Once upon a time I lived in Stesichoros
Street, in Athens. In my mind’s eye I
can look from the balcony into the crevasse of the street… where a red, winged man
is herding his musk oxen through what space remains between parked cars, apartment-block
entrances and wisteria.
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| Stesichoros. Photo: Oxyrhynchus Online |
I knew then that Stesichoros was one
of those ancient poets surviving only in fragments – of which more turn up
sometimes, on papyri recovered from the Egyptian desert, enough for a Cambridge Classical Text with commentary to be coming out soon. Stesichoros was born in a Greek settlement in
Sicily, and flourished either side of 600BC: an epic poet, post-Homeric and pre-Greek
tragedy. He wrote a long poem, the Geryoneis,
about the tenth labour of Herakles in which the hero visits a red island and
steals its red cattle from a red, winged monster called Geryon, whom he kills.
It’s interesting, as Anne Carson
says in her 1998 book The Autobiography
of Red, which took the Geryon myth as its starting point, that Stesichoros
chose to write from the victim’s perspective.
Interesting that one ancient authority said about him: “What a sweet
genius in the use of adjectives!” Maybe,
Carson suggests, he opened out the descriptive world, departing from Homeric
stock epithets. (I cross-checked that
quote, not because there is the slightest doubt about Anne Carson’s
scholarship, but because she plays around with the reader.)
Who wouldn’t love ancient literary fragments? There’s the Indiana Jones thrill, and then
there’s fragmentation in poetry from The Waste Land to Flarf.
In The Autobiography of Red, Geryon is growing up in a world both
mythical and modern. He has a teenage
love affair with Herakles, who leaves him; they meet again some years
later. The book is full of love,
heartbreak and longing; it’s also funny and, thanks to the extreme energy of
the language, exhilarated. Here’s an
extract chosen more or less at random (as the desert might offer up) from ‘XI.
Hades’. The whole poem’s in this form.
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. They
painted the truth
on the long wall of
the high school the night before departing for Hades.
Herakles’ home town
of Hades
lay at the other
end of the island about four hours by car, a town
of moderate size
and little importance
except for one
thing. Have you ever seen a volcano?
said Herakles.
Staring at him
Geryon felt his soul
move in his side.
Then Geryon wrote a note full of lies for his mother
and stuck it on the
fridge.
They climbed into
Herakles’ car and set off westward. Cold green summer night.
Active?
In Red Doc> Geryon is older, known as G. Herakles reappears as a traumatised war
veteran called Sad but Great, Sad for short.
There’s an artist called Ida, “innocent and filled with / mood like a
very tough / experimental baby”. There’s
a road trip for most of the book, through fire, ice and a psychiatric clinic; G’s
herd of musk oxen (they have a dance scene); Hermes (in a silver tuxedo), CMO, 4NO (see here), Lieutenant M’hek and
Io (a white musk ox); and G’s mother, who dies at the end:
And the
reason he cannot bear her
dying is not the loss of her
(which is the future) but
that dying puts the two of
them (now)
into this
nakedness together that is
unforgivable. They do not
forgive it. He turns away.
Grief, trauma and disillusionment
replace the youthful passions in Autobiography,
but the excitement level remains as high.
Red Doc> often reads like a
series of disjointed fragments: for example, how did the road trip start? There’s no scene setting equivalent to the Hades
passage above; it’s as if that bit’s still buried in the sand. Personal pronouns are used without the
character they refer to being named, a gap- and confusion-creating tactic. Sometimes a disconnected voice called Wife of
Brain comes in, a song-like Greek chorus crossed with an oracle: helpful
exposition + further mystification.
Otherwise the book is mostly in
columns, one per page:
THE ICE FAULT
is a slot
in the ice as
tall as a man
that vanishes back into
shadow. A smell of
something brisk and
incongruous laundry?
sunlight? lingers at the
entrance. G drops
to his
knees to peer in.
Cold
stabs up
through his
trousers. Sad has
retreated to
the car and
started the
engine which
echoes monstrously
everywhere. Moving
out!
Sad yells putting the car in
reverse.
This helter-skelter format makes the
reader zoom down the page, bumping from one side to another – it’s possible,
and perhaps best, to read Red Doc>very fast indeed and (unlike a newspaper) several times, the opposite of how a scholar might read a
papyrus. (Daisy Fried in the New York Times says the form creates “a chute for language”.) The text even looks like the narrow columns
that ancient papyri were written in.
That’s not deliberate: an NYT interview explains, “Carson hit a wrong
button, and it made the margins go crazy. She found this instantly liberating.
The sentences, with one click, went from prosaic to strange, and finally Carson
understood — after years of frustration — how her book was actually supposed to
work”. The > in the title was also computer-generated. And then there’s this:
Meanwhile in
another
room of
the clinic G is
dreaming of
Daniil
Kharms. They
are driving
along in
a paper car.
G
has
a big roll of newsprint
which he
is cutting into
stretches of
road and
leaning out to toss them in
front of
the car. This
is
hard to
do from the
passenger seat
and Daniil
Kharms has
to keep
swerving the car to stay on
the road. Is he getting fed
up? G
worries. Daniil
Kharms turns to him. Cut
me
an incognito he
says.
G
goes white with shame.
He hadn’t even
thought of
this! Daniil
Kharms could
have been saved! He sits
up
suddenly drenched in
ringing. Phone.
The book / road trip devouring its
own columns, faster than they can be written…
(DK was a surrealist and absurdist writer from the early Soviet period,
who died in a psychiatric ward in prison during the siege of Leningrad.) Anyway, Carson didn’t just fit narrow margins
to the text after her discovery; if so, some of the lines would have held more
words. The form must have helped her
shape the writing.
Then there’s dialogue, with slashes
which score the rapid play and overlay of ordinary conversation; here’s part of
the opening scene where G and his mother are talking.
/ just got out of
the army / wounded /
messed up / are they giving him care / a guy shows
up with a padded envelope
of drugs every
night I
guess
it’s care / he staying with you /
for a while / behaving
himself /
some days he sits
around reading
Christina
Rossetti some days he comes out of the bathroom
covered in
camouflage
paint /
keep him away
from
your herd /
Sometimes Red Doc> reads like a climate change near-disaster movie of
Hollywood proportions, or a quest / ordeal: G and friends journey through an
alien northern landscape experiencing both fire and ice, and…
Ice bats! They
are
blueblack. They are
absolutely silent.
They
are
the size of toasters.
And they are drafting him
down
the ice fault
with
eerie gentle
purpose.
Their roosting-place is Batcatraz,
in what turns out to be the wall of a car-repair workshop, which turns into the
clinic: dream-like shifts. Bats, batty… Carson told the NYT that Red Doc> was “a mess, obstacle course, uphill grapple in the
dark, almost totally disoriented and discontented experiment every minute of
the thousand or so years it took to work out.”
It reads as if written as fast as physically possible, and as if the
process was a lot of fun. I hope at
least the fun is true.
Fire and ice join other opposites:
lover / family, introvert (G) / extrovert (Sad), thought / speech, animal (the
herd) / human. Sad’s post-traumatic
stress adds a contemporary angle on terror.
Red
Doc> comes with
no context-setting introduction: you have to go to Autobiography of Red for that.
I think it helps. Last week I was
discussing Red Doc> with some
friends (who hadn’t read Autobiography). We were 50/50 split: sheer excitement at form
and language pulled us through, or the difficulty was overwhelming. One criticism we all had of Red Doc> was that the characters aren’t
developed; Autobiography comes in
handy for this too, giving the backstory with Geryon set up as the
introspective, arty teenager and Herakles the restless adventurer. Wife of Brain’s role as (Greek) chorus had a
surprisingly big, clarifying impact on reactions.
We discussed which of the long
narrow columns could stand on their own and agreed on the one starting ‘Time
passes’, all of which you can read here.
Hard to choose an extract; it ends:
Time for the
man at the bus stop
standing on one leg to tie
his shoe. Time taking
Night by the hand and
trotting off down the road.
Time passes oh boy. Time
got the jump on me yes it
did.
I read both the Reds in parallel,
moving between them; can’t remember when I was last so excited by a book, or
rather two. There is so much more to say
about them. The excitements include language,
form, intelligence both intellectual and emotional, worldly wisdom and
other-worldly, myth and modernity. And
the gaps: part of the thrill is exercising the imagination to supply what’s
been left out. Being a papyrologist.
