“What is time made of?”
“Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.”
Autobiography of Red warps time in a different manner than our other texts have. With Cereus Blooms at Night and Written on the Body, and even LOCA, time has moved non-chronologically, shifting between past and present fluidly (in its prose), but sometimes abruptly in execution. Here, however, time moves from past to present, Geryon and Herakles age, and life continues on. From the wired telephone to the television, society has advanced as well. Despite the linear progression of the story, however, something about the dynamic of time is still off. These characters are not originally of the time in which this narrative is set. They are figures from the past that have been thrust into the future, remolded to fit in that world, but still inherently their original selves. In retelling this myth, Carson has suggested that these characters can –and do– exist independently from time, and can live at any time –just as queer people have and do.
In this way, Carson has queered time by weaving the past and present together (merging ancient myth with present time), and has also rendered time irrelevant (also queering time, but differently). The second example of queer time –in which time means nothing– is not only evident in the narrative composition, but also thematically within the story. Geryon is not only fixated on what time is and why, but his main hobby –photography– is disrupting time by pausing and preserving it. With his photos, the “then” becomes permanent through the photograph. That moment is then able to occupy a type of existence in continuity for the rest of time, not just when the moment originally happened, just as Herakles and Geryon occupy a time period in this narrative long past when their original myth takes place.
Megamind, this is a great post! I wonder if your analysis could also apply to the poetic and literary allusions in the book. Take the epigraph, for instance. Though Emily Dickinson wrote her poems in the past, her pieces still affect the present lives of Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash. They bring Geryon and Herakles back together in Buenos Aires, and they allow Geryon to better understand his identity. In this way, they alter the present and shape the future. Though she is long dead, Dickinson is preserved through her words. The same can be said of Heidegger, Whitman, and other writers alluded to in the text. Through writing, a fleeting thought or play on words is immortalized forever in ink and parchment. How is literature similar to Geryon’s photography, and how is it different? Now that Geryon has recorded his story in his autobiography, will he, too, exist forever? Is this why the three boys find “immortality on their faces” at the book’s end? (146) I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you want to expand upon this topic for a future paper, I would recommend checking out André Aciman’s “Homo Irrealis.” During the Clarke Forum lecture, Aciman explained his belief in irrealis moods. Essentially, he argues that the past and future constantly color our present. Rather than living in the now, we live in the might-be and the might-have-been. We cannot differentiate the present from the past and future, and we do not want to. We are a species that constantly reflects, anticipates, ponders, and ruminates. Perhaps this philosophy could represent a form of queer time. If we never exist in the now, when exactly do we exist, and how? I’d love to see you apply Aciman’s framework to Carson’s text! If you end up writing this potential paper, I’d love to read it. (Listen to me already thinking about the future again!)
I enjoyed reading your post! It helped me understand the concept of time in Autobiography of Red. I knew it was relatively linear, but the time still felt like queer time in a way. One of your claims, at the beginning, about how queer people have existed in many spaces throughout time and that Carson has made a commentary on that by placing Geryon and Herakles in a more modern time really resonated with me. Often times we have received this watered down version of history in a supposed heteronormative setting. An argument some people make is that there’s “more queer people now than before so it’s just a trend” or something like that. Yet, queer people have always existed. Emily Dickinson for that matter, she lived in the 1800s. Then especially in Ancient Greece. From poets like Sappho, we get this rich history that many people ignore. But queer people have been here this whole time.