Author: The Ghost of Hanukkah Past

The cover of Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson is a very simple one. Other than the few words that tell the reader what the novel is and who it is written by, there is a picture of a volcano that has recently erupted. The way one can tell that is because of the smoke that is rising from the volcanic crater. Volcanoes are mentioned many times throughout the novel, but why is that? It is because Geryon unconsciously views Herakles as a volcano.

Geryon begins to form an interest in volcanoes because of Herakles. Herakles tells him the story of the “Volcano man” and from that point on, Geryon spends much of his life thinking about volcanoes. Simultaneously, he also spends much of his life thinking about Herakles. The times we as readers see Geryon thinking about volcanoes are the same times he is either around Herakles or remembering their time together. He obsesses over these two separate objects but always at the same time.

Geryon’s reasoning for this is the fact that Herakles erupted, and when he did that, he changed Geryon’s life forever. Volcanoes are looked to by some cultures as something to be feared but also something to be worshiped. They are seen as gods and so is Herakles. In the Greek myth of Herakles, he is a demigod, his father being Zeus and his mother being a mortal woman. He completed his 12 labors in order to achieve immortality. Herakles expects to be praised and worshiped, but does not care about anyone else. Just like a volcano, he is something that seems beautiful from a distance, but the closer you get to him and the more time you spend near him, he is bound to hurt you. Geryon learns that first-hand.

Years after his first relationship with Herakles, Geryon runs into him again. He forms a sexual relationship with Herakles once more, but learns to keep a distance from him, to put on an armor to protect him. Herakles gave him that armor. When a volcano explodes, lava is thrown from the giant mountain and covers the surrounding area. But lava is just molten rock, so once that rock cools down, it becomes another layer added to the earth, or for Geryon, it becomes armor. Geryon may love Herakles, but he has learned that he is not better than a volcano.

Mala Ramchandin was forced to endure a horrific childhood. When she was quite young, her mother had planned to leave their home of Paradise Falls with Mala, Mala’s sister Asha, and her lover, Lavinia. When that did not happen, Mala and Asha were left to live with their father, who turned to raping Mala as a way to get back at his wife, Sarah, for leaving him. Eventually, Asha leaves too and Mala is left alone with her father, Chandin. Things all come to a head when Mala starts a secretive relationship with Ambrose Mahonty and when Chandin finds out, he attempts to kill Ambrose, but Mala kills Chandin first.

After all of this, Mala ends up living a life of solitude. With a minimal use of spoken language, she lives amongst nature and seems to enjoy life, but never forgets her horrible past. Mala becomes very deliberate with her use of spoken language and only uses it when she deems it absolutely necessary. One moment is when the police are searching her house and they say that they are worried about her safety. She responds with “You never had any business with my safety before.” and “Why now for…?” (Mootoo 193).

So why has Mala retreated from speaking? It is because she has learned that people will not help her, even if she is asking them to. Throughout her whole childhood, the town of Paradise Falls knew what her father was doing to her but did nothing. They continued to respect Chandin for he was still a man of God. Everyone who ever showed care for Mala leaves her as well. Her mother and Aunt Lavinia (even though they did not plan on leaving Mala and Asha behind, they still did), her younger sister Asha, and eventually Ambrose after her learns that Chandin had been raping Mala her whole life. For Mala, spoken language had never helped her in the past, it only seemed to hurt her. When she decided to live a life of solitude, she removed all of the things that caused pain in her life and being ignored was one of them. If she never spoke again, her words could never be ignored.

Eli Claire’s Stones in my Pockets, Stones in my Heart is a beautiful but complex chapter in one of his novels, Bodies. This chapter speaks on his experience growing up as an assigned female at birth person, and how he never fully felt that he fit into that assignment. He also speaks on the abuse he suffered through his father continually raping him as a child. The title of the chapter is a recurring theme where Claire describes how he used to collect stones as a kid. He creates this metaphor but seems to leave the meaning up to interpretation by the readers.

While reading this chapter of his novel, my first thought when it came to his metaphor of stones was how in Judaism, when a person dies, we place stones on their graves. There are a few reasons why or interpretations; to keep the person’s soul down on Earth, to keep demons from entering that grave, and because while flowers are beautiful to place by a grave, they eventually die. Reading Stones in my Pockets, Stones in my Heart through that lens creates a large meaning to Claire’s metaphor. That meaning is, even though Claire suffered a lot as a child from the abuse he received from his father and growing up feeling uncomfortable in his skin, the stones that he collected were a way to keep him grounded. As well, they were a shield or a piece of armor that he felt would protect him from the outside world.

Claire tells a story of when he was younger he had a caricature drawn of him at carnival. When his mother eventually ran into the artist, they both learned that the artist had “mistaken” Claire to be his mother’s son. After hearing that he would “smile secretly for weeks…” and  “reach down into my pockets to squeeze a stone tight in each fist.” Those stones were important to him and he used them to express his emotions of happiness by carrying them around with him and, like he explained in that one story, squeezing them, similarly how Jewish families show their love a grief through the stones they place on their loved ones’ grave.

On page 131 of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, the narrator calls their ex-lover Louise a “fallen angel”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a fallen angel is “[one] who rebelled against God and was cast down from heaven”. In the Bible, Lucifer is the only fallen angel so by claiming Louise is one as well, then the narrator is saying that there is a different God who cast their ex-lover down, but who could that be?

The God that the narrator is referring to is Louise’s ex-husband Elgin. He is a doctor who is researching how to cure cancer and has given himself a god-complex. Louise was married to Elgin for 10 years until she started an adulterous relationship with the narrator, therefore breaking her relationship, as well as one of the 10 Commandments. There is also an abundance of “s” sounds on page 131 like in the words “shuttered”, “suspects”, and “shoulder”. These sounds create the image of a snake preparing to hunt its prey, that prey being Louise and the snake being the narrator, which parallels the story of Adam and Eve. In that story, The Devil transforms himself into a snake to hide in the Garden of Eden and eventually convinces Eve to eat the Forbidden Fruit, therefore causing the fall of man. The narrator feels as if they are the devil that has now convinced Louise to start a relationship with them and for her then being cast down from high society, her home, her marriage, and eventually, top of the line medical care.

Elgin’s job is the cause of his god-complex and he learns that Louise has cancer, he finds a way to use it as a bargaining chip. He believes that he has the right to decide when a person can die by dangling treatment and the possibility of a better and longer life in front of Louise and giving the narrator, not Louise, an ultimatum; give her back or let her die. The narrator chooses for Louise, one again placing all three of them in a Devil versus God scenario. Despite that scenario, Elgin and the narrator aren’t all that different. They both decide what Louise can and can’t do and therefore removes all agency from Louise’s life. While the angel had a choice in leaving Elgin, the narrator believes it was their vicious ways that seduced her and then ultimately decides for Louise that she should go back to her “God”. The narrator has now left Louise after she has fallen victim to their prey but with no place to go. She could go back to Elgin, but she would never go back to the life she lived before. Instead, she would be forever stuck between the two opposing ends of the spectrum that Elgin and the narrator have created as God and Devil.