Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Autobiography of Red, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Creativity
Communication and Mystery
Time
Self and World
Summary
Analysis
In Appendix A, Carson offers three accounts of the rumor that Stesichoros was blinded for writing unfavorably of Helen of Troy. The first account, Suidas s.v. Palinodia, explains how Stesichoros got his sight back after writing Helen an encomium called “The Palinode.” The second account, Isokrates Helen 64, dictates that Helen blinded Stesichoros to assert her own power after the poet began his poem “Helen” with blasphemous material. The third account, “Plato Phaedrus 243a,” explains that mythology commonly punishes criminals. Homer hadn’t understood this, but Stesichoros had, so he wasn’t surprised when he was blinded for slandering Helen and began immediate work on “Palinode.”
A palinode is an ode whose rhetorical purpose is to redact claims the poet made in a previous ode. Stesichoros’s “Palinode” refuted the slanderous claims he made about Helen of Troy’s sexual indiscretions in his previous poem about her. That Stesichoros (supposedly) had his vision restored after writing the palinode symbolically reaffirms the idea that language has the power to alter reality.
Themes
