Main Character Syndrome, As Experienced by A Side Character

“Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts./
Even when they were lovers/
he had never known what Herakles was thinking.  Once in a while he would say,/
Penny for your thoughts!/
and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish/
he’d eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago./
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked.” (p. 132)

Down to their colloquial name, the “Labors of Heracles/Herakles/Hercules” are inseparable from the demigod himself.  He is the one who was cursed by Hera, he is the one who pledged to redeem himself by performing labor for a wicked king, and he is the one who triumphs over all twelve challenges.  Narrativizations of the original myth focus on Herakles’s heroism and ingenuity, and on how he inspires unlikely collaborators.  Everything centers around his personal struggle against all of the monsters he must fight or fool, including the king.

On the other hand, not much time at all is spent in the minds of the monsters.  This is on purpose, of course – the original purpose of the myth is to tell long-suffering Herakles’s story, and the creatures he encounters are little more than creative obstacles.  King Augeus (the owner of the immense and never-before-cleaned Augean stables) and Queen Hippolyta (leader of the Amazons and owner of a very cool belt bequeathed to her by her father Ares) were given the most dialogue in their sections of Herakles’s story, presumably because of their humanity.  The Nemean Lion, Lerynaean Hydra, and Cretan Bull, however, are unquestionably just things to be overpowered.

Originally, Geryon is a three-bodied giant.  His first action in the myth is to attack Herakles (after the hero first kills his herdsman and two-headed dog), and Herakles promptly kills him with a poisoned arrow.  The rest of the myth is devoted to how exactly Herakles manages to transport his cattle.  Nobody focuses on Geryon’s humanity because he is there to serve a purpose – specifically, he is there to further Herakles’s growth and development as a hero.

In Ann Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red, she writes of how it may feel to be caught in Herakles’s orbit.  The reader never gets the sense that Herakles cares about Geryon in particular.  Herakles seems to prefer having a person to have sex with, or to bounce his adventurous ideas off of.  Sometimes he is kind in a romcom-male-lead sort of way: putting Geryon’s hands under his own shirt when he notices that they’re cold, or bringing Geryon along on volcanic adventures.  Still, he never convinces the reader that the person accompanying him needs to be Geryon.  He doesn’t seem to try to do so, honestly.  Over and over, Herakles shows that he doesn’t truly see Geryon, that he wishes Geryon would express himself a bit more “normally” (read: detachedly) instead of being so emotionally caught-up in their relationship, that he doesn’t understand why Geryon makes so much art about captivity, and so on.

When Herakles separates himself from Geryon near the story’s middle by offhandedly remarking that Geryon should be getting back to his own house, it doesn’t seem as though he’s particularly broken up about it.  This cavalier separation deeply hurts Geryon, and though he continues going through the motions while time passes, his thoughts are never too far away from Herakles.  When Geryon eventually happens to reunite with Herakles – as though his story is connected to the other man’s by a tether – Herakles has another partner, because of course he does.  Herakles flirts with both Geryon and Ancash, persuades them to help him steal a tiger sculpture, and leads them around South America as he pleases, all the while never really seriously engaging with either of them.  He must have charmed Ancash somehow, but the reader would be forgiven for assuming that Herakles just happens to get people to fall in love with him because of a protagonist-aura he emits.  He’s so used to getting his own way, to having people around who will do him favors and assist with his dreams, that he never puts much effort into maintaining positive relationships.  Herakles just seems to believe that things will work out for him – and so far, they have.  Even at the end of the story, when Ancash figures out that Herakles and Geryon had sex while Herakles and Ancash were still in a relationship, Herakles notices exactly why Ancash is upset, then looks back to Geryon and asks, “Volcano time?”  He doesn’t really seem to think that this will have negative ramifications for him – he’s just moving on to the next part of his adventure.

Even though the reader inhabits Geryon’s mind throughout Autobiography of Red, it becomes clear that Geryon’s story is uncontrollably tied to Herakles.  He can’t seem to help but care about him for the vast majority of the novel, even when Herakles demonstrably doesn’t care at all.  Similarly to how Herakles in the Greek myth only encountered Geryon long enough to extract what he wanted and then exit, uncaring of the damage he did to Geryon, Carson’s Herakles is always looking through Geryon to his own, singular future.  Everyone around him is just a supporting character, there to be used and then discarded in favor of the next opportunity.