Gerione between Carson, Dante and Carrere

In the year of Nolan’s "Odyssey", Anne Carson, a Canadian poet firmly rooted in the liberal universities of the upper Atlantic coast, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Carson is a classicist, and this is notable because, through her accomplished works, she demonstrates – just like Nolan – that our faltering and decadent world, good for little more than remaking past successes as if the umbilical cord linking us to the origins of creativity had atrophied (see Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society, 2020), can at least still rely on the classics to find the words it cannot otherwise find.

In Carson’s most famous book ("Autobiography of Red", 1998), the protagonist is Geryon, caught up in a gay love triangle which we shall set aside for now. What is interesting, however, is that Carson describes Geryon as a winged monster, a feature which, in antiquity, was only part of a minority tradition. Hesiod, for example, describes him merely as three-headed and immensely powerful. It was Dante’s imaginative touch that permanently gave him wings (a touch also present in the transition from Homer’s *Odyssey* to Nolan’s).

“That vile image of fraud,” says Dante in Canto XVII of Inferno, has the “face of a righteous man”, a winged, serpentine, multicoloured body with lion-like paws, and an unprecedented forked tail with scorpion stings. It is all an allegory (which Dante strives to describe with his usual realism: a sailor re-emerging from the abyss; a ship; an insidious beaver ‘among the German ships’) to represent fraud. It is ‘man’s very own evil’ (Inferno XI, 25), for, following in the footsteps of Aristotle and Cicero, Dante knows that, just as reason is the greatest gift bestowed by God upon man, so the worst sin is that which makes a distorted use of reason. Geryon has the kindly face of Albus Dumbledore, but is ready to entangle his victim with his sinuous body (Bede the Venerable described the figure of Satan in Eden as a serpent with the face of a maiden), before finishing him off with poison.

Geryon never ceases to slither through the fabric of history, as the recent events in Via Gulli in Turin bear witness: Fabio Colapietro torn to pieces and encased in concrete, and so on. What has shaken public opinion the most is not so much the ‘brutal’ act (to quote that useless Dante once again), but rather that a secondary school teacher, Nicole Formichetti, is involved in this mess – and perhaps even in a leading role. Formichetti’s profession features in every newspaper headline, because we spend half the day denigrating the teaching profession, yet the other half moralising about it. And yet, here you are again, Geryon.

It is therefore impossible not to return to Emmanuel Carrère’s “L’Avversario” (2000), which, through its encounter with the serial killer Jean-Claude Romand, has provided us with the finest portrayal of Geryon since Dante’s time. The Adversary is Satan: Geryon in biblical terms. Yet at the same time, he could be any one of us; indeed, he could be us. Geryon is multicoloured.

We must remain vigilant, from drugs to mental illness, because one is not born a Formichetti-Romand: one becomes one. We must also learn to call a spade a spade, which means reading more Dante (or has anyone written anything better?). But even culture is not enough: Formichetti is an Italian teacher. So one must also be silent, contemplate, and, for those who pray, pray. Carrère writes that Luc, the murderer’s best friend, “believes that Romand has ‘chosen hell on earth’. As a Christian, this troubles him deeply, but Christianity, he asserts, leaves room for mystery. Luc can only bow his head and accept that he does not understand everything”.

It was Heracles who defeated Geryon, and indeed the hero was interpreted by the Fathers as a figure of Christ. None of the subsequent Heracles’ have made the cut.