Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > American Ghosts & Old World Wonders

My Before and After

Over a period of almost 20 years leading up to her death, Angela Carter wrote or published four volumes of short stories (this collection, the last, was published posthumously in 1993, a year after her death).

All four volumes plus various previously uncollected stories were published in “Burning Your Boats”.

I read and reviewed each separate collection chronologically, which was a great opportunity to observe the progression in her writing over this period.

Initially, Carter revived the structure of the traditional fairy tale by injecting into its form a narrative that reflected contemporary feminist concerns. In the process, she made explicit what was previously only implicit in the traditional fairy tale – the patriarchal foundation of the original tale.

In the middle of this period, she created her own tales and fashioned them in structures analogous to fairy tales.

Impressions on Various Narrative Vehicles

In this, the fourth volume, she advanced even further, by inventing narratives and placing them in more recent or newly appropriated literary structures:

“Lizzie’s Tiger” (a prequel to “The Fall River Axe Murders”);

“John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’" (a Jacobean tragedy reconceived as a western film);

“Gun for the Devil” (a western genre novel/story set in Vienna and a Mexican border town);

“The Merchant of Shadows” (a film student’s research into a film director and his lead actress widow that reads like (and could almost have become) a film noir murder mystery);

“The Ghost Ships” (a Christmas story that is more pagan than Christian);

“In Pantoland” (a fictionalised thesis on the sexual innuendo and explicitness of pantomime that reflects anthropological, carnivalesque and feminist interests);

“Ashputtle (or The Mother’s Ghost)" (three investigations into the mutilation of children);

“Alice in Prague” (a Freudian casebook inspired by an animated film made in "an age in love with wonders": "there's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: 'Where was I before I was born?'");

“Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene” (impressions on the portrayal of Mary Magdalene over time, including Georges De La Tour’s ‘The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame”):



Superficially, “In Pantoland” gives the impression that it's an unfinished sketch containing Carter’s notes to herself about the subject matter and style of her piece. However, she obviously felt it was suitable to offer to The Guarniad for inclusion in the issue published on Christmas Eve, 1991, just months before her death.

A Stranger Among Strangers

In "Lizzie's Tiger", Lizzie is attracted to a visiting circus, when she observes a poster showing the head of a tiger, but she cannot afford the entrance fee. For Lizzie, the circus "signifies a profane church." She identifies with the other children who surround the circus:

"She was a stranger among these strangers, for all here were those the mills had brought to town, the ones with different faces." They had come variously from Lancashire, Canada and Portugal. There is something exotic about the circus: "At sunset, the incomparably grave and massive light of New England acquires a monumental, a Roman sensuality" that derives from the unfamiliar, "a sense of profound strangeness."

It was then that, swept up in the crowd, "the devil got into Lizzie." She was accosted by a drunken man who tries to kiss her in return for a nickel. Soon she is persuaded to buy a ticket to see the tiger, which "walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned...The tiger kept its head down; questing hither and thither though in quest of what might not be told."

Then it fell to its knees, subdued by Lizzie, "as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need not eat meat...It stopped roaring. Instead it started to emit a rattling purr."

'Tis Pity She's Your Sister

Johnny and Annie-Belle are brother and sister, though motherless:

"I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt...For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss! Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? 'Look after your sister.' [his mother had said to him before she died.] But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him."

This is the incest taboo raised and just as quickly shrugged off.

Later on, though, when Annie-Belle discovers she is pregnant, she confesses:

"Oh, Johnny, you knowed we did wrong."

Banned Daemonology

In "Gun for the Devil", Carter contrasts the old and new worlds:

"Out of the sandstorms, hallucinatory figures emerge and merge, figures of demons or gods not necessarily those of Europe. The unknown continent, the new world, issues forth its banned daemonology...The church seems to have disappeared."

Superstition is always just beneath the surface.

Flesh Becomes Her

The HOLLYWOODLAND sign represents the Holy Grail to a young London film student, "a student of Light and Illusion," who describes himself as "the Innocent Abroad" and an "enchanted visitor", come to visit the septuagenarian widow of a famous director, Hank Mann, (formerly Heinrich von Mannheim), "the dark genius of the screen, the director with the occult touch, that neglected giant etc. etc. etc."

"The denizens of these deeps...belong to no mythology but their weird own."

Just in case you're wondering, the Oscar-winning widow, though possessed of "some imperious arrogance...was no Gish, nor Brooks, nor Dietrich, nor Garbo, who all share the same gift, the ability to reveal otherness." Yet again, Carter is interested in the stranger, the exile, the abandoned, the rejected. The director's first wife had also been an actress, the star of Mannheim's "The Fall of the House of Usher", now lost, despite its interest to fans of Edgar Allan Poe.

The narrator, enchanted by the actress and her star quality, "assumed the stance of gigolo", in the manner of a private detective who gets too close to his female client. After three martinis, he acknowledges, "Yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was as old as the hills..." No wonder he mentions "Sunset Boulevard". "I must admit I fell into a great fear. I even thought they might have lured me here to murder me, this siren of the cinema and her weird acolyte."

Safely back in his apartment the next day, he reveals that "[I] grew glum to realise how peripheral I was."

The pupil in his study was no match for the secular gods and goddesses of the screen.

Dream, That Uncensorable State

The next story pits the liberty of the imagination against the constraints of Puritanism, as personalised by Cotton Mather:

"The greatest genius of the Puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival in, say, the custom of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made! And their distaste for the icon of the lovely lady with her bonny babe - Mariolatry, graven images! - is less subtle than their disgust at the very idea of the festive season itself. It was the festivity of it that irked them. Nevertheless, it assuredly is a gross and heathenish practice, to welcome the birth of Our Saviour with feasting, drunkenness, and lewd displays of mumming and masquerading. We want none of that filth in this new place. No, thank you...No; the imagination must obey the rules of actuality. (Some of them, anyway.)"

It's the role of fiction, especially the carnivalesque festival of Angela Carter's pagan stories, to subvert Puritanism. The master of these revels was the Lord of Misrule himself, the clown prince of Old Christmas..."He is mirth, anarchy and terror...During the twelve days of Christmas, nothing is forbidden, everything is forgiven...The Romans called it Saturnalia, when all was topsy-turvy...A merry Christmas is Cotton Mather's worst nightmare."

The Infinite Riches of a Dirty Mind

Angela Carter deconstructs the commercial and cultural aspirations of Disneyland in "In Pantoland".

"In Pantoland, which is the carnival of the unacknowledged and the fiesta of the repressed, everything is excessive and gender is variable...Now they talk in double entendre, which is a language all of its own and is accented, not with the acute or grave, but with the eyebrows. Double entendre. That is, everyday discourse which has been dipped in the infinite riches of a dirty mind...Filthy work, but somebody has to do it...Saturnalia, the topsy-turvy time, 'the Liberties of December', when master swapped places with slave and anything could happen..."

She then investigates the role that women play in Pantoland, "this rude femaleness...flirting, flattering, fluttering...in the most salacious manner...I have come back to earth and I feel randy!"

Then she recognises,

"As Umberto Eco once said, 'An everlasting carnival does not work.' You can't keep it up, you know; nobody ever could. The essence of the carnival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order, a refreshment...after which everything can go on again exactly as if nothing had happened...Things don't change because a girl puts on trousers or a chap slips on a frock, you know. Masters were masters again the day after Saturnalia ended; after the holiday from gender, it was back to the old grind..."

Angela Carter's short stories are truly excessive (they question and transcend social and literary boundaries), even transgressive, without being merely long and verbose. Her work is infinitely superior to the self-conscious pretence of the white male American post-modernists, even if, like Robert Coover, they purported to endorse her.



SOUNDTRACK:
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Cotton Mather - "My Before and After"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRlBO...

P.J. Harvey - "This is Love"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STxXS5l...

Prince - "Dirty Mind"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3GPP...

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