"There is no person without a world" (82)

Today's seminar was "one of those moments/ that was the opposite of blindness" (29) to me. Our discussion opened my eyes and heart for Geryon's autobiography and I can - despite my denying it in my last blog post - identify with him and his experiences after all. I thus read his redness as being different and individual and his red world, as living in his own world, as everybody does. We should all try to understand each other's redness, but we always fail (and a "between" people "a dangerous cloud" (132) develops), as this quote indicates:

"I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it./ But this separation of consciousness/ is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is/ to believe in an undivided being between us." (105)


At the very beginning of the romance, Geryon is a boy - innocent, pure - and has no notion of selfhood and no concept of distinction between outside and inside world. If I was him, I would have taken his brother very seriously, when he called me/him "stupid". As a small girl, I thought we are all part of one world and we can read each others thoughts and be together, helping each other out, being one unit, basically. Bad experiences like Geryon makes with his brother, made us (me and him) realise that we were wrong. Every individual lives in his/her own world - be it red, yellow or whatever - and is wandering around in a sometimes shared space being caght in his/her inner world. We come across other people in life with other worlds and try to give each other a glimpse into one's world. Experiences Geryon makes with Heracles enhance and strenghten the sensibility and sensitivity, and consequently the awareness of being different.

We are all unique and individual, but what we all share is an original and major fear of being misunderstood. We seek for understanding the outside and our inside, but more than that we seek to satisfy our biggest need which is to be understood by others. What motivates us to make distinctions and differences, in my opinion, is to prevent misunderstandings and to improve others' understanding of ourselves. This is my humble and probably oversimplified interpretation of next week's topic "distinctions and differences" and I look forward to our fruitful discussions. To sump up, I think life is all about understanding oneself and being understood by others and love is the feeling that we understand another person's inside world and are understood by that other person (outside). When love fades due to a lack of understanding or being understood, we feel like Geryon and think:

"I once loved you, now I don't know you at all. He does not say this./ I was thinking about time - he gropes - / you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time - stops." (141)

I hope you understand me in one way or another.

Claim, no claim

„[...| Stupid, said Geryon’s brother
and left him.
Geryon had no doubt stupid was correct. But when justice is done
the world drops away.“ (p. 24)

I am going to demonstrate the logical form of Appendix C to the „Fragments of Stesichoros“ which precede Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Why would someone want to analyse literature for it’s logical form? First, I am very fond of logic and literature. Second, I have never tried to mix them. But third, and this is the only point that actually seeks to provide this project with a scientific value, I am doing this in preparation for a claim about the text, namely the claim that the seesaw between logic / form and content / language use is itself a very central subject – in the text, and for Geryon.

Appendix C to the Fragments of Stesichoros consist of written fiction by Anne Carson and differs insofar from Appendixes A and B, which contain excerpts from several authors of Greek mythology. This third addendum consists of twenty-one consecutively numbered sentences. In the terminology of logic, all of them but the first one are material implications (those correspond to grammatical conditionals, or ‚if‘-clauses). The first sentence, however, is a disjunction (Either.. or..) of a proposition and its negation, and so are all the consequents of the following implications! The antecedent of the implications is each time one of the disjuncts of the former sentence’s consequent. In formal notation, then, the outlook is the following:


I. (1.) ....... A v !A ........ „A or not A“ (simplified!)
II. (2.-21.) .. A -> (B v !B) . „If A then B or not B.“ (simplified!)
III. (x(II.+1)) B* -> (C v !C). „If B then C or not C.“ (simplified!)

, whereas (Definitions:)

A -> B . is the sentential connective of the material implication (If A then B);
A v B .. is the sentential connective of the disjunction (A or B);
! A .... is the sign for negation (Not A);

A, B, C, [...] Z are simple propositional sentences (like „Stesichoros was a blind man“).

Now a disjunction (like 1.) claims that one of the propositions it takes is true. More precisely, it claims that at least one is, but this is exactly the simplification I marked above (see II., III.). I think it is possible for our purposes to simplify in this way, because all the disjunctions we are facing in (I. - III.) are of the kind that one of the disjuncts is the negation of the other disjunct. This is a special case, because it is a logical contradiction to claim that both propositions are true. In other terms, it is impossible for a proposition to be true while its negation is true. In logic, this is shown with a truth table, where each result shows F (for false):

A || A ^ !A
-------------
T || T F F
F || F F T

(Def.: A ^ B is the sentential connective of the conjunction (A and B).)
(In the case where A is true the conjunction of A and !A is false.)
(In the case where A is false the conjunction of A and !A is false.)

What this means, then, is that the first sentence does not make a claim about anything! It simply asks, says that A („Stesichoros was a blind man“) is true, or that it is not true, and that both cannot be true. Since all following sentences are logical conditionals, with the If-clause being filled with a proposition, which comes from this kind of disjunction, none of the antecedences are ever claimed. And this means, that also the consequences, whose truth in a conditional fully depends on the truth of the respective antecedents, are no claims. What we learn is, that, in Appendix C, not a single simple proposition is actually claimed to be true!

If you have followed this so far you must be thinking: what is all this discussion of logical form good for when there are no claims? This, however, is exactly the notion this Appendix C in my view is there for to provoke. The reader is provoked to ask „What is the use of such a beautifully engineered thought, when eventually it does not refer back to the world and make claims about it?“ This question, however, is one which the world of Autobiography of Red and its characters keep asking our tragic hero Geryon.

Maybe I will post another entry discussing the resulting dialogue in Autobiography of Red.

“identity memory eternity your constant themes” (149)

Anne Carson succeeds in being totally unconventional. She takes up conventional topics such as time, passion and identity, but she also turns conventions upside down. The Canadian classicist and poet was probably the first writer in history ever to retell the episode of Herakles and Geryon from Geryon’s own experience. Hercules becomes an inhumane monster through his personality and behaviour, while “Geryon turned all attention to his inside world.” (30) and thus rises to immortality. In the myth, Geryon was killed by Hercules, but Carson re-imagines a destructive love affair which ends by Hercules breaking Geryon’s heart – “Your heart of my death!” (100). “He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart/ then he remembered.” (70). They have a good time together, but Geryon knows that Hercules will never know him back.

“What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them/ developed a dangerous cloud.” (132)

“... I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. / But this separation of consciousness / is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is/ to believe in an undivided being between us. ...” (105).

Geryon’s redness and wings stand for his creativity. His redness is his inmost being, his selfhood, but Hercules dreams of him in yellow. Geryon survives through art. Carson turns the myth into the recording and surviving of pain through the viewfinder of poetry. Wings are portrayed as the Platonic image and the creative aspect of love. The beloved might not be worth the pain, but wings lift the true lover’s soul into immortality. While Geryon records all the details of life through the lens of his camera thereby keeping the only secret which is immortality. Pictures are the language which helps Geryon to express himself, since “Raising a camera to one’s face has effects/ no one can calculate in advance.” (135). As a child he feels alienated by language and prefers photography as a means of expression, since “Photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships.” (65). Exemplary for that is the fly which is floating in a pail of water looks drowned but with a strange agitation of light around the wings. The picture portrayed the fly as being almost alive and somehow immortal. Producing a self-portrait and autobiography, Geryon secures his own immortality.

Besides all that Carson also wrote a profound love story – “a reverie on the mystery of one person’s power over another, seen through the double lens of scholarship and verse” as Ruth Padel put it in her review “seeing red”. Carson writes a sweet and extravagant tale and gives lyric poetry an epic grandeur. Hence she ends up producing a hybrid work of poetry and prose – a verse novel.

In the aforementioned review Ruth Padel describes Carsons’ language as the “language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted”. I could not agree more. At times I had difficulties identifying myself with Geryon. Of course I see myself in him when he is seeking for love and his true selfhood, but the events that occur and experiences he makes are sometimes very unfamiliar – cases of defamiliarization, I would say – and I felt even awkward at times. But what I truly and ardently loved was the language Carson uses to describe feelings and thoughts. Here I share my favourite examples with you: “[...]there it was one of those moments/ that was the opposite of blindness. / The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.” (39), “She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her.” (48), “but such a cloud of agony poured up his soul he couldn’t remember / what he was saying.” (68), “He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against/ the window screen.” (84), “And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him ain a widening happiness.” (97), “We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.” (98), “habit blurs perception and language” (107), “There was neither excitement nor the absence of excitement.” (125), and “I once loved you, now I don’t know you at all. He does not say this. / I was thinking about time – he gropes - / you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time – stops.” (141). Alice Munro spoke for me when she claimed that: “This book is amazing – I haven’t discovered any writing in years so marvellously disturbing.”

We learn in Autobiography of Red that things must be viewed from different angles in order for us to grasp their worth and meaning. The title suggests that the text is an exploration of particularity and that there are several different ways to be. This is also true for Geryon’s identity construction. Geryon, the only winged red creature, finds himself in total disorientation time and again. On the one hand, his red surrounding symbolises his personal Hell since he spends so much time alone, humiliated, and without a clear sense of being. He is shy, sensitive and senses his difference to others. He is fixed with the inner. But on the other hand, Geryon is a “philosopher of sandwiches” and makes readers sympathise with him during his seek for love and identity. Hence, he is never alone as we side with him. Nevertheless he is a subjective character in a world of subjective reality. He enters a world of ambiguity, where all objects are challenged and made into subjects. He is unique, removed from the world and not subject to its reality. He is unlike other human beings and challenges the convention of the typical human character. He refuses objective routes and finds his own way, creating his own subjective reality, as we see in the example where he refuses to enter the classroom conventionally. Because of all that Geryon is unable to exist in the world of objectivity. Carson depicts a world that lacks convention which is mirrored in her writing style, which constitutes its own patterns not following any conventions of writing or pervious examples. She uses line spacing in random places, neglects punctuation and reworks the original myth. The following passage outlines Carson’s writing process - mediating between subject and object - quite well:

“What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava / has just reached his window? / he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said. / Very likely, said Geryon.” (52).

Hence, Geryon has become the subject of his own myth and autobiography. Instead of losing his identity in death, Geryon finds his identity when he flies. His flight can be seen as his final release from all outside objective realities. By flying he achieves true subjectivity. The story is about Geryon’s transposition from object to subject in various ways. In conclusion, everything depends on the experiences and beholder in whose eye reality exists.
“The eye empties.” (140)