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We can say that no writer who began in a rather lonely struggle against the power of language could or can avoid being coopted by it, either in the posthumous form of an inscription within official culture, or in the present form of a mode which imposes its image and forces him to conform to expectation. No way out for this author than to shift ground - or to persist - or both at once.
- Roland Barthes, Leçon
I don't think writing is an effort of control. It's an effort of collaboration with whatever insights are available there.
-Anne Carson (to Kevin McNeilly)
In an essay on the ancient Greek poet Stesichoros that frames her Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), Anne Carson writes that "[t]here were many different ways to teU a story like this" (5). Her "this" refers to the tenth labour of Herakles, his kUling the monster Geryon, which Stesichoros' Geryoneis and Carson's Autobiography of Red (Red) "tell" from Geryohs perspective in "different ways" - his in lyric fragments, hers as a verse novel with the rather odd generic tag, "autobiography." Ian Raes work on Red amasses Carson's fragments into the concept of the "hybrid form" (Poet's Novel 232). Rae argues that she destabüizes the neat ordering impUed by a single label.1 For him, the "mysterious designation [of] 'autobiography'" best highlights her play with "fixed modes of representation and perception" (Poet's Novel 228, 234). Rae may be right to identify Carson's general interest in creating productive discomfort in her reader, but the autobiographical apparatus remains the most radical and beguiling aspect of her text. There are stiU "many different stories" to uncover with the following question: Why is Red - part academic essay, part classicist translation, part third-person account of Geryons life - caUed an "autobiography" at all?
Three recent answers to the question of why Red is classified as an autobiography indicate a developing trend in scholarship on the text. Critics invoke the insights of a major philosopher to distill Carson's project. Jacqueline Plante reads Carson's transgression of "categorical boundaries" in terms of Gules Deleuze's notion of "becoming" (175); Stuart Murray aligns Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theories about "perception and human subjectivity in the lifeworld" with her "autobiography of...