Angela Carter
THE ANGEL(a) IN THE POSTMODERN HOUSE: CARTER'S DISRUPTIVE FICTION
The challenges of feminism, the carnivalesque and magical realism
Angela Carter is still (despite an early death in 1992, at the age of 52) one of the British writers most actively involved in the reconsideration of authorship and of traditional cultural codes and discourses, as one of the most prominent authors of "writerly texts", to use Barthes's phrase. Paradoxically, she is a very strong figure, very much alive, of the age that Barthes blesses with another famous phrase, "of the death of the author". She is also the most prominent female author in Britain not to have received, or not having been short-listed for, the prestigious Booker Prize, probably as a result of a certain prevailing masculinist bias in the critical circles of the age.
In his 1968 essay, Barthes invites readers to engage with writerly texts and be instrumental in the production of a plurality of meanings; the undecidability of writing is a fundamental dimension of narration, not a weakness: "several codes and several voices are there, without priority. Writing is precisely this loss of origin, this loss of 'motives' to the profit of a volume of indeterminations or over-determinations". Writing may be seen as a loss of origin for Angela Carter, but her work may equally be considered a challenge, and her readers, women and men, are invited to see what they are tempted to take for granted, even their gender, as artificial, social constructions, sometimes seen as ideological structures assuming the shape of cultural myths that need demythologising. Barthes's idea of several voices and codes working in texts applies to the challenging intertextual dimension of Carter's fiction, also acknowledged by Jago Morrison, who thinks that her texts are "constantly engaged in the quotation, appropriation and subversion of other texts. As well as folk and fairytale sources, her work engages with a wide range of other texts and references".
In addition to being a very critical reader of cultural myths, a heterosexual feminist and a confirmed socialist, Angela Carter was a dealer (she would have preferred the term to "high sorceress" or "benevolent witch queen") in sophisticated literary entertainment. She basically read and wrote to derive and impart pleasure, as she claimed (a special kind of literary hedonism that she also shared with Roland Barthes): "... I like to write about writers who give me pleasure. Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I'm all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around".3 However, no sooner has she made this statement than she goes on to stress the seriousness of her work: "All art is political and so is mine. I want readers to understand what it is that I mean by my stories". Her texts reinterpret all-too-neatly packaged historical constructions involving ideologically controlled class and gender, undermining them from a postmodernist perspective, as Christine Berni puts it:
QUOTE: She lampoons the need for single, uncomplicated historical causality as she demonstrates the ways that class and gender influence historical production. In short, through a host of narrative strategies often labeled "postmodern," Carter challenges history and fiction writing that disguises ideology through representational fidelity to the real.' END QUOTE
Her fiction has also been associated with magical realism, an association that was first prompted by her third published volume, the novel The Magic Toyshop (1967). The title invites the reader to answer the question: which of the two is the more magical place, the idyllic childhood home in the countryside of the female protagonist or the ominous Gothic house in London where her malevolent master puppeteer of an uncle stages patriarchal dramatic performances?
Magical realism is now commonly seen as a manifestation of postmodernist writing, and the postmodern condition is linked to "the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies".6 However, the genre's illustrious promoters did not come from postmodern, highly developed societies, but from South America: writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magic realism was initially a way of dealing with the nature of reality in that part of the world:
