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.

"Being / A Self in a Song": Autobiography of Red

At one point in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Geryon, the main character, is in "the only authentic / tango bar left in Buenos Aires," and he begins to remember a high-school dance at which he stood "against the wall / for three and a half hours in a casual pose":

Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song. (XXXI, 101)

If there is any doubt about whether Carson's verse novel gains anything from being in verse rather than prose, the second line break here clears it up with the exemplary enjambment of "the desperate drama of being / a self in a song."

Read without the phrase after the break, the line picks up on the references to Heidegger that have appeared in the last twenty pages or so; music (even the banal pop of a high-school dance) lays the basis for a moment of insight into the "drama of being." With this reading hanging in the air, the next line continues by specifying a particular kind of being: "being / a self in a song."

But I should be careful about making too much out of this, because Autobiography of Red also makes fun of reading too much into things, especially in altered states (which is what the wallflower at the high-school dance is in, even if he has not smoked or drunk anything):

... He had never been so stoned in his life. I am too naked,
he thought. This thought seemed profound.
And I want to be in love with someone. This too fell on him deeply. It is all wrong.
Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked. What was that? said one of the others
turning towards him centuries later. (XL, 136)

Be careful of finding anything too profound here, Carson seems to be warning—but even that interpretive move might be overdoing it!

In fact, one of my difficulties with Carson's book (one that I have rarely had with any other literature, whether poetry, prose, or drama) is that it simply makes my jaw drop. When I began rereading the book in preparation for the verse-novels course, I intended to read with a pencil, but I ended up just reading it straight through, without marking anything that I had not marked before (a few phrases here and there, such as "Facts are bigger in the dark"). That made three times that I had read it, and I had to read it a fourth time and force myself to highlight things in order to be able to begin to interpret it.

And frankly, even now I find it hard to interpret a book that just leaves me speechless, as in the final lines of the book (well, the final lines before the concluding "interview" with Stesichoros, author of an ancient epic about Geryon whose few remaining fragments were the starting point for Carson's work). Although my mind was less confused than it would have been if I had been as stoned as Geryon was in the lines above, and less frustrated than if I had been the wallflower at a high-school dance, each time I have read this book I have been in an altered state by the time I read these lines:

We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
night at their back. (XLVII, 146)