革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学刘倩倩

学校代码：10270 分类号：H31 学号：202200232
硕士学位论文
革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学
学院：外国语学院
专业：英语语言文学
研究方向：英美文学
研究生姓名：刘倩倩
指导教师：陈庆勋教授
完成日期： 2023 年 3 月
The Photographic Diary of Geryon：The Space Poetics in
Autobiography of Red
Liu Qianqian
Supervisor: Chen Qingxun
A Thesis Submitted to
Foreign Languages College
Shanghai Normal University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Degree of Master of Arts in
English Linguistics & Literature
March 2023
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Abstract
Abstract
Anne Carson is widely acclaimed as one of the most classically trained poets in
the world of literature today. As a contemporary exponent of the classical spirit, she
excels in reinterpreting the classics in a contemporary and innovative form.
Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse and one of the most important masterpieces
of Anne Carson. In a fragmented but coherent narrative, Anne Carson reconstructs the
story of Hercules, the Greek god, who hunts the monster Geryon. Focused on the
novel in verse, this paper is to interpret its spatial nature through the theory of space
poetics. The main framework of the thesis consists of three parts, including the spatial
turn in poetry of Anne Carson, the construction of the space of visual imagination and
the construction of image space in Autobiography of Red.
The first part is the analysis of the spatial turn in poetry of Anne Carson,
primarily analyzed from two fronts, including the reason of her spatial turn and the
specific performance in her poetry. Firstly, the spatial turn in poetry of Anne Carson is
the consequence of her struggle with the reality. Anne Carson is immersed in the
classics on account of the lack of passion of modern people, whereas she is doomed to
confront the psychological infertility of modern people. Hence, Carson becomes a
contemporary interpreter of the classics, and her poetic creation has the characteristics
both of the classical civilization and modern experience. Carson is excellent in
reinterpreting the classics in a innovative way, through which the spatial art of poetry
is capable of manifesting itself. This paper finds that Carson’s innovation of poetry,
namely the spatial turn of poetry, stems from her innovation of the poetic form, that is,
the photographic narrative. The innovation of Anne Carson manifests itself within her
reflection on poetic language. From the perspective of Anne Carson, sometimes
language can be bewildering and it is incapable of presenting the facts. According to
this consideration, Carson portrayed Geryon as a photographer and the character
narrates his life in a photographic way.
III
The second part of this paper is the interpretation of the space of visual
imagination. The construction of this space is based on the photographic world and
Geryon’s contemplation of the world as a rover. This paper argues that within the
photographic world of Geryon, he observes the reality through the lens and the
photography taken by him is not only the grasp of some moments, but also the
incarnation of his self-consciousness. At the moment Geryon clicks the shutter, he is
surrounded by the present emotion, and the scene containing the past memories and
emotion besieges him as well. At that moment, time in different space converges and
the constant overlapping of images forms the spatialization of time. Moreover, the
spatialization of time is reflected in some certain moment as well. Carson prefers to
concentrate on some moment of enlightenment. Geryon always has the impulse to fall
into sleep and dreams so as to escape from the reality, thus, he is usually in the rift
between dreams and the reality. The boundary between dreams and the reality is
active as it has leaks and the leak is actually what Carson shows preference to. This
kind of moment, recorded by Geryon’ s photograph, occurs when Geryon is awake
from his dreams. The adult Geryon is always characterized as a rover. Geryon enables
his self-consciousness wandering the photographic world and the process is
accompanied with the flow of time. The past memories and the contemporary
experience is combined with each other at present. The original order of time is
broken and rearranged, thus the displacement of space and the erratic identity appears.
The third part of the paper is to interpret the construction of image space in
Autobiography of Red. According to the illustration, the paper finds that the
application of the image in Autobiography of Red is also spatial. First of all, the image
is metaphorical and this kind of characteristic enable the existence of image space.
Additionally, the spatiality of image primarily manifests itself in three fronts,
including the organization of image space, the malleability of image space, and the
constructivity of image space. And in Autobiography of Red, these features are rooted
in the self-consciousness and visual imagination of Geryon connoted in the
photograph and the spatialization of time. The consciousness of Geryon permeates
each other, thus, time and space is in constant changes. The extension of Geryon’s
IV
self-consciousness and his visual imagination enables images to travel in different

time and space.
In the novel in verse, language is replaced by photograph by Geryon to finish his

autobiography. Hence, the narrative poem, working like collage, is filled with
cinematic plot. The photographic world is actually the inner world of Geryon. Within
this world, the subjective consciousness operates like a projector. Driven by Geryon’s
consciousness and his visual imagination, the static images in different spaces are
constantly presented on the screen of consciousness, moving forward orderly and
disorderly now and then. Ultimately, the spatialization of time is achieved.
Key words: Spatial turn; photographic narrative; visual imagination; image space
V
上海师范大学硕士学位论文摘要
摘要
安妮·卡森作为当今世界文坛古典学养最为深厚的诗人而广受赞誉，她是古
典精神的当代阐释者，擅长用当代的方式、创新的形式来重新阐释古典。《红的
自传》是一部诗体小说，也是安妮·卡森最重要的代表作之一。作品取材于希腊
神话，讲述了主人公如何坦然面对自己异于常人的身份。安妮•卡森在碎片化但
又连贯的叙事中重构了希腊神话中大力神赫拉克勒斯猎杀怪物革律翁的故事。本
文聚焦于这部诗体小说，从空间的角度切入，运用空间诗学相关理论对该诗歌进
行深入的挖掘、探讨。本文的主要框架包含三部分，即安妮·卡森诗歌中的空间
转向，以及诗人在《红的自传》中对于视觉想象空间及意象空间的建构。
第一部分着重分析安妮·卡森诗歌中的空间转向，主要包括诗人这一空间转
向背后的缘由及其空间转向的具体表现。安妮·卡森诗歌的空间转向是其困顿于
现实、逃避现实又调和于现实的结果。现代人的激情匮乏让卡森回归古典，但古
典文明的狂欢过后她所要面对的还是现实世界的贫瘠。因此，安妮·卡森的诗歌
兼具古典资源和当代感受，她是古典精神的当代阐释者。安妮·卡森擅长用当代
的方式、创新的形式来重新阐释古典，与此同时，诗歌的空间艺术也通过这种创
意形式得以展现。本文认为安妮·卡森的诗歌创新，即其空间转向的具体表现在
诗歌形态的革新，即摄影叙事。安妮·卡森的创新包含了她对诗歌语言的思考。
她认为，语言具有欺骗性，它不能描绘全部的事实。基于这样的考虑，安妮·卡
森笔下的革律翁成为了一名摄影师，并用摄影的方式叙述他的生活。
第二部分是对视觉想象空间建构的阐释，这一建构基于革律翁的影像世界及
其作为漫游者对于世界的凝视。本文认为，在革律翁的摄影世界中，他通过镜头
看世界，而他所留下的照片不仅是他对某个瞬间的捕捉，实则也暗含了自我意识
的涌动。在他按下快门的那一瞬间，当下的情绪感受包围着他，而裹挟着过往回
忆的某种情绪、某个画面也都呈现在他眼前，时间在那一刻实现了联结，画面的
不断重叠也使时间发生了空间化。此外，时间的空间化也体现在某个瞬间。本文
分析得出安妮·卡森热衷于刻画缝隙、撕裂这样的发现性时刻，她笔下的革律翁
VI
上海师范大学硕士学位论文摘要
出于对现实刺激的逃避，总是处于梦与醒的模糊界限之中。梦与醒的边界是活动
的，有裂缝，而正是卡森所偏爱的，从梦中醒来的那一刻对于革律翁来说就是某
种发现性的时刻，这一时刻同时也被革律翁的摄影所记录。成年后的革律翁总是
以漫游者的形象被刻画，同时他也任由其自我意识漫游于他的摄影世界之中，而
这一过程也伴随着时间的流动，过往的记忆与当下的感受融于此刻，在视觉想象
的空间中，时间被打乱重组，空间继而发生了位移，不稳定的自我书写也由此而
生。本文在第三部分分析了《红的自传》中意象空间的建构。本文认为安妮·卡
森在这首诗体小说中对于意象的运用也呈现出了一定的空间性。首先，意象的隐
喻性质本身就使意象具有一定的空间性，其次，这种意象空间还体现在三个方面，
即组织性、延展性、构筑性。在《红的自传》中，革律翁的摄影世界以及内含于
其中的自我意识和视觉想象构成了这三种意象空间的特质。在诗中，人物的意识
可以保持其独立性，同时也可以互相渗透，从而实现时间和空间的联动。革律翁
自我意识的延申及其视觉想象赋予了意象更多的空间场景，也实现了该意象在不
同空间的任意移动。
安妮·卡森的这部诗体小说，以摄影代替语言完成了一部红的自传，使这首
叙事诗充满了电影般的情节，赋予读者以快门式的阅读体验。诗歌中的影像世界
即革律翁的内心世界，其主体意识具备某种类似于放映机的功效，在革律翁的意
识驱动和视觉想象下，原本静止的空间画面不断呈现在高速运转的意识屏幕上，
并以时而有序时而无序的方式向前推进，最终实现了时间的空间化。
关键词：空间转向；摄影叙事；视觉想象；意象空间
VII
Contents
Ⅰ Introduction .............................................................................................. 1
1.1 A Brief Introduction to Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red ..... 1
1.2 Literature Review on Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red ........ 3
1.3 Literature Review on Space Poetics .................................................. 8
Ⅱ The Spatial Turn in Carson's Poetry ...................................................... 11
2.1 The Contemporary Interpreter of the Classical Spirit...................... 11
2.2 The Innovation of Poetic Form ........................................................ 15
Ⅲ The Space of Visual Imagination ......................................................... 21
3.1 The Photographic World of Geryon ................................................. 21
3.1.1 The Surge of Self-consciousness Beneath the Photograph ........ 22
3.1.2 The Autobiography of a Sleeper ................................................ 25
3.2 The Contemplation of a Rover ......................................................... 31
3.2.1 The Displacement of Space........................................................ 31
3.2.2 The Erratic Identity .................................................................... 36
Ⅳ The Construction of Image Space ....................................................... 41
4.1 The Metaphorical Nature of Imagery .............................................. 41
4.2 The Organization of Image Space.................................................... 45
4.3 The Malleability of Image Space ..................................................... 46
4.4 The Constructivity of Image Space.................................................. 48
Ⅴ Conclusion ............................................................................................ 51
Bibliography ............................................................................................. 54
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Chapter Ⅰ
Ⅰ Introduction
1.1 A Brief Introduction to Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson, born in Canada, is one of the foremost poets in the English
language and a translator of the Ancient Greek classics. Anne Carson is widely
acclaimed as one of the most classically trained poets in the world of literature today.
As a professor of classics, an accomplished poet and a contemporary exponent of the
classical spirit, Carson is highly regarded for her breadth of talent, unique originality
and perceptiveness, and has been admired by leading critics and writers in Europe and
America, including Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag. With classical and philosophical
genes in her blood, Anne Carson has an unconventional and transcendent poetic
vision, and she excels in reinterpreting the classics in a contemporary and innovative
form. She draws reason, ingenuity and emotion from the greats and puts them into her
own unique voice and rhythm. According to Anne Carson, suppose prose is a house,
poetry is the person who gallops through the house on fire. Carson is an author who
breaks traditional thinking mode. She has the tendency to refer allusions, and integrate
poetry, diaries, historical documents and fiction in the form of poetry which works
like collapse, thus creating experimental, artistic and highly mysterious works with
subtle emotion, careful observation and minimalist brushstrokes. In her works,
hardness and softness, classical and cutting-edge form, metaphor and allusion,
minimalist style and textual collage are interwoven, all of which are perfectly
reconciled by Carson in harmony, thus generating both a simple and composed
literary style with concise words and delicate descriptions. The famous scholar Harold
Bloom once appraised that the poetry of Carson is full of originality and ingenuity.
Her works are filled with classical characteristics and contemporary emotions.
Particularly, Carson is a contemporary interpreter of classical spirit as the ancient

texts are a source of constant refreshment to her literary creation. She interprets
modern people without passion through the mythic image of ancient Greece and
1
decorates life with unusual images. In addition, due to the profound foundation in
classical literature of Carson, she is adept in citing allusions to poetry and combines
the textual collage with various creative forms, including poem, diary, history,
documentary, fiction and so forth. Based on the compounded approach, Carson
creates experimental, artistic, and mysterious works with exquisite feeling, meticulous
observation and plain writing. Moreover, it is also a conspicuous form that Carson
applies in her poetry, namely the photographic novel in verse. As a prominent medium
utilized in her works, photography enables the narrative poetry to be filled with plots
which appears in a movie and endows readers with episodic-like reading experience.
The combination of poetry and the medium of photography, being pleasantly different
from the common literary creation, is not only a refreshing experience for the research
of poetry, but also renders inspiration and enlightenment to poets.
Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse and the most important masterpiece of

Anne Carson. Drawing on Greek mythology, it tells the story of how the protagonist
comes to terms with her otherworldly identity. In a fragmented but coherent narrative,
Anne Carson reconstructs the story of Hercules, the Greek god, who hunts the
monster Geryon. The forty-seven long poems are fascinating and full of cinematic
sense. The work is a brilliant “mélange”, an ambitious and curious bridge between
classical texts and contemporary autobiographical poetry.
Anne Carson is immersed in the classics on account of the lack of passion of

modern people, whereas she is doomed to confront the psychological infertility of
modern people. Hence, Carson becomes a contemporary interpreter of the classics,
and her poetic creation has the characteristics both of the classical civilization and
modern experience. Carson is excellent in reinterpret the classics in a innovative way,
and this kind of creativity results from Carson’s reflection on poetic language. Her
works are toward the spatial turn of poetry from the beginning of her poetic creation
under the influence of T. S. Eliot and other poets. From the perspective of Anne
Carosn, sometimes language can be bewildering and it is incapable of presenting the
2
facts. According to this consideration, Carson portrayed Geryon as a photographer

and the character narrates his life in a photographic way. Within the photographic
world of Geryon, he observes the reality through the lens and the photography taken
by him is not only the grasp of some moments, but also the incarnation of his
self-consciousness. At the moment Geryon clicks the shutter, he is surrounded by the
present emotion, and the scene containing the past memories and emotion besieges
him as well. Moreover, Geryon always has the impulse to fall into sleep and dreams
so as to escape from the reality so he is usually in the rift between dreams and the
reality. The boundary between dreams and the reality is active as it has leaks and the
leak is actually what Carson shows preference to. Carson concentrates more on some
moment of enlightenment and this kind of moment, recorded by Geryon’ s photograph,
occurs when Geryon is awake from his dreams. Geryon enables his self-consciousness
wandering the photographic world and the process is accompanied with the flow of
time. The past memories and the contemporary experience is combined with each
other at present. The original order of time is broken and rearranged, thus the
displacement of space and the erratic identity appears.
1.2 Literature Review on Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red
Generally speaking, the scope of research in China is not yet focused on the poet
Anne Carson and her work, and the scale of research has not yet been established. In
contrast, overseas research on Anne Carson and her work is more abundant and more
mature, and is generally on the rise. Between 1994 and 2011, the number of articles
published was on a slow upward trend, increasing from 2011 onwards, peaking at 165
journal publications in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, there is a downward trend in
research, but since 2020, the trend in academic journals has been on the rise again.
The review has attempted to classify these results according to different research
perspectives and the number of articles, based on the literature review on Anne
Carson and Autobiography of Red from abroad over the last three decades.
3
Anne Carson is a contemporary Canadian poet, essayist and translator. As a

Hellenist, her works are pregnant with Greek mythology she refers, modernizes or
translates. She is considered as the most successful operator of the technique of
collage in the contemporary society. Her poetry, prose or essays are also deeply
influenced by history, literature and art. She blends the sources, ideas and themes
from all her fields of expertise and thus often produces hybrid works that make her
peculiarity in today’s literary scene. Like the protagonist in her poetry who always
defers self-definition, Carson is a impersonal poet, and her subsequent collection
Decreation is also dedicated to unraveling the rigid construction of subjectivity. She is
considered as an adventurous and knowledgeable author by Susan Sontag. In the
meanwhile, Carson has been praised by Michael Ondaatje as “the most exciting poet
writing in English today” (Van Buren 1998: 88). Harold Bloom also praises that Anne
Carson is one of the living geniuses and a rare wordsmith. Moreover, it can be
observed that the creation of Carson contains the characteristics of several early poets,
such as Soppho--the early lyric poet of ancient Greece, and women poets, including
Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Emily Bronte. In the meanwhile, she is a
intellectual writer with talent as her profound interpretation of Emily Bronte and
Emily Dickinson is implicit in most of her works, but sometimes emerges in an
explicit way. As a poet with classic and philosophical characteristic and
transcendental thought, Anne Carson has the tendency to utilize the contemporary and
innovative form to conduct the reinterpretation of the classic. The contemporary
feature of her poetry can be ascribed to the innovative writing of Anne Carson. More
importantly, Carson portrays the state of human beings living in the contemporary
society and presents various problems, such as the depiction and reflection of the self.
With regard to Autobiography of Red, the text is a hybrid work of poetry and
pose with curious organization. Carson modifies serial strategies to create narratives
out of seemingly discrete units and these units are primarily connected through
patterns of iteration of diction, symbolism, and myth (Weaver 2008: 185). Hoffert
(1999: 95) proposes that Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red should be included in
4
the list of best poetry of 1998. The work is a peculiar bridge between classical texts
and contemporary autobiographical poetry. In this work, Carson seamlessly blends
Greek myth, homosexuality, and Canadian life, into a new, unique Geryoneis
(Finglass and Kelly 2015: 179). Unlike the original Greek myth, Carson’s story writes
against history’s familiar mighty figures. This sort of resistance implied in her
narrative poetry has been a necessary psychic strategy (Georgis 2006). Autobiography
of Red is an exquisite poem of a sleeper since the protagonist Geryon in the narrative
poetry experiences the self-growth within the dream-like self-narration and Geryon
has the impulse to fall in sleep as the reaction to the realistic stimulation. In 2021, the
two significant representatives of the works of Anne Carson--Autobiography of Red
and The Beauty of the Husband--was included in the second collection of Orpheus’
translated poems and officially published by Yilin Press. This is the first time that the
work of Anne Carson has been introduced to the Chinese world.
Domestic and foreign scholars have studied Autobiography of Red from the
following four perspectives: language, writing techniques, the medium of
photography in the poetry, and self-writing of the protagonist. As regards the
application of language in Autobiography of Red, the sensory and perspective shifts
contained within poetic and vivid language draws the reader into an alternate sensory
world (Ryskamp 2014: 26). For Carson, language is a kind of mechanism of
concealment. According to O’Rourke-Suchoff (2018: 83), Carson is deemed to have a
good command of metaphor in her poetic language as a wordsmith. It can be
perceived that Carson contrives to awaken contemporary people indulged in
depression through personal passion concealed within her poetic language. The
individual lines in her poetry have Carson’s recognizable poetic force
(Signorelli-Pappas 2020: 82).
With respect to writing techniques, it can be obviously detected Carson harbors

intense affinity for hybrids and fragments (McRae 2018: 140) in her work. In the
meanwhile, Miller (2011: 152) regards Autobiography of Red as a work in hybrid
5
form since the work is a novel in verse with the rather odd generic tag,
“autobiography.” Autobiography of Red can be read as a Picaresque novel, in which
the hero goes through a succession of trials before he reaches maturity in the end, a
fairy tale full of dreams and monsters, or a philosophical essay raising metaphysical
questions. Carson seems to propose different layers leading to various levels of
reading and comprehension (Sébastien 2007). From another perspective, the work is
classified into fictional autobiography combined with the form of a coming-of-age
novel (Xu 2020: 63). Additionally, Xu (2020: 63) proposes that the writing of Anne
Carson is a sort of epic negation, being different from C. D. Blanton. According to her,
the thing that Carson negates is not history, but the historical writing relative to the
actuality and reality (Xu 2020: 63). Moreover, another prominent characteristic of
Autobiography of Red is the application of literary allusion. Particularly, the
utilization of the myth in poetry by Carson is a kind of method for her to manifest the
mixture of actuality and poetic feature in daily life. Carson incorporates characters
with mythic qualities into the contemporary world, propelling readers through a world
of literary allusion and sensory involvement within the internal poetic narrative (Van
Buren 1998: 88).
Moreover, numerous readers and scholars understand Carson in the context of a

reflection on the concept on the medium as such and this kind of reflection on
medium is evident both in contemporary poetic experiment and recent work in poetics.
Autobiography of Red takes the form of a “photographic essay” with extended
meditations on photography. In the poetry, the protagonist Geryon takes up
photography, figuring the verbal medium’s other as his autobiography, since he
discovers photography as a means of comfort and escape. Geryon’s turn to the
photographic essay as a medium, “shift[s] the ground,” freely enabling his
autobiographical impulse (Miller 2011: 153). In this sense, extending beyond simply
formal space, the verbal medium articulates the relationship between the work and the
subject, and constitutes the space of intersubjectivity (Bell 2021: 14). Likewise,
McCallum (2007: 12) proposes that the autobiography is visual, not verbal in
6
consideration of the form of photographic essay of the work. According to him, the
peculiarity of Carson’s photography unfixes vision as the privileged and singular
medium of the photograph, suggesting that people rethink photography as a
synaesthesia of touch and sight, or sound and sight, much as written language is.
Furthermore, Carson conveys her musing on time and photography during the process
of providing an answer to Geryon’s perennial question regarding the nature of time
through the medium of photography (Tschofen 2004: 44).
Despite the prevalence of narrative traditions which seek to suppress monstrous

otherness, monsters can “evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity
with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress
from constrain” (Cohen 1996: 17). Carson’s Autobiography of Red celebrates all
forms of egress and escape. Her resistance to a solidified perfection, as self-contained
as an egg, is partly what her work is trying to capture (Berta 2018: 379). Similarly, the
protagonist Geryon in Autobiography of Red is also an eccentric character with
identity that is contradictory to the secularity. Carson’s archaeological excavation and
resurrection of the monster Geryon recovers a subordinate history of deictic practices
within philosophy and art from antiquity to the present day, which create and refer to
their own perspective. Geryon is wrenched out of the Greek myth that dooms him and
into a disparate myth that will reexplain his identity and redefine him from mortal to
immortal (Beasley 2015: 78). Geryon’s autobiography captures his body’s very
troubled being-in-the-world and the failure of that world to finish stable identity
categories with a recognizable and salient public meaning (Murray 2005: 120). In the
meanwhile, his autobiography invites readers into his cage to witness the process of
writing the history of the discarded other. During the process, Carson resists the
temptation to represent Geryon’s subjectivity through the limits of nameable social
identities and collective histories, even if his body is socially marked as a gay racially
hybrid young man (Georgis 2014: 165). Battis (2003: 198) illustrates that Anne
Carson’s Autobiography of Red invades the reader, exploding definitions of the novel
just as its narrator explodes social and sexual binaries. Within Carson’s portray, the
7
identity of Geryon, like his space is erratic, malleable and performative so that finding
the authentic Geryon is impossible (Battis 2003: 198). For Carson, she prefers to
conceal the truth beneath strata of ivory because this is the look of truth.
1.3 Literature Review on Space Poetics
The traditional poetic theory, according to Lessing’s Laocoon, is based on the

viewpoint that painting is combined in space and poetry contains the subjects of
actions, which is defined in the dimension of time (Lessing 1979: 151). Lessing’s
temporal and spatial opinion of the boundaries between poetry and painting in
Laocoon is noticeable and remarkable in Europe at that time with epoch-making
significance. With the break of European unanimity of poetry and painting, Lessing
makes it possible to take a major step forward in the perception of poetic and pictorial
time and space towards Soja’s third space (Zhang 2020: 78). Spatiality and
temporality are both constitutive elements of narrative. Nevertheless, time has long
been of more interest to narrative theorists for its homogeneity, fluidity, and
irreversibility, while space has been placed in opposition to time and considered as
passive, static and dispensable (Pang 2014: 84). In the early twentieth century, the
modern aesthetic transformation of Anglo-American poetry arises, and the one of the
reasons behind the transition is the spatial turn of English poetry (Deng 2022: 64).
And from the late 1960s, the mainstream of social critical science had been
encountered an unprecedented crisis of trust. The long-standing tradition of modern
criticism began to decay and the theory of space once again became a critical
discourse receiving more and more attention (Guo 2013: 110). In The Poetics of
Space, Bachelard proposes that the isolated image, the verse, or occasionally the
stanza in which the poetic image radiates, form language areas that should be studied
by means of topo-analysis (Bachelard 1994: 14). Bachelard offers an inventory of
spatial motifs, including the house, nests, shells, corners, miniature, and so forth. With
respect to its presentation in literature, with the boom in spatial theories disrupting the
previous the oretical focus on time and history, literature is now regarded as a spatial
8
product, and the diversity of spatial theories provides an open field for literary
criticism (Gao 2017: 165). According to Mitchell (1980: 539), the concept of spatial
form has questionably been central to modern criticism not only of the fine arts but of
language and of culture and literature in general. Particularly, both in the West and in
the East, poetry is always the outpost of literary territory, the most sensitive to the
impact of new information and ideas, and the most capable of responding in a flexible
manner.
According to Holtz (1977: 272), the spatial form of poetry is not necessarily
descriptive writing aimed at the mind’s eye but rather a form that grows out of the
writer’s attempt to negate the temporal principle inherent in language and to force
apprehension of his work as a total thing in a moment of time rather than as a
sequence of things. In a poetry with spatial turn, the poetic language, at any one
moment of time, offers the knowledge and civilization of the past and present as a
whole, and a unified spatial apprehension of the work is ultimately possible. T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land provides similar illustrations. Modernist authors abandons
realism in favour of the fragmented, open, and shifting forms as a means to represent
the fragmented, traumatized subjects of capitalist culture (Tao 2008: 57). In
accordance with Frank’s basic argument, modernist literary works, particularly by
Eliot, Pound and Joyce, are spatial as they replace history and narrative sequence with
a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose
with disjunctive syntactic arrangements (Mitchell 1980: 541). Guo (2008: 67)
elucidates that modernist poetry, represented by the The Waste Land partially pursues
fragmentation but retains some unifying characteristics as a whole with the
combination of the classics and the creative application of poetic language.
Furthermore, the concept of space also has a great influence on the poetic creation of
Emily Dickinson. The poet, as a ideologist, spends her whole life considering the
significance of space, which is not merely embodied in numerous images of space
utilized in her poems, but also is reflected her creation of the spatialized form of
poetry (Wang 2016: 103). Actually, Carson, as a classical enthusiast, is influenced by
9
the space poetics to some extent. In Autobiography of Red, Carson reinterprets the
Greek myth with the photographic narrative. Living experience can be viewed as the
unfolding of poetic space. This is neither just matter nor experience, but the collective
exploration of felt embodied meanings by individuals, which co-create as
transformations of a fecund whole (Weber 2021: 192). The stream of consciousness of
Geryon beneath his photographic world is erratic, dynamic, and unpredictable, thus
leading to the displacement of space. This is how the spatialization of poetry in
Autobiography of Red operates.
10
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Chapter Ⅱ
Ⅱ The Spatial Turn in Carson’s Poetry
At the beginning of the twentieth century, English and American poetry

encounters a fundamental aesthetic transformation from romanticism and Victorian
mode to modernism. Additionally, the primary course of this sort of aesthetic
transition is that the spatial turn arises in the field of English poetry and it is also the
essence and nature of the transition. In China, poetry of the Tang Dynasty which is
regarded as the representative of metrical poetry is of spatial characteristic at the very
beginning. Nonetheless, in the western world, the development of poetry originates
from the epic poem which is an authoritative narration that follows the time. The
period from the epic poem to modern poetry contains the transition of the poetic form
orientation of poets from temporal forms to spatial forms. Poetry with spatial
characteristics is the elementary development orientation of modern poetry.
2.1 The Contemporary Interpreter of the Classical Spirit
Human beings creates conception of things based on the common experience,

and language, being utilized to convey the conception is essentially metaphorical
(Chen 2008: 78). For the poet, modern poetic language is a metaphorical expression
of their experience in life (Chen 2008: 78). The poet commits more time and effort to
the perception and experience of life compared to the common people. Moreover, the
poetic language is influenced by their experience of life. Actually, literature, as an art
of language, is a kind of social practice and a social creation of the poet. The poet, as
a member living in the society with specific social status, conveys to the public with
the poetic language based on the personal experience and reflection of the reality.
According to the poetic creation, the audience gets the opportunity to notice the dark
side beneath the external and hypocritical silence. In normal circumstances, the spirit
of the age, being infrangible and impregnable, spares anyone who obeys it but
scourges those endeavors to violate it. Besides, the latter group is always composed of
literary creators. Unfortunately, those literary works created by authors with
11
subjective and sober consciousness sometimes become the sacrifice within the fight
against the times. However, more classical works get the chance to be exposed to the
public, thus awaken those callous people or provides the orientation for people who
have already realized some sort of crisis of the civilization but are incapable of
exploring a way out of the predicament. In comparison with other language, the poetic
one has more influence. A common poem of Shakespeare plays a more significant role
in enlightening the poor and the evildoer in contrast to the education from the
churchman or the philanthropist (Woolf 2020: 170). Although some literary works fail
to make some practical innovation, at least they expose the current situation and
dilemma which has aroused concern from some people. Insomuch, it can be
considered that literature, especially poetry, is definitely not only the individual
creation of the author but also a kind of creation with social foundation.
For instance, in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, language acts not only as a medium of
experience but also as the experience itself, and therefore the innovation of the poetic
language becomes an approach to saving the modern culture (Chen 2008: 79). After
the realization of the crisis of the poetic language, Eliot along with numerous
contemporary authors attempts to create fresh forms of poetic works, especially the
transformation of language. Eliot dates back to the metaphysical poets, to Dante, to
ancient myths for the purposes of searching the traditions and order that no longer
exist in a fractured modern society (Chen 2008: 79). The waste land of the society is
inundated with varieties of degraded and depraved civilization. Under such
circumstances, the literary creation is not merely the pure representation of the reality,
but necessitates the thorough transition to save the decayed civilization. The
resurgence of the classics is incapable of assisting the poets with the salvation of the
fragmented society, so it is found that saving the poetic language becomes the primary
mission of the poets to resuscitate this waste land.
Likewise, Anne Carson is also disappointed with the contemporary society. In

her view, it seems that human beings living in the contemporary society have the
12
tendency to be deficient in some sort of desire and inspiration. Moreover, Carson is

incapable of discovering the significance within the study of English literature. For
Carson, English is probably a very reasonable thing to study, but it seemed to her she
cannot do that without special expertise (D’Agata 2014: 4). Accordingly, Carson is
unable to acquire passion within the study of English literature. On the contrary,
Carson is deeply interested in classics as she holds the opinion that the classics is just
intrinsically interesting. Being immersed in Greek words, Carson acquires a sense that
she is among the root of meanings, not up in the branches. With regard to this, she
makes the explanation that Greek words are pure, older, and original. Furthermore,
Carson deems the writing by the contemporary people seems to be self-circling, a
form of therapy. This kind of creation, a way of writing without having to have any
facts is lazy and disrespectful on the grounds that the authors tend to ignore the world
in order to concentrate themselves. As a poet, Carson is unconvinced that art
possesses the function of therapy. From the perspective of the Greek, the poetic
creation is in the necessity of making something charming and being received and
recognized by the world. The reality, no matter being wonderful or being miserable,
endows human beings some sort of reflections on life. In particular, literary creators
and artistic creators seize the gift that life gives to them and make their own
contribution to the world in turn. As regards the poets, they utilize the poetic language
to express their experience of the reality and reflection on life to the public after the
acquisition of enlightenment from the world. Eliot perceives the terrible fact of the
reality, then struggles to explore a method to save the withered civilization. This sort
of process is positive and satisfactory circle as the poets takes the gift, namely the fact
of the reality which is from the world, and creates something influential and profound
as a gift in return to the world. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Carson, the
contemporary people have the tendency to turn back the gift into the self and stop
here without passion. The Geek has a word for grace, charis, which means grace in
the reciprocal sense of coming and going (D’Agata 2014: 17). In addition, the word is
used by the Greek to make description of the grace and significance of the poems. It is
precisely the way the ancients talk and consider language that influence on the
13
thinking mode of Carson. Therefore, being similar to Eliot, Carson traces back to the
classics to pursue the passion which is absent in the modern society as well. As a
matter of fact, the decision of Carson to embrace the classical culture is not the
thought by accident. Carson starts classics in high school with the beginning of the
study of Greek. In her own words, she has the opportunity to search her own roots
within the study of classics since she regards Greek is the best language in the world,
even better than Latin which Carson has been studied at the same time. Carson
assumes that Latin is sort of a mathematics of thought whereas Greek is an art
(D’Agata 2014: 4). Anne Carson herself is person with multiple identities, including
an essayist, translator, a classicist, a professor and a Canadian poet. Carson’s
immersion in the classics directly makes impact on her poetic creation. Autobiography
of Red is a representative work which contains the classic civilization. The novel in
verse is a coming-of-age story about Geryon. Geryon is the name of a character in
ancient Greek myth. He is a strange red winged monster who lived on an island called
Erytheia quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Herakles
came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle (Carson 1998: 5). Nevertheless,
the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus transforms the traditional story into a story of a
tragic hero from the perspective of Geryon in the narrative poem Geryoneis.
Moreover, Autobiography of Red of Anne Carson is a kind of parody of the version of
Stesichorus. Being compared to Eliot, the difference is that the throwback to the
classics of Eliot is implicit in his poetic creation while Carson’s retrospection about
those classic works is obvious and manifest within her poetry.
Nevertheless, like Eliot, Carson also discovers the pure immersion in the classics
is unable to resolve the current situation. Therefore, the characteristics of the poetry of
Carson is both classic and contemporary. For Eliot, the resurrection of the gods cannot
make the realistic world recover from the collapsed modern world. The ancient
structure and civilization can only lurk in the depth as a metaphorical counterpart, and
the fragmentation of reality that the poet is doomed to confront remains (Chen 2008:
79). Therefore, Eliot is dedicated to making innovation in modern poetic language to
14
revive the modern waste land of civilization. With respects to Anne Carson, she
derives psychological strength and inspiration from the classics, then return to the
modern world. The feature both of the classics and philosophy occurs in her literary
creation and her ability of the reinterpretation of the classics is excellent with a
contemporary and innovative method. Carson makes an acquisition of reason,
wittiness, and emotion from the ancient giants so as to construct her own poetic world
with peculiarity.
2.2 The Innovation of Poetic Form
The transition of English poetry the Romantic and Victorian models to

modernism is a fundamental shift. Moreover, this fundamental shift, transpiring at the
beginning of the twentieth century, signifies a modern aesthetic transformation of
English and American poetry, namely the transition from Romanticism to Modernism.
The underlying cause and essential feature of this aesthetic shift is exactly the spatial
turn of the poetic creation. The spatial turn of poetry has three layers of meanings. In
the first place, there is a conversion in the space in which Anglo-American poetry is
produced, i.e. from the countryside to the city. Secondly, the objects and themes of
Anglo-American poetry have moved from the countryside to the city as well. In other
words, Anglo-American poetry has transferred from writing about natural space to
writing about urban space. Besides, the significance of the spatial turn of
Anglo-American poetry implies another important dimension, namely the spatial
orientation of poetic innovation. The pursuit of spatiality of poetic creation is implied
in constant innovation of poetic form of the poets, such as the deliberate white space,
alignment, punctuation and collage between lines.
Anne Carson is a poet with both of the contradictory and concordant

characteristics. Both of the decay of the modernism and the majesty of the classics are
unable to be found within her poetic works and language. Eliot once attempted to
make innovation in language so as to save the decadent civilization. Likewise, Carson
15
also has her own contemplation of the poetic language with the acute insight and
unique thinking mode. The spatiality of poetry in Autobiography of Red is precisely a
typical presentation of the reflection on poetic language of Carson. In other words,
Carson’ s reexamination of the poetic language is the fundamental cause of the spatial
characteristics in Autobiography of Red. Additionally, the consequence of this kind of
reexamination is the creative poetic form in Autobiography of Red. Carson has the
tendency to make the poetic creation with the collage of text, and in this novel in
verse, the form is accomplished by the photographic narrative.
Life is not about some meaningful detail, illuminated by a flash of light and
frozen forever, whereas photographs are. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art,
which records the stagnant, fading time and the death of time. To take a photograph is
to participate in the certain death, the fragility, the mutability of another person or
object. All photographs are a record of a moment of death. Photography bears witness
to the relentless passage of time, and it preserves moments and realities that are
decayed or ceased to exist as well. The camera captures reality, rather than merely
interpreting it. Like the painting, the photograph is an interpretation of the world, and
Carson’s Geryon uses the camera to record reality, in a sense, to capture it.
Photographs may be more memorable than vivid visual records because they are a
neat cut of time rather than a flow. A photographic record may give a more realistic
sense of what has happened in the past. But at the same time, when viewing a moving
image, one may miss an important moment. Each still photograph is an important
moment, and the moment that has passed becomes a tangible object that survives and
can be viewed again and again. The camera is particularly good at documenting the
trauma of time. Through photographs, humans are able to trace the chronicle of how
people age in the most visual way. As a medium of preserving the past, photographs
convey a message of the past, allowing humans to gaze at old photographs of
themselves, or of anyone they know, or of a public figure they once loved, with their
irrefutable infectiousness. Photography is an inventory of a life that has been swiftly
lived as a stage, a moment, a landscape seen, a group of people met is able to be
16
brought together through photographs, then the flow of time is permanently sealed,
thus becoming a time that can be extracted at will in five-dimensional space. The
output of photography is at the same time a melancholy object. The fascination
created by the photograph is reminiscent of death and can also be sentimental. The
photograph turns the past into a still object that is tenderly watched, the death of time
is only the surface, what is sorrowful and discomforting is the memory beneath time
that is about to be forgotten or has been banished from the mind. The infectious power
of the visual image instantly turns the past into the present, and the silent past gives
voice to itself through the photograph.
Photography is not only about preserving the past, but also about uncovering and
preserving an overlooked reality with a new vision. Apart from some specific
functions and occasions of photography, what touches people to take photographs is
the discovery of beauty, which people often regret for not having recorded in time.
Photographic viewing implies a tendency to find beauty in stuff that is too
commonplace to be seen by everyone, and the documentarian makes a new visual
choice to preserve reality. By cropping reality more narrowly and enlarging a corner
of it, the photographer has taken on a more ambitious form.
In Autobiography of Red, Carson’s photographic narrative is likewise a record of

the reality. Her young protagonist Geryon is, in Greek mythology, an alien who is not
recognized by so-called justice. Stesichorus writes a lyrical poem about Geryon, in
which he is a winged red monster slain by Herakles, the party representing justice.
Stesichorus writes the poem from Geryon’s point of view, portraying it not as a
triumph of civilization over barbarism, but as a brutal, harrowing killing. In Carson’s
version, however, Geryon becomes a melancholy boy, and the mythical killing shifts
from the body to the mind. In Carson’s version, the story is also told from Geryon’s
point of view, and the red-winged Other remains, except that Hercules brings Geryon
a wound to his soul rather than a destruction of his body, and Geryon’s Other is not
just his red wings that Carson portrays as a homosexual, an identity that is not
17
accepted by the mainstream. Carson gives Geryon a new lease of life, but puts him
through pain in a different way. Geryon documents his life through photography, his
experiences captured in a shuttered narrative in every frame. Susan Sontag (1977: 163)
elaborates that reality is understood as unmanageable and inaccessible, and the
photograph is a way of imprisoning reality, of keeping it in stasis. The collection of
photographs can be used as an alternative world, one that exists specifically for those
effects that are exciting or soothing or compelling. Geryon’s photo diary is more
about trauma and scars than it is about exciting moments. He has no way of capturing
the time that has passed, no control over his life and can only give vent to all his
emotions in his photographs:
Geryon kept the camera in his hands and spoke little. I am disappearing, he
thought
but the photographs were worth it.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has
effects no one can calculate in advance. (Carson 1998: 135)
The flowing time is perishable while the time conserved within the picture
though photography is under control. Geryon believed that people are neighbors of
fire and it is certainly true. Fire is a kind of ephemeral existence yet it has fiery and
fervent life. Likewise, a few decades of human life, no matte being impassioned or
insipid, cannot escape the destiny of death. Nonetheless, oblivion, rather than death, is
the authentic destination. Hence, the record of the reality through photography
impresses people with the death of time and a certain memory. Although the transitory
oblivion happens, the picture is able to present the recurrence of the past. Geryon’s
Greek mythology and red wings are a symbol of his heterosexuality, a situation made
all the more difficult by the fact that Carson’s poetry is full of depictions of his
homosexuality. Geryon is outside the order, unable to manage reality, he chooses to
imprison all his trauma in his photographs; each moment Geryon captures is a
standstill in time, time imprisoned in the photograph, and with it the trauma encased
18
in time. Photographic viewing, that is, viewing reality as a mass of potential

photographs, creates a detachment rather than a union with reality. The kind of
cutaway, detached view that photography can provide gives Geryon breathing space
in this fictional reality. In the same way that photography preserves the reality and
detaches itself from it, Geryon documents reality through his photographs. Actually,
Geryon’s obsession with the fictional world in photography is also his approach to
escaping the reality. In Autobiography of Red, Geryon has the tendency to wake from
a dream and he is always in the blurred state between awake and asleep. Dream only
occurs within one’s sleep, which is almost at night. Geryon is more adjusted to the
darkness:
Geryon was bored and said he couldn’t see any

good spaces left,
got out his camera and went off towards the sound of traffic.Up on the overpass
the night was wide open and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the
wind and let it peel him
clean. (Carson 1998: 55)
Only within the darkness, Geryon has the courage to expose the real self. He prisons
time in his photographs and prisons himself as well.
Photography is not only a record of life; specifically, it is a fragmentary record of

life. Implicit in all of photography’s functions is the assumption that each photograph
is a fragment of the world. Each photograph people record is a moment in life, and a
fragment of life. In Autobiography of Red, through Carson’s photographic narrative,
images of reality are presented in pieces through the medium of photography, with
shuttered chapters of poetry forming this photographic diary of Geryon under
Carson’s collaged text. As a matter of fact, the autobiographical writing of Geryon
began in his childhood with the use of words. So Geryon was trying to use words to
record facts. However, it seems that there is an inherent paradox between words and
facts since words can be altered optionally (Zhang 2023: 142). In a straight narrative,
19
too many words are used which are not the facts as the language is unconvinced with
instability and perplexity. In Autobiography of Red, the unreliability of language is
able to be proved:
Geryon watched his mother pick a fragment of tobacco off her tongue before she
said,
Does he ever write anything with a happy ending?
Geryon paused.
Then he reached up and carefully disengaged the composition paper
from the teacher’s hand.
Proceeding to the back of the classroom he sat at his usual desk and took out a
pencil.
New Ending.
All over the world the beautiful red breezed went on bloeing hand
in hand. (Carson 1998:38)
In order to satisfy his mother, Geryon makes modification of the ending of his
writing. Thus, the uncertainty of language renders the narrative of Carson innovative
and creative. In adolescence, the conflict between language and photography begins
to manifest itself in Geryon. During this period, Geryon gets acquaintance with
Herakles. The intimate relationship between him and Herakles is not understood and
accepted by Geryon’s mother. In addition, Geryon is no longer dependent on his
mother as well as his childhood and he has less conversation with his mother, even he
began to lies to her. Conversely, photography gradually becomes his autobiographical
language, which is a more authentic and credible one.
20
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Chapter Ⅲ
Ⅲ The Space of Visual Imagination
In accordance with Lu (2022: 133), the imagination of poetry is the poet’s ability
to transform both the experience and memories so as to create the new and unique
image. Both the intensification of personal imagination and the utilization of
empirical elements expand the context and vision of poetic narrative (Lu 2022: 130).
Additionally, this sort of imagination is associated with the poet’s understanding and
expression of language, personal life, the soul, history, and culture. As a classical
enthusiast, Carson enables her protagonist Geryon, who is from the Greek myth, to
finish his autobiography in the photographic way. Geryon is immersed in the
photographic world and indulges himself in the flow of self-consciousness. Within the
space of his visual imagination, those traumatic experience and memories have the
tendency to torture him from time to time and the time and space is consequently
chaotic and turbulent, which actually has a great influence on the construction of the
space of visual imagination.
3.1 The Photographic World of Geryon
Photographs involve a specific sense of loss—the loss of reality, the limitation of

movement and of experience. Some contemporary Canadian artists and writers have
felt the loss, and are now involved in opposition to the photographic vision, and some
are refusing the abbreviation of history, deconstructing the myth of stasis (McDougall
1987: 119). As regards Carson, she reinterprets the Greek myth with the photographic
narrative within her poetic language. The photographic way of the autobiography of
Geryon is not completely mature, whereas after the adulthood of him, the way he
writes his autobiography departed further from language and relied more and more on
the documentary function of photographs. In later years, the autobiography becomes
entirely in the form of a photograph.
21
3.1.1 The Surge of Self-consciousness Beneath the Photograph
In Autobiography of Red , the spatial narrative of the poem is made possible by

the photographic narrative employed by Carson. Carson’s poetry has been described
as a cinematic collage of texts. This statement suggests that Carson’s protagonist,
Geryon, becomes a photographer, viewing the world through a lens, combining a
series of disparate, photo-like images to form his distinctive film-like autobiography.
In a world ruled by photographic images, all boundaries seem to be blurred and
everything can be separated. The camera makes reality atomized and manageable. The
above theories suggest that the camera-like way of looking at the reality provides a
visual world of stray images that appear randomly and the space can be constantly
deconstructed and reconstructed. As a poet who sees the world through a lens,
Carson’s poems are always a random list of objects and places. These images are
captured by Geryon’s camera at a very fast pace, without any prior judgement or
decision, but are simply recorded quickly. The visual space she constructs is
ephemeral, timely and non-associative. Through the eye of the camera, the poet
creates fleeting, transient sensations, and people and objects she observes become
instantaneous events, as the experience is consumed almost as soon as it is given. In
Carson’s poems, Geryon is like a wanderer, wandering through the real world and
being present in it, combining its contradictions, sensitivities and desires in an
uncanny way, but always remaining aloof. It is this wanderer’s gaze--a hidden,
reconciled, hallucinatory gaze--that allows Carson to construct an illusory, ambiguous
space of visual imagination in her poetry through wordplay.
Within poems, the consciousness of characters can maintain their independence.

In the meanwhile, the consciousness can also interpenetrate, thus unconsciously
forming itself into a whole and realizing the connection of time and space. The
extension of consciousness not only appends more spatial scenes but also achieves
arbitrary movement in different spaces. In Autobiography of Red, Carson presents this
kind of permeation and wandering of consciousness of her protagonist Geryon.
22
However, unlike the common way, Geryon’s consciousness is almost contained in

Carson’s photographic narrative, namely his own photographic diary. His diary is not
merely a pure preservation of the life, but also the record of his subjective
consciousness and emotional experience. In Geryon’s world, everything is alive and
he endeavors to record the surging life through the camera:
A church bell rang across the page

and the hour of six P.M. flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on
and white bedspreads sprang forward,
water rushed in the walls, the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow
cage.
I am not the one who is crazy here. (Carson 1998: 115)
The series of description is the world through Geryon’s lens as well as the inner world
of Geryon as “photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships” (Carson
1998: 65). Driven by Geryon’s consciousness, the originally static spatial images are
constantly presented on the high-speed screen of consciousness, and move forward
in a manner which is sometimes ordered and sometimes disordered, forming a
powerful spatial fluid, thus completing the construction of modern spatial poetics.
Since the childhood of Geryon, he has been suffering from the terrible and
horrible reality, such as the sexual assault from his elder brother, the separation from
his lover Herakles, the estrangement from his mother. In addition, Geryon himself has
been in the state of self-constraint and self-imprisonment as he has a pair of unusual
red wings. Therefore, the inner world of Geryon is always a mass of chaos with
disordered, restless and confused emotion:
He went up to the roof and sat

on his cot trying to think how to photograph Lima. But his brain was as blank
as the featureless sky.
He went out walking again. Along the seawall. (Carson 1998: 125)
23
The description that Geryon has no idea how to photograph Lima is actually the
symbolization of his chaotic brain. In a sense, a brain with miscellaneous emotion and
thoughts can be tantamount to a blank and empty brain. The psychological world of
Geryon is dynamic with continuing spatial motion, thus his photographic world which
connotes his self-consciousness is also in a chaos.
Photography preserves memories, and it is not only objects that carry memories;
like poetry, photography takes as its starting point the action of people. Photography
functions first and foremost as an extension of the middle-class wanderer’s eye
(Sontag 1977: 55). The wanderer is a connoisseur who knows the pleasure of looking,
an empathetic connoisseur who sees the world as “picturesque.” The wanderer
discovers and feels the world, similar to the photographer who observes and records it,
and whose process of capturing reality through the lens is the process of feeling the
world.
In Autobiography of Red, Carson highlights Geryon’s gaze on the real world

through photographic narrative. In a departure from traditional poetic forms, Geryon
refuses to recount his life in words and instead uses photography to document the real
world. Carson’s mythological retelling gives her young protagonist Geryon unlimited
tension and imagination. The self-contemplation and self-writing of Geryon is
presented through his photography. The world preserved within a series of pictures is
not merely the swarming of diverse creatures and static things, but also a sort of
surging of his own subjective consciousness and emotional experience:
Resting the camera on the rear window of the car Geryon is watching the road
fall away behind them
into a light so brilliant it feels cold and hot at once. (Carson 1998: 137)
Within Geryon’s photographs, almost everything is of gloomy emotion. The light,

being normally warm and brilliant, turns out to be cold and frigid at once according to
the sight and the feeling of Geryon. Actually, it is the consciousness of Geryon that
24
endows the light with coldness. Sometimes the world recorded by Geryon is
depressive and decadent is not only because his additional subjective consciousness
connoted in those scenes but also because Geryon has the tendency to concentrate on
those decayed creatures:
He stepped out into a blood-colored dawn.

Not the parking lot. He was in the debris
of the hotel garden, ruined roses of every variety paused stiffly on their stalks.
Dry blades of winter fennel clicked
in the clod air and swung low over the ground. (Carson 1998:142)
Geryon wanders nowhere but in the bleak garden of the hotel. A series of images
including “ruined roses”, “dry blades” and “clod air” is what Geryon observes and
captures through his camera. The depressive scenery is essentially the consciousness
and emotion of Geryon. Insomuch, it can be perceived that as Geryon contemplates
the world, he realize the self-contemplation and self-writing as well. In this regard, the
autobiography of Geryon can also be considered as the photographic diary of Geryon.
3.1.2 The Autobiography of a Sleeper
The loss of the sense of time has become an important feature of the view of time
during the post-modern times, but the loss of the sense of time does not mean the
nonexistence of time. The fact is that in the society of post-modern period, time
comes into existence in another form: that is, traditional, linear, one-dimensional time
is disintegrated, and the totality of time becomes a fragmented, non-directional
fragment of time after its collapse. These fragments of time are influenced in some
way and are organized and brought together into the “now”, which becomes the only
sign of temporal existence that embraces the past and the future. From this perspective,
time is incorporated into a space centred on the “now”, or rather, both past and future
time are incorporated into the space of the present. Accordingly, time is spatialised. In
other words, the spatialisation of time is another mode of existence of time, in which
25
time is incorporated into the space of a certain moment, and the linear character of
time is destroyed, and the characteristics of space is highlighted. This is a significant
feature of the view of time within the post-modern times. And the precondition of the
occurrence of the spatialisation of time resulting from this change is rooted in three
major reasons. Firstly, due to the development of technology, time is compressed and
the elimination of the sense of spatial distance occurs. Secondly, the turnover of
capital in consumer society accelerates, thus giving rise to the dilution of the original
sense of temporality. In addition, time is dismembered on account of the necessity of
symbolic production and image-making, of which everything becomes an element.
This sense of spatio-temporality is well presented in many classical works, such as in
stream-of-consciousness works, especially Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and
Mrs. Dalloway. It can be observed that the spatialisation of time occurs on the basis of
the transformation of people’s conception of time and space, not only exists in the
space-time of post-modern times. Hence, it is only when the conditions are prepared
this concept of space-time becomes more intense, but it does not prevent it from
appearing in the age of clear and orderly chronology, especially in literary and artistic
works. Autobiography of Red also has a non-linear presentation of time, where time is
incorporated into the space of the present, where past, present and future are all
centralized in the same space. However, the spatialized form of time presented in
Carson’s poetry is not the result of the aforementioned altered sense of time and space,
and therefore this novel in verse cannot be taken as a simple testament to this notion
of time and space. The spatialization of time in Autobiography of Red is mainly
reflected in an instantaneous moment with enlightenment. Geryon shows preference
to this sort of moment as he is not interested in human comfort and for him, “much
truer is the time that strays into photographs and stops” (Carson 1998: 93).
Furthermore, this sort of moment has the tendency to occurs in the intersection of
sleeping and waking of Geryon. Additionally, Geryon always utilizes photography to
seize and conserve the moment as his autobiography resembles a photographic diary.
The rewriting of the story of Geryon is not only confined to the plot of the
26
original version, but also contains the transformation of the characteristics of Geryon.
In the version of Carson, Geryon, being not as intrepid as in the Greek myth, becomes
a sensitive and solitary boy. He suffers from the sexual assault from his elder brother
and gets no shelter from his mother. Moreover, he is plagued by Herakles who turns
out to be his lover and breaks Geryon’s fragile heart. As a consequence, from the
childhood of Geryon, he began to wallow in sleep as every period of sleep is a kind of
alleviation of misery and the release of imagination for him. The real world is so
grievous and distressing that Geryon is compelled to seek comfort and from the sleep:
Every ten meters or so along the seawall Geryon could see small twined couples.
They looked like dolls.
Geryon wished he could envy them but he did not. I have to get out of this place,
he thought. Immortal or not.
He climbed into his sleeping bag and slept until dawn without moving. (Carson
1998: 130)
Within the narration which is seemingly muddled, dream-like, Geryon experiences his
personal growth and gradually expands the the spiritual landscape of the self.
Although the journey may end in a volcano, an eruptive, heavy and dangerous passion.
But that desire is perhaps what is lacking in the modern world and it is also what
Carson endeavors to portrait and pursue. Through the power of words, Carson
attempts to recall the passions within people, and of course, the hidden desire for love
in the narrative, the individual passions that exist as a vision, as well as the
motivations of the characters and the images they leave behind in the fragments, all of
which, layer by layer, the reader is left to savor.
At the end of Autobiography of Red, Geryon, in his twenties, sets out on a

journey to the Andes with Hercules and his boyfriend, Ancash, in search of a volcano
in a countryside called Jucu in the northern mountains of Varas and the story pauses at
the moment they find the volcano:
27
He had dreamed of thorns. A forest of huge blackish-brown thorn trees

where creatures that looked
like young dinosaurs (yet they were strangely lovely) went crashing
through underbrush and tore
their hides which fell behind them in long red strips. He could call
the photograph “Human Valentines”. (Carson 1998:131)
On the way to the volcano, Geryon drifts off to the sleep on occasion, and the
boundary between dreaming and waking is blurred. The ardent gaze is transformed
into a bloody dream, which intertwines and superimposes itself in Geryon’s vision,
and is imaged as a photograph. The acute perceptions of Geryon fractures into dreams,
and the border between dreaming and waking is far more mysterious than that
between psychological reality and everyday reality, thus Geryon is apt to be immersed
in such moment. After all, the realm of dream is an empty space that the text of fate
has not yet touched, and the most magnificent landscapes people have ever seen often
come from dreams. Additionally, the space between dream and waking is active as the
space is actually a sort of seam:
Under the seams runs the pain.

Panic jumped down on Geryon at three A. M. He stood at the window of his
hotel room.
Empty street below gave back nothing of itself.
Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the
street
Little rackety wind went by. (Carson 1998: 98)
Geryon suddenly wakes after midnight and he is stuck in the panic and confised
emotion, which is exactly the inducement for Geryon to finish his photographic
autobiography. Geryon is incapable of directly confronting reality, then he experience
life in his photographic world. This is how Geryon reconcile himself to reality.
Actually, during the childhood of Geryon, he relishes sleep and dreams but the
28
moment of waking attracts him more. Nonetheless, as he grows up and experiences

more sufferings and miseries, he becomes more and more addicted to the fantasy
world, namely his dream:
Geryon wiped his face

with his wings and went out to the living room to look for the camera.
When he stepped onto the back porch
rain was funnelling down off the roof in a morning as dark as night.
He had the camera wrapped
in a sweatshirt. The photograph is titled “If He Sleep He Shall Do Well”.
(Carson 1998: 71)
Geryon is reluctant to be awake for the reason that sleep is the primary choice for him
to escape form painful reality. Moreover, when Herakles again declines his love,
Geryon’s heart and lungs form a black crust (Carson 1998: 62) and he was suddenly
trapped. He feels bruised but pure and he falls instantly asleep (Carson 1998: 75). The
immersion in sleep of Geryon is a sort of stress response to the sorrowful and
melancholy reality. Moreover, the photograph Geryon takes at the moment he wakes
up from the dream drags him into another fantasy world. In this world, Geryon gets
the acquisition of a certain enlightenment:
He woke up from a loud wild dream that vanished at once and lay listening
to the splendid subtle ravines of Hades
where hardworking dawn monkeys were wheedling and baiting one another
up and down the mahogany trees.
The cries took little nicks out of him. This was when Geryon liked to plan
his autobiography, in that blurred state
between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul.
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.
29
Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to

meet
the cold air of the world and stop,
as we do, just in time. (Carson 1998: 60)
Therefore, Geryon’s immersion in sleep and dream is not merely the cowardice and
self-absorption of retreating into a fantasy world. This kind of moment is also what
Carson pursues. The action of sleep announces that the unreal world beyond the
reality is magical and enigmatic, in which human beings are possible to obtain the
strength to counteract reality. The classics is a sort of fantasy world for Carson, and
the Geryon she describes gets access to the world through his dreams and
photographic diary. The wonderland of the dream not only offers the shelter and the
courage to resist and reconcile oneself with the reality, but also transcends the laws of
language. The narration of Autobiography of Red actually contains Carson’s
retrospection and reflection of the ancient civilization and language. Carson wakes up
from the classical world and interprets the Greek story in a contemporary way, namely
the photographic narrative of Autobiography of Red. According to the theory of
photography, photography is surreal art and the tradition of surreal painting is close to
a kind of dreams, mostly wet dreams, square fearful nightmares. Likewise, in
Autobiography of Red, sleep, dreams, poetic imagination, and the healing of
photography all collapse into a single force, which helps a sensitive boy to struggle
reluctantly with dignity against the order of wakefulness and the discipline of
language. Consequently, Geryon repeatedly wakes up between dream and reality, love
and loss, pain and understanding, and will eventually sleep forever in the fate laid
down for him by Greek mythology. Nevertheless, Carson does not wallow in the
ancient mystery forever as she considers that. The world of fantasy, once falls into
conflict with the reality, is confronted with the collapse. Hence, the real happiness,
wittiness and profundity are impossible to be accommodated in the realm of fantasy
and the disillusion occurs. Therefore, Carson embraces the modern world in a creative
way and the civilization and wisdom from the ancient times comes into existence at
30
the moment she returns to the reality. Therefore, the spatialization of time is realized
since the ancient time is incorporated into the space of the present, where past, present
and even future are all centralized in the photographic narrative, which is a
contemporary way to interpret the classics.
3.2 The Contemplation of a Rover
The word “wanderer” comes from the French word “flaneur”, which means
“wanderer” or “idler.” The image of the “wanderer” first appeared in French literature
in nineteenth century. The French poet Charles Baudelaire describes the “wanderer”
as an artist and poet wandering the streets of a modern metropolis. Furthermore,
“wanderer” is defined as a person on the edge of the city, as does Geryon. In
Autobiography of Red, Geryon is portrayed as a homosexual and sensitive boy with
eccentric red wings, who once encounters the sexual assault from his elder brother.
This multiple identity definitely puts Geryon in an awkward position in the society, in
which varieties of regulations exist. With the passage of time, the image of the
“wanderer” is no longer confined to French literature. In Autobiography of Red,
Geryon is like a “wanderer”, wandering the streets of city or the countryside, in the
midst of glitz and glamour, combining the city’s contradictions, sensitivities and
desires in an uncanny way, but always remaining aloof. It is this “wanderer”s gaze--a
hidden, conciliatory, hallucinatory gaze--that allows Carson to construct an illusory,
ambiguous visual space in his poems, through wordplay or strange line breaks.
3.2.1 The Displacement of Space
Photography is the fragmented record of the reality with the record of some
instantaneous moment, so this kind of art can be regarded as the static record of the
dynamic space of the reality. However, the photographic narrative of Geryon in
Autobiography of Red, although working like collage, is actually the dynamic
narration of Geryon’s life and inner world with the continuous change and
displacement of space.
31
The reality represented by the camera is always more concealed than exposed,
because the thin space created by the photograph seals only a slice of reality.
Photography captures reality, which is an imaginative fragment of reality rather than
the real and complete reality. The photograph is a way of explaining the world, but it
is not the photograph itself that explains the world, it is the inferences, speculations
and fantasies that the viewer makes after seeing the photograph that form the
photograph’s interpretation of the world. Photography implies that if people accept the
world in the light of the reality it records, they will understand the world. But the
opposite is true: understanding the world requires us to dig into its essence, and if
humans accept the photographic record of the apparent world as the real world, their
understanding of the world will not reach the truth of the world. Thus, the
understanding of the world produced by photography is limited. By decorating the
chaotic real world with a replica of the image world, photography makes the world
seem more comprehensible to us than it actually is. People’s impression of the real
world is stuck in a thin photograph, thus creating a solidified impression. Strictly
speaking, it is difficult for people to know the world only through a photograph.
Although a photograph is able to pull us back to a scene in the past and fills in the
gaps in the many images of the past in our minds, the lens is selective. The mute past
gives its voice through a photograph, but this voice is cropped, it carries with it the
subjective emotional attitude of the photographer. The photograph is an autonomous
choice of the picture of reality in the photographer’s field of vision, so the audience is
incapable of obtaining an objective understanding of the real world through a
subjective interception of the picture of reality. The photographer was once thought of
as a keen but non-interfering observer, a scribe rather than a poet. But as it become
clear that no matter how you photograph the same thing, you are impossible to take
the same picture. The assumption that the camera provides an objective, impersonal
influence gives way to the fact that the photograph is not just a proof of what exists,
but of what one see through one’s eyes, not just a record of the world, but an
appreciation of it. For the photographer, to take a photograph is to give importance,
and there is an inherent tendency in all photographs to assign what the photographer
32
perceives as value to the subject, and this tendency is difficult to suppress. Therefore,
the awareness people is able to gain is in fact a kind of incomplete awareness, which
appears to be wise, just as a photograph appears to reproduce reality and possesses it.
The photograph is a slice of the world, and the relationship between the world in the
photograph and the real world is as fundamentally inaccurate as the relationship
between a still photograph and a film. The seductive and deceptive nature of
photographs is that they offer the connoisseur a relationship to the world and a hybrid
acceptance of it at the same time. Photography’s gaze beyond fluid reality makes the
viewer feel comfortable, creating a false sense of omnipresence, a deceptive insight.
For some people, the attempts to make sense of the world is boring, so the viewer is
grateful and content to see the world the photographer has gleaned for us, indulging in
the virtual reality created by photography in the mistaken belief that they are
gradually getting a glimpse of the world. The camera is a liar, and photographs are
often praised for their honesty, but this suggests that most photographs are not honest,
so it is the few that do appear that deserve praise. Photography is not just a record of
reality, it is more concerned with how reality is presented to the viewer, and with this
aim in mind, the reality recorded by photography is no longer pure, it changes the
concept of reality, and it changes the concept of realism. Photographic viewing tends
to view reality as a mass of potential photographs, thus creating a detachment from
reality, a one-sided view that creates a gap between the objectivity of the camera and
the human eye in focusing on and judging reality.
This stagnant recording of reality in photography stems not only from its
fragmentary, one-sided still images, but is also limited by photography’s pursuit of
artistic beauty. Being similar with painting, photography is a figurative art, which also
possesses the ultimate quest for beauty. For the art of figuration, the artist has to
express the highest degree of beauty in a given situation of physical pain, but it is well
known that the intense distortion of form in a situation of physical pain is
incompatible with the highest degree of beauty. Likewise, photography also tends to
create things of beauty, no one finds ugliness through photographs, but many find
33
beauty through photographs. As mentioned above, photography is more interested in

documenting dark realities, which are often more difficult to convey the concept of
beauty, so photographers have to embellish the ugly but real reality, because there is
often a large gap between what the viewer sees through the camera and what the
naked eye sees. Even the most well-intentioned and aptly illustrated works by
photographers remain ultimately undiscovered. Lewis Hine’s photographs of
exploited children in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American
factories and coal mines easily outlast the importance of their subject matter in terms
of composition and elegant perspective. For many photographers, the camera can
provide an insight into the horrors of the world, and photographs documenting tragic
realities can be painful and indeed distressing. But the tendency to aestheticize
photography is so strong that this medium of transmitting pain diminishes the pain of
reality, and even ends up cancelling it out, so that photography’s quest for artistic
beauty creates a degree of confusion in the viewer’s perception of the real world.
Real time is fluid, while virtual reality under photography is frozen and
one-sided. The actual operation of the real world take place in time and must therefore
be explained in time, and only what is narrated can make sense to us. The poem is a
kind of sound painting, moreover an ensemble of coherent images of reality. In
Autobiography of Red, the virtual reality created by the photographic narrative is
dynamic and can be glimpsed in its entirety. Unlike the static reality documented by
photography, Geryon’s photographic autobiography allows the reader to feel the flow
of time, and his photographic diary not only documents his growth, but also gives us a
glimpse into his full state of mind after all his experiences, something that
photography cannot achieve. Moralists who love photographs always hope that words
can save them. Carson gives his protagonist, Geryon, the opportunity to document
reality through photography, while at the same time relaying Geryon’s photographs in
poetic text, at a time when photography is no longer just a one-sided representation of
the real world, but has the power of a narrative. It takes on a fluid time in the narrative
of the text with the reorganization of time resulting from the displacement of space:
34
But when he reached the room

he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
groping for a switch-he hit it
and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors. (Carson 1998: 57)
In this section, the two “room” actually exist in two space. The first “room” is
the room of the mother of Herakles, in which Geryon wants to find the telephone to
contact his own mother. And the second “room”, which is seemingly the same room,
is actually another room in other space according to the emotion of Geryon at that
moment. From the very beginning, Geryon’s mother has been criticizing Geryon for
the relationship between Geryon and Herakles, which is abnormal in the modern
society. Geryon is anguished as he is incapable of getting support from the woman on
whom he has been dependent since the childhood. As a consequence, when Geryon
has to contact her mother, he cannot resist the surge of sorrow and fury, and the
second room is precisely the room of Geryon’s mother. Hence, the image of “room” in
these lines achieves the juxtaposition within the space, which is a three-dimensional
structure of image. The “unappeasable debris of woman liquors,” symbolizing the
anger of his mother, is actually what Geryon once saw or imaged in his mother’s room.
Carson’s poetry does generate depth in the unpredictable visual space. On the one
hand, it is in close association with the Geryon’s sensory and emotional feelings as a
wanderer, and on the other hand, it systematically constructs a network of
interpenetration between body and matter. The visual space built up from the
perspective of the wanderer’s gaze thus shows the interpenetration and fusion of
vision and sensation, as Geryon’s senses and feelings are evoked by the material
world, and he is exposed to the noise and chaos of life. The vagaries of visual space in
Carson’s poetry serve to enhance perception. In other words, the material world
around Geryon is affluent, and the environment in turn reflects the depth of Geryon’s
own feelings.
35
Moreover, the “room” Geryon imaged in his inner world is also his home and
house. The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study
of the intimate values of inside space, provided, of course, that people take in both its
unity and its complexity, and endeavor to integrate all the special values in one
fundamental value (Bachelard 1994: 3). The house manifest itself in dispersed images
and a body of images at the same time (Bachelard 1994: 3). In the meanwhile, the
imagination arguments the values of reality (Bachelard 1994: 3), in other words, the
original house is possible to occur in different time and space due to the imagination.
In Autobiography of Red, the imagination of Geryon is not merely derived from his
photographic world, but also is from the unrestrained flow of his consciousness. For
most people, transcending their memories of the house in which they have found
shelter, they have the opportunities to comfort themselves with the illusion of
protection. Nonetheless, Geryon only trembles behind thick walls that are built by his
imagination with impalpable shadows as he mistrusts the seemingly staunchest
ramparts (Bachelard 1994: 5). Geryon experiences the “room” in its reality and in its
virtuality, by means of thought and dreams. At that moment, the mother’s “room” in
another space comes to dwell in the present space with an entire past and Geryon is in
the functional composition of imagination and memory. The “room” in which Geryon
have experienced sorrow and heartbreak reconstitute itself in a new space, and it is
because those memories of former dwelling-places are relieved within the steam of
consciousness. Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in
space, the sounder they are (Bachelard 1994: 9). With the stream of consciousness, the
past containing those memories gather to the present, thus the displacement of space
occurs.
3.2.2 The Erratic Identity
Photography, although strongly subjective and emotional, follows a certain style.

People in the real world come in all shapes and sizes, but under the camera operator’s
lens they are confined to a certain set of rules that prevent them from revealing their
36
true individuality. A coherent style of photography seems to make the different

personalities confined to the same rules. Because for the cameraman, impeccable
lighting, skillful composition, clarity of the subject, accuracy of focus, etc. are the
benchmarks by which a photograph is measured. The moment the cameraman focuses
the camera on a different person, even if they intend to show that person’s personality,
they cannot help but take these factors into account and are thus limited to a fixed
photographic pattern.
Nonetheless, in Autobiography of Red, Geryon’s contemplation on himself is

erratic with the self in a dynamic condition. Carson’s Geryon turns out to be a gay,
talented adolescent, emotionally attached to his chain-smoking mother, and by no
means a monster; he only fears being perceived as one. Terribly alone accompanied
only by his pet dog, Geryon questions his identity; “are there many little boys who
think they are a| Monster?” Geryon is portrayed as a gay in his autobiography,
however, Carson’s queer love story does not present itself as interested in historically
queer identities but in queer being. Carson never names Geryon’s sexuality: the noun
“gay” is never uttered. Other dimensions of his social identity are also left unnamed.
The description of the family scene suggests he is lower middle class living in North
America. He is also seemingly white, but by the end of the novel the readers learn
otherwise. What they do know is that Geryon is a monster and everything about him
is red. Geryon saw everything in red. The entire novel in verse is imbued with
inferences of red. Indeed, his red monstrosity organizes and inflects all of his
experiences, not easily defined by him or by those who are his witnesses. His
experiences are described pictorially, which offers us not understanding but an
affective reality that sets the conditions for interpretation. Red stands for Geryon’s
innermost queer being, the affect that underlies the loss of those who have suffered
from historic expulsion. For Georgis (2015: 155), he stands for the discarded bodies
of empire: the displaced and queer who suffer from violent xenophobic social
histories. The reading of Carson is not interested in sidestepping the historic violence
of those with marked social identities. Rather, it is suggested that human beings are
37
supposed to make a relationship between the discarded queer bodies of social histories
and the discarded queer monstrosities of subjectivity.
Queerness does not define identity, the view is that it is implicated in subject
formation. In Autobiography of Red, Carson’s queer red-winged monster is a
metaphor for passions that exist outside knowable history. Red, however, is not
outside reality; rather, as Monique Tschofen argues quoting Umberto Eco, it gestures
toward “the dynamics of the real,” the force of temporality, relationality, and emotion
on existence. For Tschofen, Geryon stands for metaphor itself: the principle of seeing
what cannot be seen directly; the principle that makes a distinction between
representation and the passions in charge of or animate representation. Geryon’s
wings stand for things queer—the monster within that has no name, only adjectives.
Geryon’s red wings are not “real” but they do exist. They inflect his subjectivity
semiotically and render him, as Julia Kristeva might put it, a stranger to himself. Red
is not itself identity, not the affirmation that signifies a set of meanings; it is the
substance of confusing affects and psychic conflicts from which signification is
possible and from which subjectivities are made and unmade, named and renamed.
For Geryon, his red wings always render him confused and painful:
These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animal they were.
With a piece of wooden plank he’ found in the basement Geryon made a back
brace
And lashed the wings tight. (Carson 1998: 53)
Geryon’s red wings are growing while he thinks the period is full of struggle and pain.
The description that his wings tears against each other is actually the symbolization of
the tearing of the ego of Geryon himself. Geryon is always in the state of being
anxious and frightened about his identity, to be specific, his weird red wings. His
inner world, being implied in his photographic world, is consistently disordered and
38
chaotic, which is similar to the dream of Geryon. His action of lashing the wings tight
is obviously the reflection of his suppression of his identity:
All your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.

Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head
and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing. (Carson 1998: 55-56)
Geryon’s many actions are related to captivity and suppression, which is a kind of
insinuation and representative of his self-denial of his identity. When Geryon stopped
in the dark he involuntarily makes a interrogative noise--“Who am I?” Therefore, the
identity of Geryon portrayed in his photographic diary is erratic and is even not
acceptable to himself. It can be observed that what Geryon actually escapes is not his
miserable life but his erratic and chaotic identity.
Actually, the erratic identity of Geroyn also originates from his childhood,
especially his memories in his home. Sometimes humans hold the opinion that they
know themselves in time, when all they know is a sequence of fixations in the space
of the being’s stability (Bachelard 1994: 8). Generally, the space with stability is one’s
own home, or the house, as the house is the personal corner of the world, in which
people achieves a sense of identity. However, the house is of no value to Geryon as he
has no sense of belonging at that place, where he suffers the sexual assault from his
elder brother and he obtains no protection or support from his mother whom he once
believes in and relies on. Without the spirit of house, humans would be a dispersed
being. Therefore, Geryon, is always on the journey to find a real shelter to get to
know the true self. Furthermore, the erratic identity also originates from a sort of
restriction on himself:
Freedom is what I want for you Geryon we’re true friends you know that’s why
I want you to be free.
Don’t want to be free want to be with you. Beaten but alert Geryon organized all
his inside force to suppress this remark. (Carson 1998: 74)
39
Herakles expects that Geryon is capable of obtaining freedom, whereas the inner
voice of Geryon yearns for the company of Herakles. According to this, it can be
observed that Geryon is incapable of tolerating the solitude and loneliness, or more
precisely, the single self. He is dependent on the one he loves to have the opportunity
to know himself, however, the reality disappoints him and his identity remains erratic.
Actually, although Herakles, as the past companion of Geryon, steals Geryon’s tender
heart, he is entirely unacquainted with the inner world of Geryon and what he pursues
is disparate in comparison with Geryon’s pursuit:
The reason I called is to tell you

about my dream I had a dream of you last night.
.............................................................................
Yellow? Said Geryon and he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams
he doesn’t know me at all! Yellow! (Carson 1998: 74)
In Autobiography of Red, Geryon is a sensitive boy with red-wings and

everything about him is red. Nonetheless, Herakles hardly approaches the inward
world of Geryon and he is impossible to accompany him as a soulmate. In reality,
Geryon has a clear understanding that Herakles and him are completely two different
people and Herakles is incapable of providing him with the spiritual comfort and
consolation in the real world. The more unacceptable and heartbreaking fact, for
Geryon, is that Herakles has no possibilities to know his inner consciousness even in
the fantasy world, namely his dream. Both family and friends of Geryon are incapable
of supporting him and furnish him with the company, and Geryon gets himself into a
frightful muddle of the ego as well. Consequently , he becomes a solitary wanderer
with the collapsed inner world and the erratic identity.
40
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Chapter Ⅳ
Ⅳ The Construction of Image Space
In 1945, Joseph Frank published The Spatial Form of Modern Literature, which
sparked a scholarly interest in literary space. Frank reviewed the discussion of
literature and painting in Lessing’s Laocoon and directly rejected its applicability to
modern literature (Frank 1945: 221-240). After the analysis of artistic form of modern
literature, Frank assumes that numerous works of literary figures belonging to
modernism such as Eliot, Pound, and Proust demonstrate a sort of spatialized art. The
space he mentions is definitely not the actual physical space, but the textual space of
the work. From his perspective, the space of modernist literary form primarily refers
to the technique of juxtaposition in the works of modernist writers. Modernist literary
creators have a rather self-conscious perception of the spatiality of art. For instance,
Pound considers that imagery as the unity of ideas and emotion, which is a complex
formed in a single moment. In brief, the reader of these modernist works are supposed
to understand the works in a syncretic way rather than in a chronological order, that is,
only when various and varied imagery are combined with each other can readers
perceive the purpose the author and the meaning of the works. Insomuch, the works
can be regarded spatial. As regards Autobiography of Red, various and complicated
images are utilized by Carson to adorn the melancholy life of an unusual boy Geryon
so as to form the contemporary poetic fiction of the Greek myth.
4.1 The Metaphorical Nature of Imagery
Poetic imagery is the basic building block of poetry, the soul and life of poetry.
Poetic imagery is the carrier of language. In fact, the process of creating poetry is the
poets’ search for objective things to use as imagery, constructing imagery language, so
that their subjective emotions can be expressed vividly and imaginatively. From a
literary perspective, poetic imagery is a means of shaping artistic images, while from
a linguistic perspective, it is an artistic language that conveys aesthetic information
and aesthetic feelings. Poetic imagery language is figurative, metaphorical, ethnic and
41
paired with the transcendental. The poet’s use of metaphor is what makes figurative
poetic imagery a vehicle for his or her subjective emotions. Poetic imagery language
is characterized by semantic multilayeredness, polysemy and indeterminacy. The
language of poetic imagery has multiple layers of semantics, i.e. it has both a surface
conceptual meaning and a deep aesthetic meaning. In the semantic system of the
language, many words have not only a physical conceptual meaning, but also a
variety of cultural meanings derived from the conceptual meaning, which are
characteristic of the nation. These words become the main imagery words of poetic
imagery language, which naturally forms the semantic polysemy of imagery language.
Poetic imagery is the material medium through which abstract emotions are
concretized, and it conveys and expresses subjective ideas in a metaphorical way,
rather than directly in unmistakable language, thus producing a hazy and ambiguous
sense of beauty, and thus a certain degree of uncertainty. When the poet constructs the
language of imagery, he uses the mechanism of metaphorical thinking. Metaphorical
thinking is based on the similarity between people and things, and between things and
objects. Therefore, metaphorical thinking follows the law of interpenetration of all
things. The poet constructs the similarity between subjective emotions and objective
things through the use of intuitive associations or extraordinary imaginative thinking
operations, and corresponds his subjective feelings to certain sensual characteristics of
objective things, thus constructing a metaphorical poetic imagery language. The poet
is stimulated by the external world to produce a creative motive, and is driven by this
motive to organize internal speech. The process of conceiving and organizing the
internal language of poetic imagery is the process through which the poet, under the
constraints of national culture, selects objective things to serve as imagery carriers
and constructs the imagery language of poetry to express his or her feelings. Once the
internal language of poetic imagery has been created, the internal language must be
externalized, expressed in sound and shaped in words, before the whole process of
constructing poetic imagery can be completed. The poet uses external linguistic
means such as phonetics, semantics and syntax to transform the internal speech into a
metaphorical external speech.
42
The reason why poetic language is called metaphorical language in comparison

with everyday language is that the poet’s way of thinking and rhetorical means of
constructing poetic imagery are metaphorical. The essential feature of poetic imagery
is that the poet uses metaphor to project his inner emotions and experiences onto
objective things through the choice of external things and scenes, and to integrate
them with objective things. In fact, through the metaphorical language of imagery, the
poet materializes the mind or the mind of the object. Metaphor is a significant
principle of poetry, the main text and glory of the poet. The reason for this is that
poetry is full of metaphorical imagery, which has been described as the essence of
poetic language. The poetry of the famous American poetess Dickinson is famous for
her metaphorical imagery, which is concise, subtle and profound. The metaphorical
nature of poetic imagery is the essential characteristic of poetic imagery, and the
metaphorical nature of poetic imagery is merely an outward expression of the poet’s
metaphorical way of thinking. Therefore, poetic imagery language is not only the
result of the poet’s clever choice of language and the use of figurative and
metaphorical language to express his thoughts and feelings vividly, but also the
product of the poet’s active metaphorical thinking. The metaphorical thinking of the
poet in constructing imagery is a kind of awareness inspired and strengthened by
emotion, a kind of thinking activity in which emotion is embodied through concrete
images. The fundamental reason why poetic language is such a system with a
multi-level aesthetic-semantic structure lies in the metaphorical nature of its dominant
component, imagery. According to the famous American poet Frost, poetry offers the
readers a way of suggesting something else, ostensibly stating one thing, but in fact
meaning something else (Liu 2012: 146). The metaphorical nature of poetic imagery
determines the multilayered nature of its semantics. On the one hand, poetic imagery
exists as an everyday linguistic form that carries an abstract and general conceptual
meaning, and on the other hand, it exists as an aesthetic form that conveys an
aesthetic message, i.e., an aesthetic meaning that lies beneath the conceptual meaning
of words and that evokes associations. People therefore divide the semantics of poetic
imagery into the surface conceptual meaning of the symbols and the deeper aesthetic
43
meaning of the imagery. The language of poetic imagery exists first and foremost as a
symbol of everyday language, a material medium through which the poet constructs
the imagery system and conveys the aesthetic experience, without which poetic
imagery could not form a material entity. Therefore, as far as the linguistic symbols of
imagery are concerned, they have their own conceptual meaning, that is, the
conceptual meaning of the surface of the language of poetic imagery. But when
everyday language is used as a vehicle for imagery and becomes the language of
imagery, it becomes an artistic sign to be used, which gives rise to a deep aesthetic
meaning.
The imagery of poetry is a process from sensation to perception, and sensation is

the most primary form of perceptual reflection, a direct reflection of individual
properties and aspects of the object of consciousness. Sensation cannot simply be
produced or extinguished subjectively by the thinking subject, but is primarily
triggered by the stimulation of external objects or inner consciousness, providing us
with real information about external objects as well as stimulating our imagination
and hallucinations. Since the senses provide the first material of knowledge people
can grasp about the external world, which then triggers the whole process of our
knowing. According to Lenin (Chen 2011: 33), the first premise of epistemology is
undoubtedly that the senses are the only source of our knowledge. However, Kant
(Chen 2011: 33) argues that sensation is only a fragmentary, unintegrated momentary
representation, the starting point and the first step in conceptual knowledge, and that
only perception is a higher form of sensual reflection than sensation. Perception is the
combination of sensations into a whole, and is thus formed on the basis of sensation;
yet perception is not the perception of sensory material, but the direct perceptual
reflection of the totality of the existence of a particular object, its state, etc. Only
perception, as empirical consciousness of the manifest, contains a multitude of
associations in empirical intuition, so that the synthesis of experience is also
necessary to form a holistic perception of the here and now of this one thing as an
object of consciousness.
44
In Autobiography of Red, the inner consciousness of Geryon stimulates the

imagination and hallucinations of him. Moreover, the consciousness of Geryon is
implicit in the image with the process of unrestrained flow. Therefore, the image
space emerges since the images Carson applied are possible to be constructed in a
three-dimensional space with extensible meanings and significance.
4.2 The Organization of Image Space
According to Chen (1989: 99), the construction of imagery can be categorized as

the organization of image space, the malleability of image space, and the
constructivity of image space. The existence of the organization itself is a sort of
spatial existence, which is a flat space. This kind of space is not in the necessity of
understanding beyond the poetic language itself, thus relatively speaking, this space is
the most obvious and distinct. For instance, the appearance of the literal symbols is
received by our eyes and brains and then construct a direct transformation of the
image, and this is the operation of the function of the organization of image space.
Certainly, this kind of characteristics appears among novels as well because the
organization comes into existence as long as the construction of syntactic relation is
presented in some sentence pattern. Hence, it can be concluded that all kinds of
literary creation that apply words owns the characteristics of the organized image
space (Chen 1989: 100). However, within poetry, this feature still has some unique
connotations. For instance, in Autobiography of Red:
Grass swan towards him and away. Joyous small companies of insects
with double-decker wings
like fighter plane were diving about in the hot white wind. The light
unbalanced him. (Carson 1998: 49)
This excerpt is not a straightforward linear structure, but a continuous loop with
a certain point as the axis, and Geryon himself is the axis. The “grass” is the
ecological image of the green plants in the courtyard, and “insects” are creatures in
45
the ecological system of the courtyard, and the “light” is a natural phenomenon
caused by the movement of the air. It can be observed that the three images have no
inevitable logical relations. Therefore, these images cannot be assembled in the
narrow text space but for the specific principle of organization. And the reason that
the fusion of these images is able to be perceived lies that these images become
appreciable and tangible through the behaviors they perform in Geryon. Generally
speaking, the organization of image space is not difficult to understand. The length of
the stanzas, the rhythmic counterpoint, or the placement of staccato in Western poetry,
or even the necessity of limiting the poem to “fourteen lines” are all the consequence
of strict organization of the poem. Even if some poets go beyond the rules and break
stanzas or staccato, which is seemingly the detriment of this literal organization, they
are still, in essence, implicitly following the rules and not making the poetic creation
as a true treatise. In Autobiography of Red, many fragments of sentence are utilized so
as to realize some kind of enlightening effect:
He had been here before, dangling

inside the word she like a trinket at a belt. Spokes of red rang across his eyelids
in the blackness. (Carson 1998: 57)
The sentence “Spokes of red rang across his eyelids in the blackness” (Carson 1998:
57) is split into two rows, which is seemingly irregular. Nevertheless, this kind of
arrangement is precisely the highlight of the blackness, which is a symbol of the
sorrowful inner world of Geryon.
4.3 The Malleability of Image Space
The malleability of image space brings a constant fascination to the poetry, and it
manifests itself particularly in the extension space beyond the literal structure. The
concept of extension space increase the density of image, thus giving rise to the
evolution of the traditional aesthetic understanding of poetry, which is based on the
definition of the poem’s temporal duration by Lessing. The poetry is an open system,
46
in which each stanza is, within itself, a self-contained system of interlocking stanzas.
However, as soon as they are assigned to a chain of temporal states, each occupying a
position either before or after the other, the imagery immediately ceases to be equal.
This temporal sequence, in which the preceding causes form the final effect,
inevitably creates inertia of constant movement and it is this inertia that is effectively
exploited by extension. If the poem terminates with a puzzling ending, the readers are
capable of relying on their imagination, which is supported by the malleability of
image space, to compensate for the gap until the acquisition of one’s own
understanding of the poem.
In comparison with the organization of image space, the malleability of image

space is not distinct and obvious, but contains connotative rules. The fundamental
meaning of the malleability of image space is that the image only provides the direct
feelings, but this reaction always cease with the termination of the verse. Nonetheless,
the existence of the malleability is capable of making readers not be confined to the
end of the poetic lines and stretch one’s own feelings:
Outside the sun had set. The little barred window was black. Geryon sat wrapped
in himself. Would this day never end?
His eye travelled to the clock at the front of the room and he fell into the pool
of his favourite question. (Carson 1998: 92)
This is the end of one chapter in Autobiography of Red and this kind of ending
possibly renders the readers puzzled and confused as Carson does not directly tell the
readers what Geryon’s favourite question is. However, the answer is not clueless since
the image of “clock” invites the readers to exert their imagination. Before Geryon is
immersed in some question, he has been contemplating the clock at the front of the
room and the clock is a tool to record time. Thus, it can be inferred that the question is
related with time. Apart from the image of “clock”, the image of “sun” is also a
distinct and noticeable evidence. The description of the sunset,which is a concept of
time dimension, actually implies what provokes Geryon’s thought and reflection. In
47
this sense, the image of “clock” and the image of the “sun” are associated with each
other and both of them provides the readers with the space of imagination. As a matter
of fact, Carson directly presents the favourite question of Geryon, that is “What is
time made of (Carson 1998: 80)”:
What is time made of ?

he could feel it massed around him, he could see its big deadweight blocks
padded tight together
all the way from Bermuda to Buenos Aires—too tight. (Carson 1998: 80)
Although Carson presents the question, she does not directly reveals the answer to it,
whereas the image of “big deadweight blocks” actually gives the explanation. For
Geryon, the flow of time resembles the movement of the collection of deadweight
blocks. From this point of view, time is tangible with a entity, just like that in a five
dimensional space. The blocks from different place is exactly the incarnation of time
in different ages, including the past, now, and the future. Henceforth, Carson’s
concept of spatialization of time is exemplified anew.
4.4 The Constructivity of Image Space
Comparatively speaking, the constructivity of image space is the most

complicated and intricate among the three characteristics. The flatness of language
and the fact that poetic language is temporal renders the constructivity of image space
difficult. And the dual meaning of some line usually refers to its symbolic connotation,
which is interpreted though the content of the verse rather than the form of the
structure of the image. For instance, in Autobiography of Red:
Geryon’s brother was regarding her with one eye closed his mode of total
attention.
What about you Geryon
what’s your favourite weapon? Cage, said Geryon from behind his knees.
48
Cage? said his brother.

You idiot a cage isn’t a weapon. It has to do something to be a weapon.
Has to destroy the enemy. (Carson 1998: 33)
The dual structure of the image “cage” is obvious. The cage is a sort of indication of
the response of Geryon to the pathetic reality. Geryon has no courage to confront the
reality directly or fight against it and his choice is to escape from the reality and to
imprison himself in the cage, just like the tendency of him to fall asleep. Therefore,
the image of “cage” forms the constructivity of image space. However, this kind of
constructivity is still confined in the content and meaning of the verse without the
consideration of the structure of the image itself. The dual meaning of the image of
“cage” operates in a paralleled way, and the more intricate constructivity of image
space is the juxtaposition of image structures:
But when he reached the room

he stopped in a night gone suddenly solid.
Who am I? He had been here before in the dark on the stairs with his hands out
groping for a switch-he hit it
and the room sprang towards him like an angry surf with its unappeasable debris
of woman liquors. (Carson 1998: 57)
The two “room” actually has a more complicated constructivity. The first “room” is
the room of the mother of Herakles, in which Geryon wants to find the telephone to
contact his own mother. Nontheless, the second “room”, which is seemingly the same
room, is actually another room in other space for Geryon at that moment. Geryon is
disappointed and grieved as the relationship between Geryon and Herakles is not
accepted by Geryon’s mother. As a consequence, when Geryon has to contact her
mother, he cannot resist the surge of sorrow and anger, and the second room is
precisely the room of Geryon’s mother. Hence, the image of “room” in these lines
achieve the juxtaposition within the space, which is a three-dimensional structure of
49
image. This kind of characteristic also manifests itself in the traumatic memories of
Geryon:
The cold pressure of the concrete wall

against his back had tumbled him into a recollection. He was at a Saturday night
high school dance. Hours of music had crashed
on his ears while he stood
at the wall with his back pressed against cold concrete.
His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.
(Carson 1998: 101)
Geryon is subjected to the sadness of the past when he stands against the wall of the
bar. The first “wall ” in this section is the one in the bar at present. And the second
“wall”, within the recollection of Geryon, is a heartrending existence. The reason is
that Geryon, standing against the wall in his high school, was once assaulted by his
elder brother. The two “wall” seemingly exists in different space. However, with the
flow of Geryon’s consciousness, the first “wall” is actually transformed into the
second “wall”, namely the one in Geryon’s memories. The displacement of time and
space resulting from the stream of consciousness of Geryon contributes to the bored
and extensive connotations of the image “wall”, thus the constructivity of image space
is achieved.
50
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Chapter Ⅴ
Ⅴ Conclusion
Autobiography of Red, being curiously organized, is a hybrid work of poetry and

prose. The novel in verse rewrites the Greek myth of Herakles 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. During the process of creating the modern-day text, Carson
enables her protagonist Geryon to narrate his autobiography through the medium of
photograph. The readers are invited to witness and to be touched by Geryon’s life
through his photo-autobiography, which captures, the surging self-consciousness, the
moment of enlightenment, the unstable self, and the dynamic time.
Autobiography is visual, not verbal. This explains why Carson asked Geryon to
write his autobiography through the medium of photography. Autobiography itself is a
review of the past, but also a gaze at the reality of the self. In the same way that
photography preserves the disappearing past, it also gazes at the reality of the world.
Carson, a poet with an unconventional and extraordinary poetic vision, reinterprets
the classics in a contemporary and innovative way. The use of the photographic
medium creates a photographic narrative within the poem, which is also a new form
of fusion of poetry and painting and is an innovation of poetic language more.
Photography, like mainstream surrealist taste itself, exhibits a habitual penchant for
waste, eyesores, useless objects, oddities and artifice. As the red-winged monster
Geryon is also portrayed as a homosexual who is different from the mainstream, he
would be the type of person the photographer would love to document, with a curious
yet indifferent attitude, and for the viewer Geryon is something they long to know.
And Carson does turn the camera on Geryon, leaving the mastery of the camera in his
hands.
The true insight of Autobiography of Red is that the poetry and all these sections
move like collapse, which is what Carson attempts to create. The creation of poetry is
51
regarded as the painting by Carson and she paints with thoughts and facts during the
process of poetic production. Carson is bored of the lack of passion of human beings
living in modern times, thus she devotes herself to the classical world, in which she
explores her roots and receives psychological comfort and alleviation. Nonetheless,
the sluggish reality is so inescapable that Carson is destined to confront it. Fortunately,
Carson succeeds in getting accordance with the reality and she becomes the
contemporary interpreter of the classics. One of the significant aspect Carson has
reflection on is the poetic language. Language is limited to time so the traditional
argument is that poetry is temporal. With the development of literary criticism concept,
the spatialization of time within poetry gradually arises, which is also what Carson
pursues among her poetic work. The spatial turn of poetry in Autobiography of Red
mainly embodies in Carson’s innovation of the poetic form. Carson is mistrustful of
the credibility of language’s description of the facts, as a consequence, she enables her
protagonist to narrate his autobiography in the way of photography. Within the
photographic world of Geryon, the photograph taken by him not only conserves some
moment he expects to seize, but also contains a deluge of the consciousness of
himself. The moment Geryon presses the shutter incorporates the present emotion of
him along with his memories of the past. Moreover, Geryon has the tendency to fall
into sleep, which is a sort of stress response to the miserable reality and escape from
the reality. Geryon is always in the boundary between dream and waking, and the
boundary between dreams and waking is active as it has leaks. Additionally, in the
space of leak, Geryon is endowed with the moment of enlightenment, which inspires
and encourages him to proceed with his photographic autobiography. Carson herself
concentrates more on some moment of enlightenment and this kind of moment,
recorded by Geryon’ s photograph, occurs when Geryon is awake from his dreams.
The photographic world is a kind of dream for Geryon to some extent. The
photograph and the self-consciousness buried in it render the time in Autobiography
of Red chaotic and disordering, thus the displacement of space occurs and the
spatialization of time is achieved. Likewise, the identity of Geryon is in constant
change as well. Geryon has been always in the process of tearing of the ego and
52
within his photographic autobiography, the self recorded by himself is allowed to be

erratic with endless imagination. Furthermore, the application of the image in
Autobiography of Red also presents the spatiality. The image is metaphorical and this
kind of characteristic enable the existence of image space. The spatiality of image
primarily manifests itself in three fronts, including the organization of image space,
the malleability of image space, and the constructivity of image space. And in
Autobiography of Red, with the flow of the self-consciousness of Geryon, the space of
visual imagination is constructed. Accordingly, the images Carson utilized in the
novel in verse are endowed with the three characteristics mentioned above as the
surge of consciousness is connoted beneath the images. Therefore, the concept of
image space is established.
In conclusion, Carson’s reinterpretation of the classics in a contemporary way is

innovative and creative. Both her reflection on language and her distrust of language
contribute to the photographic narrative in the novel in verse. The spatial turn of
Autobiography of Red primarily manifests it self in two fronts. On the one hand,
Carson enables her protagonist Geryon to indulge in his flow of consciousness in the
photographic world, in which the time and space is turbulent and disorganized with
the spatialization of time. On the other hand, Carson renders the images, connoting
the stream of consciousness and visual imagination of Geryon as well, extensible and
constructible. This kind of inner immensity gives the real meaning to certain
expressions concerning the visible world. Therefore, the image space is created.
53
Shanghai Normal University Master of Arts Bibliography
Bibliography
Bell, Al. Medium and Mediality in Anne Carson [J]. Textual Practice, 2021, Vol. 36
(7): 1-21.
Beasley, Bruce. Who Can a Monster Blame for Being Red? Three Fragments on the
Academic and the “other” in Autobiography of Red [A]. Anne Carson: Ecstatic
Lyre. Ed. Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
2015. 74-81.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space [M]. Trans. Mariajolas. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994.
Battis, Jes. “Dangling Inside the Word she”: Confusion and Gender Vertigo in Anne
Carson’s Autobiography of Red [J]. Canadian Literature, 2003,Vol. 176(176):
198-203.
Berta, Katherine 1. Float, by Anne Carson [J]. Women’s Studies, 2018, Vol.47(3):
377-379.
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse [M]. Random House of

Canada, Limited, 1998.
Cohen, Jeffrey. Monster Theory: Reading Culture [M]. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1996.
D’Agata, John and Carson Anne. A _____ with Anne Carson [J]. The lowa Review,
2014, Vol. 27(2): 1-22.
Frank, Joseph. Spatial Form of Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts [J]. The
Sewanee Review, 1945, Vol. 53(2): 221-240.
Finglass P. J., and K. Adrian. Stesichorus in Context [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2015.
Georgis, Dina. Discarded Histories and Queer Affects in Anne Carson’s

54
Autobiography of Red [J]. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2014, Vol.15(2):

154-166.
Georgis, Dina. Hearing the Better Story: Learning and the Aesthetics of Loss and
Expulsion [J]. Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 2006,
Vol.28(2): 165-178.
Hoffert, Barbara. Autobiography of Red [J]. Library Journal,1999, Vol.124(6): 95.
Holtz, William. Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration [J]. Critical

Inquiry, 1977, Vol. 4(2): 271-283.
McRae, Calista 1. A Book of Readings on Anne Carson [J]. Journal of Modern

Literature, 2018, Vol.41(3): 138-141.
McCallum, E. L.. Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne
Carson’s Autobiography of Red [J]. Postmodern Culture, 2007, Vol.17(3): 10.
Miller, Geordie. “Shifting Ground”: Breaking (from) Baudrillard’s “Code” in

Autobiography of Red [J]. Canadian Literature, 2011, Vol. 210(210-211):
152-167, 267.
McDougall, Russell. ‘A Portable Kit of Images’: Photography in Australian and

Canadian Literature in English [J]. Kunapipi, 1987, Vol. 9(1): 110-121.
Murray, Stuart J. 1. The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and the Limits of

Narrative Self-Possession in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red [J]. English
Studies in Canada, 2005, Vol.31(4): 101-122.
Mitchell, W. J. T.. Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory [J]. Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 6(3): 539-567.
O’Rourke-Suchoff, Jessi. “Near and Unlost”: Reading Paul Celan with Anne Carson
[J]. Germanic Review, 2018, Vol.93(1): 76-83.
Ryskamp, Dani Alexis. Neurodiversity’s Lingua Franca?: The Wild Iris,

Autobiography of Red, and the Breakdown of Cognitive Barriers Through Poetic
55
Language [J]. Hilltop Review, 2014, Vol.7(1): 21-32.
Sébastien, DUCASSE. Metaphor as Self-Discovery in Anne Carson’s Autobiography

of Red: A Novel in Verse [J/OL]. E-rea, 2007. Retrieved 17 March.
<https://journals.openedition.org/erea/190>.
Signorelli-Pappas, Rita. Anne Carson Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (review) [J]. World
Literature Today, 2020, Vol. 94(3): 82-83.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography [M]. New York: Noonday P, 1977.
Tschofen, Monique. First I Must Tell about Seeing: (De)monstrations of Visuality and
the Dynamics of Metaphor in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red [J].
Canadian Literature, 2004, Vol. 180(2): 31-50.
Van Buren, Ann K. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse [J]. Library Journal,
1998, Vol.123(9): 88.
Weber, Andreas. A Path to Poetic Space [J]. Constructivist Foundations, 2021,

Vol.16(2): 192-195.
Weaver, Andy. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada [J]. English
Studies in Canada, 2008, Vol. 34(4): 184-187.
陈庆勋. 艾略特诗歌的语言问题 [J]. 国外文学, 2008, 111(3): 78-87.
陈圣生. 诗路历程: 诗歌意象纵横论 [M]. 北京: 中国社会科学出版社, 2011.
陈振濂. 空间诗学导论 [M]. 上海: 上海文艺出版社, 1989.
邓鸥翔. 20 世纪初英美诗歌的“空间转向”与审美现代转型 [J]. 外国语文,

2022, 38(4): 64-72.
弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫. 奥兰多 [M]. 徐会坛, 刘漪, 王瑜玲, 周乐怡译. 武汉:

华中科技大学出版社, 2020.
戈特霍尔德·埃夫莱姆·莱辛. 拉奥孔 [M]. 朱光潜译. 北京: 人民文学出版

社, 1979.
56
郭方云. 论《荒原》的空间诗学内在特征 [J]. 外国文学, 2008, 211(2):

67-70+127.
郭方云. 英美文学空间诗学的亮丽图景: 文学地图研究 [J]. 外国文学, 2013,

245(6): 110-117+159.
高文婧. 空间批评的建构与反思 [J]. 当代外国文学, 2017, 38(3): 165-171.
刘芳. 诗歌意象语言研究 [M]. 上海: 上海译文出版社, 2012.
卢桢. 新世纪诗歌的写作精神与想象空间 [J]. 中国文学批评, 2022, 30(2):

130-138+191.
庞玉厚. 空间与叙事: 《献给爱米丽的玫瑰》的空间诗学 [J]. 杭州师范大学学

报(社会科学版), 2014, 36(03): 82-86.
苏珊·桑塔格. 论摄影 [M]. 黄灿然译. 上海: 上海译文出版社, 2008.
陶家俊. 客体、文学与接触空间——通向接触空间诗学之路 [J]. 当代外国文学,

2008, 114(4): 53-60.
王玮. 艾米莉·狄金森空间化的是给形式创造 [J]. 国外文学, 2016, 143(3):

103-110+159.
许小凡. 安·卡森的否定史诗与神话方法: 评《红的自传》 [J]. 英语学习, 2020,

715(9): 63-68.
张广奎. 莱辛《拉奥孔》中的时空观 [J]. 外国文学研究, 2020, 42(2): 71-79.
张雯. 加拿大当代诗体小说的摄影式叙事手法 [J]. 解放军外国语学院学报,

2023, 46(1): 138-144+152+161.
57

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学 刘倩倩

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学 刘倩倩

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学 刘倩倩

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

学校代码：10270 分类号：H31 学号：202200232

Supervisor: Chen Qingxun

Foreign Languages College

Shanghai Normal University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of Master of Arts in

English Linguistics & Literature

self-consciousness and his visual imagination enables images to travel in different

In the novel in verse, language is replaced by photograph by Geryon to finish his

1.1 A Brief Introduction to Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red

Particularly, Carson is a contemporary interpreter of classical spirit as the ancient

Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse and the most important masterpiece of

Anne Carson is immersed in the classics on account of the lack of passion of

facts. According to this consideration, Carson portrayed Geryon as a photographer

1.2 Literature Review on Anne Carson and Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson is a contemporary Canadian poet, essayist and translator. As a

With respect to writing techniques, it can be obviously detected Carson harbors

Moreover, numerous readers and scholars understand Carson in the context of a

Despite the prevalence of narrative traditions which seek to suppress monstrous

1.3 Literature Review on Space Poetics

The traditional poetic theory, according to Lessing’s Laocoon, is based on the

Ⅱ The Spatial Turn in Carson’s Poetry

At the beginning of the twentieth century, English and American poetry

2.1 The Contemporary Interpreter of the Classical Spirit

Human beings creates conception of things based on the common experience,

Likewise, Anne Carson is also disappointed with the contemporary society. In

tendency to be deficient in some sort of desire and inspiration. Moreover, Carson is

2.2 The Innovation of Poetic Form

The transition of English poetry the Romantic and Victorian models to

Anne Carson is a poet with both of the contradictory and concordant

In Autobiography of Red, Carson’s photographic narrative is likewise a record of

in time. Photographic viewing, that is, viewing reality as a mass of potential

Geryon was bored and said he couldn’t see any

Photography is not only a record of life; specifically, it is a fragmentary record of

Ⅲ The Space of Visual Imagination

3.1 The Photographic World of Geryon

Photographs involve a specific sense of loss—the loss of reality, the limitation of

3.1.1 The Surge of Self-consciousness Beneath the Photograph

In Autobiography of Red , the spatial narrative of the poem is made possible by

Within poems, the consciousness of characters can maintain their independence.

However, unlike the common way, Geryon’s consciousness is almost contained in

A church bell rang across the page

He went up to the roof and sat

In Autobiography of Red, Carson highlights Geryon’s gaze on the real world

Within Geryon’s photographs, almost everything is of gloomy emotion. The light,

He stepped out into a blood-colored dawn.

3.1.2 The Autobiography of a Sleeper

At the end of Autobiography of Red, Geryon, in his twenties, sets out on a

He had dreamed of thorns. A forest of huge blackish-brown thorn trees

Under the seams runs the pain.

moment of waking attracts him more. Nonetheless, as he grows up and experiences

Geryon wiped his face

Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to

3.2 The Contemplation of a Rover

3.2.1 The Displacement of Space

beauty through photographs. As mentioned above, photography is more interested in

But when he reached the room

3.2.2 The Erratic Identity

Photography, although strongly subjective and emotional, follows a certain style.

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学刘倩倩

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学刘倩倩

革律翁的摄影日记：《红的自传》的空间诗学刘倩倩

弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫. 奥兰多 [M]. 徐会坛, 刘漪, 王瑜玲, 周乐怡译. 武汉:

戈特霍尔德·埃夫莱姆·莱辛. 拉奥孔 [M]. 朱光潜译. 北京: 人民文学出版

苏珊·桑塔格. 论摄影 [M]. 黄灿然译. 上海: 上海译文出版社, 2008.