The arts of Angela Carter

A cabinet of curiosities

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526136794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

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, psycho-geography or translational poetics. The purpose of this collection is to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. This is the continuation of a tradition, triggered by the first edited collection by Lorna Sage in 1994, published in the wake of her untimely death in 1992, while the most recent, New Critical Readings (2012), edited by Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips marks the twentieth anniversary.

1

Intermedial synergy in Angela Carter’s short fiction

Michelle Ryan-Sautour

We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes. That is our life. (Carter, 1992: 2)

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO Angela Carter’s The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works, Susannah Clapp speaks of a startling array of images discovered in Carter’s study following her death: ‘Drawings and paintings spilled out of these drawers’ (Clapp, 1997: ix). For Clapp these elements are more than anecdotal; they open up new perspectives on Carter’s artistic production, as Carter’s interests extend well beyond the realm of prose fiction: ‘There was also an unexpectedly large number of plays for theatre, film and radio. […] By their form and extent, they enlarge the scope and alter the contours of a rich body of work’ (Clapp, 1997: ix). Carter’s creative imagination was highly literary, yet she was also deeply influenced by other art forms. Clapp’s memoir, A Card from Angela Carter, which contains reproductions of postcards, points to this sensibility, in that it dwells upon Carter’s close connection to image, interweaving fragments of Carter’s life story and ideas with a series of postcards ‘casually despatched’ to reveal a ‘zigzag path through the eighties’ (Clapp, 2012: 10). Clapp comments on how these cards reflect Carter’s preoccupations of the time, and she highlights a statement of intent written early in Carter’s career: ‘I want to make images that are personal, sensuous, tender and funny – like the sculpture of Arp, for example, or the paintings of Chagall. I may not be very good yet but I’m young and I work hard – or fairly hard’ (Carter qtd. in Clapp, 2012: 9). Sculpture and painting appear as lenses through which to visualize her future as a writer.

As Clapp observes, Carter was also ‘a child of the radio age’ who ‘grew up hearing both the sweetness of John Masefield’s Box of Delights and the sepulchral tones of the Man in Black’ (Clapp, 1997: ix); it is well known that Carter’s turn to writing for the radio was triggered by a sensitivity to sound: ‘I ran the pencil idly along the top of the radiator. It made a metallic, almost musical rattle. It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage’ (Carter, 1997a: 499). Such sounds allow Carter to explore a different sort of image, that of the internal visual imagination, where the reader is invited to contribute ‘his or her own way of “seeing” the voices and the sounds, the invisible beings and events, that gives radio story-telling its real third dimension’. This space ‘interests and enchants’ Carter (Carter, 1997a: 497), as it allows her to ‘paint some pictures in radio’ (Carter, 1997a: 501).

It is such pathways between media that seized Carter’s attention. Her affection for the cinema, and particularly the culture of Hollywood,¹ also spans much of her career, and her writing for radio, screen and stage has been addressed in depth in Charlotte Crofts’ ‘Anagrams of Desire’: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film and Television, a work that filled a gap in the critical landscape surrounding Carter’s writings. Crofts was one of the first critics to underline the centrality of media in Carter’s writing, referring specifically to periods characterized by some critics as being unproductive in fiction writing, but highly productive in projects for other media (Crofts, 2003: 197). I will take up the idea that Carter’s writing for media ‘is central to an understanding of her work as a whole’ (Crofts, 2003: 197), as Carter’s awareness of ‘the complex processes involved in transforming a text from one medium to another’ (Crofts, 2003: 197) is key to understanding Carter’s late short fiction.² Rather than focus on Carter’s turn to other media, I will reverse the question by examining how other media and forms of intermediality act as an underlying force to Carter’s writing, which intensifies towards the end of her career. Intermediality appears to give rise to new forms of iconoclasm in Carter’s speculative spaces, and proposes surprising vistas for understanding the political and cultural dimension of her short fiction.

Short fiction and intermedial citationality

Joan Smith raises the question of calling Carter a ‘Renaissance woman’,³ as Carter was an author whose activities were wide and varied. This ‘Renaissance’ character carries over into the intertextual dimension of her writing, which is studied in depth in Rebecca Munford’s Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2006), and Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic (2013). But Carter’s work is also strikingly intermedial. When one looks closely, her preoccupation with other media appears to be informed by an underlying consciousness of how media shape stories and meaning in different ways. Marie-Laure Ryan has written of the difficulty in defining the term ‘medium’, explaining how a sociologist or cultural critic might see television, radio and the internet as examples of media; an art critic would speak of music, painting, sculpture, literature, drama, etc.; a phenomenologist might discuss the visual and auditory as factors for defining media; and an artist might speak in terms of clay, bronze, oil and watercolour (Ryan, 2004: 16). It is indeed exceedingly complex to define the nature of media, particularly as Carter’s references and work from media stretch across these different areas, reaching into the technologies of film, television and radio, while also pointing to the possibilities of painting, sculpture, oral performance and theatre. Ryan ultimately resists the creation of a definitive definition in favour of the concept of media relativity; media are studied in relation to each other according to their power to shape narrative:

Hence, what counts for us as a medium is a category that truly makes a difference about what stories can be evoked or told, how they are presented, why they are communicated, and how they are experienced. This approach implies a standard of comparison: to say, for instance that ‘radio is a distinct narrative medium’ means that radio as a medium offers different narrative possibilities than television, film, or oral conversation. ‘Mediality’ (or mediumhood) is thus a relational rather than an absolute property. (Ryan, 2004: 18)

Media thus take on multiple forms, and it is the constraints and affordances offered in the telling of a story that reveal their characteristics. This flexible concept in relation to storytelling appears as the guiding principle of Carter’s own engagement with media.

In her introduction to Expletives Deleted, Carter indeed emphasizes the centrality of narrative, explaining that books act as containers, ‘bottles’ for stories, and that the story itself is essential: ‘because the really important thing is narrative’ (Carter, 2006: 2, emphasis in original). The story is primordial in its migration across media, an idea that is reinforced in Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon’s introduction to Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014), in which they present the concept of intermediality as follows:

Through intermediality, texts of a given medium send tendrils toward other media (see Rajewsky). These tendrils can include cross-medial adaptation (film to video game), references within the text to other media objects (a painting playing an important role in a novel), imitation by a medium of the resources of another medium (hypertext structure in print) and ekphrasis, or other forms of description of a type of sign through another type (music or visual artifacts described in language). (Ryan and Thon: 2014: 335)

Carter’s fiction appears to deploy many such ‘tendrils’ towards various media productions. In Wise Children, for example, we are faced with the intersection of cinema, stage and television, an intermedial reflection with carnavalesque overtones that re-examines the relationship between Shakespeare and Hollywood, as Carter explains in a 1988 review of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: ‘Hollywood was, still is, always will be, synonymous with the movies. It was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production’ (Carter, 1997b: 385). Hollywood was a place where ‘scandal and glamour’ were ‘an essential part of the product’ (Carter, 1997b: 385). The Passion of New Eve (1977) is also openly based on an intermedial engagement with not only the form of the cinema, but also its culture, with the character of Tristessa figured as a film star. References to other media are widespread in Carter’s writing. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, Debussy’s La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune, as if played upon ‘a piano with keys of ether’ is associated with the protagonist’s loss of virginity (Carter 1997c: 122), along with the Marquis’s collection of paintings, including Gustave Moreau’s Sacrifical Victim and Paul Gauguin’s Out of the Night We Come […] (Carter 1997c: 123). Carter’s reflections on George de la Tour’s The Magdalene and Two Flames also reflects what Karima Thomas describes as an ‘urge for intermediality’ in ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ (Carter, 1997c). According to Thomas, this piece reflects upon the media transference of cultural artifacts: ‘Its objective is to perform the permanent construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of meanings out of existing cultural artifacts’ (Thomas, 2011: 76).

As Carter developed her writing for other media, this intermedial ‘urge’ was enhanced. Her fiction underwent shifts, often experimenting with the idea of ‘story across media’ while creating forms of symbiosis between fiction and radio or screen plays. The short story ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1975) is an emanation of Carter’s radio play Vampirella,⁴ which, as mentioned above, emerged from a sensitivity to sound. The Company of Wolves, both the radio play and screenplay, propose three versions of fairy tales, carrying traces of an oral tradition. These fairy tale narratives were initially rewritten in The Bloody Chamber (1979),⁵ and then transformed through radio and film. Much of Carter’s fiction connects with such intermedial trajectories. However, there appears to be an increasing awareness of how media shape meaning later in her career. The intermedial character of the texts in American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (1993) reflects a growing consciousness of how media can interrelate with the forms of condensation and concentrated meaning that are characteristic of short fiction.

The short story was an important space of speculation for Carter. A perusal of Angela Carter’s journals in the archives at the British Library, reveals a repetition of the words ‘short story’, accompanied by fragments of poetry, fictional blurbs, reflections and quotations. Short narrative 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 intermedial thrust of her writings acts in synergy with the generic experimentation present in much of Carter’s short fiction. Carter’s short pieces indeed fluctuate between the seemingly autobiographical musings of ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ to the fairy tale and fantasy modes of ‘Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest’ and The Bloody Chamber. Stories also appear as biographical sketches in ‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’ and ‘Black Venus’, and as fictionalized historical myths such as ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’. This heterogeneity is heightened in Carter’s last collection, as American Ghosts & Old World Wonders proposes pieces collected and published posthumously, and juxtaposes theatrical journalistic fragments such as ‘In Pantoland’, with screenplay sketches such as ‘Gun for the Devil’, and speculative enigmas such as ‘Alice in Prague or The Curious Room’.

In addition to having produced a heterogeneous collection of short fiction, Carter also wrote pieces that are hybrid in nature, often questioning the limits of fiction, and displaying a baroque quality that leads Salman Rushdie to see Carter as being at her best in her stories: ‘Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky, opium-eater’s cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flimflam, can be exhausting. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she’s ahead’ (Rushdie, 1997: x). Carter’s short texts often waver between fiction and non-fiction, between sketch and story, glossary and fairy tale, and thus can be destabilizing for the reader. Paul March-Russell comments on this potential of short fiction:

Like the literary fragment, the short story is prone to snap and confound reader’s expectations, to delight in its own incompleteness, and to resist definition. These qualities not only mean that the short story has been of service to experimental writers but that they also relate the short story – and, in turn, modern and contemporary literature – to the mutability of the oral tradition. (March-Russell, 2009: viii)

Ali Smith, in a literary fable that appears in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Angela Carter’s curious rooms – Marie Mulvey-Roberts
• 1 Intermedial synergy in Angela Carter’s short fiction – Michelle Ryan-Sautour
• 2 Psychogeography in the curiosity cabinet: Angela Carter’s poetics of space – Anna Kérchy
• 3 Bloody chamber melodies: painting and music in The Bloody Chamber – Julie Sauvage
• 4 Angela Carter’s poetry – Sarah Gamble
• 5 Angela Carter’s objets trouvés in translation: from Baudelaire to Black Venus – Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère
• 6 Myths, meat and American Indians: Angela Carter and Claude Lévi-Strauss – Heidi Yeandle
• 7 Angela Carter’s ‘rigorous system of disbelief’: religion, misogyny, myth and the cult – Marie Mulvey-Roberts
• 8 ‘Clothes are our weapons’: dandyism, fashion and subcultural style in Angela Carter’s fiction of the 1960s – Catherine Spooner
• 9 Desire, disgust and dead women: Angela Carter’s re-writing women’s fatal scripts from Poe and Lovecraft – Gina Wisker
• 10 The ‘art of faking’: performance and puppet theatre in Angela Carter’s Japan – Helen Snaith
• 11 ‘I resented it, it fascinated me’: Carter’s ambivalent cinematic fiction and the problem of proximity – Caleb Sivyer
• 12 The rough and the holy: Angela Carter’s marionette theatre – Maggie Tonkin
• Index