I was struck by our conversation in class surrounding the ending of chapter 1, “Justice” from An Autobiography of Red. I was wary of this book specifically because I thought it might be hard to understand due to its verse, but that hasn’t been true so far. I believe that the primary reason for this retelling’s coherency and poignancy is actually Anne Carson’s choice to write in verse. I am going to look briefly at how poetry can bring us closer to the text, and how this serves this particular story well. I would also like to compare An Autobiography of Red to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, to emphasize how the verse form is a powerful tool in the literary world.
The excerpt from An Autobiography of Red that I would like to focus on is, “gripping his new bookbag tight/ in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,/ while the first snows of winter/ floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced/ all trace of the world” (l.55-58). Geryon is able to recall these moments in great detail because of the verse form. What’s so intriguing about poetry is its ability to draw the reader in extremely close. In some ways, there is an expectation that this is what poetry will do— make the reader truly understand the human experience through detail. There is a focus on slowness and careful examination, as poetry often doesn’t need to be as expansive as an entire novel. In that way, it allows for lines like these that don’t explicitly further the plot, but provide sensory details that suggest Geryon’s isolation.
When looking for connections to make with this text, I kept coming back to The Buried Giant. I’m currently reading this novel for another English course, and one of the themes it discusses is memory— or the loss of it. Set in a post-Arthurian England, the characters are haunted by a mist that robs them of their memory. Essentially, it is a collective loss of memory regarding the traumas they faced during war. The writing style in this book is starkly different from that of An Autobiography of Red. Although much of the prose is detail-oriented, it is difficult to slow down on a single memory, because there are so few. Here, the story needs the ability to move forward while still describing all that has happened in the present. Where prose works to convey the themes in The Buried Giant, it would be unlikely to serve An Autobiography of Red well. Yet, verse is sometimes less enthusiastically read because of its apparent differentiation from traditional prose. The retelling of this myth, which draws itself in closely to Geryon as a character, begs for the reflectiveness that poetry can bring through the examination of details. Verse, however arduous it may be to read, is a crucial component of literature, and one that Carson was masterful in choosing for this story.
This is the first time I am reading a novel in verse. It has been an interesting experience, but I have come to quite like it. I agree that there is a focus on the slowness and careful examination. When reading the novel the breaks give the reader a chance to slow down and really imagine and think about what Carson is writing about. It gives the readers a chance to feel the novel. In regular chapter novels you just continue reading and do not really stop and think about what you have just read.
I love your thoughts on sensory details – I found that one of the aspects of verse form I liked most in this novel, even if it was scary at first, was the usage of line breaks throughout the text. There are many points where a line break allows the story to convey a sort of “split” thought for Geryon. A full sentence in the text may convey one thought (perhaps something more obvious to the situation), but the line breaks allow the reader to understand the thought as something slightly different (sometimes allowing for more nuanced aspects of Geryon’s character to be revealed). This is something that I do not think would be as easily achieved through prose, and I do think the unpredictability of the verse form reflects Geryon’s character in some ways too!