In her novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson reworks the myth of Hercules slaying the red-winged monster Geryon into a romance told from Geryon’s perspective. The premise of the novel itself is inventive, but the imaginative interview with Stesichoros that closes the novel is particularly inventive in its effort to remind the reader of the origins of Carson’s own work. By closing her novel with a fictional interview with Stesichoros, Anne Carson alludes directly to the process of invention by which she created Autobiography of Red and connects her own text to Stesichoros’s original inventive myth.
In the fictional interview, Stesichoros speaks about seeing, saying that he was “responsible for everyone’s visibility” (148). Here, Stesichoros is using the act of seeing as a metaphor for the act of writing. When Stesichoros says that by seeing, he was responsible for “everyone’s visibility,” he is describing the process of creating a certain vision of the world by means of a written text. Carson’s choice to portray Stesichoros as a bold artist making the world visible in new and innovative ways offers insight into how Carson perceives her own text in relation to Stesichoros’s. If Stesichoros’s original myth was responsible for creating its own vision, then Carson’s retelling renders that original myth visible in another way. By placing the interview with Stesichoros at the end of her own retelling of Stesichoros’s version of the myth, Carson draws attention to the balance between invention and influence that characterizes her text. While the interviewer’s conversation with Stesichoros reminds the reader that each piece of writing renders things visible in infinitely varied ways, Carson’s choice to place the interview at the end of her own vision of the myth serves as a reminder of the ancient influences at play in her text.