An allusion in Carson's Autobiography of Red.

I've been searching out some of the source material in Carson's Red for some time now, but tripped over this one completely unawares. In the fragmentary propendix "Red Meat"--the very best part of the book, if you ask me (but then again I'm so modernist I'm modernest)--we get this:

    III. Geryon's Parents
If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

Geryon, of course, is about to be tediously molested by his older brother. Turn to The Waste Land, 215ff:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting ...

Eliot's meaning here is double--he's referring to the idle end of a workday when the body waits out the timeclock while the soul tenanting it fidgets homeward; at the same time he has something more sordid in mind, the vile tryst that follows to line 256 and the semi-automatic lusts that animate it. The image here is of the body on autopilot, soul wandering elsewhere: a psychosomatic helplessness. Now, "ticking" is the vox propria of taxi meters, and Eliot's language is rather different from Carson's; still, I think there's good reason to believe that she was receiving Eliot here. Have a look at some comparanda--In Eliot (235-38), the clerk makes his move at the end of the evening meal:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired;
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

The parallel to Geryon's situation doesn't need much explanation--we see plenty of his passivity in the opening movements of the verse-novel, and though "unreproved" isn't exactly right the general sense is exact: unwanted after-dinner caresses at the burnt out end of the day. Now I'm not so confident about this one, but compare Eliot 223f,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins,

with the odd image at the end of Carson's fragment V:

Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see
Coil of the hot plate starting to glow[.]

I'm certain something else is going on--I have to confess that, semi-literate hack that I am, I haven't yet done the brainbreakingly obvious thing and actually compared the fragments of Stesichoros with Carson's text--but I wonder whether this image isn't a bit of subtle signposting to direct us back to Eliot? In fairness, Eliot's kitchen runs on gas and Carson's is electric and--as far as I can tell--these fragments are otherwise unrelated; but I'll take what I can get. One more thing: Geryon's brother is in early puberty when he starts to molest him, so Eliot's epithet for the clerk--"the young man carbuncular" (231)--is appropriate to teenage acne as well. This is fairly weak stuff, of course, but I hope you'll accept it as ancillary for the moment and follow me back to Eliot's taxi. What business does Carson have with a poem so different from hers in ethic and style?

The passage from The Waste Land depends on the hermaphroditic Tiresias of the Metamorphoses--Eliot gives the text of Met. 3.320-38 in a footnote and calls it, slyly, "of great anthropological interest." What's remarkable here, though, is that the Waste Land footnote is disingenuous--Ovid's version is self-consciously orthodox, and Eliot is far more aware of this than he lets on: if anything, the passage is of great mythographical interest. The version of the myth we find in the Metamorphoses traces its pedigree back to Hesiod rather than to the heterodox version in Callimachus, Hymn 5, where Tiresias' mother Chariclo is bathing with Athena:

ἀμφότεραι λώοντο, μεσαμβριναὶ δ’ ἔσαν ὧραι,
πολλὰ δ’ ἁσυχία τῆνο κατεῖχεν ὄρος.
Τειρεσίας δ’ ἔτι μῶνος ἁμᾶ κυσὶν ἄρτι γένεια
περκάζων ἱερὸν χῶρον ἀνεστρέφετο·
διψάσας δ’ ἄφατόν τι ποτὶ ῥόον ἤλυθε κράνας,
σχέτλιος· οὐκ ἐθέλων δ’ εἶδε τὰ μὴ θεμιτά. (73-78)

They both were bathing; it was the midday hour; deep peace spread over that hill. Teiresias still ranged with his hounds that holy place, his cheeks just darkened with down--and dreadfully thirsty he came to a flowing stream, poor boy; all unwilling he saw what no mortal should see.

But Ovid has assumed this source material and misapplied it as a model for his heterodox Actaeon:

dumque ibi perluitur solita Titania lympha,
ecce nepos Cadmi dilata parte laborum
per nemus ignotum non certis passibus errans
pervenit in lucum: sic illum fata ferebant. (Met. 3.173-76)

And while Titania bathed there in her usual pool, behold--Cadmus' grandson, wandering through the unfamiliar wood with hesitant steps--his day's work set aside--intrudes on the grove: so did the fates decree for him.

This wanderer surprised with an illegal epiphany is a total revision of the peeping-tom Actaeon Nonnos gives us in the Dionysiaca (5.287ff), who runs his eyes salaciously up and down the goddess' naked flesh--Ovid has given us an orthodox Tiresias and a heterodox Actaeon, and if we wanted to be sly, too, we could say that in refashioning Tiresias Ovid has taken up the role of Chiron reported by Apollodorus (Bib. 3.4.4), ὃς εἴδωλον κατεσκεύασεν Ἀκταίωνος--who made an image of Actaeon.

But I digress. What's at issue here is that Eliot knew what Ovid was up to--his allusion to John Day had made that clear enough--and Carson doubtless knows it too, professional classicist that she is. In receiving this passage she puts herself in a position to do two things: she lifts themes from "The Fire Sermon" and uses them as commentary on these early passages of the book, at the same time nodding to the Alexandrian roots of Modernism by leaving her gloss on an old mythographical contention.

Carson's reference to The Waste Land is pretty easy to unpack--the fragments in "Red Meat" gloss passages in the Autobiography, and fragment V refers especially to Autobiography II, "Each." There's a mirror here to the disassociated sexuality Tiresias reports in "The Fire Sermon:"

Geryon paused. Facts are bigger in the dark. Sometimes then he would descend
to the other bunk
and let his brother do what he liked or else hang in between with his face pressed
into the edge of his own mattress,
cold toes balancing on the bed below. After it was over his brother's voice
got very kind. (p.28)

At the same time, Geryon and Eliot's secretary struggle with language in the same way, though for very different reasons. The spiritual disengagement that troubles Eliot's characters and leaves them inarticulate before their own moral turpitude--"Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: | 'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over,'" 251f--is a kind of negative image of Geryon's constant struggle to express himself verbally. In his case it's not spiritual fragmentation, though, but if anything a surfeit of the internal:

That was also the day
he began his autobiography. In this work Geryon set down all inside things
particularly his own heroism
and early death much to the despair of the community. He coolly omitted
all outside things. (p. 29)

This primacy of the spirit--and the deep discomfort with corporeality that goes with it--is a major theme of the poem. This dualism persists into Geryon's adolescence--

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING
is something you know
instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head
at sixteen. (Autobiography XI, "Hades," p. 48)

--and I think Carson wants it to be clear that it's hardly a pop-psychological carryover from his childhood "nightlife" (p. 26); no, Geryon's relationship to the world, especially as a child, is too immediate--too rich--for the necessary abstraction of language:

Bits of words drifted past Geryon's brain like ash.
(Autobiography III, "Rhinestones," p. 31)

This basic difference makes it clear, though, that we shouldn't associate Geryon with Eliot's secretary so much as with Tiresias: both characters are physically and sexually ambiguous, Eliot's hermaphroditic Tiresias and Carson's homosexual, all-red Geryon with his wings. Tiresias too is half-observer, half-participant, and the moral voice of this passage in "The Fire Sermon" as well:

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.) (243-46)

Here especially we can see the point of Carson's allusion--the Autobiography is couched (at least ostensibly) as Geryon's own text, something Carson emphasizes by referring us back to this fellow-suffering observer in Tiresias. Geryon narrates the sordid scene in "Each" in the same way: this voice comes to us from an indeterminate lacuna in time, the voice of a former participant now speaking at an indistinct remove. Geryon's voice here no longer inhabits the figures of his narrative but is still an experiencing voice, still within the memory; in this he has much in common with Tiresias.

Finally there's the issue of the gloss, of drawing attention to Eliot and, through him, back to Ovid and his use of Callimachus. This has much in common with the philological allusions to Homer in Apollonius, for instance, where the poet-philologist lends his support to a variant reading by using the same variant in his own poem in allusive context. As such, I think we could say that Carson has aligned herself with Eliot and the Ovidian Teiresias--she's preferred the Hesiodic hermaphrodite to the Callimachean hunter. At the same time, though, she's made her gloss on Eliot, and Eliot's relationship to Ovid is--as we've seen--perverse.

The Waste Land footnote points to Ovid but does it with Callimachus in mind; when Carson--at least superficially--confirms Eliot's hermaphroditic Tiresias, she's done something even more sophisticated. There are enough parallels between Eliot's Tiresias and her Geryon that we could pass on from the reference without pushing it any further, but there's much amiss, too. The hermaphroditism, for instance--there's Geryon's physical and sexual indeterminacy, for sure, but there's quite a gulf, if not of type then of degree, between "his little red wings" (p. 36) and this Tiresias, the "old man with wrinkled female breasts" (219). And what about the problem of age? Geryon at Carson's oldest is an ephebe, worlds away from this Ovidian Teiresias. This, then, is where Carson engages the Callimachean heterodoxy--her reference to Eliot really is a gloss, much less a simple confirmation than an expansion and critique.

In the same way that Ovid's Tiresias depends on a hybrid literary history, Carson's Geryon--referred back to him through Eliot--must realize that hybridity. Geryon can only really be related to Tiresias with any completeness, that is to say without leaving wide swaths of the allusion without parallel or in actual conflict, if Carson carries this reference to Eliot back to its source in Callimachus, back to the heterodox Tiresias of Hymn 5. If her Geryon in going to take on the aspects of Tiresias even for a moment--and this is what the allusion to The Waste Land leads me to believe--he has to assume the qualities of a hybrid Tiresias, a Tiresias not simply Hesiodic but also, at the same time, Callimachean.

So if Geryon is a youth, he shares that youth with the Tiresias of Hymn 5, ἄρτι γένεια περκάζων, cheeks just darkened with down; if he is struck with speechlessness, his voice sticks in his throat after the pattern of the Callimachean Tiresias (83f) suddenly stricken with epiphany and blindness:

ἑστάκη δ’ ἄφθογγος, ἐκόλλασαν γὰρ ἀνῖαι
γώνατα καὶ φωνὰν ἔσχεν ἀμαχανία.

He stood speechless; agonies glued his knees and helplessness choked his voice.

What is this blindness and this pain to Geryon? The pain is easy, and the helplessness: we've already seen him stricken by the force of experience, of epiphany, of vital life seen unclothed. It's nothing so vulgar as sexual transgression--here again we have the Callimachean epiphany, not the Ovidian voyeur--but the painful and isolating recognition of experience which defies the verbal, a helplessness, ἀμαχανία, in the face of the gap between Geryon's reality and the choking depths of the logos in which he participates so strangely, so piecemeal:

Herakles gave it--and here Geryon had meant
to slide past the name coolly
but such a cloud of agony poured up his soul he couldn't remember
what he was saying. (Autobiography XII, "Fruit Bowl," p. 68)

Isn't this a kind of blindness, too? Carson thinks so; and in this she completes the frame of reference and justifies her allusion to Tiresias qua blind seer.

The last section of Red is another appendix, "Interview: (Stesichoros)." Its language is the most enigmatic and fragmentary in the poem and Carson casts it as a fruitless, more-than-Brechtian dialogue between S and I. It begins:

I: One critic speaks of a sort of concealment drama going on in your work some special interest in finding out what or how people act when they know that important information is being withheld this might have to do with an aesthetic of blindness or even a will to blindness if that is not a tautology
S: I will tell about blindness
I: Yes do
S: First I must tell about seeing
I: Fine

The whole passage, perverse as it is, is programmatic; more importantly the consummating point of contact between Geryon and Tiresias is embedded here, in the "information being withheld" by this strange interview. I think this riddling dialogue gives us the means to complete the figure implied by the Waste Land allusion in "Red Meat" III, in fact: we already have Geryon and Tiresias, young, physically ambiguous, and stunned in the face of epiphany--but blind? Blindness and prophecy unite Ovid and Callimachus' accounts of the Tiresias myth, but Geryon and Tiresias share real blindness only here, in the sudden reassertion of a voice the text has gradually and perversely effaced--the voice of Stesichoros, the blind palinodist and author of the Geryoneis. These are the fragments, after all, that Carson is ostensibly translating in "Red Meat" and from which the Autobiography emerges, so when we say that the Autobiography is Geryon's text, Geryon's voice, we've been tricked into the same metaphysical perversion to which Eliot led us in his footnote to "The Fire Sermon"--to mistake a polyphonic and hybrid voice for monody.

Eliot led us to believe that his Tiresias spoke with the voice that Ovid gave him only, when in fact he was much more: Actaeon and Tiresias together, Ovid and Callimachus writing them and Eliot rewriting that writing. Carson's ticking taxi brings us back to Callimachus, too, and so leads us past the clear voice of Geryon's autobiography to another hybrid, Carson as pseudo-Stesichoros and their creature speaking together. It's another palinode, the palinode of the Geryoneis and of the language games that transmute Carson's Geryon and his personal history into personal historiography, into the logos that resists and mutates its impossible subject matter. This is the "will to blindness" of Carson's pseudo-Stesichorean text, the will to confront the epiphany of the real--the pre-verbal, pre-biographical--and, wishing to transmute it into logos, become blinded by it, or rather, blind to it. To be blind is to believe in the capacity of literary fiction to represent that vitality, to look on the goddess bare and see a body, not words: the interview continues,

S: No I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it
I: Did they
S: I was (very simply) in charge of seeing for the world after all seeing is just a substance

This blindness carries a promise: μάντιν ἐπεὶ θησῶ νιν ἀοίδιμον ἐσσομένοισιν, says Athena of Tiresias in Hymn 5--indeed, I shall make him a seer to be sung of by future men (121), and both Eliot and Carson have made good on this promise. Though it may be hopelessly divorced from the pre-verbal epiphany and may actually require willful blindness to it, Carson has manifested Athena's pledge in her own backward-looking fantasy of literary reception: she has written a Stesichoros-cum-Geryon-cum-Tiresias, a polyphonic Stesichoros who has taken up the fragmentary Geryoneis and said of it, as he did of his Helen, οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος--"No it is not the true story" (Carson's translation, p. 17). Here begins the palinode, and the Autobiography of Red.

The text that sparked my realization here and to which I am very much indebted is M. Perret's 1974 "Eliot, the Naked Lady, and the Missing Link," in American Literature 46: 289-303. For the perplexities of Teiresias' mythographic tradition, have a look at the magnificent footnote on Apollodorus' Library 3.7.7 in J. G. Frazer's Loeb. Lastly, the full text of Carson's "Red Meat" has been posted on a dead blog whose flagrant disregard for fair use may give you some pleasure.