The Surrealist Autobiography: Epic and Lightness in Anne Carson and CAConrad


The language poets that preceded Anne Carson and CAConrad preached that form is only ever an extension of content. But while Charles Olson and John Cage took this idea to its most minute levels-deconstructing language itself-Carson and Conrad invert their microscopic treatment of form-content unity. Their poetry takes the form of the autobiography. In his article “The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and the Limits of Narrative Self-Possession in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red”, Stuart Murray observes that, etymologically, autobiography is “auto- (oneself) + bio- (life) + graphia (writing; from the verb graphein, to write)”. Murray takes this to mean that life (bio) interrupts the process of self-writing, rendering it illegible and escaping the intentions of the autobiographer altogether. However, instead of life obscuring one’s writing, I would like to suggest, in the tradition of Olson’s form-content unity, a union of life, self, and writing that Carson and Conrad uphold in their work. Instead of autobiography as object, as “one’s life story”, as Murray puts it, autobiography as process, as the writing of one’s life.

Carson chooses the classical monster Geryon as the subject of The Autobiography of Red from the Geryonesis by Stesichorus. In fact, she frames the autobiography with a discussion of Stesichorus and translation of his fragmented poem. Plato calls Stesichorus, whose name means choirmaster, an intellectual for, upon being struck blind for slandering Helen, regains his sight by writing a palinode. To answer Carson’s title question “What difference did Stesichorus make?”, I would say that he recognized the union of form and content, in language, and between language and life. Stesichorus realized that as he wrote, he was writing his life into existence and so was not surprised when his writing came to bear directly on his sight, and knew what to do. Carson’s Stesichorus has a “passion for substances”, not Homer’s “fixed diction” of words and their attributes, but a union of form and content into substance. Carson’s classical frame of The Autobiography of Red ends with an interview of Stesichorus in which he declares “no difference” between form and content. For him, “seeing is just a substance” and there is “a link between geology and character”. These combinations describe Geryon’s own experience as an autobiographer, a writer of his own life. Conrad’s “The Book of Frank” recounts the life of Conrad’s protagonist, Frank, from Frank’s own experience. It is written in an intensely subjective third person that presumes a position inside Frank’s life. The title of the book recalls the books of the Bible, arguably the most influential epic in history. Elements of the epic pervade both Carson and Conrad’s work as they unify the scope of the epic and the minutia of the autobiography. In The Book of Frank, Conrad references John Milton’s enormously influential Christian epic, Paradise Lost, in the moment where Frank realizes that, in super-reality, the world and the kitchen table are the same after “his wife/ with a sack of gold/ and compass/ sets out/ on a hunch” (114). Referencing the golden compasses used by the Son of God to create the world, Conrad illustrates that the epic form can render even the kitchen table into the whole world through the union of substances. This reflects the union of form and content as they tie the most personal and subjective of forms (the autobiography) to the most transpersonal and historical of forms (the epic), as if uniting a spectrum of formality into a circle. This creates the image of the frame as it separates the subjective interior world from the objective exterior world. For Carson and Conrad, their intentional exclusion of the objective and focus on the extreme subjectivity of life as experience may seem polarizing. But my argument will seek to show that their aim is the unification of all substances, life, writing, seeing, and experience.

In examining autobiography, it is not the produced work itself, but rather the autobiographer who is the focus. Both Geryon and Frank are autobiographers, or rather feel themselves to be the active writers of their lives. Geryon is the more formal of the two, he makes sculpture (before he can write), writes (both poetry and graffiti), and, his preferred form, amasses a photographic essay. Ancash, whose name conversely means “blue” in Quechua, tells Geryon that he is “an eyewitness”. Carson introduces the idea of the autobiographer as eyewitness to their own lives, and that in itself being an extraordinary tale. When Geryon takes the video camera and flies into the volcano, he says “The Only Secret People Keep”, as if it were the title of an epic poem of interior lives, the substance of their experience, their autobiographies. Frank experiences his autobiography in various ways that imply an active performance of his life. He writes “FRAGILE! FRAGILE! CONTAINS MY VERY SOUL” on a letter and suffers rigor mortis when the mailman crumples it (130). His mother breaks his paint brushes and he shouts “FRAME ME! take the copyright from God! FRAME ME!” with the canvas around his neck, framing his head (25). Frank returns twice to the image of himself as a one-man show. Firstly, Frank’s makes movies in his head, never leaving his “one-seat” theater (94). Then later Frank declares “I’m no theater”, but nevertheless men, women, and dogs alike arrive for the show, “someone ripped his doors open/they filled him for an hour” (101). These examples do not follow Murray’s definition of the unwritable life story, but rather the life that is created by the subject through performance, such as writing. The idea of the autobiographer as the one-man show, like a circus attraction, also appears in The Autobiography of Red. The Lava Man is a man who was in prison when the volcano erupted and survived it. After being badly burned, he joined the Barmun Circus and toured extensively as an attraction. “I am molten matter returned from the core of the earth to tell you interior things” the lava mans says to his viewing public (59). The motif of the interior or the inside appears throughout The Autobiography of Red. The eyewitnesses are those who have gone inside the volcano and returned. “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” (60). Carson unites the individual and the volcano as having distinct inner and outer realms, one which boils and rages with molten magma and one that appears cool and dormant. The Lava man is an eyewitness, touched by the definitive insideness of lava, the interior of the volcano, but returned as an autobiographer to share his story. In The Book of Frank, Conrad calls upon Kafka to describe a moment in which Frank bonds with insects. I want to use Kafka, who Conrad calls upon by name, to discuss two important aspects of the poetry, one of which I have already touched on before. While Conrad references Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I would like to pass over that particular text for now and focus on two shorter stories: “A Hunger Artist” and “The Bucket Rider”. “A Hunger Artist” is the story of a professional faster who once enjoys great popularity but finally becomes a circus attraction. His art is his life, echoing the union of form and content centering my argument. Kafka’s hunger artist is a performer, an attraction, like Carson’s description of the Lava Man, and a one-man show, as in Frank’s performance of his life. He fasts because he, like the other autobiographers, must—he can live in no other way, just as Geryon and Frank’s experiences are both the form and content of their poems. “I think you are confusing subject and object” Herakles’s grandmother says to Geryon, to which he replies “Very likely” (52). Because like the hunger artist, Geryon’s life and his autobiography are synonymous; form and content, object and subject, autobiography and autobiographer.

“The Bucket Rider” espouses my second topic of discussion: lightness of transformation. In the story, a man is so thoroughly out of coal that he flies his bucket to the coal vendor. But his flying bucket is too light and carries him too high for the coal vender to notice him, so he “ascends into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever” (Kafka 414). In an essay on “Lightness”, Italian author Italo Calvino describes “The Bucket Rider” as “privation that is transformed into lightness” (28). This principle can be applied directly to both The Book of Frank and The Autobiography of Red in that both use the lightness of Surrealism to transform the moments of personal life into the elements of an epic. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Calvino observes, everything is subject to transformation and “knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world” (9). Such is the effect of the transformations of Carson and Conrad, that of dissolving the world into infinitely mutable substances that compose life and experience. To Calvino, Ovid also recognizes the union of form and content as “an essential parity between everything that exists” in a world “made up of qualities” (9). This doctrine of transformation echoes Stesichorus’s “passion for substances”.

Ovid’s morphism rules the logic of Carson and Conrad’s poetry. Instead of Charles Olson’s linear progression of ideas—“ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION”— Anne Carson and CAConrad deny Olson’s linear narrative progression and employ morphism that emphasizes connection through comparison instead of logic. Carson and Conrad choose an image and, instead of proceeding to the next “further perception”, morph the idea into one that, although unrecognizable, resembles it in comparison. The resulting structure could be described as spiraling in upon itself instead of traveling in a cardinal direction. While Olson and Cage were trying to create meaning in an open field by imposing a linear structure, Carson and Conrad free themselves of logical obligation by framing their poetry within specific limits of form.

Transformation is an essential element of Surrealism, which is associated with the subconscious mind and is often thought of as a sub-realist genre. However, surrealism is actually translated as super-realism. This is interesting because it implies that the real is not black and white (yes this is real, no this is not real), but that there is a continuum of reality with things being more real or less real. On this continuum, the bizarre surrealist poem would then be considered beyond real.

Morphism includes both Surrealist and classical transformations. Echoing the emotional extremes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Conrad’s Frank grows crows for hands and his sister sprouts big blue feathers while Carson’s protagonist sports his own set of red wings. Through morphism, the human turns into the epic, while elsewhere trafficking in the fallacies of anthropomorphism. Conrad’s toast lectures on suffering while the Bible becomes food. There is no leading direction of morphism, it changes the inanimate into the human just as easily as it renders the human as object. Instead, the point lies in the transformation itself as it retains an element of its meaning in each form. Such is the effect of the Eunoia of Christian Bok, who’s precious vowels assume each and every one of their forms in search of their truer natures.

A sense of lightness is essential for Surrealism to retain elements of reality. The suffering of Geryon as a red monster and Frank as an ordinary individual are transformed into the epic by the lightness of Carson and Conrad’s surrealist transformations. The feeling of lightness is maintained in both works through the ease of morphism in the language as well as the lightness of the characters themselves. Perhaps for both Carson and Stesichorus, what lends Geryon’s story so easily to the surrealist style is his wings. He is a monster and therefore suffers, but he posses the incredible gift of ultimate lightness: flight. After a lifetime of keeping his wings bound tight to his body or hidden inside his coat, Geryon is confronted with Ancash’s challenge “I want to see you use those wings”, he says to him after their fight (144). The reader too, wants to see Geryon finally take flight after witnessing his lightness of thought and heart throughout the poem. Even Herakles, half-hero half-villain, understands the lightness associated with Geryon. In a moment at home in Ovid’s universe, Herakles dreams of Geryon “you took it by one wing and just flung it right up into the air WHOOSH it came alive”, much in the same way Carson’s words seem to fling off the page and transform into life (74).

Conrad uses lightness of transformation to treat The Book of Frank as a super-realist epic. Reminiscent of Geryon, “Frank’s sister grew long blue feathers” (31). Although “Frank would lie in bed at night/touching his own back//crying//praying it wouldn’t come to him”, he feels a sense of “awe” on “the day his sister flew to the house” (31). Although painful like Ovid’s metamorphoses, the lightness of his sister’s transformation inspires Frank. Soon after, Frank finds his own lightness as “something inside him/ spread its wings” (43). The period of Frank’s adolescence represented between these instances contains “air/planes”, a flying station wagon, waving trees, and ascending monkeys—all images of lightness (34-42). In his partial state of transformation into adolescence, “Frank grew crows for hands/ it was a difficult childhood” (34). This particular image conveys the frustration of the transformation of adolescence by juxtaposing the lightness of birds with their morphing into objects of inconvenience and awkwardness as hands, which are supposed to be dexterous.

Conrad unifies his lightness of transformation with the surrealist in his references to life as dreams. “Part of the dream,” Frank says, “is that you accept/ your waking life as/ part of the dream” (122). Conrad blurs the lines between dreams and waking to emphasize the subjective nature of reality. In the argument between Frank and the pig, the fence between them remains the same, only their perspectives change. After Frank’s suicide, he becomes, among other things, “a/ young boy/ asleep in/ ancient/ Tibet// what you/ thought was/ your life is/ really his/ dream// he may wake at any moment” (143). Here Conrad goes beyond the destabilization and dissolution of reality within the poem and seeks to “undo the latches” (as Stesichorus in Carson) of the reader’s reality as well. The final page of The Book of Frank reads “Frank rode/ the dandelion seed/ floating above/ the street” (144). At the end, after his death, Frank achieves the lightest state of all and floats above the street just as Conrad’s surrealist imagery floats above reality. Riding “the dandelion seed” is an experience of true weightlessness and echoes Kafka’s “The Bucket Rider”.
One of the more interesting instances of lightness in The Autobiography of Red is the light that “flowed out” from Helen’s “unlatched” epithet, resulting in the blinding of Stesichorus. Of course, this light refers to the photon sort and not to the quality of the weightless, but is nonetheless reminiscent of Stesichorus’s “bouncing” words, Herakles’s dream, and Frank’s flight (3). Among the first things to achieve a surreal lightness in Carson’s poem is the word “each” which “blew toward him and came apart on the wind” (26). This is also the day that Geryon begins his autobiography, the day of his discovery of the world of the super-realist. Carson juxtaposes flying in an airplane with the lightness and mutability of ideas when Geryon travels to Argentina. Geryon himself is not part of the flight, he is part of the “dangling fragment of humans” which observes the movement of the “bitten moon” and “silver nonworld” outside. Complimentarily in the inside world, Geryon feels “indifference roar over his brain box” and “an idea glazed along the edge of the box and whipped back down the canal behind the wings” (81). Here, the elements of lightness are not the things flying (the plane, Geryon himself), but rather ideas and the world as a whole, things of the super-realist sphere. When Geryon, Ancash, and Herakles go to Lima, they are transported to the realm of the super-light, super-realist and live on the roof of Ancash’s mother’s employers. These elements are not wholly outside the realm of possibility, but they stretch the boundaries of what is real in the physical world—the weight of Ancash’s mother’s life much be light enough to exist in such transitory space as a rooftop.

In reading Carson’s The Autobiography of Red and Conrad’s The Book of Frank, the immediate effect is one of epic scope and precise detail. The subjects saturate each verse of their autobiographies so completely that there is no longer a separation between the life and the story, the autobiography itself (as Murray puts it) and the autobiographer. The union of form and content practiced by the characters as well as the authors dissolves the world into a series of substances, which, like language itself, can be transformed with a surrealist lightness into the infinite variations of the super-realist world. In asking ourselves what difference did Carson and Conrad make, we can say that they elevated the person to the epic by giving it the lightness to rise above reality into the arguably more real, more valuable realm of personal experience and the lived autobiography.

Works Cited

Bok, Christain. Eunoia. Ontario: Coach House, 2001.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Massachusetts: Harvard, 1988.
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998.
Conrad, CA. The Book of Frank. Arizona: Chax Press, 2009.
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1971.
Murray, Stuart J. “The Autobiographical Self: Phenomenology and the Limits of Narrative Self- Possession in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red” ESC: English Studies in Canada, Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2005, pp. 101-122 (Article)
Olson, Charles. “PROJECTIVE VERSE”. Postmodern American Poetry. Ed. Paul Hoover. Chicago: Norton, 1994.