Albertine in Carson’s Queer Journeys: from Stesichoros to Proust

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The queerness of Anne Carson's poetics relies on her understanding how the process of queering language and therefore of being itself operates when contingence enables distant characters, myths, artworks to resurrect, connect, transmigrate, inform new paradigms without aiming at the establishment of new orders, canons or identities. This paper examines how Carson’s queer imagination brings together Stesichoros and Proust through the latter's character Albertine, a paradigmatic queer figure of defiance. If in Geryoneis, Stesichoros rewrites Hercules’ tenth labour from the point of view of Geryon, in Autobiography of Red, Carson rewrites Geryoneis transforming the imperialistic drive into a passionate love affair that leaves the red-winged monster in desperation. The two characters, renamed and middle-aged, meet again in Red Doc>, a sequel explicitly “haunted by Proust.” As Carson herself suggests, G, the adult version of Geryon is the actual author of her next published book, The Albertine Workout, a retelling of Albertine’s story. Analyzing the three works along with their Proustian intertext, this paper examines how the mythical figure writes The Albertine Workout instead of his own autobiography in the precarious form of a school notebook rejecting any definitive reading. Resembling the scattered, numbered pieces of an ancient papyrus, The Albertine workout suggests a new definition of writing as only a possible reading of the innumerable versions of Albertine’s uncontainable story, of one’s always unstable identities and the artificial linearities of every story.