The story was a monster and everything about it was red.
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is a retelling of Stesichoros’s Geryoneis, a poem of the killing of Geryon which only exists in fragments, and which shatters the Homeric tradition of an adjective system where each noun is pinned to a single metaphor.
This allows a text to be shaken and reconsidered. My work is a mapping of the redness of Autobiography of Red, translating the story to a chromographic retelling centred on a single hue – the red parts – and asking what happens when we fragment a story, especially a love story about a monster.
A story can be fractured by an act of violence. Sometimes putting it together, too, is an act of destruction. A red act.
Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be, hereafter. And write them in red.
