Angela Carter - The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

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 works 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

With an introduction by ALI SMITH

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PENGUIN CLASICS

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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 publishers 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

THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN

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 novels end and the bloodstained handkerchief that blooms from its hero Desiderios 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 Doctors 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 Hoffmans 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 Carters 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-sicle 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, Mallarm, Freud, the Bible, cinema, de Sade, Shakespeare, Surrealism, Pope, Proust and thats just a surface skim) and its as if its author has swallowed literary and visual culture whole, from Chaucer to Calvino, de Mille to Fassbinder, Defoe to Foucault.