Loneliness
In all of Geryon’s relationships, there are gaps in both partners' understanding of each other, and the consequence is loneliness, whether they’re together or apart. Geryon is a fundamentally solitary person. People pass in and out of his life. This solitude weighs on him because he is someone who longs for love, and puts great stock in relationships, not only between persons but between persons and their environment. He wants to feel a part of things, embraced by the world, for he knows “There is no person without a world” (82). One of the happiest moments we see Geryon experience is at a dinner party in Buenos Aires, where he let “the talk flow over him warm as a bath,” and “for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness” (96-7). He wants to feel contained within the warmth of others. We see this also in his silent exhortation towards Herakles: “Don’t want to be free want to be with you” (74). Herakles finds Geryon’s obsession with “captivity” to be “depressing,” because Herakles values freedom over intimacy, and this is a major source of Geryon’s loneliness; he feels alone in valuing intimacy over freedom (55).
Abuse
The early abuse that Geryon suffers at his brother’s hands is a formative trauma that gradually drives him out of his family home. As soon as his mother, his only hope of protection from his brother, leaves the house, he “felt the walls of the kitchen contract as most of the air in the room/swirled out after her. He could not breathe” (30). The way he copes is by turning inward: “Geryon turned all attention to his inside world.” The only place where he feels safe is inside himself; he doesn’t feel like he has control over his body or the world around him. The lesson his brother’s abuse instilled in him at a young age is that the “difference between outside and inside” is that “inside is mine” (29). Even once he has escaped his brother as a young man, that way of navigating the world persists, and the echo of that early abuse resonates at times in the solitude of his later life, when he turns inwards to escape hurt.
Photography
Geryon’s interest in photography develops throughout the story as a mode of storytelling and a practice of seeing. Chapters XL – XLVI are all descriptions of photographs that Geryon takes, and the broader moment that they capture. Geryon experiments with manipulating time and distance in his photographs. As a moody adolescent who briefly relinquishes speech in favor of photography, his constant readjustments of focus and angle with his camera dramatize his struggle to see things clearly. His mother jokes: “If I say anything intelligent you can take a picture of it” (40). That fabulist looseness with what a photograph is and does persists throughout the story. At one point Geryon focuses on memorizing the image of a zebra so that he can make a photograph of it later. What kind of photograph can be made after its subject is gone? Geryon’s photography isn’t documentary in nature; it is a kind of subjective storytelling that stretches the boundaries of reality in order to hone in on the truth, not the appearance of things.
Time
Geryon notices clocks everywhere. His favorite question is “What is time made of?” (92-3). It is a question without an easy answer. Everywhere he goes he asks people the question, mulling over their answers without being fully satisfied by any of them (93). Time is both omnipresent and elusive, subjective. Time is what Geryon is trying to capture and pin down in his long-exposure photographs. “Much truer/is the time that strays into photographs and stops,” he thinks to himself (93). He finds Herakles’ grandmother’s photograph “Red Patience,” a fifteen-minute exposure of a volcanic eruption, disturbing for how it has “compressed/on its motionless surface/fifteen different moments of time” (51). He thinks about taking a “fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava has just reached his window,” (52) and later takes a fifteen-minute exposure of a fly in the process of dying (71). What all of these long-exposure images have in common is the process of mortality: a forest burning from the volcanic eruption, a man’s life threatened by the lava reaching his window, and a fly’s last motions as it dies. Long exposure compresses many seconds into one; it reveals time in a way that defies and alters time. Photography offers Geryon agency over time, over which he otherwise feels he has no control.
Distance
In the chapter “Space and Time,” where Geryon is struggling to overcome the distance he played a part in imposing between himself and his mother, he wonders: “How does distance look?” (43) It is the kind of question he might ask in the context of photography, and the relation between subjects, foreground and background. He also continually asks this question in the context of interpersonal relationships. His answer here is that distance “extends from a spaceless/within to the edge/of what can be loved. It depends on light.” In a poignant play on words, he then asks his mother: “Light that for you?” And approaches her with a box of matches. But she rejects his offer, “turning away,” and musing that she really should quit smoking. The choreography of this encounter dramatizes the distance between people, and the effort of trying to close it. He and his mother push each other away and draw near to each other in different ways, at different times. Distance reemerges as an explicit theme later in the story too, in the chapter “Distances,” when Geryon has a long conversation with the philosopher Lazer about distance, and Geryon says: “That is who we are. Creatures moving on a hill. At different distances… at distances always changing. We cannot help one another or even cry out.” (95) His philosophy of distance is one characterized by loneliness through time.
Myth
The project of Autobiography of Red has its origin in myth—the story of Herakles’ tenth labor, in which he killed Geryon—and engages in new mythmaking, spinning Geryon and Herakles’ story in a different direction. The creative potential of myth is evident everywhere in this story, ancient commingled with contemporary, familiar with strange. Carson spins a new myth of Geryon’s possible origins at the end of Autobiography of Red: A Romance when Ancash tells Geryon of a local myth that some people who were sacrificed to the volcano reemerged with wings like Geryon’s. And the limitations of myth are dramatized in “Appendix C: Clearing Up the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen,” which is a list of 21 equivocal statements where something is either true or it isn’t: “Either Stesichoros was a blind man or he was not… if this condition had a contingent cause that cause was Helen or the cause was not Helen…” and so on. Nothing in myths can be known for sure, because the truth is lost to history, and so this section leads us cyclically to nowhere. But just because something is fiction, doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain truth.
Red(ness)
Redness saturates this book from the title to the final page. The word “red” is used 19 times in the three-page section “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” Anne Carson’s inventive translation of the remaining fragments of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis. The first thing we learn about Geryon is that “everything about him was red.” As a young man in Buenos Aires searching for meaning, browsing books of philosophy, he stumbles upon the passage: “I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it…. To deny the existence of red/is to deny the existence of mystery” (105). He has a strong physiological reaction to reading these words, feeling “something like tons of black magma boiling up/from the deeper regions of him.” We glean from the language of this passage an overarching theme of Geryon’s “redness,” which marks him as a mysterious “other,” and distorts his self-perception. He aches to be seen accurately, and to be loved for what he is. Herakles’ lack of effort to see and understand him drives a wedge between them, as when Herakles associates Geryon with the color yellow, and Geryon despairs: “Yellow! Even in dreams/he doesn’t know me at all!” (74)
