Anne Carson plays with language, color, time, symbology, and gender a lot in Autobiography of Red, in the name of guiding the reader through Geryon\u2019s mind and his telling of the story. Every bit of information espoused in the novel \u2013 whether through metatextual symbology (between the book and the ancient Greek legend), Geryon\u2019s perception of colors (red, as himself, yellow, as he is seen, and blue, as Herakles is), themes of natural disasters and photography \u2013 allows the reader, in their mind, to embody the mind of Geryon and the strange, colorful way he interprets the world. The poetic prose writing style is a deviation from the modern genre, and yet also link to the past, to the ancient Greek stories of gods and monsters (esp. the translated tale of Geryon at the beginning of the book). Geryon\u2019s love of photography as well offers an interesting relationship with time; the most chaotic photographs \u2013 those in motion, in progress, time-lapses \u2013 are the most disturbing to Geryon, and yet the ones he finds himself most drawn to. The relationship between red and Geryon (the bound wings, the seating for an audience, the volcano), and blue and Herakles (sex, desire, masculinity), is also worth noting. These juxtapositions create embodiments of the conception of queerness, and the use of time, in the context of these other themes, alludes to the timelessness of queerness, seeming to say, \u2018we\u2019ve always been here\u2019.<\/p>\n
The text, in itself, is inherently meta and uses its inventiveness to create a commentary on the juxtaposition of the monolithic norm and the personal, chaotic, fluid nature of reality. Each invention creates a link to the queer narrative and its relationship that acts both outside and within Herakles, blue\u2014 and the monolith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anne Carson plays with language, color, time, symbology, and gender a lot in Autobiography of Red, in the name of guiding the reader through Geryon\u2019s mind and his telling of the story. Every bit of information espoused in the novel \u2013 whether through metatextual symbology (between the book and the ancient Greek legend), Geryon\u2019s perception … Continue reading title<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3896,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3896"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}