From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet De Curiosités: Angela
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités: Angela Carter's Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages Author(s): Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère Source: Marvels & Tales, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp. 284-308 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/marvelstales.30.2.0284 Accessed: 07-04-2017 10:28 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Marvels & Tales This content downloaded from 188.62.129.27 on Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:28:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARTINE HENNARD DUTHEIL DE LA ROCHÈRE From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités Angela Carter’s Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages Tant que la lecture est pour nous l’incitatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même les portes des demeures où nous n’aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. —Marcel Proust, “Sur la lecture,” 208 Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death. And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book. —Anthony Doerr Stories take you somewhere beyond what you know. —Marina Warner From Wunderland to Wonderland: Traveling Words and Creative Encounters Angela Carter, a self-confessed bookish writer who memorably associated intellectual development with the “new readings of old texts” (“Notes from the Front Line,” 37), found food for thought and inspiration for her multifaceted oeuvre in reading widely across genres, periods, and languages. When Carter died from cancer in 1992, Margaret Atwood said in a deeply felt obituary for Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2016), pp. 284–308. Copyright © 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201. 284 This content downloaded from 188.62.129.27 on Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:28:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MT_30.2_07.indd Page 284 22/03/17 3:10 PM FROM THE BLOODY CHAMBER TO THE CABINET DE CURIOSITÉS The Observer, “She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse” (61). Traveling both reflected and fostered this insatiable intellectual curiosity. Carter’s exposure to foreign languages in particular was an important source of inspiration that fed into her literary project of boundary crossings and reading against the grain. During her two-year stay in Japan, she likened her experi- ence to Alice’s time in Wonderland, because it revealed the constructed nature of language, cultural norms, and social order, to the point of changing her perception of herself as a woman and reinventing herself as a writer.1 A few years later, translating the fairy tales of Charles Perrault during the hot summer of 1976 was another eye-opening activity that stimulated Carter’s philological curiosity and revealed the potential of the familiar stories for retellings in dif- ferent styles, genres, and media.2 Angela Carter’s entire oeuvre, I believe, was indeed shaped by a translational and transcreative dynamic that underpins the development of literature worldwide, although this phenomenon is often obscured by national canons, monolingual scholarship, and ideological agen- das.3 Examining Carter’s work from a cross-linguistic, transnational, and trans- cultural perspective therefore questions traditional conceptions of the fairy tale as either universal invariant or reified expression of national culture and instead brings out the complex web of interconnections, mutual borrowings and exchanges, translations, responses, and reinventions out of which it devel- oped.4 In this essay I link Carter’s encounter with foreign languages and cul- tures to her lifelong engagement with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the nonsense tradition, including its legacy in the surrealist movement. Specifically, I focus on the fictional possibilities opened up by the linguistic and literary resonances of the word cabinet, which Carter drew on to celebrate curiosity in The Bloody Chamber and beyond. Carter’s Curious Alices: From Metaphysics in the Nursery to Japanese Cats and Wolf-Girls Like Carroll, Carter uses wordplay to quicken the intellect and unlock new imaginative doors. Because a foreign language confronts the learner with the challenge of making sense of unfamiliar words or signs, strange grammar, syn- tax, rhythms, and sounds, it brings an unsettling realization that no two lan- guages are similar and makes cultural difference and worldviews palpable, and this experience is not unlike falling into a rabbit hole or stepping through a looking glass. As such, it provokes wonder about language, its relation to the world, and our perception of it and of ourselves. Marina Warner notes that the 285 This content downloaded from 188.62.129.27 on Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:28:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MT_30.2_07.indd Page 285 22/03/17 3:10 PM MARTINE HENNARD DUTHEIL DE LA ROCHÈRE word wonder is inseparable from the fairy-tale genre and is itself a source of philological wonder.5 The etymology of the word is telling. The Indo-European root wen means “wish” or “desire.” Old English wundor signifies “wonder” and “marvel” but also “horror” and “monster.” In the modern sense, wonder refers to the emotion provoked by something curious, unknown, or surprising and to the intellectual experience, mental pondering, and thought process result- ing from it. It is no surprise that Angela Carter associated wonder with Carroll’s books, which so memorably capture the mixed shock and delight, epistemo- logical dizziness, and imaginative response that comes with new ways of using language. As it turns out, even the word that has come to define Carroll’s fiction in English, wonderland, owes something to a foreign language and literary move- ment. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst observes that the word was much more unusual than it is now when Carroll decided to rename Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), the title of the manuscript he offered to Alice Liddell: “For German writers such as Friedrich Schiller or Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, whose poems ‘In fernem Wunderland’ (‘In a Distant Wonderland’) and ‘Ein Wunderland’ (‘A Wonderland’) were often translated and anthologised in the period, Wunderland referred to a place where anything could happen because it existed only in the imagination” (par. 16). The probable influence of a German word on Carroll’s masterpiece illustrates the way words, texts, and genres travel and are constantly reinvented anew across languages and cultures. Along with loan words, calques, and cross-linguistic puns, intertextual references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are scattered throughout Carter’s fiction, covering a thirty-year span. They can even be said to frame her literary production, from the early poem “Through the Looking Glass” (1963), recently anthologized in Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter (2015), to “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room,” published posthumously in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993).6 Carter’s whimsical and epigrammatic poem “Through the Looking Glass” sets the tone for her later literary engagements with the Alice books and Victo- rian nonsense: “Waking, Alice shook her kitten, demanding: / ‘Which dreamed it?’ and it peed with fright; / And the nursery grew rank with metaphysics” (7). We remember that at the beginning of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land, Alice talks out loud to reassure herself as she is falling down the rabbit hole. She misses her beloved cat Dinah and worries that her pet may not be fed milk in her absence, before puzzling over the conundrum: “‘But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ . ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes ‘Do bats eat cats?’” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 11). Alice’s sleepy fantasy of Dinah chas- ing bats in the air stems from the phonic proximity of the monosyllabic pair (bat and cat) and from the disturbing possibility of a mirrorlike world of 286 This content downloaded from 188.62.129.27 on Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:28:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MT_30.2_07.indd Page 286 22/03/17 3:10 PM FROM THE BLOODY CHAMBER TO THE CABINET DE CURIOSITÉS nonsense created through grammatical substitution in the sentence. But it also leads the girl to consider that the arbitrary closeness of signifiers may conceal some hidden truth because, she muses, a bat is “very like a mouse” (11). The notion of a bat as a flying mouse is indeed far less absurd in French than it is in English, because the word for bat is chauve-souris (owl-mouse). This draws attention to Carroll’s probable association of nonsense with learning French as a foreign language.