The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

  Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and later evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She studied English at Bristol University and published the first of her nine novels, Shadow Dance, in 1966. After escaping an early marriage, she used the proceeds of a Somerset Maugham Award to enable her to live in Japan for two years, a transforming experience. Her final novel, Wise Children, was published in 1991, a year before her death from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one. In an obituary from the Observer, Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘She was the opposite of parochial … She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the universe.’

  Perhaps best known for her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, Carter was much admired for her work’s exuberant mix of fantasy, philosophy, science fiction and satire. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, published in 1972, is, according to Ali Smith, ‘her real, still underrated, classic’.

  Both The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and Heroes and Villains are also published in Penguin Modern Classics

  Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

  With an introduction by ALI SMITH

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1972

  First published in the United States of America under the title The War of Dreams by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973

  Published in Penguin Books 1982

  Reissued with a new introduction in Penguin Books 2010

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © Angela Carter, 1972

  Introduction copyright © Ali Smith, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-139965-2

  Contents

  Introduction by ALI SMITH

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN

  Introduction

  1. The City Under Siege

  2. The Mansion of Midnight

  3. The River People

  4. The Acrobats of Desire

  5. The Erotic Traveller

  6. The Coast of Africa

  7. Lost in Nebulous Time

  8. The Castle

  Introduction

  ‘Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.’ From the intoxicating dream-roses covering the warring city in its opening chapter – so powerfully imagined that they seem to perspire perfume, ‘make the very masonry drunk’, even sing piercing pentatonics heard by the inside of the nose – all the way to the novel’s end and the bloodstained handkerchief that blooms from its hero Desiderio’s pocket, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was itself, in literary terms, what might be called a matrix of the unprecedented.

  It opens Proustianly: ‘I remember everything. Yes. I remember everything perfectly.’ But then, just a couple of pages on: ‘I cannot remember exactly how it began.’ Who can we trust in this or any story, when memory is so human and dream and actuality so inextricable? Our narrator is Desiderio, an old man now, an ageing politician and venerable historic figure, recalling his youth and the bygone era of Doctor Hoffman, a scientist who, by means of mass hallucination, can alter what reality looks like whenever he chooses.

  The Doctor resembles a god, ‘probably omnipotent’, and has brought about a state of emergency in this unnamed South American metropolis by playing sumptuously poetic and insidious games with time and space: ‘I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honeysuckle.’ Such disruptive and seductive power messes with trade and challenges state control – anathema to the government of the city. A war of extremes, between rationality and the imagination, is soon raging, a war of power-envy too, between the Doctor and the Minister, who, with their capitalized roles, rule this novel like leftovers from Victorian socio-realism. But this is another literary landscape altogether. The Minister enlists Desiderio, half-Indian, half-outsider, a low-ranking civil servant crucially unmoved, even ‘bored’, by the Doctor’s baroque and beautiful illusions, a good candidate for tracking the Doctor down. ‘It was the day before my twenty-fourth birthday. In the afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious fireworks.’ Soon everything ex cathedra in this novel is ablaze, and Desiderio, passionately in love with Hoffman’s beautiful and elusive daughter, Albertina, is on a veering picaresque journey that shifts and shimmers like Albertina herself in a postponement of narrative and sexual climax, through landscape after landscape, from seedy British seaside to primitive tribal, to Sadeian, to Swiftian, to Kafkaesque.

  In a ‘bouquet of ferocious images of desire’, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman declares itself a post-war novel. It was Carter’s sixth novel, published in 1972. Though she is renowned now for her rewritten fairy tales and the winning characterizations of the winged trapeze-artist and music-hall cockney-girl starlets in her two final novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is surely her real, still underrated, classic. This imagistically cornucopic and virtuoso performance is a visionary book for a virtual age.

  It takes apart the ‘machines’ of love, of narrative, of social structure, in a fusion (and simultaneous analysis) of fantasy, fin-de-siècle richness, pastiche, sci-fi, thriller, postmodernism, picaresque, quest literature, adventure story, pornography and political and sociological theorizing. It was an unforeseeable leap forward in terms of form, voice and technique, even for Carter (whose novels tended to redefine her originality each time she published a new one). She had specialized in the medieval period at Bristol University: ‘As a medievalist, I was trained to read books as having
many layers.’ But this is a work not so much layered with as organically formed by a shimmering body of allusion to the literary and visual arts. Try to pinpoint its influences (Kafka, Swift, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, the Bible, cinema, de Sade, Shakespeare, Surrealism, Pope, Proust – and that’s just a surface skim) and it’s as if its author has swallowed literary and visual culture whole, from Chaucer to Calvino, de Mille to Fassbinder, Defoe to Foucault.

  Perhaps it was too far ahead of its time for critical comfort: ‘Autobiographically, what happened next, when I realised that there were no limitations to what one could do in fiction, was… I stopped being able to make a living.’ It was, she said, ‘the beginning of my obscurity. I went from being a very promising young writer to being ignored.’ Her first five novels had earned her several literary awards and had gone out of their way to reveal the artifice of the literary realism which characterized the 1960s literary novel, outfacing kitchen-sinkism with gaudiness and anarchy. In among the unwashed clothes and pubs and parties, the shops and city streets and parks, Carter unveiled megalomania, sexual mastery, a surreality of social and sexual puppeteering. She saw this as no less realist. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism,’ she said. ‘But there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’ She wrote Hoffman in Japan, where she’d gone in 1969 on the money she’d won from a Somerset Maugham award, drafting the novel ‘in three months, in a Japanese fishing village on an island where she seems to have been the only European’, as the critic Susan Rubin Suleiman notes in a seminal essay on Hoffman and Surrealism. ‘Since I kept on trying to learn Japanese, and kept on failing to do so, I started trying to understand things by simply looking at them very, very carefully, an involuntary apprenticeship in the interpretation of signs.’ By all accounts, when she came back both her fiction and her life had been transformed. ‘In Japan, I learned what it is to be a woman and became radicalized.’ She wrote some of her most experimental short stories, later published in her first short story collection, Fireworks (1974), and published this novel, in which the roots of later works like The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the Circus can clearly be seen, but which arguably remains, on its own terms, her most formally courageous work.

  Its demonic Doctor Hoffman was one of the last and best defeated of her recurring megalomaniac male authority figures. By name he alludes to E. T. A. Hoffmann, the highly influential nineteenth-century German Romantic writer whose Tales of Hoffmann she parodies here in her own version of the magician-father/beautiful-but-dangerous-daughter matrix. (Perhaps Heinrich Hoffmann, the German psychiatrist and poet who published the grotesque and arresting collection of gothic morality poems for children, Der Struwwelpeter (1845), is also somewhere in the mix.) Doctor Hoffman’s daughter, the elusive and allusive Albertina, is a cunning mirroring of Proust’s Albertine, the object of desire in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with a very different Albertine, the eponymous heroine of the Norwegian novel of 1886 by the artist and writer Christian Krohg, the subject of which was prostitution and the realism of which saw it impounded by the police.

  But enough about allusion. ‘From The Magic Toyshop onwards,’ as Carter told an interviewer in the mid-1980s, ‘I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface to the novels, so that you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to.’ This rolling narrative hooks its readers, in the best tradition of storytelling, by means of a meld of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Each of its chapters functions as its own seductive and terrifying peep-show ‘desire machine’. Ever opening to something new while simultaneously (and this is one of its technical feats) repeating itself – in other words, treading new ground over an age-old, echo-filled literary landscape – the novel is very much about the business of entertainment, about what it means to be both liberated and held, fixed in place, by it. It dissects the cheapness and richness of fantasy, from high art to low. Whether we’re in the city, or the land of myth, or an American upper-class country house, or a wet and empty backstreet British seaside resort, we’re just one step away, if we look, from the surreal and the grotesque, and from the same old stalwarts of story: attraction and terror and relief, sex and death and survival.

  A thesis on power, it returns repeatedly to images of eyes and notions of vision while teasing apart the connections between the nature of desire and the repeating deceptions, expectations and satisfactions, over time, of what might be called cultural media. It examines continuum and survival alongside the incendiary creative/destructive powers of passion. It is curious about all of these things, but particularly about the connections between passion and power, since this, as it demonstrates, is one of the fundamental ways by which narrative propels itself, in an alternation of boredom and attraction, promise and postponement. What is pure in such a narrative ‘machine’, and what is debauched? Carter always treats both purity and debauchery wryly. One of the great achievements of Hoffman is its liberating revelation of pornography as just another genre. She would shortly publish her devastatingly witty study of de Sade, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Here, in Hoffman, (as, to some extent, in all her work), she is taking issue with ‘ideational femaleness’, the ways in which she perceives women to be the particular victims of social or gender or power fantasies, reduced to ‘benign automata’, ‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’, wearing masks of ‘hideous’ resignation – none of which resemble in any way the brilliant, flashing unpindownability of Albertina herself.

  But even for Albertina the land of myth means rape. In The Sadeian Woman Carter would spell out exactly what she thought of myth: ‘… all the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway.’ Here, although she gifts her male protagonist throughout with his own crucial mutability (in a twinning with his beloved), she also demythologizes the spangly mirror-show of desire, putting him through some of the painful objectification with which this novel is centrally concerned. The violent gang rape he suffers at the hands of the Acrobats of Desire begins with the power of the eyes ‘to bind me in invisible bonds’.

  Desiderio’s outsider status, the fact that he is part-Indian (descended from a people so lowly in status that they ‘performed tasks for which you do not need a face’), is one of the keys to his survival, his ability to stay fluid and mutable when it comes to identity. But in the end he has become a historic fixture, a statue-man, a bloodless old politician. Carter, a committed socialist, believed the novel had a moral function and that art was always political; this book ends on a note of class war and in a kind of dual triumph and defeat. But the real triumph of Hoffman is that it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful’). Its narrative and sexual postponement is Scheherazade-like. It makes practical use of ‘the picaresque, where people have adventures in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions… it’s a very eighteenth-century pursuit to make imaginary societies which teach one about our own society,’ as Carter put it later. It leaves its readers questioning and asks them to be wise – both to the structures which work to categorize or limit who and what we are, and to the ways and potentials of the imagination.

  It is a book full of curiosity about what’s real, what’s artifice, how we live, and what art can do. It is swooningly romantic, indifferently and knowingly beautiful, rigorously philosophical and cunning beyond belief. Its double act of fidelity to and anatomizing of ‘the death-defying double somersault of love’ makes it timeless. Right now,
in the emergence of the virtual age, the age she foresaw nearly forty years ago in her ‘kingdom of the instantaneous’, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman never looked more relevant.

  Ali Smith 2010

  For the family, wherever they are, reluctantly including

  Ivan who thought he was Alyosha.

  Les lois de nos désirs sont les dés sans loisir.

  Robert Desnos

  (Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of the content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one: the definition is a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork. Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician

  Introduction

  I remember everything.

  Yes.

  I remember everything perfectly.

  During the war, the city was full of mirages and I was young. But, nowadays, everything is quite peaceful. Shadows fall only as and when they are expected. Because I am so old and famous, they have told me that I must write down all my memories of the Great War, since, after all, I remember everything. So I must gather together all that confusion of experience and arrange it in order, just as it happened, beginning at the beginning. I must unravel my life as if it were so much knitting and pick out from that tangle the single, original thread of my self, the self who was a young man who happened to become a hero and then grew old. First, let me introduce myself.