Angela Carter and Surrealism by Watz Anna;

Author:Watz, Anna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Notes

1As Gamble argues elsewhere, ‘[t]‌o a certain extent, Carter’s fascination with pornography can be traced to her experiences in Japan, a country in which, as she portrayed it, the sadomasochistic fethishisation of the female body is commonplace’ (1997, 98).

2Suleiman reaches this conclusion without much actual reference to surrealism. Instead, her reading concentrates primarily on Carter’s postmodernist narrative strategies and her allegiance with the cultural pessimism of Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord, in whose writings ‘the technological appropriation’ of surrealism and liberation philosophy is shown to have been exploited for capitalist aims. David Punter (1985) and Gamble (2006a) also explore the links between Doctor Hoffman and the thought of Marcuse.

3E.g. ‘I DESIRE THEREFORE I EXIST’; (DH, 211); ‘BE AMOROUS! … BE MYSTERIOUS! … DON’T THINK, LOOK’ (26; capitals in the original); ‘Go in fear of abstractions!’ (35); ‘My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass; they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way’ (97); ‘I have become discontinuous’ (147).

4Parodic allusion was indeed a frequent surrealist practice, which Carter employs to her own critical ends, in a process in which the surrealists themselves end up as one of the targets of her parody. Carter is thus indebted to surrealism in her parodic analysis of archetypal representations of gender and desire, even as she critiques surrealism for its complicity in perpetuating them.

5Of course, the echo of the German Gothic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann in the Doctor’s name is not accidental. In ‘The Hoffmann Connection: Demystification in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman’, Peter Christensen elucidates the links between Carter’s novel and Hoffmann’s story ‘Nutcracker and Mouse-King’ (1994). For further discussion of the link between Doctor Hoffman and E.T.A. Hoffmann, see Suleiman ([1994] 2001, 104).

6The name Desiderio – ‘the desired one’ – might refer to the pseudonym Monsu Desiderio, used by three different artists during the Baroque period: François de Nomé and Didier Barra, both born around 1593, and a third artist sometimes identified as Francesco Desideri (Caws 1997, 169). The most famous of these – Nomé – was considered by the surrealists as one of their artistic forerunners (Vaneigem [1977] 1999, 56).

7Benjamin Péret was one of the poets in the circle around Breton.

8In an interesting analysis, Maggie Tonkin investigates the connection between Albertina and the muse-like Albertine in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) (2002). For an additional analysis of the Proustian elements in Doctor Hoffman, see Natsumi Ikoma (2008).

9According to critics such as Gauthier and Hal Foster, this idealised love is essentially regressive, strongly resembling a desire for the return to a pre-Oedipal symbiosis with the mother. Gauthier writes: ‘[t]‌his connection with the other – a connection of fusion and effusion – is a regressive relationship, the type of connection that exists between a child and its mother. This is a key point to the understanding of surrealism’ (1971, 77; n.d., 30). Some of the imagery that Desiderio – who has never known his own mother – encounters in the peep-show is evocative of such maternal plenitude.

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