Anne Carson’s novel, Autobiography of Red, deviates from expectations by retelling the myth of Geryon and Herakles while allowing Geryon to remember the more traditional version. Instead of simply rewriting the myth, Carson is examining Geryon’s story in the context a story that ends in Geryon death. This process of contextualizing the novel against the ancient myth is made apparent when Carson writes, “New ending/All over the world the beautiful red breeze went on blowing hand/in hand”(38). This is a declaration that, by the end of the novel, the ending of the myth will have drastically changed.
By engaging Geryon’s death in the traditional myth of Herakles, and stating a new ending, Carson is not only challenging our perceptions of the heroic Herakles inside the text, but in the context of the myth, and, perhaps, even in the broader scope of the ideals of conquest and power that the mythical Herakles represents.
But this is a dangerous interpretive path as it leads us away from the main character, who is promised a new ending, Geryon. If we take this self-aware focus on shifting the story as a shift from the traditional narratives, then we must shift our perspective away from a traditional hero, and towards Geryon, a character who lacks clear symbolic structures. His identity is something unclear, symbolized by the vague word “red,” otherwise undescribed by language. And it is only through the contextualized shift in focus that Geryon’s redness can be giving a new ending, while remaining separate from language