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FLUCTUATIONS OF FANTASY: POSTMODERNIST CONTAMINATION IN ANGELA CARTER'S FICTION Anna NOTARO Ph.D Sheffield University 1 995 ANNA NOTARO FLUCTUATIONS OF FANTASY: POSTMODERNIST CONTAMINATIONS IN ANGELA CARTER'S FICTION SUMMARY What I am offering in this thesis is a kind "contaminated" reading, that is a reading deeply involved in the stylistic and ideological dissonances of Carter's fiction, to the point that they are assimilated within different and, in some cases, contrastive interpretative paths. But the contamination works also on another level: to read Carter is to tackle some veiy complex questions, including the possible articulations of Marxism and deconstruction/postmodernism or, more generally, the role played by ideology with reference to the tendencies and movements den ying from poststructuralism; my argument is that Carter's writing itself is heavily "contaminated" by postinodernist aesthetics despite her implicit denial and negative attitude towards it. In the thesis I have discussed three collections of short-stones (The Bloody Chamber in Chapter 1, Black Venus and Fireworks in Chapter II) and four novels (The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, The Passion of New Eve. Nights at Circus and Wise Children from Chapter HI to VI). I have also quoted extensively from the numerous interviews given by Carter in different stages of her career and from her critical works, in particular from The Sadeian Woman, a sort of aesthetic manifesto for a literary corpus in which the worlds of Eros and sexuality play a crucial role in transgressing and subverting the habitual dichotomies of gender. In the final Chapter (VII) Carter's work is located in the framework of the debate between feminist and postmodernist thought. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface Chapter 1 The Bloody Chamber Chapter II Fireworks Black Venus Chapter ifi The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman L2 Chapter IV The Passion of New Eve 169 Chapter V Nights at Circus Chapter VI Wise Children Chapter VII FeminismfPostmodernism: the Critical Intersection Bibliography Acknowledgmenis In preparing this thesis I have benefited from the insights, assistance and support of my supervisor Dr. Tim Armstrong. Additional thanks go to the Inter-Loan Staff of the University of Sheffield Main Library for their courteous efficiency. Preface Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. (Walter Benjamin) The first and also the last time I saw Angela Carter was in April 1987 in Nice at a conference organized by the local university and whose topic was "E.A. Poe et la Raison Visionaire". On that occasion the English writer read, or rather performed, her rewriting of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", entitled "The Resurrection of the House of Usher". The reason for my starting on such a personal note is that the memory of those few days in Nice has accompanied me throughout this thesis, not so much in the sense that the fact of actually seeing the writer was going to have any repercussion on my subsequent work - at the time my critical interests did not lie in contemporary fiction - but rather because I still keep very clear in my mind the image of her. A tall woman who looked older that she really was - mainly due to her loose grey hair - she was also wearing a denim shirt and a long denim skirt, low heels; in sum the style of the Sixties, a decade of intense ideological struggles whose echoes clearly survive in many of her writings. Carter's stylistic anachronism recalls her own characters: the twin sisters Chance, the gay old protagonists of Wise Children, who go on using the garments and make-up of their younger years, 1 tenaciously maintaining their self-image. Wise Children is the last novel written by Carter before her untimely death in 1992, and its melancholy gaiety represents a perfect ending to a literary career which has been always stimulating, notwithstanding the ideological dissonances and stylistic disharmonies one can detect in it. Throughout my thesis I have taken a particular care in highlighting such dissonances whenever they occurred, seeking to avoid the propensity towards apology of the monograph. Neither do I wish to offer the comfortable illusion of offering a definitive and "objective" reading of the author's writings, since an "objective" reading would presuppose a necessary distance between literary and critical discourses. Such a distance often transforms itself in contiguity, as Carter herself seems to acknowledge in an interview. What I am offering here is a kind "contaminated" reading, that is a reading deeply involved in those dissonances and disharmonies, to the point that they are assimilated within different and, in some cases, contrasting interpretative paths. Such an approach seems necessary with a writer like Carter whose work is based on Marxist epistemological assumptions, while adopting on the fictional level techniques and strategies typical of contemporary postmodernist aesthetics. To read Carter is to tackle some very complex questions, including the possible articulations of Marxism and deconstruction/postmodernism or, more generally, the role played by ideology with reference to the tendencies stemming from the epistemic 2 spring of poststructuralisrn. In this sense Carter's writing itself appears to be "contaminated" by postmodernist aesthetics in a way that contradicts her somewhat prejudicial and implicit denials. If to all this one adds Carter's declared feminist aims and consequently the necessity of evaluating her texts in the light of contemporary feminist thought, then the difficulties of providing a suitable context for an attentive analysis of her work increase. (A concise but I hope incisive assessment of such questions is provided in the final chapter "Feminism/Postmodernism: A Critical Intersection") I have decided to anchor nry work by quoting extensively from the numerous interviews given by Carter at different stages of her career. Such interviews offer an immediacy of insight and useful suggestions on the aims and motivations of her texts. Undoubtedly, any critic will approach the above sketched perspective (quoting the author's interviews in order to evaluate her intentions) in a cautious manner: the notion of intentionality has long since come under suspicion. The attempt to resuscitate it here should be viewed in the light of some functional considerations: it is my belief that any hermeneutic reading can only hope to be carried out effectively if one establishes with the author who actually put his/her signature to the text a relationship as complete and as articulated as possible. My writing in this thesis aims to do that, also adding to the author's disharmonies its own dissonances of tone and 3 style. In some cases my writing is abstract and essaytic, like in the opening pages of the section .L t- "Reflections", elsewhere a little indefinite or too much "involved" in Carter's prose thus risking paraphrasing her words. As I write at the outset of chapter VI one should be constantly aware of the double danger of being trapped in the discourse of the text while trying to clarify its meaning. Besides the various interviews mentioned above, I have also decided to give a particular preeminence to Carter's critical works and, above all, to Sadeian Woman, a sort of aesthetic manifesto for a literary corpus in which sexuality plays a crucial role in transgressing and subverting the habitual dichotomies of gender. Carter's interest in Sade goes well beyond the mere analogy of themes and images and places her among a group of admirers which include, to cite only a few, Hauberk, Baudelaire, Wilde, Dostoevsky, Apollinaire and Camus. Such writers, although very different from one another, have in common a fervid appreciation for the Divine Marquis, "one of the most amazing menjever existed", as Apollinaire defined him, or "the rebel hero", according to Camus. Adorno stressed Sade's role as researcher of the extreme in the field of knowledge, arguing that his work led Illuminism towards final and unacceptable conclusions, exploring a cruel syllogism according to which life consists in the researching of pleasure, pleasure conducts man to his own destruction, ero life is based on the desperate negation of itself. 4 I believe that the reason for Carter's interest in Sade lies mainly in the provocative strength of his thought; he never falls into what Bataille defined as "lies of omission", into the escapism of consolatory belief (like that which negates man's capability of committing the most violent crimes) . More than once in her critical writings - for example in "Notes from the Front Line" - Carter has condemned such comfortable illusions, whose main source she locates in myth. While she uses myth herself, she offers a disillusioned reading of myth, in order to strip it bare (the best example is perhaps f Passion j New discussed in chapter IV) The first work by Carter to be examined in this thesis is the exquisitely Sadian title-piece to The Bloody Chamber. As the table of contents suggests the sequence of the various chapters is not chronologically orientated. I have chosen instead to start with a work of 1979, one of Carter's most famous pieces, and a stimulating one for any critical analysis, not only because it contains in a compressed space almost all the themes and images developed in the rest of her works, but also because I believe Carter is at her best in the short-story genre (she has been called "the poet of the short-story"). The justification of this contention will be provided in the first chapter. Clearly, there are many omissions in this study, in particular the early stage of Carter's career: novels like Love, Shadow Dance, The Manic Toyshop are only briefly mentioned or are not discussed.

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