Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) is inspired by Stesichoros’s epic poem Geryoneis, which describes the killing of the monster Geryon by the mythical hero Herakles. Carson’s take on the story reframes the violence between Herakles and Geryon through metaphors. The bodily injury in the ancient narrative is reworked into emotional harm and mental trauma and visualised through successive images. Geryon is “hurt” by Herakles by means of a romantic relationship between the two which is ever unfulfilling; ultimately, they break up. Geryon’s subsequent struggle to handle his emotions and in particular his unresolved anger as a result of loss is expressed through the metaphor of “redness”. Carson writes of the “monster” Geryon that “everything about him was red” (9). Anger is described as a subject with agency and performativity that resembles that of a human, as it becomes clear in an interaction between Geryon and his personified anger after the breakup with Herakles:
He had touched rock bottom.
Feeling bruised but pure he switched off the light.
Fell instantly asleep.
Anger slammed the red fool awake at three a.m. he kept trying to breath each time
he lifted his head it pounded him
again like a piece of weed against a hard black beach. […]
(Autobiography of Red 75).
Interestingly, these verses follow the description of a phone call in which Herakles broke up with Geryon, in which the initial trivial small talk revolves around boxing. As Herakles casually recounted his day, he spoke about a common acquaintance, Hart, who is a boxer. Their discussion shifted to corner men and their importance for boxing, reaching as far back in time as Muhammad Ali and his corner man (73). The boxers mentioned are reminiscent of the personified anger’s effect on Geryon, in that they too would “slam” and “pound” someone. Anger is thus associated with a boxer “pounding” and “slamming” their opponent on the floor. This comparison pushes the anthropomorphic expression of anger so far that the metaphor of anger overtaking the mind and body becomes literal in its embodied effects.
Recent medical accounts on anger situate it in the intersection between mind and body, also challenging the view of anger as an emotion. For instance, Garfinkel et al. explore the ways in which “emotion and cognition are coupled to bodily arousal,” describing anger as an emotional state expressed in both the body and the brain, which causes neural and physiological alterations (150). That is, the alterations caused by anger affect both the cognitive process, for instance by hindering effective decision-making, as well as bodily functions, for instance by increasing or slowing down systolic blood pressure. Witnessing anger triggers one out of two responses to a perceived threat, which reflect the response of “fight or flight,” albeit in varying degrees (Garfinkel et al. 151). Namely, the threat might be met with fear or, alternatively, with anger, through “mirroring” the emotional state witnessed.
If anger is met with fearful response, it “decreases in galvanic skin response” and increases time of reaction causing decision paralysis. But if anger elicits anger, the process of “mirroring” it causes impulsive changes on the body, such as increasing systolic blood pressure. In both cases, however, the process of “forming” an emotional state within the body has an observable effect to it and alters its processes. That is, according to Garfinkel et al.’s medical review, anger has observable effects on both cognitive and physiological processing and has to be examined in both the brain (e.g. by using fMRI) and in the body’s “physiology” (e.g. blood pressure) (156). Brain and body are, thus, both affected by anger.
Combining Carson’s account of anger with a medical account such as that of Garfinkel et al., reveals that medicine, too, even as it attributes anger to cardiovascular activity, nonetheless depicts anger rhetorically as able to “act” on the body in a way that feels “pounding” – that is, by increasing blood pressure. By merit of the syntactical formation of this hypothesis, anger seems, in literary terms, to be “personified.” Applying the toolset of literary devices to medical discourse can elucidate the degree to which scientific research is shaped by metaphorical thinking.
More importantly, literary accounts such as Carson’s may reframe the interaction between emotional states and bodily reactions. Her metaphors describe aptly the medical facts that a) anger as an emotive state affects the body and b) an angry behavioural response has a substantial physical impact on the body. Yet she also points out a third component: her account showcases the interaction between the subject experiencing anger and their own violent emotional response, as if the latter had agency of its own.
In describing the intersection between emotional states and the body, Carson not only destabilises the hard distinction between the two but also questions the assumption that there is a single acting subject and that their emotions are a mere feature of their actions. Anger in Carson’s work is not only “woven” within the psychosomatic formation of Geryon and reflected on his red skin. Rather, by merit of the metaphorical image of a boxer, the effects of anger on the body are described in Autobiography of Red as similar to the embodied experience of someone’s being in a physical fight. Rather than Geryon “getting angry,” his head and body are represented as responding to the violent physical effect of an angry response forming within him. The experience of “battling” with anger is as violent as receiving physical blows.
By emphasizing the interaction between the brain and the body when responding to external stimuli, Carson’s account goes beyond complementing medical accounts. The poet reframes the complex mechanisms of cognitive responses, highlighting the bodily toll of the process of “experiencing.”
Works Cited
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. Jonathan Cape, 2010.
Garfinkel, Sarah N et al. “Anger in brain and body: the neural and physiological perturbation of decision-making by emotion.” Social cognitive and affective neuroscience vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 150-8. PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26253525/.
Image:
Photograph by Andrea Cassani, Source: Unsplash