Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is Way Funnier Than You Remember

Like many people, Autobiography of Red was my introduction to Anne Carson. When I read it for the first time, a decade ago, I was enchanted, moved, delighted. According to my reading log, I immediately followed it with Carson’s Eros, the Bittersweet and then If Not, Winter, both of which are very different projects, and both of which I admired for different reasons, but neither of which I loved like the story of Geryon.

I was not alone. Autobiography of Red, Carson’s fourth book, sold remarkably well for poetry (or whatever it actually is)—the number cited in a 2000 profile is 25,000 copies over two years—and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; two years after its publication, Carson was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Autobiography of Red was lauded up and down the literary world—my copy has blurbs from Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Susan Sontag, and Michael Cunningham—and soon became a kind of shibboleth for a certain genre of reader.

It was even, with Eros, the Bittersweet, referenced as part of a plot point in the pilot of The L Word in 2004. “I think, um, those books practically changed my life,” Jenny Schecter (a young writer, also possibly a sociopath, with a boyfriend, but no matter) tells Marina (who also reads Nietzsche and Amy Bloom). “What about you,” she asks, the camera zooming on her lips, “have you read them?” She has! Then they start making out in the bathroom.

Whenever it comes up amongst the literary girls and gays who love it, it seems to be discussed in these terms: life-changing (or life-reflecting) adulation. And of course it is: this is a genre-bending, queer coming-of-age novel, half poetry, half prose, highbrow and postmodern and sly and sexy. It is a “novel in verse” but also a novel in fragments, a novel in irreverent scholarship, a novel in invented interview, a novel in list, a novel in appendices. It is a tender and extravagant love story, a careful, poetic unspooling of what happens after you run into someone at a bus stop and have “one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.” Carson’s subjects are universal and timeless: identity, monstrosity, and “the human custom of wrong love.” It is also, of course, beautiful, full of surprising, earth-moving lines and bright red emotional landscapes.

But what no one seems to talk about—and what I definitely forgot until I reread the book this week, twenty-five years after its original publication (on March 31, 1998)—is how funny it is.

Everyone knows that Autobiography of Red is based on the story—the anecdote, really—of the 10^th labor of Hercules, in which the famous Greek demi-god slays the monster Geryon, brains his poor little dog, and steals his magical red cattle. More specifically, Autobiography of Red is based on some fragments of the story as written by the ancient Greek poet Steischoros, who miraculously chose to tell it from Geryon’s perspective. But let’s be real: despite a bunch of preamble, and the idea that a broken heart is similar to a broken head, the novel bears almost no relation to the source material. This is Anne Carson’s first joke.

No, actually, Anne Carson’s first joke is in the first line of the first prefatory section (more on these in a moment): “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” Ah yes, those famously difficult 26 centuries. Unlike all of the other easy centuries in which to be a poet.

In fact there are five prefatory sections, each in a different form: a prologue of sorts about Steischoros and Gertrude Stein and what adjectives are (“the latches of being”); a selection of Steischoros’ fragments themselves, which Carson says “read as if Steischoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat”; and then three appendices on this “unanswerable” side question of whether Steischoros talked shit about Helen, was blinded for it, and then apologized his way out of his blindness.

Appendix C, in particular, seems to me either a barrier to entry or a neon welcome sign: read it, and you’ll know whether you’re interested in this book or not. Appendix C: Clearing Up the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen! It consists of 21 either/or hypotheticals and clears up exactly nothing. It is irreverent and modern and very very funny.

The brilliance of these sections is, of course, that they teach you how to read the rest of the book. They demonstrate Carson’s knowledge and erudition, and the apparent importance and gravity of her source material, and then they also demonstrate that she will be playing a little game in this book—with herself, with the story of Geryon, and with you. As a poetry professor friend of mine put it: her “proemium” is akin to pulling the reader aside and saying “I’m about to tell you a very important story about farts.”

But wait, you protest, this isn’t a story about farts. It’s a moving love story! It’s a meditation on monstrosity! It’s sexy! It’s Poetry! And yes, of course it is. It is all of those things. But be honest: it’s also a teen romantic comedy. Boy falls for boy. Boy dismisses boy. Boy is devastated. Boy moves on, but not quite. Years later, boy runs into boy again. (“Geryon’s heart stopped. The man was Herakles. After all these years—he picks/ a day when my face is puffy!” LOL.) Things resume, but not quite. It’s good, and also bad. Geryon is an aspiring photographer, because of course he is. Herakles is dating someone else, because of course he is. They all go traveling together. We all learn something about ourselves. After all, everyone has dated a Herakles. (If you haven’t dated a Herakles, I regret to inform you that you have been a Herakles.)

It is a rom-com, but it is not boring, or paint-by-numbers. Carson is a surprising writer—in her larger conceptual movements but even more strikingly on the line level—and surprise is key to not only to literary transcendence but also to humor. I can’t help but love, and laugh at, lines like “They were two superior eels/ at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.” (What does it mean?)

Like so much great art, Autobiography of Red gives us what we want and also makes fun of us for wanting it and then gives us something we didn’t know we wanted at all and finally pats us on the head and tells us that actually there is no Helen.

Even the setting is funny, a juxtaposition of the fantastical (as a child Geryon lives “on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place”) and the everyday (is it Canada?):

Outside the dark pink air
was already hot and alive with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.

This world includes Agatha Christie and Charlie Parker and graffiti and stupid novelty t-shirts (TENDER LOIN) and hockey practice and a magazine called Balling from Behind (“a whole magazine devoted to this?” Geryon wonders, “issue after issue? year after year?”), and also it includes a red world with a red boy in love with a Greek demi-god, and volcanoes that spit out holy men. It includes a grandmother who name drops Virginia Woolf and Freud, and wings that tear “against each other on his shoulders/ like the little mindless red animals they were.” In the end, Geryon flies into one of those volcanoes. But he’s fine.

Ultimately—whether you remember it or not, whether we talk about it or not—it is this irreverence that underpins the book’s success. Yes, it is beautiful and swoon-worthy, poetic and formally inventive, queer and romantic, but without the grounding of the humor, without that essential connection to all our own stupid, embarrassing teenage love stories, it would merely be a bunch of exciting language shaken up in a box with song lyrics and scraps of meat. Instead, it might just change your life.