As its title suggests, Autobiography of Red is a book that deals with the formation of identity. Geryon, the protagonist, begins constructing his autobiography even before he learns to write, fashioning a sculpture out of a cigarette glued to a tomato in an attempt at self-expression. As Geryon grows older, his preferred tool for creative self-expression becomes a camera, and his autobiography takes the form of a photographic essay. Geryon’s ongoing attempts at identity formation are artistic and interpretive. He is an artist rather than a documentarian. As such, his autobiography becomes a personal, subjective meditation on his experiences rather than a presentation of stable, objective, and unchanging facts. In this way, the novel suggests that a person’s identity rests in their subjective, often creative interpretations of their life’s experiences and their attempt to fashion those interpretations into a coherent whole.
The novel further emphasizes this idea in its formal structure as well. Autobiography of Red is Carson’s retelling of the Greek myth of Geryon. The book opens with an essay and appendices concerning the Greek poet Stesichoros’s adaptation of the myth of Geryon in his lyric poem Geryoneis, which serves as Carson’s most direct inspiration. Carson’s retelling of the surviving fragments of Stesichoros’s poem takes even further interpretive license, turning an ancient lyric poem into a coming-of-age story about a young, red-winged monster boy growing up in 20th-century North America. These introductory materials blend genres of poetry, verse, and essay into a genre-bending, innovative work. The creativity of this compositional choice, combined with Geryon's creative endeavor of constructing his autobiography, the work’s central focus, highlights creativity and self-fashioning’s central role in the construction of identity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Identity and Creativity ThemeTracker
Identity and Creativity Quotes in Autobiography of Red
Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches. Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver.
Once she said the meaning
it would stay.
Inside is mine, he thought.
Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved.
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.
All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
How do you think it feels
growing up in a house full
of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high.
His eyes met hers and they began
to laugh. They laughed
until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back
to opposite walls.
Geryon’s life entered a numb time, caught between the tongue and the taste.
Yellow? said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams
he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow!
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
There is no person without a world.
It was not the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair.
[…] Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.
It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.
You can’t be alive and think about nothing.
“…I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
I’m a master of monsters aren’t I?
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.
There is one thing I want from you.
Tell me.
Want to see you use those wings.
This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty.
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.
