Anne Carson doesn’t always overthink her titles. She called her 2013 book Red Doc> because that was the default name of her draft, automatically generated by her computer—a title derived from an abdication of one. Red Doc> is a sequel to Carson’s popular ‘novel in verse’, Autobiography of Red (1998), an adolescent love story inspired by the surviving fragments of a poem by Stesichoros about the myth of Herakles and a red, winged monster named Geryon. In the middle of Red Doc>’s black cover are horizontal streaks of red. It looks like the residue of a hasty swipe of a calligraphy brush, or as though the cover of Autobiography of Red—also black, with a pristine red circle at its centre—has been smeared. In one of Carson’s oblique manifestoes, ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, which is about Joan of Arc and Francis Bacon and their shared aversion to cliché and the ‘boredom of storytelling’, Carson explained that Bacon defeated narrative by making ‘free marks’ on his canvas: ‘He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand, or just throws a can of paint at it’. Red Doc>’s cover could be described as a similarly resourceful defacement. The red brushstrokes—almost like a ‘Keep Out’ sign—echo the spirit of its ‘found’ title. It rebuffs interpretation and so of course incites it.
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