In her book Feeling Backward, Heather Love proposes that ‘as queer readers we tend to see ourselves as reaching back toward isolated figures in the queer past in order to rescue or save them’ (8). She argues that some texts are amenable to this treatment, whilst at other times they “disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present”¹ (8). Love uses this framework to examine negative effects in early 20th century novels, thereby demonstrating the importance of the past to the present and future. We all carry our own pasts with us after all, and the pasts of those who came before us – our parents and their parents, and then people who shared our experiences and fought for our communities; these pasts carry sorrow as well as joy. Turning away from the past risks ignoring the very real violence directed at queer people – especially trans women – today.

The truth is that some things will not pass, some things will remain etched in our brains and bodies. And perhaps, as Love suggests, it is tempting to try to rehabilitate the past, pull its figures into the future even if they resist us. Carson brings us Geryon the winged monster and wraps him in a coming-of-age novel-in-verse, and even as I try to untangle him from his ropes, he is still tied to a rope that stretches back two millennia. Autobiography is a myth retelling but it’s wholly original; it’s a coming-of-age narrative that drops off like the edge of a cliff; it’s a narrative poem that describes itself as a novel; love saves and decimates Geryon and saves him again.

Carson’s Geryon’s monstrosity marks a clear sense of otherness. The two are almost indivisible. Like many monster outcasts, the metaphor that could arguably be read as a metaphor for disability as well as being gay and/or trans and thus targeted by society’s dominant structures. Geryon is excluded from a school age and struggles with socialisation; he also has an affair with Herakles, and later an arrangement approaching a ménage à trois with Herakles and Herakles’s lover, Ancash. In our contemporary era, the hero Herakles is known at least by name to anybody who has seen Disney’s Hercules, while Geryon as a herdsman is largely relegated to a footnote in Herakles’ story; in Autobiography, Carson revives a lost text which in turn rescued Geryon. The impulse to rescue the past, redo it, bring it forward. Myth itself belongs to a history of storytelling, already external to the history of events and real people. By casting interiority upon a red monster and intervening in classical myth whilst doing so, Carson turns myth into a mediation space for an exploration into monstrosity as a metaphor for othering.

It’s singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens saying, ‘I am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands’. It’s Richard Siken saying, ‘The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

The fact that Geryon is presented as a monster, as Other, feeds into and then is exacerbated by his surviving incestuous child sexual abuse at the hands of his brother. Already an abuse survivor, he meets Herakles at age fourteen, by chance at a bus stop, and the fact that they meet at a place of transit speaks to the fleeting nature of their encounter at this stage. It is not long before the two boys fall into a friendship and then a sexual relationship, where the image of them ‘Not touching / but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh’ (45) explicitly places them beside each other in manners of the flesh, joined in their shared sexuality and yet calling upon an image of bodily harm to do so. This relationship is an abrupt turn from Herakles merely killing Geryon’s cattle, moving from an antagonistic tension towards romantic and sexual homoeroticism. Herakles is many things that Geryon is not: older, confident, brash, sure of his place in the world. Whilst turning over ways of framing their dynamic, I’m reminded of the Jungian shadow-self, an idea I’ve most extensively encountered through 1997–2003 television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically protagonist Buffy Summers and her counterpart in slayer Faith Lehane; another person in the world like her, but impulsive, horny, full of an inner turmoil and outward resentment.

On the one hand, Herakles treats Geryon with tenderness, ‘You’re cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here. / He put Geryon’s hands inside his shirt.’ (39) where again the body is crucial. The assertiveness in that instance typifies their dynamic, where Herakles is clearly the more sexually experienced. Notably, section XVI. Is titled ‘Grooming’, in which Herakles asks Geryon to ‘Put your mouth on it Geryon please, (54)’ a line weighed by the beginning of the next line, a heavy ‘Geryon did.’ Still, there is an element of pleasure, such that, afterwards, ‘Geryon felt clear and powerful–not some wounded angel after all’ (54). As they seem to relax into each other on this particular afternoon, Carson writes that

They had start to practice 
their song (‘Joy to the World’) when Herakles pulled Geryon’s head 
into his lap and began grooming
for nits. Gorilla grunts mingled with breakfast sounds in the busy room. (54)

Here, Carson pulls the reader along across the lines, until grooming as predatory sexual practice is swapped out for grooming as an act of care, the double meaning nevertheless tinting this relationship with a sense of darkness. Thus, an ambivalence to the relationship between Herakles and Geryon begins to emerge, simultaneously freeing and predatory, if not abusive. It’s a fascinating re-rendering of Herakles murdering Geryon’s cattle; did Herakles release that original Geryon from his duty, or merely cause him grief?