“On My Volcano Grows the Grass” : Towards a Phenomenology of Desire in Autobiography of Red

Abstract: This thesis establishes a phenomenology of desire in Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. It examines how desire constructs the self in the text and how it positions it in relation to its surrounding world. The self’s status in the text is read through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s understanding of desire and their concepts becoming and deterritorialisation as explicated in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These concepts are used to map the transformative power of desire in Autobiography of Red and provide an approach through which to understand the tenuous nature of self in the text. It reveals desire not as located solely in the relation between the text’s protagonist Geryon and Herakles, but as a movement that animates and constructs the text. It reads the “red” of the title, the presence of the volcano, of lava, as essential to the text, mapping how the force of desire positions the self and undoes the notion of a phenomenal “background”. Deleuzian desire has linguistic implications and the thesis further extends the use of becoming and deterritorialisation to understand Carson’s poetics and the text as the site that gives rise to a phenomenology of desire. The text is deterritorialised and Carson articulates a way of relaying experience beyond the representative mode. The thesis offers a reading of Autobiography of Red with a Deleuzian theory of desire, which is a new approach in Carson scholarship. As such it hopes to open up both the poetic text and theoretic text to new understandings and create points of departure for further research.