Discarded Histories and Queer Affects in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red

This article takes up Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) as an allegory for the discarded history of queerness. The novel in verse rewrites the Greek myth of Herakles (Hercules) and the red-winged monster Geryon as a queer love story. In Carson’s rendition, Herakles is not a colonizer who murders Geryon to seize his red cattle but a lover who steals and breaks his fragile heart. Born hybrid in a modern-day context, Geryon struggles with narrating his life in words and instead takes pictures.

By asking us to pay attention to history’s queer affective traces, Carson invites us to think about how bodies become discarded social monsters and how monsters must learn to live in their bodies. She turns our attention to the traumas and their affects that render the activities of subjectivity unpredictable and undecipherable. In Autobiography of Red, “queer” is not simply sexual orientation but the abject perversions of difference, not easily nameable. Without the familiar registers of identity, we are invited to witness and to be touched by Geryon’s life through his photo-autobiography, which captures the affect of experience, otherwise lost to the foreclosures of time.