The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and the Limits of Narrative Self-Possession in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

Abstract

Philosophic Problems. will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation consciousness is recognized only after failure communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us. Anne Carson, Autobiography 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 autobiography: auto- (oneself) + bin- (life) + graphic (writing; from the verb graphein, to write). Thus, autobiography is the written story one's life, one's story. And yet, this act self-writing frames life (bins) in such way that the meaning each term is obscured. Life interrupts the act 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 writing (graphein), closer to the sense oneself (autos), or something else altogether escaping the autobiography that strives to contain or convey it? And will that life be legible? (2) Is 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 phenomenology, for phenomenology seeks to grasp and to communicate the immediacy experience while remaining faithful to its rich complexity. In this study, I turn to the phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty as way to open up Anne Carson's very scholarly and philosophically informed in verse, Autobiography Red. Merleau-Ponty helps us to understand perception and human subjectivity in the lifeworld-the Lebenswelt-in such way that begins to do justice to the rich autobiographical 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 its author than the autobiography its main character, Geryon, and about the world in which he dwells; is the autobiography of red, no less than the autobiography the reader who writes his or her own into its pages; and, more generally still, is the autobiography autobiographical writing itself. Autobiography and its proper author-subject--if indeed has one--float almost indiscernibly through the text, ghostly, suspended by the text's seductive voices, which seem to claim their own. Here, for example, are the opening lines from what Geryon calls his Autobiography: Total Facts Known About Geryon. Geryon was monster everything about him was red. Geryon lived on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place. Geryon's mother was 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 these words, almost lyrical, with stilted, interrupting punctuation? They announce but fail to offer up in any ordinary sense, to be sure, while the periods disrupt the lyric flow, making seem more list-like and factual. What is 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 philosophic problem: facts will prove utterly insufficient in the expression subjective life. We are vexed not by facts but by the values, perceptions, feelings, private metaphors, and hearsay that supplant the in the fragment above. will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it (105). …