Fetch Your Copy The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman Designed By Angela Carter Offered As Publication

trip into a battle between order/reason and chaos/desire
I'm afraid this book is far too difficult for me to do justice with given my meagre powers of analysis.
Suffice to say it is a strange, unforgettable fever dream of disturbing and weird episodes, chockabloc with many highlevel allusions to various literary greats and delves deep into the psychology of signs and symbols, so probably much of it went over my head, but nonetheless I really found it fascinating stuff, and Angela Carter's baroque and colorful writing remains a revelation.
So I think it best I revisit this short but very tense tale again, it's something that you can gain more from a second or third reading,
Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does,

So be prepared to throw your rationality and causality expectations overboard as you embark on this literary journey through a 'dangerous wonderland', following the peregrinations of one young man named Desiderio who tries to put a stop to the reality altering attacks coming from the renegade and possibly mad scientist, Dr.
Hoffman. As an added incentive, Desiderio is also chasing a personal chimaera, the beautiful daughter of Hoffman Albertina, Desiderio is chosen for this mission because he is apparently immune to the disruptive effect of the miracle machines, but in order to reach his destination he, and the reader, must abandon logic and succumb to the lure of the subjective, the absurd, the improbable:

Be Amorous!

Be Mysterious!

Don't Think, Look!

When You Begin To Think, You Lose the Point!

Objectify Your Desires!

I Desire Therefore I Exist!

If Dante's journey begins under the motto of abandoning hope, this masterful novel of Angela Carter is born under the signs of Robert Desnos' surrealism "Les lois de nos desirs sont les des sans loisir.
", the pataphysics of symbolist and anarchist Alfred Jarry "Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork.
" and the modern philosophical relativism of Ludwig Wittgenstein who warns us that all definitions are misleading, All quotations chosen by Carter on the first page of the novel will bear fruit in the later developments, as Desiderio first has the reality of his city destroyed, later succumbs to his yearning for Albertina's love and finally must admit that wisdom and selfknowledge will come only when he sheds his own initial certainty and rigid values.
The outcome of the quest is not a surprise, since Desiderio gives it away in the very first chapter, what is relevant is the internal personal journey as he goes from being an advocate of 'a barren yet harmonious calm' of a city that doesn't believe in magic and supernatural manifestations In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire.
And that was, for everything to stop, to an admission of the subjective, irrational and sensory determined nature a fertile yet cacophonous tempest of our experience of the world I was somehow, all unknowing, the instigator of this horror.
. There are enough literary elements present to make the journey of Desiderio a picaresque adventure: exploration of new lands and cultures, danger and earnest chases by reality police, cannibalistic pirates, extremely flexible acrobats, 'elderly and steatopygous' amazons, lustful centaurs or the Doctor's henchmen, natural disasters or thrilling philosophical debates with a peepshow owner or a decadent Lithuanian Count.
Most important to the author though seems to be the exploration of sexuality and the dynamics of the gender roles, as Desiderio goes through constant changes: unimaginative and puritan conformist to rapist then subject of rape, romantic knight to decadent sensualist, egotist libertine to devoted partner.
The feminine characters may appear in the beginning as victims and passive participants in the quest but, led by Albertina, they slowly get the upper hand and assert both their independence and their sexual liberation, a reaffirmation of the feminist principles that have coloured all the other novels by Carter I have previously read.


For a novel that concentrates on the mysterious, the unexplained and the surreal I feel it would be useless to attempt in my review to be structured and rational.
I prefer to let myself go freestyle and underline some of the sparkles of metaphor and wit, the particularly beautiful turns of phrase that first attracted me to Carter's prose, leaving the plot details and the philosophical implications aside in favor of obscure desires, fanciful associations and grotesque encounters.


The journey starts in an obscure Latin American city that for a first impression and style of presentation reminded me strongly of "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino, another poet who likes to experiment with literary structures:

Consider the nature of a city.
It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deepdown, deadintheground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.


The author sometimes abuses a flowery, intricate phrasing, but in the next paragraph you can stumble on the concise and equally effective alternative sentence, which reminds me for some reason of Gabriel Garcia Marques:

Here they built a house for Jesus, a bank, a prison, a stock exchange, a madhouse, a suburb and a slum.
It was complete. It prospered.

On this urban scene a war is waged between Desiderio's boss, the Minister, and the mad scientist, one of them trying to preserve the status quo, the other to open the doors of perception and let in all the nightmares of the subconscious.
The Minister's work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.


By his own confessions, Hoffman is a prophet of chaos:

I go about the world like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with changes.


or: He dreamed of fissile time of exploding the diatonic scale with its two notes, past and present, into a chromatic fanfare of every conceivable tense and many tenses at present inconceivable because there is no language to describe them.


Desiderio's first reaction, as most of the other citizens of the unnamed city, is one of panic:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown I was afraid.


His way of dealing with the fear is to go out into the unknown and try to destroy it, armed with the certainty of his convictions and with an inflated sense of his own worth.
Every following chapter can thus be considered his Hero's Journey in search of wisdom, gained through succesive violations of his self, both physically and mentally,

I've read a little about other pet projects of Carter, and I plan to read next some of her subversive modernized fairytales, One of the Easter eggs for me in the present novel is one such fable that adapts the classic Sleeping Beauty tale, It can be found in the "House at Midnight" chapter:

In the pure light of the morning, the fallen bricks, the exposed beams, the roses and the trees still seemed to sleep, murmuring and stirring a little as if a vague, unmemorable dream disturbed a slumber as profound as that of their mistress, the beauty in the dreaming wood, who slept too deeply to be wakened by anything as gentle as a kiss.


There may be more easter eggs or literary references like this that I have failed to detect, but I never let my lack of sophistication stop me from enjoying the text for itself.
One of my favorite chapters describes a river journey in the company of a tribe of the original inhabitants of the country, a tribe of Indians with a special language and peculiar traditions that are mirror of their way of life: He did not think in straight lines he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking circles.


Most of the later characters Desiderio meets argue the case of Dr, Hoffman and his efforts to negate the objectivity, the materialism of the world and to submit fully to the world of the senses, First the peep show proprietor and later the Count and Albertina try to convince Desiderio to join their cause:

The journey alone is real, not the landfall.
I have no compass to guide me, I set my course by the fitfulness of fortune and perceive my random signposts only by the inextinguishable flame of my lusts,

Salvation comes to our hero at a tangent, not necessarily through the powers of reason so much as by the refusal of the physical world to be ignored and disconsidered:

Ocean, forest, mountain, weather these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them.
For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.


Desiderio is ultimately saved by accepting the world as it is, accepting the need for change and growth but without throwing away all the hard won rules of social convenience, accepting the presence and power of physical desire but without becoming a slave to the senses, learning to care about other people as much as he cares about himself.
The price he pays is high, leaving him to spend the rest of his long years as the celebrated hero of the war but without the passion and the devotion inspired by Albertina.
My final quote is the attempt Carter makes to reconcile the two worlds, the chaos proposed by Hoffman and the stasis championed by the Minister, the ray of hope that is offered to each of us who try to make sense of the much too real, linear and indifferent future:

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.


conclusion: a difficult, but very rewarding book,
.