Volcanoes symbolize the ambiguity between the “inside” world and the “outside” world, and Geryon’s struggle to navigate this liminal space. One of Geryon’s central struggles throughout the novel is how to express his inner thoughts and develop meaningful, intimate relationships with others. After suffering abuse at the hands of his older brother, Geryon turns inward, rarely confiding his true thoughts and desires with others. Geryon explicitly compares “the cracks and fissures of his inner life” to the “lateral fissures called fire lips” of volcanoes. Unlike a “healthy volcano,” however, which periodically purges itself of its inner “pressure,” Geryon cannot regulate the expulsion of his “inner life.” Volcanoes fascinate Geryon because he longs to master the divide between inside and outside and learn how to project his inner turmoil outward so that he can use it to express himself to others rather than alienate himself from them. Geryon also associates volcanoes with his passionate but tumultuous relationship with Herakles, since it was Herakles’s grandmother’s photograph of a volcanic eruption, “Red Patience,” that first attracted him to volcanoes. On the same visit to Herakles’s hometown of Hades when Herakles first saw the photograph, Geryon, Herakles, and Herakles’ grandmother visited the volcano that was the subject of her photograph, as well. Geryon is also struck by Herakles’s grandmother’s story about Lava Man, the sole survivor of the 1923 volcanic eruption. Although Lava Man suffered severe burns, his residual scars symbolize the melding of his “inside” and “outside” worlds, something Geryon desperately longs to achieve in himself.
Volcano Quotes in Autobiography of Red
What if you took a fifteen-minute exposure of a man in jail, let’s say the lava
has just reached his window?
he asked. I think you are confusing subject and object, she said.
Very likely, said Geryon.
I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things
It is
because of her I began to notice moments of death. Children make you see distances.
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.
There is one thing I want from you.
Tell me.
Want to see you use those wings.
This is for Ancash, he calls to the earth diminishing below. This is a memory of our
beauty.
We are amazing beings,
Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.
And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.