the silence overtly conceals, and in so doing, subtly communicates. That practice is not unlike the job of a translator of fragments: how do you communicate what is missing from a work of art? How do you make space for absence? Geryon is attentive to the lesson being communicated by Herakles’ grandmother, and tells Herakles that Herakles’ grandmother is teaching him “the value of silence.” A reader familiar with Anne Carson’s other works may be reminded here of her translation of the fragments of Sappho, and how Carson honored the communicative possibilities of what was missing from her poems.
XXII. FRUIT BOWL
The confrontation between Geryon and his mother over the fruit bowl is one of the most overtly symbolic moments of dialogue in “Autobiography of Red: A Romance.” Raw from his break-up with Herakles, and already holding back the anguish of his mourning over the end of their relationship, Geryon explodes instead with a monologue about his mother’s fruit bowl. Why is it always there, and why is always empty? How do you know it’s a fruit bowl if there’s never any fruit in it? How do you think it feels to grow up in a house full of empty fruit bowls? These are the questions that Geryon lobs at his mother, and this is the only time he directly confronts her over the ways in which her love has been insufficient. The question of “what makes a home” is implicit in his lamentation that you can’t know a bowl is for fruit if there’s no fruit in it, as well as the question of “what is a mother for,” if not to protect her children?
Bombarded with these questions, his mother doesn’t answer, but “they laughed/until tears ran down.” This parallel reaction indicates that they both experience Geryon’s rant as tragicomic. Laughing and crying are both ways of venting emotion, perhaps even expressing the same emotion by different means. The idea of “venting” through laughter and tears maps onto the volcanic metaphor for Geryon’s psyche, as he has already spoken of “valves in the soul” which open and close, letting the inside out and the outside in. In contrast to the sleepiness we see Geryon experience as a defense mechanism when Herakles initiates their separation, Geryon’s sleepiness here after his conversation with his mother, though undoubtedly a sign of physical exhaustion, also suggests a volcano lapsing into dormancy after its eruption.
XXIII. WATER
Every morning when Geryon wakes up, there is a brief moment in which he forgets he is a “brokenheart,” after which it is a “shock/to return to the cut soul.” The simile of a “cut soul” merges two storylines that we have been juggling in terms of Herakles and Geryon’s relationship: the mythic story where Herakles slays Geryon, and the modern story of Herakles breaking Geryon’s heart. Carson turns the arrow that severs Geryon’s skull in Stesichoros’ Geryoneis into a metaphor for emotional rupture, insinuating that heartbreak violates the spirit just as bone-breaking violates the body. We recall that an earlier metaphor positioned Geryon and Herakles in relation to each other as “two cuts lying parallel in the same flesh,” foreshadowing the latent violence in their romantic relationship. What is remarkable about the way Herakles ends up hurting Geryon is that most everyone experiences heartbreak at some point in their life: it is a quotidian violence remedied not by justice but by time. There is no punishment for breaking a heart.
Geryon goes outside into the raging storm and photographs a dying fly in a pail of water in a fifteen-minute exposure. The moribund photograph is called “If He Sleep He Shall Do Well,” and captures in a “strange agitation of light around the wings” the last vestiges of the fly’s movements before it succumbs to death. What Geryon captures in this photograph is time, and the transition between life and death, compressed almost impossibly into a single frame. In a later chapter he voices his belief that “Much truer/is the time that strays into photographs and stops.” (93) Stopping time is part of what draws Geryon to photography, but his interest here in stopping time indicates that Geryon isn’t ready to move on from his and Herakles’ relationship. The passage of time, not its stoppage, is what will heal Geryon’s hurt. If he could see a long exposure of his healing, and compress every step along the way into a single frame, it would make it seem that healing was a gratifyingly immediate process—but it would also obscure the journey to getting there.
XXIV. FREEDOM
Along with Geryon and his mother’s conversation about the fruit bowl, the snippet of phone dialogue between Herakles and Geryon in this chapter is one of the most symbolically poignant exchanges in the novel. Herakles calls Geryon to tell him about his dream, in which he claims that Geryon appeared in the guise of an old Indian man, who was sitting on the porch beside a pail of water. In the water was a drowned yellow bird. The old man said to the bird, “Come on now/get out of there,” and flung it by the wing into the air, and just like that it came alive and flew away. Herakles interprets this dream as a freedom dream, and tells Geryon that freedom is exactly what Herakles wants for him. Because they are “true friends,” Herakles says, he wants Geryon to be free. Geryon’s suppressed reply is that he doesn’t want to be free, he wants to be with Herakles. At the same time, he’s anguished by Herakles’ perennial inability to know who Geryon truly is, which reaches a focal point when Geryon thinks: “Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams/he doesn’t know me at all!” Indeed, not only was the winged bird yellow instead of red, but Herakles identified the old man as the stand-in figure for Geryon in his dream, rather than the bird. This misunderstanding underscores their incompatibility, but it doesn’t lessen Geryon’s heartbreak.
Though Herakles’ dream points to a deep-seated misunderstanding of Geryon’s symbolic nature—red and winged—his instinct to seek Geryon’s freedom in flight is hardly misplaced. Yet Geryon is far from being ready to free himself. We see this after the phone call, when he observes himself “emptily” in the mirror, thinking, “Freedom! The chubby knees/the funny red smell the saddening ways.” He collapses on his bed. In his disdain for the type of freedom—loneliness—that Herakles seeks to impose on Geryon, he doesn’t recognize the part of himself which is reaching out for freedom, and seeking flight. Just as his wings tore against each other in Herakles’ house, struggling to fly, and he bound them to a wooden plank, now Geryon ignores the plight of his wings entirely, and focuses on other parts of himself which seem to signify his unlovability: his knees, his funny smell, his “saddening ways.” When Geryon no longer finds himself unlovable, that is when he becomes ready to grant himself freedom, and fly.
XXV. TUNNEL
This brief chapter jumps forwards in time by a number of years. We listen to Geryon’s side of a phone call between himself and his mother as he prepares to leave for Argentina. What we glean of this older Geryon, now twenty-two, is that not much has changed in his relationship with his mother since he was a teenager. He is still in fairly close contact with her, as he was when he was dating Herakles, but he also still holds her at arm’s length, having little tolerance for her nervousness about him flying. (“Mom be reasonable,” he groans.) One of the more cryptic lines reads: “Well you know what the gauchos say… Something about riding boldly into nullity… Not exactly it feels like a tunnel.” What feels like a tunnel? This line may be illuminated by some of what follows in the subsequent chapter.
A tunnel is a dark, narrow, claustrophobic space that you pass through in order to reach the light on the other side. In the next chapter, Geryon is on the plane, squeezed claustrophobically in his narrow seat in the darkness, reading about how “the gaucho acquired an exaggerated notion/of mastery over/his own destiny from the simple act of riding on horseback/way far across the plain.” The audacity of the gaucho is to feel in control of his destiny; he thinks he’ll reach the light, when really the light eludes his grasp. Geryon’s audacity, in contrast, is “riding boldly into nullity”: stepping outside of his comfort zone when he’s aware that there may not be a light on the other side, and that what happens next isn’t entirely in his control.
XXVI. AEROPLANE
On the plane, Geryon reads about the culture of the Yamana people indigenous to Tierra del Fuego, who “were extinct/by the beginning of the twentieth century.” Among other things, this passage from his guidebook foreshadows Geryon’s eventual discovery of the Yazcamac, a legendary people believed in by the residents of Jucu. The Yazcamac are said to be eyewitnesses of the inside of the volcano: people who were thrown into the volcano but survived, and returned as immortal red people with wings. The Yamana are a lost civilization whose story lingers on; the Yazcamac are a mythic people of unverifiable truth. Geryon is the product of both such lineages, as a creature of mythology created by an ancient Greek civilization whose stories still impress themselves upon our culture today. Geryon doesn’t know that his journey to South America will involve the potential discovery of his own history, but beginning his journey to South America by reading about a lost civilization subtly foreshadows this eventuality.
During his flight, Geryon feels squeezed like an accordion by “time,” and his lungs contract as “fear of time came at him.” Normally, anxiety about time is tethered to its passage—how quickly time slips away. But Geryon experiences time as tethered to space, and wants to understand the medium or materiality of time: “What is time made of?” is his favorite question. What’s most oppressive to Geryon about time isn’t how fleeting it is but how powerful it is. Geryon’s photographs of time play with “perceptual relationships,” expanding and contracting distances between subjects. But what Geryon fears about time is that it has an inexorable shape: “A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,/like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.” He has no choice but to arrive. Given that Geryon may be immortal, this is an understanding of time’s profundity that lasts even if one is immortal. His fear is not of approaching death but of how time shapes his life, regardless of his desires.
XXVII. MITWELT
Café Mitwelt becomes Geryon’s home away from home in Buenos Aires, and he returns to this café a number of times in the following chapters. We learn that Geryon has been studying German philosophy in college for the past three years, and see him write bits of Heidegger on postcards to his brother and philosophy professor. The word “Miltwelt” is a concept in Heidegger’s writings: “mitwelt” is a term to refer to an individual's social or cultural environment. Mitwelt is the social dimension of life, pertaining to how the individual relates to the community. Carson here is suggesting one way of interpreting the present struggles in Geryon’s life, as contiguous with his lifelong struggle with loneliness and isolation. Geryon wants to fit in, and feel a part of the world around him. We see this ingratiating impulse in the postcards he writes to his brother and professor: in both of the postcards, he says that “there are many Germans in Buenos Aires,” but to his sportscaster brother he says they are all soccer players, and to his philosophy professor he says they are all psychoanalysts. In the next chapter, we see him do the same in his postcard to his chain-smoking mother, telling her that all the Germans are cigarette girls. What can we make of these innocuous lies, if not that Geryon is struggling to find ways to relate to these people in his life? “Mitwelt” is the operative framework in which Geryon is trying to find his place.
This chapter marks a departure in Geryon’s life, from the days in which his autobiography was all about “inside things,” and he “coolly omitted all outside things,” to a moment when his social environment is his primary preoccupation. Geryon is struggling to integrate himself into the outside world. When he flees Café Mitwelt in distress, it is because he cannot recall a single word of Spanish, and the betrayal of his mind—“this blank desertion of his own mind”—causes him despair. He wonders if he’s going mad. “Inside things” are no longer a sanctuary for Geryon. In this chapter, we learn that his inner life hasn’t always been a sanctuary, for in seventh grade he used to wonder whether he was crazy because he saw the world differently than other kids. For Geryon, colors make noise, and the red roses in his mother’s yard would scream at him as they were “burned alive in the noonday sun… like horses in war.” This marker of Geryon’s social difference made him wonder if he might be insane. But it also is a source of his compassion for other beings, which we’ve seen to be a constant characteristic of Geryon’s personality. When the teacher told him that he should interview roses instead of people, Geryon liked the idea, and photographed the roses carefully. His photography is a means of communicating across the divide of different languages, as well as a practice of attention to the outside world which simultaneously stymies and captivates him.
XXVIII. SKEPTICISM
Geryon’s postcard to his mother contains this fragment of German, attributed to Heidegger: “Die Angst offenbart das Nichts.” This can translate roughly to “Anxiety discloses Nothing” or “Anxiety discloses Nothingness.” The irony here is that these postcards disclose a potent social anxiety. Geryon tells everyone he writes a postcard to that Buenos Aires is full of Germans, but what those Germans do (soccer players, psychoanalysts, cigarette girls) he tailors to each of his recipients, proving that Geryon is clumsily trying to relate himself and his life to other people. He struggles to do so straightforwardly or honestly, and invents such fictions as a way to draw nearer to each person on their own terms. What the social anxiety evident in his postcards discloses is that Geryon struggles to meet people in the middle; the people in his life don’t give and take in equal measures, so either he meets them on their terms, or he’s left alone on his own terms.
We’ve seen that Geryon’s imagination is susceptible to the power of suggestion, as when in Chapter XII Geryon wonders what it would be like to be a woman, and then feels that he becomes a woman. Such poetic logic in which likeness becomes sameness is evident in a few places in this chapter. First, the metaphor of passengers streaming on board a bus like “insects into lighted boxes” leads to a simile in which “the experiment roared off down the street.” If metaphors suggest that two things overlap like concentric circles, then similes slide one circle on top of the other, creating one shape with a dual resonance. Another instance of this type of poetic transformation occurs when Geryon notices that the yellowbeard philosopher has a “pink mouth small as a nipple.” After that he can’t see the man’s mouth as anything but a nipple: he tries not to stare at the nipple as it “puckers” and “a small tongue clean[ed] jam off the nipple.” The disturbing and erotic overtones of this image reveal the subconscious turmoil Geryon is experiencing in matters of desire. This eroticization of the yellowbeard’s mouth is repellent to Geryon; it functions to create social distance between them, following a pattern in Geryon’s life of erotic attraction leading inevitably to social isolation.
XXIX. SLOPES
In the taxi, Geryon and the yellowbeard discuss codes of law, because the yellowbeard studied the sociology of ancient law codes. The yellowbeard professes that his favorite law code is that of Hammurabi, because of its “neatness,” for example: “The man who is caught/stealing during a fire shall be thrown into the fire.” He says that if there’s such a thing as justice, that’s what it ought to sound like—“short. Clean. Rhythmical.” This conversation about justice resonates with the first chapters of “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” in which Geryon’s brother, through his abuse, teaches Geryon about “justice.” With Geryon’s abusive brother in our mind, we read Geryon’s reply to the yellowbeard’s description of the “short, clean” justice he would like enacted: “Like a houseboy,” Geryon remarks, to which the yellowbeard replies, “Pardon?” and Geryon answers, “Nothing.” It is difficult to know how to parse Geryon’s comment about the houseboy, as there is little context in the book to shed light on it. What we know of a “houseboy” is that he is a servant, subjugated in a domestic context. We might conjecture that Geryon associates houseboys with himself, an association formed back in the days when his brother’s cruel “justice” involved sexually abusing Geryon, and Geryon’s house felt like a prison. In contrast to the “clean and neat” killing method of the garotte, which Geryon’s childhood babysitter professed was her favorite weapon, Geryon’s favorite weapon was a “cage,” and indeed he felt himself within one. Geryon has a history of objecting to the neat, clean efficiency of forms of violent punishment.
In the Code of Hammurabi, there are a number of laws which pertain to servants and slaves, whose “justice” by contemporary standards is evidently cruel, for instance: “If a slave has said to his master, ‘You are not my master,’ he shall be brought to account as his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear.” Other provisions of servitude in the Code of Hammurabi include: “If a man is in debt and sells his wife, son, or daughter, or binds them over to service, for three years they shall work in the house of their purchaser of master; in the fourth year they shall be given their freedom.” Justice in the Code of Hammurabi as it pertains to “houseboys” may be neatly parceled, but it codifies “freedom” unequally. Whether or not Geryon is familiar with the Code of Hammurabi, we know that the reference to a “houseboy” here serves to puncture the yellowbeard’s illusion of a neat, clean, violent justice. Empathic as ever, Geryon is drawing attention to the plight of a powerless party, for whom no justice system was ever designed.
XXX. DISTANCES
At the bar, Geryon meets the philosopher named Lazer, and immediately asks him if his name is Lazarus. Lazarus in the Bible was raised from the dead by Jesus, and his name is now widely known to be synonymous with resurrection. We have seen evidence of Geryon’s lasting interest in the transition between life and death in his long-exposure photographs at the moment of death, and this theme is implicit in Geryon’s interpretation of Lazer’s name to be short for Lazarus, when in fact it is derived from Eleazar.
Geryon, hungry as ever, scarfs down eight olives while Lazer watches him. Lazer observes that Geryon eats with “lucidity.” Lucidity is defined as both “clearness” and “clairvoyance,” which is the ability to see beyond what is directly observable. Here Lazer may be suggesting that Geryon’s appetite signifies more than hunger for food—that the way he eats discloses other desires. Lazer himself has a certain lucidity, observing that Geryon’s appetites are connected to each other, and reflect a more abstract hunger. Later on in Chapter XXXV, we will see the humiliation of hunger and erotic desire linked; Geryon finds all of his appetites to be difficult to satisfy. Yet when they are satisfied, Geryon feels exorbitantly blissful. In Chapter XXXV, when his desire for Herakles’ touch is finally satisfied, Geryon is suffused with love for everything around him. In this chapter, “a miracle occurred/in the form of a plate of sandwiches.” Devouring his sandwiches, he radiates joy—“for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness”—and the relief of his hunger being satiated makes him want to connect to other people: “He would like to discuss this with someone.” Geryon’s desire for human connection is linked with all his other hungers, as Lazer so aptly insinuates. Geryon has the revelation that if he were a philosopher, he would be a “philosopher of sandwiches”: of “things good on the inside.” The interfaces between inside and outside, self and other, remain a central theme to this story, and to Geryon’s arc towards self-understanding.
