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- Author: Marie Mulvey-Roberts x
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Interviewing can be a vampiric act especially when it involves leeching from its subject the fluidic exchange which exists between life and art. The vampire novelist Anne Rice had agreed to let me interview her at Waterstones Bookshop in Bristol, England, on 26 January 1993 about the fourth book in her Vampire Chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief (1992). In the interview she describes the novel as dealing with the differences between art and life and mortality and immortality. Specifically, the story examines the paradox of choosing to be Undead for the sake of life, and the way in which art opens up a locus for a redemption that is outside of life. In my view, the text is as much about the process of interviewing as about authorship. A more obvious example is Rice‘s well-known novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) in which the hapless interviewer eventually enters into the very narrative he is recording by becoming another Ricean revenant.
This book aims to give new insights into the multifarious worlds of Angela Carter and to re-assess her impact and importance for the twenty-first century. It brings together leading Carter scholars with some emerging academics, in a new approach to her work, which focuses on the diversity of her interests and versatility across different fields. Even where chapters are devoted specifically to her fiction, they tend to concentrate on inter-disciplinary crossings-over as in, for example, psychogeography or translational poetics. This collection is a response to the momentum arising from commemorative events to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary since her death, including the first art exhibition inspired by her life and work. The arts of Angela Carter builds on existing scholarship and makes new interventions in regard to her inter-disciplinarity. The arrangement of the material, indicated by the chapter headings, draws attention to a variety of areas not normally associated with dominant perceptions of Angela Carter. These encompass fashion, art, poetry, music, performance and translation, which will be discussed in a number of historical, literary and cultural contexts. The book will also explore her interests in anthropology and psycho-analysis and engage in current debates relating to gender, feminism and postmodernism.
The body is a potential marker of monstrosity, identifying those who do not fit into the body politic. Irregularity and the grotesque have been associated with Gothic architecture and are also indicative of wayward flesh and its deformities. Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. Original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts include The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies will be traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. Dangerous Bodies demonstrates how the Gothic corpus is haunted by a tangible sense of corporeality, often at its most visceral. Chapters set out to vocalise specific body parts such as skin, genitals, the nose and eyes, as well as blood. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
Angela Carter was fascinated by the trope of the curious room and cabinets of curiosities. This introduction considers her work in relation to space, which includes an exhibition inspired by her life and work, co-curated by the editor, and set out in an art gallery as a series of curious rooms. This was one of many events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary since her death which specifically drew attention to her links with Bristol, since place, as well as space, was important to Carter. She lived in the city for nearly ten years, which provided a setting for her Bristol trilogy of novels. Carter also lived in the neighbouring city of Bath where she wrote her most important non-fictional work, The Sadeian Woman (1978). This chapter reveals that the time she lived in the West Country was the most productive of her writing career, despite her being regarded mainly as a London writer. It also draws attention to the diversity of Carter’s interests and how that is reflected in the chapters which follow. These fall into distinct subject areas, such as psychogeography, music, art, theatre, anthropology, translation and religion and have been written by leading and lesser-known scholars show-casing Carter’s multi-disciplinarily.
When perusing Angela Carter’s journals in the archives at the British Library, the words ‘short story’ appear repeatedly, accompanied by fragments of poetry, fictional blurbs, reflections and quotations. Short narrative indeed appears to have been intertwined with her creative process, and seems to have functioned as a sort of laboratory in which she could play with ideas, and spin out critical fictions that challenge the reader’s perception of generic identity. The breadth and variety of her short fiction demonstrate the far-reaching intertextual and intermedial aspect of her writing. As a twentieth-century ‘Renaissance woman’, Carter’s borrowing ranges from high to low culture and moves beyond the limits of literature into areas as diverse as philosophy, the visual arts, psychoanalysis, cultural and religious iconography, radio, film and language theory. As a result, the edges of multiple disciplines are played with and highlighted in the shape-shifting production of short fiction throughout her career, ranging with her first collection Fireworks (1974) and culminating in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). This chapter studies how Carter’s short fiction develops throughout her career and draws upon the specificities of short narrative to propose powerful, multimedial spaces of fictional reflection to the reader.
This chapter explores how Angela Carter’s fictional spaces metanarratively reflect upon creative authorship and textual productivity along the lines of a feminist psychogeographical poetics of spatiality. It scrutinizes the individual affective charge fictive locations hold for the woman writer who composes herself into being within sites of her own mak(e-believ)ing. It starts out from a brief overview of geographical interpretations of Carter’s fictional places, which associate her trademark challenging of generic conventions and gender roles with spatial explorations that surface both on a thematic and stylistic level of her work. It then argues that Carter’s decentralization project resonates with the poststructuralist notion of an ‘open text’, which allows readers to meander in a labyrinthine narrative while tackling the ultimate metafictional dilemma: ‘Where do stories come from?’ After a brief analysis of the affective investment of spatial imagery in Carter’s short fiction, my close reading of ‘The Scarlet House’ shows how the narrator protagonist’s mental mapping of her traumatic past becomes a survival strategy when the stake of maintaining her sense of space is the preservation of her sense of self.
This chapter examines the way The Bloody Chamber intermingles literary, pictorial and musical elements to ground a new aesthetic of reading. Drawing on both aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that Carter plays on the traditional gendering of space and time, as well as their related fine arts. She thus uses painting and music to blur the boundaries and implicit hierarchies between genres and genders, but also between the senses to which they appeal, giving prominence to the repressed sense of hearing, which is closely linked to touch. Looking first at ‘The Bloody Chamber’, it shows that it provides a key to a collection which should be read like a score and calls for performative readings, in the musical sense. Broadening the perspective, it then provides an overview of the whole collection as structured around visual, musical, and consequently tactile, refrains in the sense Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari understand them. It demonstrates that Carter thus renews a somewhat stultified genre, which trapped characters and readers into predetermined roles, by turning the very motives that constituted the death trap into a constant de-territorialization process, reviving their capacity to affect her readers and urge them to reconfigure their own relationship to otherness.
This chapter examines Angela Carter’s evolution as a poet, and the links between her early poetry and her later prose fiction. Through discussion of a range of Carter’s – admittedly limited – selection of poems, it considers Carter’s poetry in the context of the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, the Bristol counterculture and her own university career. Drawing on hitherto unpublished correspondence with the editors of the little poetry magazines The Aylesford Review and Tlaloc, the chapter discusses Carter’s ambitions for her poetry, and how they enabled her to shape a literary agenda that was to be carried through into her novels. Its ultimate argument is that, while Carter might not have been a particularly distinguished poet, her poetry constitutes a valuable body of juvenilia which enabled her to come to novel writing with a style and approach already recognizably ‘Carteresque’.
Angela Carter experimented with translation across languages, genres and media throughout her life, and this informed her literary practice as well as her view of intellectual development as stemming from ‘new readings of old texts’. This chapter focuses on translation-related activities that stimulated Carter’s imagination, critical reflection, and creativity through the example of Baudelaire’s continuing presence in her life and work. From adolescence onward she was drawn to the French poet as a verbal magician, provocative dandy figure and forerunner of surrealism, quoting from Les Fleurs du Mal and rendering short prose texts from Le Spleen de Paris in English, but also critiquing the sexual politics of aestheticism and the cruel aphorisms of Mon Coeur mis à nu. This would percolate in her fiction, especially in the 1980 tale of ‘Black Venus’, which revisits the Jeanne Duval poems from a female perspective and assesses the poet’s legacy in an ambivalent gesture of appropriation, homage, emulation and derision. In this piece Carter muses on her life-long fascination for Baudelaire with her characteristic mix of self-irony, mockery, erudition and tenderness as she punningly responded to her love affair with the French poète maudit as venereal disease.
This chapter discusses Angela Carter’s engagement with Claude Lévi-Strauss, particularly concentrating on how this shapes her work from 1969–74, a period which coincides with Carter’s time in Japan (1970–72). Through a discussion of Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and ‘Master’ – a short story from Fireworks (1974) – the chapter focuses on how Carter’s reading of Lévi-Strauss is central to her depiction of primitive communities in these texts. It argues that this aspect of Carter’s anthropological research, but particularly her references to Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and The Raw and the Cooked, contribute to her satirical depiction of supposedly civilized groups in her fiction, and help to blur the portrayal of civilized and primitive societies in Carter’s work. Moreover, Carter’s engagement with American Indian mythology, particularly myths surrounding cooking and the origin of fire, underpin Doctor Hoffman and ‘Master’ and contribute to the demythologization of myths that portray American Indian tribes as ‘savage’.