A ‘90s Twist on an Ancient Poem

Although hardly a household word, Anne Carson has made a name for herself in literary circles. A Canadian poet and scholar who teaches classics at McGill University, Carson won the Lannan Award for Poetry in 1996. She is also one of the poets selected by Harold Bloom for inclusion in “The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997.”

Her new book, “Autobiography of Red,” is subtitled “A Novel in Verse,” a concept that summons up memories of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” and perhaps the recent efforts of Vikram Seth. But Carson’s verse novel bears a more tangential relation, both to the genre of the novel and to the medium of verse, than a book like Seth’s “The Golden Gate.”

For starters, her verse doesn’t rhyme. Rhyme is not a prerequisite for poetry, and normally its absence is not a cause for comment. But poets who write verse novels tend to employ rhyme, perhaps to heighten the effect of combining two such disparate genres. As for novelistic qualities, here again Carson does not seem particularly interested in demonstrating how well her “verse novel” can duplicate the functions of the traditional prose fiction narrative. Her “novel” does not abound in richly delineated characters, gritty social realism or enthralling plot twists.

What, then, is Carson attempting? Ostensibly, a modern re-imagining of an ancient myth. More specifically, she is starting out with some fragments of a lost poem by an ancient Greek poet, Stesichoros (born around 650 BC), about a mythological creature named Geryon, “a strange winged red monster who lived on an island . . . quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Herakles came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle.” But although Carson’s book mimics the format of a scholarly translation, its relationship to the ancient myth is much more oblique. What we have here is a modern poem that seeks to emulate certain classical qualities such as directness, economy of expression and irony.

Carson’s Geryon is a recognizably modern character: a lonely, small-town, gay American teenager. He does have red wings, but generally conceals them under a jacket. He meets up with a good-looking sort of Neal Cassady-ish drifter from New Mexico named Herakles. The young men hang out together and eventually have sex. Herakles drifts off. Geryon is also an amateur photographer and, for reasons unexplained, travels to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he encounters a vaguely sinister visiting professor from California. Geryon also meets Herakles again, who has a new boyfriend of Incan ancestry called Ancash. Herakles and his two boyfriends, past and present, decide to visit Ancash’s home in Lima, and later, they and Ancash’s mother go to see a volcano.

The point is not the plot but the poetry, a wry, occasionally arch, blend of naivete and irony. A scene with Geryon and his mother begins:

Don’t pick at that Geryon you’ll get it infected. Just leave it alone and let it heal,

said his mother

rhinestoning past on her way to the door. She had all her breasts on this evening.

Geryon’s innocence also serves as an ingeniously ingenuous counterpoint to the slippery sophistries of the California professor, whose lecture Geryon attends:

the yellowbeard quoted Pascal and then began to pile words up all around the terror

of Pascal until it could scarcely be seen--

. . . the yellowbeard strode up and down

his kingdom of seriousness bordered by strong words, maintaining belief

in man’s original greatness--

or was he denying it? Geryon may have missed a negative adverb--and ended

with Aristotle who had

compared skeptic philosophers to vegetables and to monsters. So blank and

so bizarre would be

the human life that tried to live outside belief in belief. Thus Aristotle.

“Autobiography of Red” is full of small, deftly wrought delights such as these. It meets at least one of the poetic criteria enunciated by Wallace Stevens in “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”: It gives pleasure (or amusement, anyway). But the tone it leaves is perhaps a shade too coy. Carson characterizes her classic inspiration as coming “after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” “Red,” however, seems to owe more to Stein and Emily Dickinson, particularly its air of sly, understated mockery. Carson’s work is less insufferably self-satisfied than Stein’s, but it is still a far cry from the poetry of Dickinson, for whom irony was only a means rather than an end.