Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998)

I've been mulling over a notion for a while now which seems to fit this one. It is that poetry and prose have different 'signatures' i.e. poetry in some way resembles or recalls the beating of the heart, prose equally the pulses of the mind. Not sure if I fully subscribe, but there's certainly something to say about the fact that this book is presented as poetry when its main feel is definitely prosy. In fact, I'd push the boat out and say that this is a sheep in wolf's clothing. It doesn't need to be presented in the oh-so-cleancut, literary way it has been, with stark, elegant lines drawn onto the pages as though they rhymed. But this piece occupies a strange spot, where this possible overshowiness is confirmed by some extraordinary 'apparatus' before and after the main event. The main event itself, this sheep, is delightfully woolly and fuzzy, bleats well, and charms the reader. It's the story of a young chap who just happens to be a red, winged monster. His milieu is decidedly West Coast, can almost be pinpointed to San Francisco. Early on, as this staccato but entertaining picture was in the early stages of its drawing, I thought to myself "this guy ought to wear Converses" - lo and behold, later, he did. Geryon is youthfully serious, almost clinically so, and discovering himself in a Manga-cum-Boulevard-of-Broken-Dreams-cum-City-Lights kind of way, staring blankly, answering questions with others or off at tangents, his Beat monsterism presumably standing in for anything from autism to dislocation. His gets it together with a slightly older guy and goes through the discoveries of relationship. After they break up, he heads off to Buenos Aires to study, meets all sorts in bars, goes to funky university lectures, and then meets his old flame and his new young lover. They all three head off to Peru, the young lover's homeplace, in search of a mountain village and a volcano. The main thrust of this is charming and quietly insightful, with very occasional moments of hits-you-where-it-counts poetry, and lots of 'poetic' prose. It has a stylish lightness, and approaches one thing better than anything I've read for a long while - that feeling, when we're quite young, of heading out for the first times into an uncertain world, travelling to another city, family meaning loads still but coming into different focus, falling in love, twisting and writhing in life's raw emotions, discovering sex and the world's dark places, crying in heartbreak and exulting in the sulphurous air, everything bursting with significance - of spreading our wings in the modern era. Now to the wolf's clothing: the look of this book may perhaps have been affected by the publishers, the fact that it's been presented as high falutin' maybe too, but the apparatus - yowser, they cannot be set down to the account of anyone but Carson herself. They start with an overlong introduction explaining that the inspiration for this piece is a fragment of ancient Greek by Stesichoros, Geryon being a monster from a red island who guarded cattle, the killing of whom was one of Herakles' twelve famous labours. This has next to nothing to do with the main piece. Then comes a "free-adaptation" version of the few tiny snippets we have left of Stesichoros. This has nothing whatever to do with the main piece. The comes Appendix A - some extras about Stesichoros' treatment of Helen as a character. You've guessed it - nothing whatever. Then Appendix B - three lines at the bottom of a page, all of the rest of which is the title of the appendix. No comment required. Then Appendix C - a truly dreadful pseudo-logical set of therefores starting with Stesichoros' possible blinding by Helen. Not only not connected, but really grim. Thereafter comes the contrasting brightness of the piece itself. Unfortunately she can't resist and gives us, after it, an 'interview' with Stesichoros, where he babbles a few freeform nonsenses, which are nothing to do with the piece, and nothing to do even with Stesichoros, except as a lame Carson 'invention'. It may have been apposite to provide a short introduction to explain from where the author drew the first inspirations for her otherwise barely associated characters, but the rest of this gunk is just pretty damn awful, and spoils the memory and the immediate aftertaste of the simple light funk of Geryon's story, which has a haunted Cool which recommends itself to being a graphic novel I think. Why she felt the need to do it is the question - my temptation is always to psychoanalyse: she wasn't confident enough about the piece itself, and felt the need to 'dress it up' with classical references? Well, we'll be nice and leave it at that.