The autobiographical self: phenomenology and the limits of narrative self-possession in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

English Studies in Canada, Dec, 2005 by Stuart J. Murray

Philosophic Problems.

"I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us."

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

ATTENDING TO MARTIN HEIDEGGER's phenomenological insight to parse terms etymologically, (1) we find the following Greek roots when we read into the meaning of "autobiography": auto- (oneself) bin- (life) graphic (writing; from the verb graphein, to write). Thus, autobiography is the written story of one's life, one's life story. And yet, this act of "self"-writing frames "life" (bins) in such a way that the meaning of each term is obscured. "Life" interrupts the act of self-writing, exceeds it, even though the writing is about that life, and occurs within it, necessarily prior to that life's completion. Is "life" here closer to the act of writing (graphein), closer to the sense of oneself (autos), or something else altogether escaping the autobiography that strives to contain or convey it? And will that "life" be legible? (2) Is it the case, as Heidegger maintains, that what is closest to us experientially is furthest from us intellectually, least susceptible to analysis or storytelling, and most resistant to representation and linguistic convention? If "life" holds this place for us, between writing and being, then autobiographical criticism ought to consider the insights of phenomenology, for phenomenology seeks to grasp and to communicate the immediacy of experience while remaining faithful to its rich complexity.

In this study, I turn to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a way to open up Anne Carson's very scholarly and philosophically informed "novel in verse," Autobiography of Red. Merleau-Ponty helps us to understand perception and human subjectivity in the lifeworld-the Lebenswelt-in such a way that begins to do justice to the rich autobiographical life explored in Carson's text. Although the novel is called an autobiography, this titular term is itself unclear, its meaning unstable, because the novel is ostensibly less the autobiography of its author than the autobiography of its main character, Geryon, and about the world in which he dwells; it is the autobiography "of red," no less than the autobiography of the reader who writes his or her own life into its pages; and, more generally still, it is the autobiography of autobiographical writing itself. Autobiography and its proper author-subject--if indeed it has one--float almost indiscernibly through the text, ghostly, suspended by the text's seductive voices, which seem to claim a life of their own. Here, for example, are the opening lines from what Geryon calls his "Autobiography":

   Total Facts Known About Geryon.

   Geryon was a monster everything about him was red. Geryon
   lived on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place. Geryon's
   mother was a river that runs to the sea the Red Joy River Geryon's
   father was gold. Some say Geryon had six hands six feet
   some say wings. Geryon was red so were his strange red cattle.
   Herakles came one day killed Geryon got the cattle. (37)

What are we to make of these words, almost lyrical, with stilted, interrupting punctuation? They announce but fail to offer up "facts" in any ordinary sense, to be sure, while the periods disrupt the lyric flow, making it seem more list-like and factual. What is a monster? What is red? Or in what sense can one's mother be "a river" and one's father "gold"? Immediately, autobiography is posed as a "philosophic problem": facts will prove utterly insufficient in the expression of subjective life. We are vexed not by facts but by the values, perceptions, feelings, private metaphors, and hearsay that supplant the "facts" in the fragment above. "I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it" (105). In a certain manner, this is "true," but autobiography is less a question of concrete facts or "knowledge" than lived experience. In this vein I shall argue that Carson's phenomenological reading of Geryon's own very red, non-factual, experience helps to rescue the expression of subjective life from the strictures of conventional language and thought.

Carson is not the first to tell Geryon's story. Her Autobiography of Red offers an extended poetic narrative inspired by the ancient myth of Geryon--a red, winged monster slain by Herakles--whose adventures are told in the few remaining fragments originally written by the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros (ca. 600 BCE) and gathered under the title Geryoneis ("The Geryon Matter"). (3) For Carson, Stesichoros is a proto-phenomenologist and autobiographer: "[T]he extant fragments of Stesichoros' poem offer a tantalizing cross section of scenes, both proud and pitiful, from Geryon's own experience" (6; emphasis added). Carson opens her book with several of her own liberal translations of Stesichoros's fragments; she proceeds to offer her rendition of the Geryon myth as the postmodern coming-of-age story of a young boy who is, as in Stesichoros, a "strange winged red monster" (5). Ashamed of his wings, uncertain of what his colour might mean, and passionately in love with an older boy named Herakles, Geryon autobiographically struggles with his own monstrous subjectivity by composing the story of his life through sculpture, words, and photographs--an artful and often philosophical self-styling that would answer or at least push back the burning question, "Who am I?" An authentic answer will not merely deploy given norms and conventions. Thus, through Geryon, Carson calls for the aestheticization of experience, of things, to overturn ironclad logics that strive irrevocably to bind things to their meaningful identities. We find in her language and in her inimitable style an expression of the irreducible life that the body experiences through its complex and anxious being-in-the-world. She takes her lead from Stesichoros, who releases being, permits things to become unnamed, freeing them to their renaming. In the end, it is less a philosophical question than a rhetorical one, inspiring the autobiography to ask not just "Who am I?" but, rather, "Who can I say that I am?" In other words, autobiography must reflect upon the conditions through which self-writing is made possible, offering insight into the terms by which a self might be said to possess itself in language, even as it is possessed by a life that it will never fully comprehend.