Anne Carson: “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros”

What do the words red meat conjure? The rare, the raw, the uncooked, a slab of flesh, the objectified, the carnal, the demands and nourishment of conventional masculinity, the slaughter, the substantial—see “the meat of it”; see also “the heart”—the ways people’s minds meet what they read, have read. Anne Carson’s “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros”—the second piece in Autobiography of Red (1998)—requires entertaining this question.

To help readers along, “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros” is preceded by a short essay, “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” Carson—classicist, translator, and writer—introduces the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros, whose “Geryoneis” serves as the inspiration for Autobiography of Red. In the essay, Carson elucidates Stesichoros’s contribution to poetry, claiming that, in verse, “Stesichoros released being” by abandoning the fixity of the Homeric epithet, whereby a sea, for instance, could be only “wine-dark” or “wine-faced.” Instead, Stesichoros activated adjectives, those “latches of being in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.” Thus, she argues, Stesichoros allowed “[a]ll the substances in the world [to go] floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless.”

Perhaps gesturing toward the translator’s ultimately impossible task of fidelity to the original text, a question inevitably arises when reading “Red Meat”: to what extent are these pieces translations and to what extent are these pieces inventions—or interventions, adding to a story that has been lost to readers, appending it, like one of Stesichoros’s liberating adjectives? Some of Carson’s imagery is whimsically anachronistic, as in the description of the blushing or flushing of Geryon’s mother, “Engineer of his softness,” in the fifth section: “Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see/ Coil of the hot plate starting to glow.” In the subtitle, Carson calls the sequence fragments rather than translations, and readers are served by remembering that to fragment is to break, which one might activate by breaking with or away from. Carson’s training as a classicist may lead some to overlook the initial question the sequence poses; she has, after all, provided, among other texts, rich translations of Sappho with a translator’s note in If Not, Winter (2003). The subtitle to If Not, Winter, like “Red Meat,” also highlights fragmentation—reading not Translations of Sappho but instead Fragments of Sappho. The language of fragments in the titles is at very least a reminder of all to which readers do not have access because Stesichoros’s and Sappho’s recovered work is incomplete.

Still, the tasks the two books set up are very different: one positions Carson as the author and the other positions her as the translator. Inserting the fragments of Stesichoros into a generically creative text creates different permissions and allows Carson to engage a “thrill” she describes at the end of her translator’s note in If Not, Winter: “at the inside edge where [Sappho’s] words go missing, a sort of antipoem […] condenses everything you ever wanted her to write—but they cannot be called texts of Sappho’s and so they are not included in this translation” (xiii). Perhaps “Red Meat” is part poem, part antipoem—a continued exploration of desire, a favored topic of Carson’s, whose first book, Eros the Bittersweet, inquires into the role lack plays in the composition of desire.

Three appendices follow the “Red Meat” sequence, after which comes Autobiography of Red, the verse novel reimagining the red-winged, three-bodied Geryon’s death at the hand of Herakles, whose 10th labor is to steal Geryon’s red cattle, which leads to the subsequent killing of Geryon. The unwieldiness of categorization, whether of genre or identity, is amplified throughout Autobiography of Red by all that one cannot pin down, including the author of the titular autobiography, the central novel in verse. Is Red shorthand for Geryon, or is the color red itself responsible for the narrative, for this particular record of redness?

Though in the myth, Geryon’s death is literal, in the contemporary retelling, it is not. An arrow through Geryon’s head becomes a metaphorical arrow through his heart; lovestruck, Carson’s Geryon suffers without the respite of death. Unlike the novel in verse, the fourth fragment in “Red Meat” features Geryon foreseeing his death and the slaughter of his cows and pondering his mortality and the frictive possibility of immortality. This inquiry into selfhood leads to a consideration of metaphor versus substance in the 11th fragment: “Are there many little boys who think they are a/ Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon.” Finally, in the 13th and 14th fragments, readers see the death of Geryon and his dog, the two-headed Orthos (Orthros). Carson writes,

Arrow means kill It parted Geryon's skull like a comb Made
The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a
Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.

In an earlier book, Plainwater (1995), Carson connects the color red to the concept of shame in a journal entry from a contemporary pilgrim walking the road to Santiago de Compostela. The pilgrim writes,

Red, My Cid informs me, is the only color wolves see: this is taken as clear testimony, in ancient Celt-Iberian belief, that they are genuinely royal animals […] And there is still more red, as we move from the museum to the cathedral, for the cathedral at Astorga wears a deep blush. Its porch of rose limestone is inscribed with scenes of shame: Christ expelling moneylenders from the temple, and others. Now we are close to the heart of the color. Shame.

The poppy-breeze simile highlights succumbing to power as the source of shame and makes the poppy culpable for its nature, a delicacy that keeps it from remaining upright or confident (holding its head up) in the presence of wind, which in the fragment is erotically charged via the adjective Nude. 

Autobiography of Red ends with an interview with Stesichoros, who may or may not be parading as Gertrude Stein. There is an autobiography within the verse novel in which, among other entries—sometimes photographic, sometimes sculptural—Carson’s Geryon writes an account of himself that echoes the account readers first get in “Red Meat.” In “VI. Ideas,” Geryon writes an entry he titles “Total Facts Known About Geryon”: he reduplicates, synthesizes, and revises the details of Geryon’s life provided in “Red Meat,” as if he has consulted his own mythology laid out in the essay and fragments. Interestingly, he maintains the third person point of view, creating distance between his mythology and himself. “Total Facts Known About Geryon” calls back to the title of the 15th fragment in “Red Meat”—“Total Things Known About Geryon”—with the assuredness of the language of “facts” iterating the myth’s truth value. The first line of Geryon’s own “Total Facts Known About Geryon” mirrors the first line in the fragments: “Geryon was a monster everything about him was red.” Geryon is yet again reduced to his redness (perhaps supporting the desire to read Red in the titular autobiography as a metonym for Geryon himself). Though the fragments foreground an explanation for Herakles’s murder of Geryon (“Herakles came and/Killed him for his cattle”), the autobiographical entry is more ambiguous. Geryon writes, “Herakles came one/ day killed Geryon got the cattle.” The facts are followed by “Questions and Answers,” which considers only one question, despite the plurality in the subtitle: “Why did Herakles kill Geryon?” The entry is a point of discussion in a parent-teacher conference, in which Geryon’s mother observes, concernedly, that it seems as if Geryon does not write happy endings, an observation that inspires action in Geryon. Revising the perceived sad ending of the entry, Geryon again borrows from “Red Meat,” this time its final fragment, writing, “All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand/ in hand,” shifting away from self-centering and instead highlighting red’s continuance without him and its propensity for connection, despite Geryon’s own alienation. Redness is not exclusive to boys but can belong to breezes too.

Because Carson’s Geryon does not die as a result of his encounters with Herakles, he is able to reappear in the sequel Red Doc> (2013), in which his cattle play a prominent role. The sequel sees Geryon saying his final good-byes to his dying mother and envisions a reconnection between Geryon and Herakles, who is now a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. H of H Playbook (2021) returns again to the myth of Herakles (with a cameo by Geryon), engaging Euripides’s fifth-century Greek tragedy Herakles. Whether engaging with the work of Stesichoros, Sophocles, Simonides of Keos, Sappho, or Euripides and importing their tactics into her own compositions, Carson demonstrates that the study of language is a study of living and relationality and that telling stories is a way of bearing witness to the daily dramas of living—an act of preservation (and recognition). Her revivifications or poetic excavations create worlds in the gaps of what can’t be recovered but can be re-covered, trod upon again and again, an affirmation of the inherent meatiness of myth.