Your name is the only thing you have for your entire life. Your name is always with you, a part of you, and yet your name is invisible. A ghost limb, guiding you through the world as do your feet. But your heels can develop blisters, your toes can grow warts, your toenails can cut your skin if you let them get really long. What pain does the name inflict upon the soul, if it inflicts no pain upon the body?
Do our names decide our fates? Are our names the titles of our photographs, presenting themselves before the fragments of our person? Geryon doesn’t express himself through spoken language, yet language precedes, and helps him conceive, his photographs. In chapter 38 of Autobiography of Red, Geryon has a dream in the backseat of the rental car on the way to Huaraz. He dreams that “creatures that looked/like young dinosaurs (yet they were strangely lovely) went crashing/through underbrush and tore/their hides which fell behind them in long red strips. He would call/the photograph ‘Human Valentines.’” (Carson, 131).
Geryon’s dream, his artistic vision, is nameless. Nor do the creatures he dreams about have names; they are “like young dinosaurs” (Carson, 131), but calling them dinosaurs would be wrong. They are living without language. Escaping language. The “long red strips” of “their hides” represent the traces of those who cannot speak in the “Human” world (Carson, 131). We see these animals, these quasi-humans, these humans with red wings, but we do not hear them. We see them, but we do not See or Understand them.
“Human Valentines”: Their love for us expressed in our language, but expressing their vision. The name of the photograph precedes the photograph itself (maybe the photograph will never even be taken), but the name follows the essence of something, someone, that defies what I can write about, that defies what Geryon can say.
Maybe we grow into our names, or grow with them. Maybe our art, our lives, are nameless. Maybe this is why people change their names. Maybe some people will never feel satisfied with language. Sometimes I fear I am one of those people.
Cinnamongirl, what a fascinating post! I, too, love thinking about names. In my opinion, names do not limit us. Rather, they allow us to understand the world and our place within it. We cannot begin to know a thing without first attempting to name it. In Autobiography of Red, Geryon feels placeless until he discovers he is a Yazcol Yazcamac. This name imbues him with power and allows him to find his place in history.
I think you might be interested in Michael Ohl’s “The Art of Naming.” (I’ve attached the citation below; you can access it via the Waidner-Spahr Library’s website.) Ohl analyzes the various scientific names given to organisms throughout history. The book uses a bioscientific and historical perspective to explain why names matter. Ohl argues that “[l]anguage forms the framework within which scientific knowledge is gained and secured” (274). In other words, naming “creates [an] order” that we can make sense of (274). Still, Ohl questions who gets to create this order. In his opinion, the power ultimately resides with “the collectors and researchers, experts and amateurs who make the study of nature their life’s work” (274). What does it mean that the named object or organism cannot decide its own name? Why does it matter? This might be worth exploring in a future paper.
Alternatively, you might be interested in David E. Leary’s “Naming and Knowing: Giving Forms to Things Unknown.” (I’ve also attached this citation below; you can access it via JSTOR.) Leary argues that “we are necessarily creatures of metaphor” (267). Since we cannot name every object, we must approximate by creating metaphors. This framework might be particularly applicable to Autobiography of Red. Geryon cannot name his queerness, so he attributes it to redness. The metaphor of redness also encompasses his creativity, individuality, anger, loneliness, and other feelings. Why is it so frustrating to lack a name? Why do we grope for names in the dark using metaphors? Perhaps you could expand on the idea of names from this more philosophical perspective.
All in all, great post! I think this is a fantastic topic to expand upon in a future paper! If you end up writing it, I would love to read it.
Leary, David E. “Naming and Knowing: Giving Forms to Things Unknown.” Social Research, vol. 62, no. 2, 1995, pp. 267–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971094. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.
Ohl, Michael. The Art of Naming. Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, The MIT Press, 2018.
Cinnamongirl, I love this! I’m going to add on to what Therun Silver noted above, about how we feel the need to name things –impose a name onto something or someone– before we can try to understand it. This is even true of our own names. Traditionally, they are not something we give to ourselves, save those who have changed their name or adopted a preferred name. Our names are given to us by others based on what they think best fits us. Our name becomes our first categorical term to which all the rest of the categories we belong to (self-defined or imposed by others) fall under. We, as infants, are imposed upon with a name by which to understand who we are before we even have an identity and a life to understand, for sometimes we are given a name before we have even taken our first breath.
I really love the connection of naming to Autobiography of Red. Naming is how one claims their identity but, it also has association with how people interpret you. For example, some people have reported job discrimination based on their names (ethnic names or non-western names). Also, we associate certain names with certain attributes such as “basic names” associated with names like Emma or Sarah. The name-less is also interesting when discussing Autobiography of Red because Geryon knows the dinosaurs but can’t name them, probably because their non human like him. Also, Geryon feeling this unnamed queerness in his own life. It makes think about how much power does being able to name a feeling, sensation or person have on our emotional and mental state.