A Review of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and "Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings"
B. Renner

Whatever skills Anne Carson may have as a classical scholar--her reputation is for brilliance--I am unable to comment upon. I know no Greek, and Stesichoros and Mimnermos--the two poets toward whom she has most completely turned her attention in these books--are available to us only in fragments. Her treatment of these poets, however, is "creative," rather than academic, which means that non-classically trained reviewers such as myself can comment upon the new work she has fashioned from the ancient materials.
One thing that becomes immediately obvious, in turning to either of these works, is that Carson has masterfully assumed the stance, the tone of the High Modernist, both knowledgeable and comfortable with knowledge, one who--if not precisely lecturing to acolytes--is certainly as debonair and nonchalant as a world traveler--or returning hero--introducing a slide show of her adventures, herself the connection between Old World and New, past and present. For example, "All We as Leaves," the second "poetic" entry of "Mimnermos," and ostensibly a version of the ancient poet's fragment, begins

All we as leaves in the shock of it:
spring--
one dull gold bounce and you're there.
You see the sun?--I built that.
As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner.
But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago
where I had the first of those--my body walking out of the room
bent on some deadly errand
and me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out--

Carson moves fluidly from images given as sentence fragments, as though we are reading a "literal" rendition of a mere snag of Mimnermos' work, to the casual "modern" clauses, "You see the sun?--I built that." Did Mimnermos write that? Surely not, we think, with some doubt. But we have no doubt that he did not write about hotels in Chicago or New Age, out-of-body experiences. It's clear we are looking at something more closely akin to Robert Lowell's "Imitations" or even Pound's "Sextus Propertius" than anything like a scholarly translation.
"Autobiography of Red," a revisitation of Stesichoros' poem about Geryon, likewise quickly announces its willingness to vary, even in those portions of the work claiming to be versions of the past. We are in only the third of the pieces labeled "Fragments of Stesichoros" when we read

If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don't want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

In fragment 5, Geryon sees a (metaphoric) "hot plate" glowing in his mother's cheek; in 6, the gods ride in a glass-bottomed boat; in 7, Geryon and a centaur leave a bar together.
In spite of the "looseness," there is, unquestionably, a kind of power in Carson's work in these sections. "To Tithonos (God's Gift)", fragment 4 of "Mimnermos," reads in its entirety--

They (on the one hand) made his chilly tears immortal
neglecting to tell him
his eyes were not.

and "Half Moon"--

Half moon through the pines at dawn
sharp as a girl's ribcage.

These may, in fact, be more or less literal versions of Mimnermos.
By the same token, Carson's fragments of Stesichoros sometimes look like true "translations", but--whether they are or not--they are interesting pieces of a fragmentary story--

Geryon walked the red length of his mind and answered No
It was murder And torn to see the cattle lay
All these darlings said Geryon And now me

*

Geryon lay on the ground covering his ears The sound
Of the horses like roses being burned alive

*

The red world And corresponding red breezes
Went on Geryon did not

Carson's prose pieces accompanying the sets of fragments--the sort of essays a blithely eccentric scholar might write--are also mostly inviting and entertaining, if sometimes opaque to readers without a degree in contemporary critical jargon. But when Carson steps completely beyond her classical foundation, something odd happens--something bad. It is as though she loses her grip on her own intelligence and critical capabilities.
Carson's versions of Mimnermos and her essay about him are followed by three "interviews" with him. The interviewer asks such foolish questions as "have you ever been psychoanalyzed" (no punctuation used by author) and makes such comments as "Within the last decade there have been many references . . . to the fact that the Western world stands on the verge of a spiritual rebirth . . . ." The interviewer quotes Freud and Foucault. The reader is forgiven for thinking that he has stepped into an ugly graduate seminar. But the brevity of these interviews and their positioning as appendices of a sort make it easier to dismiss them and attend primarily to the preceding portions of the work.
"Autobiography of Red," on the other hand, is not simply an investigation, however "creative," of Stesichoros' fragments about the monster Geryon. It is instead a "novel in verse." Carson's versions of Stesichoros and her accompanying essay constitute barely a tenth of the work as a whole. Most of the rest if the "novel" (or the "autobiography", if you prefer). And what a production it is!
Carson has cast Geryon as the younger son in a contemporary Canadian family (though he still has wings). He is (how au courant) sexually abused as a child by his older brother, though it is not clear whether Carson wishes us to link that to his adolescent and adult homosexuality. Herakles who, in the myth, kills Geryon and steals his cattle is here a homosexual "golden boy," beautiful but shallow, a few years older than Geryon. He seduces Geryon, they have a brief romance, then Herakles breaks it off. In the space of a few pages following, Carson moves Geryon from brokenhearted teenager to twentysomething photography aficionado, apparently taking a break from graduate school to fly to Buenos Aires with his camera. That Geryon "hides" behind his camera is already a cliche; that, in Argentina, he should run into Herakles and his current lover is soap opera. Herakles and the exotic Ancash are in South America to record (audio, not video) volcanoes (how emblematic).
And yet, as silly as all this sounds in summary, one must grant that a first-rate writer can take such materials and transform them into art. (Shakespeare, anyone?) Carson, unfortunately, isn't up to the task. The problem is not simply a failure of imagination--a failure to elevate Geryon and Herakles from stereotypes into authentic individuals. The failure involves the writing itself. Carson seems to be unable to distinguish between solid craftsmanship and schlock.
In the first chapter (canto?) of the novel, Geryon and his brother walk to school together.

Geryon

was focusing hard on his feet and his steps.
Children poured around him
and the intolerable red assault of grass and the smell of grass everywhere
was pulling him towards it
like a strong sea. He could feel his eyes leaning out of his skull
on their little connectors.

Here we have a mesh of careful and careless, cliched writing. That Geryon focuses on his walking is precise, evocative of a shy child on the first day of school. That children "pour[. . . ] around him" is tired. The "assault" of the grass is another precise image--it suggests both childhood allergies and a luxuriousness in the grass that Geryon has not seen on the lawn at home. But why is the assault red? Red, throughout the book, is Geryon's color and--we are (I suppose) to suppose--the color of rage and lust and pain. In what way does this "fit" the grass at school? That the grass is both intolerable and attractive is, again, an effective idea, the strength of which is immediately undercut by the dead simile "like a strong sea." And the following image, of Geryon's eyes bugging out, seems practically designed to call up Jim Carrey in "The Mask."
What, we must ask, is Carson doing? Unfortunately such lapses are not an exception. The quality of the writing is erratic throughout.

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING
is something you know
instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head
at sixteen.

Oh? Is this not simply dismal pseudo-intellectualism? And yet, a few pages later, when Herakles is begging Geryon for oral sex, Carson writes well--

The break in his voice
made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn
first thing in the morning
when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night.

Lines like that make it clear why Carson is thought, in some quarters, to be a strong writer: the image is fresh and mysterious, leaving the reader to decide how the visual attaches itself to the aural.
There is nothing to be gained by citing further examples. And it is true that, despite the immense failure of this work, it exerts a sort of fascination--if in nothing else than the relentlessness of its visual imagery. One can easily imagine why it charmed Carson's editors: in spite of its surface of high intellectualism, it is an easy read, the same sort of psychological baring that one finds in much confessional poetry, the "literary" equivalent of a beach towel novel. It gives off the sheen of Art while hooking the reader with easy sensation. As an added bonus, by writing it in "verse," Carson can perhaps elude the more normal critical apparatus that functions in regard to a "regular" novel. And the fact that Carson's lines are no more or less worthy to be called verse than most of the so-called poetry published in the past two or three decades will not be noted at all.

1996 © 2004