Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line 9781474468305

Citation preview

ANGELA CARTER: WRITING FROM THE FRONT LINE

ANGELA CARTER: WRITING FROM THE FRONT LINE

Sarah Gamble

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

In memory ofMark

© Sarah Gamble, 1997 Edinburgh University Press

22 George Square, Edinburgh Transferred to digital print 2007

Typeset in Caslon by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPT Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-I 0 0 7486 0851 6 ISBN-13 978 0 7486 0851 5

The right of Sarah Gamble to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act (1988),

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Vll

Introduction

1

PART 1: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND ANONYMITY

Chapter 1 'Once More Into the Mangle' (1971) 'Flesh and the Mirror' (1974) 'The Mother Lode' (1976) 'My Father's House' (1976)

13 18 20 24 29

PART 11: LIVING ON A DEMOLITION SITE

Chapter2 Truly, It Felt Like Year One' (1988) 'The Man Who Loved a Double Bass' (1962) Shadow Dance (1966) Several Perceptions (1968)

39 42 45 48 57

Chapter3 The Magic Toyshop (1967) Heroes and Villains (1969) Love (1971)

66 68 73 82

v

CONTENTS

Vl

PART III: MAD SCIENTISTS, DRAG QUEENS AND

FAIRY GODMOTHERS

The Infernal Desire Machines ofDoctor Hoffman (1972)

93 95 97 104 109

Chapter 5 The Passion ofNew Eve (1977) The Bloody Chamber (1979)

118 119 130

Chapter4 'Fin de Siecle' (1972) The Sadeian Woman (1979) Fireworks (1974)

PART IV: FLYING THE PATRIARCHAL COOP

Chapter 6 'Masochism for the Masses' (1983) Black Venus (1985) 'The Bloody Chamber' (1979) Nights at the Circus (1984)

145 146 149 153 156

Chapter 7 Wise Children (1991) American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993)

168 169 185

Epilogue

190 192 197

Select Bibliography Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The stereotype of the solitary scholar is all very well, but I now know from experience that it is impossible to write a book on your own. So thanks are therefore due to many people, including Jackie Jones of Edinburgh University Press, for all her help, and the University of Sunderland for allowing me sabbatical time in which to write. Thanks also to my colleagues at the Department of English Studies, especially Professor Stuart Sim, who gave me advice on how to prepare my original proposal for the consideration of Edinburgh University Press. My gratitude to Dr David Amigoni of the University of Keele, for reading much of the original manuscript, and to Dr Bryan Burns of the University of Sheffield, for introducing me to Carter's work in the first place, and for providing me both with ideas and material for this book. Very special thanks indeed to my mother, for her invaluable help with childcare and housework. And lastly, but by no means least, to Tabitha, for putting up with a parent who has spent most of the last few months either reading, writing or lost in thought.

Vll

INTRODUCTION

Since her death in 1992, Angela Carter's reputation has passed into academic urban legend. The story goes that, among the requests for grants for doctoral study received by the British Academy in the academic year 1992-3, there were 40 proposals to study Carter's work: more -and this is the punch-line- than the Academy received for the entire eighteenth century. Although I retrieved the above facts and figures from Paul Barker's 1995 article on Carter, 'The Return of the Magic Story-Teller', the story itselfhad already assumed quasi-folkloric status in the English Literature departments of university campuses long before he reproduced it in The Independent on Sunday. 1 But what moves this anecdote into the realm of folklore is the way in which, even while its overall message remains the same, the exact details of the story vary depending on the teller. A few months after Barker's piece, Observer Lift magazine also published an article on Carter, in which Nicci Gerrard repeats Barker's assertion of her celebrity status, although this time she is reported as having overtaken Virginia Woolf in the student popularity stakes. Indeed, the very fact that such stories are related in the context of an article in a Sunday supplement (albeit a 'quality' Sunday supplement) rather than the academic press in itself indicates Angela Carter's growing popularity among general readers. While both articles cover more or less the same ground, both are accessible assessments of Carter's career which, unhampered by academic jargon, have doubtless been instrumental in furthering the process of Carter's posthumous (re )discovery. It is tragic that Carter died before attaining her present level of fame, and it is a tragic irony that it was probably the one that, at least partly, made the other possible. As Nicci Gerrard observes, the death of any author transforms her body of work into an 'oeuvre, ready for academic 1

2

INTRODUCTION

discussion and instant reappraisal? and this general truism is particularly apposite when applied to Carter. Formidably well-read in literature and theory, she tended to anticipate critical responses to her work in a way that is distinctly disconcerting to the critic; Harriet Gilbert, in a review of a collection of essays on Carter, summed it up when she wrote that 'the problem facing anyone who attempts to assess Carter's oeuvre is that she has usually got there first'. 3 She certainly took a lot of keeping up with, for her body of work was consistently increasing and ever-varying. In the course of her career, Angela Carter wrote novels, short stories, plays, academic articles and pieces of cultural commentary. She loved to upset expectations, outrage convention and challenge preconceptions, which meant that the only thing she could be relied upon to do was the unexpected. It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that Carter was wholly ignored in her lifetime, because she wasn't. Furthermore, more often than not, the fluctuations in the progress of her career were at least partially self-induced. She certainly enjoyed her popularity when it came, and steadfastly maintained that there was no point in writing unless one made money out of it, but she was not the kind of writer who developed a winning formula and stuck with it. When she began writing in the 1960s she looked set for early success, winning two major literary prizes in as many years. In 1967, she won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize with only her second novel, The Magic Toyshop, and her third, Several Perceptions, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. However, instead of capitalising on her burgeoning reputation, Carter then took herself off to Japan from 1969 to 1972. Her geographical distance from the British literary scene was only compounded by what she chose to write: her novels written over this period, including The Infirnal Desire Machines ofDoctor Ho/.fman and The Passion ofNew Eve, remain among her most shocking and experimental, and received a very lukewarm reception on their publication. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that Angela Carter's reputation began to extend much beyond a small circle of cognoscenti. Her collection of subversively rewritten fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, gained widespread attention, all the more so when one story, 'The Company of Wolves', was made into a film in 1984 directed by Neil Jordan. There was much controversy when Carter's penultimate novel, Nights at the Circus, was not placed on the Booker Prize shortlist in the same year, indicating how far she had progressed from the days when her work was virtually ignored by a wider reading public.

Introduction

3

Academic critiques of Carter's writing also began to appear during this time, both capitalising on her ever-growing popularity and furthering it. Carter, through her work teaching creative writing in universities both at home and abroad, made many friends in academia, as well as in the publishing world, and it is these who have led the way in developing a substantial body of criticism on her work. The pre-eminent critic in this area ofliterary research at the time of writing is Lorna Sage, whose first interview with Carter, published in 1977, probably constitutes the first published academic assessment of her work. Sage is also the author of a study of Carter's writing published in the Northcote House 'Writers and Their Work' series, and the editor of a volume of essays, Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art ifAngela Carter. However, criticism on Carter's work is widespread and ever-growing, although with the exception of Sage's study, it has taken the form of essays, reviews and conference papers rather than book-length studies. The growing interest in Angela Carter's writing within the academy has led to the inclusion of her work on various courses, not only to do with literature but also with cultural studies and women's studies, which is where this particular book comes in. Although I would hope that it does not exclude the well-informed general reader, it is aimed primarily at a student audience who wish to gain some knowledge of Carter's career and the dominant themes and concerns within her work as a whole. As such, my discussion is general rather than specific, wideranging rather than narrowly focused. I have included analysis of all of Carter's published books, both novels and collections of short stories, as well as a substantial amount of her non-fiction, including her most controversial piece of feminist polemic, The Sadeian Woman. I have also attempted to give the reader some indication of the current state of criticism on Carter's work. However, any critical study, no matter how broad, must have a specific agenda. My main area of concern in this discussion, in accordance with Edward Said's contention that 'every literary text is in some way burdened with its occasion, with the plain empirical realities from which it emerged', 4 is with charting the way in which Carter was constantly interacting with the cultural environment within which she wrote. I intend to argue that she did not do so in such a way as to integrate herself and her writing into the mainstream: on the contrary, she was primarily concerned with maintaining a sceptical, interrogatory position on the periphery of dominant cultural attitudes and conventions. I think there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that Carter regarded

4

INTRODUCTION

such a position as an extremely empowering one, and her construction of both herself as writing subject and what she wrote as 'marginal' was crucial to the progression of her career. By 'marginal' in this context, I mean that she regarded herself as operating from the edge of consensus views of any kind; specifically, the conception of history as 'grand' or 'master' narrative, 5 conventional social codes regulating propriety and 'women's place', and the categorisation of any cultural product, especially literature, into 'high' and 'low' forms. Carter linked this cultivation of the sceptical, marginal view to feminism and socialism, both doctrines she espoused, but even there she avoided integration into the mainstream of these movements. Her relationship with feminist critics and women's studies departments, for example, was an extremely ambivalent one. One of the most controversial areas of her work as far as feminists are concerned is both her apparent support for pornography, and her graphic depictions of violence against women in her writing, which have led some critics to conclude that, in spite of the feminist opinions she began expressing from the late 1960s onwards, she actually only furthers reactionary portrayals of women as nothing more than the objects of male desire. Carter, however, took nothing, not even feminism, at face value. Instead, both her fiction and non-fiction writing showed her constantly pushing at, testing, the boundaries of any received belief system. 'I'm all for putting new wine in old bottles', she famously proclaimed in 1983, 'especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottle explode'. 6 The kind of insouciant anarchism implicit in such statements shows Carter in her favourite role; as a kind of cultural saboteur, using her writing to blow up comfortable assumptions and habitual patterns of thought. Her fictions act as shattered mirrors through which her readers can still see themselves, but fragmented, refracted, multiple and startlingly defamiliarised. It was this impulse that remained constant throughout her career, and which motivated the many changes in the way she wrote and in what she wrote about. To quote Carter again, once you become conscious, your position - however many there are of you - isn't the standard one ... you have to keep on defining the ground on which you're standing, because you are in fact setting yourself up in opposition to the generality. 7 Angela Carter's career as a whole can be viewed as an extended exercise

Introduction

5

in conscious redefinition, not only of her own cultural environment, but also of her own response to it. Setting yourself against convention is all very well, but Carter was also not unaware of the dangers inherent in the cultivation of a marginalised position or perspective. The trouble is, of course, that existing on the peripheries of anything involves performing an extremely delicate balancing act between inclusion and exclusion, and this is echoed in the way Carter's fiction persistently concerns itself with the evocation of boundaries and borderlines, precariously suspending itself at the very point at which one state, condition, place or mode merges into another. In terms of form, her fiction resists the way in which postmodernism renders reality itself just another meta-narrative; but it isn't quite realism either. Categorising Carter's chosen mode of writing is made additionally difficult because of the fact that throughout her career, her narratives constantly negotiate and adjust their position on the margins of a variety of literary genres and forms. In his discussion of Carter's work in Post- War British Fiction: Realism and After, Andrzej G;;tsiorek describes Carter's fiction as oscillating betwixt and between fantasy and analysis, allegory and rationalism. Her texts are deliberately aporetic, not only because they refuse decisive forms of closure, but also because they refuse to opt finally for one of these two discourses, thereby repressing the other. Carter's form neither implies that carnival and fantasy can suffice nor suggests that rationalism and critique be eschewed; rather, it urges a view of the novel as a composite form in which both kinds of discourse supplement one another, allowing the writer a fuller apprehension of reality. 8 G;;tsiorek, note, does not doubt Carter's belief in a reality capable of being apprehended, and neither do I. It is, however, sometimes difficult in her writing to pinpoint the moment where her narrative games end and an engagement with reality begins. In the context of this discussion, however, I find Linda Hutcheon's conception of'historiographic metafiction' particularly useful, which she describes as 'always assert[ing] that the world is resolutely fictive and yet undeniably historical'. 9 While it problematises the nature of the real, therefore, historiographic metafiction does not discount the importance of the historical process, and thus it is a mode in which two 'views of history - as intertextual and as extra textual - appear to co-exist and operate in tension' .10

6

INTRODUCTION

The content of Angela Carter's fiction, too, tends to be similarly predicated on tension, for she consistently uses it to celebrate borderline states and conditions of being. She is fascinated, for example, by the blurring of gender boundaries; by adolescence, that brief period when the subject is not quite a child, but also not yet adult; with the period of suspension between departure and destination which constitutes a journey; with the moment when the season or the millennium is caught at the instant of change. The settings of her fiction are also characteristically liminal, the dance-halls and toyshops of her early fiction giving way to the cinema and the fairground, the music-hall and the theatre. All are places of display and artifice, in which the extravagance of the illusion disguises the very hard work that goes into its maintenance. In her essay 'Framing Marginality: Distinguishing the Textual Politics of the Marginal Voice', Sneja Gunew discusses the possibilities and limitations inherent in the act of speaking from the margins; issues Carter was constantly working through in her writing. Although Gunew agrees that 'the margin constitutes the place of transgression, which in turn subverts hegemonic discourses', 11 she is also concerned with problematising the kind of view, expressed by such theorists as Bakhtin and Kristeva, that the margin is a kind of utopian space of ultimate possibility. She claims that the dominant centre 'desires the existence of the marginal' 12 because The textual productions of marginal minorities exist to confirm hegemonic textualities. And these minority writings have been in general homogenised as the area of plurality, disruption, closure, deferred meaning and process; in other words, as affirming the dynamism of the centre and its ability to accommodate changechange which is safely contained. 13 For Gunew, the problem intrinsic to writing from the margins is that it is almost impossible to do so without initiating a simplistic process of reversing binary oppositions, a reversal which can only ever be temporarily satisfying, since it lasts only as long as the moment of reading: 'There is a moment of ambivalent satisfaction in recognising their own marginality reconstructed as the dominant term ... But the moment is fleeting, because neither for women nor migrants is there any lasting political advantage in merely reversing the old oppositions.' 14 What Angela Carter shares with Gunew is the realisation that such a process of simple reversal isn't enough, and this is what motivates her

Introduction

7

attempts to maintain a balance between the 'fantastic' and the 'real' in her work; a narrative strategy described by Andrzej G