Angela Carter - Heroes and Villains

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Heroes and Villains

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. Heroes and Villains, published in 1969, is her fourth novel.

Both The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman are also published in Penguin Modern Classics

Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches Cave Writing (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme.

ANGELA CARTER

Introduction by ROBERT COOVER

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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1969
First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1969
Published in Penguin Books 1981
Published in Penguin Classics 2011

Copyright Angela Carter, 1969
Introduction copyright Robert Coover, 2011
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: 9780141968377

Like so many fairytale heroes before her, this tales protagonist must leave home and set forth upon a perilous journey of self-discovery. After the axe murder of her beloved Professorial father, Marianne chops off her golden plaits, burns her fathers books, drowns his clock in the swamp, flees her protective white tower and, in the company of her brothers killer, ventures into the dark and mysterious forest beyond the fringes of her known world. She loved nobody in this place but beyond it lay the end of all known things and certain desolation. A fearsome prospect, but she is not afraid. If her savage companion claps his hand over her mouth, she bites it. Her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear. This is a girl who is bored with the impotent intellectual life of the Professors, hates their community festivals and rituals, including marriage, and disdains their self-referential language a severe child who wont play the games of others, upending the little boy who, in his somewhat nasty innocence, only wants to play the hero, leaving him yowling in the dust. The boy calls her a Barbarian and a villain, and she becomes one.

In similar fashion, the author, Angela Carter, is here, in her breakthrough fourth novel published at the end of the turbulent 1960s, launching forth upon her own voyage of discovery, leaving behind the homey formulae of conventional British fiction and plunging into the dark entanglement, out at the edge, of cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious. After being labelled by reviewers a Gothic writer for books she thought of as mostly mainstream naturalism, she decided, as she wrote in 1975, that she would indeed write a Gothic novel, a truly Gothic novel full of dread and glamour and passion. About this time, I began to read the surrealists and felt an increasing sense of justification, and what I wrote was a kind of pastiche Gothic novel called Heroes and Villains (after a current Beach Boys number), in which I used the framework to examine some intellectual problems about politics which were beginning to exercise me. Using an absolutely non-naturalistic formula gave me a wonderful sense of freedom.

Like Marianne locked up in her safe but stifling steel-and-concrete tower, Carter felt penned in by the prevailing literary ideology So many celebrations of the status quo, as she called the novels of her time, mere etiquette manuals opting instead for de Sades definition of art as the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order. Writing, she believed, retained a singular moral function that of provoking unease. Opposing naturalism as a deeply politically repressive propagator of dead forms and deceptive half-truths, she chose the Gothic mode, with its holocausts, its stereotyped characterization, its ghosts, its concentration on inner life, its rhetorical and conventionalized prose style (all qualities present here in Heroes and Villains), because it can scarcely pretend to be an imitation of nature; so it cannot disseminate false knowledge of the world.

In Heroes and Villains, the world has been devastated by a nuclear holocaust and human society has regressed to something resembling medieval Britain. Its isolated fortified villages, with their hereditary castes of Professors, Soldiers and Workers, are surrounded by dense overgrown forests inhabited by wild animals, who escaped from the pre-war zoos, and illiterate gypsy-like Barbarians, who live by pillage and scavenging, with subhuman mutants Out People skulking zombie-like at the edges of the contaminated ruined cities. To save her Barbarian husbands life, Marianne has to kill one of these creatures, but feels neither shame nor horror, only a release from boredom and, with it, a certain sense of well-being. Marianne is a strong-willed and independent young woman, unfazed by rape or savagery, fearing only the loss of her own autonomy, a prototype of other plucky Carter heroines to follow. Even as a child, when told that the Barbarians were cannibals who wrap little girls in clay bake them in the fire and gobble them up with salt, Marianne knows herself to be too tough to be eaten.