Troubling Adjectives

As we’ve discussed in class, Autobiography of Red is an extremely inventive and poetic novel in a vast multitude of ways. However, I want to focus on the use of adjectives , specifically ‘red’, in conversation with Dina Georgis’s literary essay. From the very beginning of the novel the use of the word ‘red’ becomes symbolic in terms of Geryon’s queer identity. Carson writes, “Total facts known about Geryon. Geryon was a monster everything about him was red,” (Carson, 37). Now, how can a person represent a color? ‘Red’ in this sense doesn’t so much describe the actual color of something, but more so describes the ostracization and queerness of Geryon’s character. This can prove troubling to the literal reader and confuses the meaning of adjectives in general. Throughout the entirety of the novel, Carson continues to use ‘red’ to describe things that don’t actually have color in order to fully engrain this redness or queerness into the audience’s brain. For example she says, “…Bolts of wind like slaps of wood and the bitter red drumming of wing muscle on air…” (Carson, 145). Because drumming cannot really have a color, this proves troubling to the reader, and makes one question the idea of adjectives in general. And if this “redness” directly means “queerness”, then Autobiography of Red also troubles queer identities. In her essay, Georgis says, “Red is not itself identity…it is the substance of confusing affects and physic conflicts from which signification is possible…” (Georgis, 158). Therefore leading one to believe that there is so much more to an identity than simply the label ‘queer’. This inventiveness of the troubling nature of adjectives serves to prove the troubling nature of the word queer in itself. By troubling something that is already seen as troubling, Carson’s novel continually proves to be innovative.