The Work of Angela Carter

SYNTHETIC AUTHENTICITY: THE WORK OF ANGELA CARTER, GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLE GUATTARI Karen Isabel OcMa Comparative Literature, McGU University, Montreal August, 1996 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial hifilment of the requirements of the degree of Master's in Art. Karen OcMa, 1996 National Library Bibliothéque nationale 1+1 ,mada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services sen/ices bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. me Wellington OttawaON KIAONQ OttawaON KIAON4 canada canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, 10- distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of ths thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in ths thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otheMrise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT This thesis consti tu tes art investigation into con temporary writing -- both fictional and philosophical. More specifically, it is a comparative analysis of the work of British novelist Angela Carter, and French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattai, in the iight of the concept of synrhenc authentïciry. It is divided into three chapters, "Becomings","Events", and "Machines", and each chapter presents the work of both Carter and Deleuze and Guattari, respectively, in light of one of these topics. Chapter Two, however, focuses closely on Angela Carter's first novel, Shudoiv Dance, as it relates to the concept 'event'. And Chapter Three focuses on Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines ofDocror Homan, as it relates to and differs from the schizoanalytic notion of desiring machines. Cette these est une investigation de l'écriture contempcraine, fictive ainsi que philosophique. Plus exactement, c'est una analyse comparative de l'oeuvre de la romancière anglaise Angela Carter, et de l'oeuvre des philosophes Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari à la lumière du concept de synthèse a~uhenrique. La thèse est divisée en trois chapitres: "Devenirs", "Événements", "Machines". Chaque chapitre présente l'oeuvre de Carter, ainsi que celle de Deleuze et Guattan à la lumière des sujets de devenir, événement et machines, respectivement. Le deuxième chapitre, pourtant, analyse en profondeur le premier roman d'Angela Carter, Sltadow Dance, en montrant comment il se relie au concept d'événement. Le troisième chapitre montre les différences et inter- relations entre le roman The Infenral Desire Machines of Doctor Homan et le concept schizoanalytique de machines désirantes inventé par Deleuze et Guattari. Table of Contents 3 INTRODUCTION 4 CHAPTER ONE Becomings CHAPTER TWO Evenrs CHAPTER THREE Machines CONCLUSION Finale NOTES WORKS CONSULTED Acknowledgemenrs Thanks to al1 -- family, fi-iends, allies, rivals -- for any help, advice, ideas, inspiration, and support which may have gone into the making of this thesis. Much gratitude also to Brian Massumi for his supervision. I also extend my thanks to McGill University -- professors, staff, and support staff -- without whose support and indulgence this thesis would not have been possible. To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, in transi tivel y. -- Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other INTRODUCTION 1 Writing is invention and experiment. It is not a matter of being objective and of making one's words conform with things, mimetically -- for words and things are of a different order. It is a matter of being productive, of desiring and producing a non-pre-existent reality: new virtual-actual objects, where reality is this production itself - a production of flows, a production of affects, a production of effects, a production of images. Writing produces relations, thought-relations, affect-relations, putting words- objects, words-subjects, verbs, affects, sounds, into temporal and spatial relations. It can attempt to describe reality as it is, but reality never ceases to ernerge here and now, (or as it is remembered, or as it is desired): in fact, a certain order of reality ernrrges in wnting, and becomes reality us writing. At best, writing can attempt to beconie with or against, and between different orders of reality. Writing produces and simulates: it produces a non-pre-existent reality, or rather a parareality, extra-reality, inter-reality; Deleuze and Guattari have said it produces rhizomes. Barbie has said that flesh is grass. And Carter makes flesh into dreams. 11 This thesis arises out of an interest in contemporary writing, fiction as well as philosophy: poststructural, postmodem intertwinings, and their stnicturalist underpinnings. More specifically, it is to be a study of the fiction (and nonfiction) of British writer Angela Carter, and of the literary theory and philosophy of French writers Gilles Deieuze and Félix Guattari. My contention is that Carter, Deleuze and Guattari are allies in a politics and micro-politics of experience and erperimenrarion , resistance and affirmation. Their work is directed both against reactive and repressive psychosocial mechanisms and towards an engagement in life and the affirmation of thought, art, and chance. This thesis will involve an attempt to present the work of Carter, Deleuze and Guattari in such a way as to respect the integnty of =ch, but sirnultaneously forge passages behveen them, seeing where their ideas and writings converge, where they diverge, and where they remain indifferent. Such a comparative project involves certain processes, procedures and methodological challenges, which 1 will attempt to outline. The first process involved a double capture. This first stage or procedure, was one of mutual aggression. I was reading one set of texts against the other -- Carter against Deleuze and Guattari and vice versa -- in mono, as rivals, subtractively or competitively . I fell into the trap of having Deleuze and Guattari's voluminous theoretical apparatus overcode Carter's fictions so that 1 was reading her fiction in terrns of their concepts. This was followed by the tendency to masure Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis by a stringent feminist 6 yardstick, by which they are bound to fa11 short. (These comparative tendencies are extrernely difficult to overcome.) The second stage or procedure came about when 1 learned to read the two sets in stereo.. .with one another, aiongside one another, additively, having one subvert another's meaning, or reading both sets of texts as mutant offspring of a sort of involuntary, enveloping, 'epochai' meramilieu or AR -- their common matrix. Despite the fact that they were almost a generation apart in age, they shared many corn mon influences. In terestingly , Carter had a predilection for French writers (Racine, de Sade, Proust, Rimbaud, Bataille, Baudelaire, Colette), whereas Deleuze and Guattari were crazy about English and American writers (Lewis Carroll, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, Burroughs, Kerouac). However, 1 do subscribe to a common AIR notion. One would only have to specify that this air had various currents. In addition to a radical European 20th century intellectual whirlwind of Marx, Kafka, Nietzsche and Freud, there were other literary and extra- literary airs: ringing hoofbeats from the steppes out East, the potent silences of Far Eastern Zen, the passionate cry of Latin American and Mexican modemists, including a more esoteric gust of Borgesian air from Buenos Aires. And, of course, American rnovies, T.V., blues and jazz. Then there was Foucault. Not to mention ages past: "the Classics", romanticism, and more recently, surrealism, stnicturalism and psycho-analysis. This first process could be seen as one tendency, the con- and confra-rextuulizing, historicizing , tendency of a comparative methodology , which, admittedly, is far too schematic. 7 A more satisfiing alternative may be to perforrn an immanent or inrratatual reading focusing on a single work or a single author, attempting to rad it, hirn or her in itdtheir own terms, finding the critical language or meralanguage within, performing an 'intrinsic' critique. Such an enterprise is undertaken in the spirit of stnicturaiism, and then deconstruction (Barthes' Les Deux Critiques, Eco's Opera Aperra, Demda's voluminous critical apparatus)', but it arises, more simply, as the impulse to read as one pleases, or intuitively . In England, there was the Leavis school. And in North America. New Criticism. It does seem somewhat perverse to attempt to read Carter as pure lirerature, pureiy in terms of some son of great ahistorical literary code, when she was very much in the demythologizing and historicizing business (especially when writing culrural history, as she does in The Sudeian Woman). She did. however, corne to be invoived in rewriting old myths and fairytales and in creating new ones. Fabulation need not be timeless, it cm be tram-historicai. Demythologizing or fabulating, fiction embraces life, enfolds it, and then unfurls it in a vision. " 'What we cal1 styles," said Giacometti. "are those visions fixed in tirne and space.' It is always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned. or of tempting it into an uncertain combat.lo2 [< < On appelle styles, disait Giacometti, ces visions arrêtées dans le temps et I'espace. > > 11 s'agit toujours de libérer la vie là où elle est prisonnière, ou de le tenter dans un combat in~ertain."~]Here you have one of the paradoxes of freedom : there is a desire to liberate desire, to Liberate life .. and on the other hand, this liberation when it is artistic and also when it is philosophical, takes 8 the form of freezing things in tirne and space -- making of these visions of freedom frozen constnicts, statues.

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