Author: august ambrose

“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.

“Mala’s abrupt withdrawal was welcome.  It was as though, as time passed, Ambrose had fallen in love with desire itself and the act of desiring was its own fulfillment.  …But when Mala pushed him gently away, he was forced to acknowledge the companion that desiring had become for him over the years.  He was, he realized, unwilling to jeopardize his relationship with desire.  If he succumbed to Mala’s treasures, desire could change, would disappear even” (pp. 217-218).

“[Ambrose] looked feebly around for a knife to protect himself, all the while feeling shame for her and for himself – as though he had been betrayed by Mala, and at the same time wrestling with the notion that she could not possibly, not conceivably have been agreeable to intimacies with her father.  In that instant of hesitation he so distanced himself from Mala that, like an outside observer, he saw the world as he had known and dreamed it suddenly come undone.   …[Ambrose] shrank with the thought that a call for help would expose the shameful goings-on in the house, to which he had become connected” (pp. 227-228).

 

These two passages relay Ambrose’s inner monologue as it relates to Mala, and they work well as foreshadowing for how he operates in the later years of his life.  Ever since Ambrose was a child, he was infatuated with Mala (Pohpoh, at that time) and the concept of being close to her forever, but never succeeded in wooing her.  After Ambrose went overseas, it seems as though his desire for the concept of a relationship with Mala was incubated, unable to be resolved because of lack of proximity, and so only grew.  However, because Ambrose knew little about Mala’s actual life in the first place, and missed out on years of development of her situation, his perception of her would likely have become an idealistic fantasy.  He became much more attached to the sensation of wanting her than her actual interiority, and this persisted even after he moved back to his hometown.  This is why the last couple of sentences of the first quote imply that achieving a serious intimate relationship with Mala came as second fiddle to his love for pining after her, because actually knowing her would put an end to fostering this years-long desire with which Ambrose had grown so comfortable.

The second quote drops the reader into Ambrose’s head just as he has run away from Mala’s final confrontation with her horrifically abusive father.  Throughout this passage, it becomes explicitly clear that his first priority is himself in this situation.  His desire for Mala became more about himself finally having his perfect version of her, who loved listening to him talk even though he didn’t explain the complicated terms and phrases he used, who would travel with him and cook for him, who would fall in love with him without having any baggage attached.  This is why his first response is to feel betrayed – for many years, he had built up desire for a much less complicated version of Mala, and now her reality was disrupting his belief.  The reader is aware that absolutely none of this is Mala’s fault, but Ambrose (at least in this moment) cannot shake the feeling that this is something she is doing to him.  (Of course, Ambrose is also definitely in shock, but reading into how Mootoo writes his kneejerk reaction can still tell us a lot about his state of mind.)  If we read Ambrose’s affection for Mala as a bit shallow, based more on his idea of her than who she has become while growing up, this could explain why his desire for her takes an abrupt backseat to the priority of his reputation in Lantanacamara.  He grew up on the island, and knows how people talk.  Again, he foreshadowed this, in a way: he did “succumb to Mala’s treasures”, and that did not break his illusions, but that part aligned with his hopes and dreams.  When he learned information about Mala that did not align, though, his bubble broke, and his trademark indecision paired with waning positive feelings towards the reality attached to Mala prompted him to extricate himself from the whole situation instead of trying to assist Mala in fighting her father.

Interestingly, Ambrose’s lifelong preoccupation with desire could explain his later obsession with sending Mala care packages and otherwise checking out of his life.  After that whole catastrophe, he was able to replace his desire for an uncomplicated Mala with a desire to rectify his mistakes that night and reconnect with the woman he loved.  He yearned for who he believed her to be, was briefly interrupted by a shocking reality check, and afterward returned to pining after her, but also after a version of himself who would have fought back and saved Mala instead of leaving her behind.

In “You’re the Only Friend I Need”, Heredia shows how Noel and (especially) Fabio are othered gender-wise by both their male and female peers.  Throughout the story, the two friends are thoroughly ignored by the boys of their school.  Outside of the bounds of this story’s timeline, it is implied that Noel and Fabio were long ago abandoned by the other boys because of “the secret that everyone knows, but no one braves themselves to say” (p. 35).  They possess mannerisms which position them as “less than” their male peers, because of how societally, AMAB people who adopt femininity are not just seen as vaguely strange, but also are looked down upon for “giving up” masculine power which is supposed to be coveted by all members of society.

Fabio ends up getting into a fist-fight with a popular girl after she calls him an offensive term because of his femininity, which Heredia describes as “unapologetic and exuberant.”  It is important to note how this resistance on his part is positioned within the story.  This reaction is not seen as Fabio reclaiming some level of masculine violence, but on the contrary, cements that Fabio is less than a “proper” boy is supposed to be.  It’s implied that his male peers wouldn’t even have deigned to fight a girl, because doing so would be construed as putting themselves on an equal playing field as her.  “After Fabio’s fight, there was no question,” Heredia writes.  “Fabio was a girl-fighting maricon, and Noel, by association, was maricon adjacent, far too close to be considered straight” (p. 36).  Even in fighting, which is typically considered a very cis-het male pursuit, Fabio’s context has doomed him to not-quite-boyhood, not-quite-girlhood.

When Noel decides to wear a less stereotypically-feminine outfit when going to the party with Fabio and Ren, Fabio is again quick to lash out, especially after Noel describes his decision as wanting “to look more cool than girly” (p. 39).  This, again, is an understandable reaction after Fabio has spent his entire adolescence being scorned by almost everyone he knows for expressing any amount of femininity.  A bit earlier in the story, when Ren is putting on makeup, Fabio is described as looking “as if he’s found a pearl after searching long and hopelessly in the dark,” and is lost for words.  Finally, someone Fabio looks up to is offering a path which doesn’t acquiesce to the default ideal of what someone like him should want to be.  However, his walls immediately spring back up when Noel expresses less comfort in himself looking girly and says it’s uncool, which once again places Fabio’s desires at the bottom of the familiar societal hierarchy.  He had been vulnerable enough to take the leap into presenting fully feminine, which Heredia established that he tries to do only when he feels safe, and is met with his best friend unexpectedly orienting himself with masculine ideals after all.  No wonder Fabio’s so defensive – it takes so little for his true self to be denigrated, explicitly by the gender-conforming boys and girls around him, and even implicitly, when Noel unthinkingly expresses that girliness can’t be cool, and that coolness is what they should strive toward.

“Cheating is easy.  There’s no swank to infidelity.  To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first.  You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on.  Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.” (p. 77)

“The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage.  Swear you’ll cleave only unto him or her and magically that’s what will happen.  Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex.  The charm didn’t work.  You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn’t work.  It’s not your fault is it?  Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.” (one paragraph later, p. 78)

 

These musings from Written on the Body’s narrator follow their train of thought after Jacqueline has just learned of their infidelity.  The narrator has been swept up into a self-admittedly familiar haze – the first few months spent teetering on the edge of an illicit tryst, then finally falling into a full-on affair.  From what has been established so far, the narrator is very used to being an affair partner, but not so much being the one actively cheating.  Still, it’s possible to surmise that rationalizations their partners have given in the past have informed the narrator’s justifications.  My first quote emphasizes how effortless it was for the narrator to become entangled with Louise.  They express that it’s “easy” to get into a rhythm of taking increasingly more from the trust built up in an established relationship.  I would assume that since the narrator elected to get into a relationship with a woman they found entirely bland, they had even fewer qualms this time than they would have otherwise.  There are no considerations of how Jacqueline might feel when she discovers that what she thought was a mutually-loving relationship was actually abandoned long ago by her partner.  The only hint of hesitance in this first quote appears in the last sentence, when the narrator extends their metaphor to imply that they should have gathered something meaningful from “all that taking”, but instead they end up bereft of any substantive relationship.  Interestingly, though, this does still frame things in a way that makes the narrator the main victim – they’re the one that’s been left high and dry.  Pay no attention to the partner whose trust has been violated.

The second quote holds a much more by-the-book justification for cheating.  The narrator voices the argument of placing all responsibility for maintaining an infidelity-free marriage onto the state-sponsored institution, not on the people involved.  There is no discussion here of incremental choices made on the part of the would-be cheater, so no accountability can be requested of them.  Elsewhere in the story, the narrator considers how fantasizing about cheating does end up damaging a relationship even though it seems like a too-strict boundary to uphold.  They conceptualize it as having given a portion of their heart away, even as they still lie in bed beside the person they’ve pledged themself to.  If they decide to continue going down that path instead of addressing the issue, communicating with their partner, and either deciding to recommit themself or break off the relationship, then emotional cheating can steal the passion and trust from a relationship just as much as physical cheating can.  In this selected quote, though, the narrator places the blame for cheating onto the cultural conceptualization of marriage as a “magical charm.”  Once someone discovers that it’s not that, and that people within monogamous relationships – even legally-married ones, gasp – are still capable of experiencing desire for people outside their relationship, they can’t be faulted for becoming disillusioned with the whole thing and drifting toward the next person/people they desire instead.

The last sentence especially makes this viewpoint clear: “Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire.”  Sure, if you’re viewing it as a spell that prevents you from ever experiencing attraction ever again, then yes, marriage as a construct will not prevent that from happening.  Conscious choices to continue nourishing your relationship, and still experiencing attraction but making the decision to stay with the person(s) you love and have decided to be loyal to, are important.  If you are so tempted to be in a relationship with someone else that you’re already halfway out the door either emotionally or physically, then ending your current relationship first would seem to be the more moral thing to do instead of hurting the person(s) you’re with.   Mutual decisions to keep choosing your partner(s) instead of other people are what sustains the trust of a relationship, not a legal document.  The narrator undercuts this specific argument about marriage in the next paragraph, but – importantly – allows this same argument about disillusionment to justify their cheating on Jacqueline.  People don’t just fall magically into cheating; lots of tiny decisions are made along the way to get to that point.  However, people invested in preconceived romantic ideas of following their hearts outside a relationship they made the choice to commit to, or people who would rather just wash their hands of any responsibility to not damage the trust of their partner(s), would follow the same line of reasoning that the narrator’s currently allowing themself to follow.