‘In the Demythologising Business’: Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972)

Abstract

The theme of this collection is ‘Culture, Society and Belief in Modern Fantasy Literature’, but Angela Carter’s position is evidently one that exists only after such terms have lost validity. According to her she could only be what she is in their absence:

It seems obvious, to an impartial observer, that Western European civilisation as we know it has just about run its course and the emergence of the Women’s Movement, and all that implies, is both symptom and product of the unravelling of the culture based on Judaeo-Christianity, a bit of Greek transcendentalism via the father of lies, Plato, and all the other bits and pieces…

The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place. I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline. (’Notes’ 72–3)

The fantasy she writes is thus of the sort that Rosemary Jackson has termed ‘the literature of subversion’ (Jackson, Fantasy passim): which is not at all to suppose that it is negative or without life. Indeed Angela Carter feels that one can only realise what true culture, society and belief are when they have ceased to be systems imposed either from on high or by the past.