The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (2 page)

Its demonic Doctor Hoffman was one of the last and best defeated of her recurring megalomaniac male authority figures. By name he alludes to E. T. A. Hoffmann, the highly influential nineteenth-century German Romantic writer whose
Tales of Hoffmann
she parodies here in her own version of the magician-father/beautiful-but-dangerous-daughter matrix. (Perhaps Heinrich Hoffmann, the German psychiatrist and poet who published the grotesque and arresting collection of gothic morality poems for children,
Der Struwwelpeter
(1845), is also somewhere in the mix.) Doctor Hoffman’s daughter, the elusive and allusive Albertina, is a cunning mirroring of Proust’s Albertine, the object of desire in
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
, with a very different Albertine, the eponymous heroine of the Norwegian novel of 1886 by the artist and writer Christian Krohg, the subject of which was prostitution and the realism of which saw it impounded by the police.

But enough about allusion. ‘From
The Magic Toyshop
onwards,’ as Carter told an interviewer in the mid-1980s, ‘I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface to the novels, so that you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to.’ This rolling narrative hooks its readers, in the best tradition of storytelling, by means of a meld of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Each of its chapters functions as its own seductive and terrifying peep-show ‘desire machine’. Ever opening to something new while simultaneously (and this is one of its technical feats) repeating itself – in other words, treading new ground over an age-old, echo-filled literary landscape – the novel is very much about the business of entertainment, about what it means to be both liberated and held, fixed in place, by it. It dissects the cheapness and richness of fantasy, from high art to low. Whether we’re in the city, or the land of myth, or an American upper-class country house, or a wet and empty backstreet British seaside resort, we’re just one step away, if we look, from the surreal and the grotesque, and from the same old stalwarts of story: attraction and terror and relief, sex and death and survival.

A thesis on power, it returns repeatedly to images of eyes and notions of vision while teasing apart the connections between the nature of desire and the repeating deceptions, expectations and satisfactions, over time, of what might be called cultural media. It examines continuum and survival alongside the incendiary creative/destructive powers of passion. It is curious about all of these things, but particularly about the connections between passion and power, since this, as it demonstrates, is one of the fundamental ways by which narrative propels itself, in an alternation of boredom and attraction, promise and postponement. What is pure in such a narrative ‘machine’, and what is debauched? Carter always treats both purity and debauchery wryly. One of the great achievements of
Hoffman
is its liberating revelation of pornography as just another genre. She would shortly publish her devastatingly witty study of de Sade,
The Sadeian Woman
(1979). Here, in
Hoffman
, (as, to some extent, in all her work), she is taking issue with ‘ideational femaleness’, the ways in which she perceives women to be the particular victims of social or gender or power fantasies, reduced to ‘benign automata’, ‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’, wearing masks of ‘hideous’ resignation – none of which resemble in any way the brilliant, flashing unpindownability of Albertina herself.

But even for Albertina the land of myth means rape. In
The Sadeian Woman
Carter would spell out exactly what she thought of myth: ‘… all the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway.’ Here, although she gifts her male protagonist throughout with his own crucial mutability (in a twinning with his beloved), she also demythologizes the spangly mirror-show of desire, putting him through some of the painful objectification with which this novel is centrally concerned. The violent gang rape he suffers at the hands of the Acrobats of Desire begins with the power of the eyes ‘to bind me in invisible bonds’.

Desiderio’s outsider status, the fact that he is part-Indian (descended from a people so lowly in status that they ‘performed tasks for which you do not need a face’), is one of the keys to his survival, his ability to stay fluid and mutable when it comes to identity. But in the end he has become a historic fixture, a statue-man, a bloodless old politician. Carter, a committed socialist, believed the novel had a moral function and that art was always political; this book ends on a note of class war and in a kind of dual triumph and defeat. But the real triumph of
Hoffman
is that it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful’). Its narrative and sexual postponement is Scheherazade-like. It makes practical use of ‘the picaresque, where people have adventures in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions… it’s a very eighteenth-century pursuit to make imaginary societies which teach one about our own society,’ as Carter put it later. It leaves its readers questioning and asks them to be wise – both to the structures which work to categorize or limit who and what we are, and to the ways and potentials of the imagination.

It is a book full of curiosity about what’s real, what’s artifice, how we live, and what art can do. It is swooningly romantic, indifferently and knowingly beautiful, rigorously philosophical and cunning beyond belief. Its double act of fidelity to and anatomizing of ‘the death-defying double somersault of love’ makes it timeless. Right now, in the emergence of the virtual age, the age she foresaw nearly forty years ago in her ‘kingdom of the instantaneous’,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
never looked more relevant.

Ali Smith 2010

For the family, wherever they are, reluctantly including
Ivan who thought he was Alyosha.

Les lois de nos désirs sont les dés sans loisir.

Robert Desnos

(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of the content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one: the definition is a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations

Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork. Alfred Jarry,
Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician

I remember everything.

Yes.

I remember everything perfectly.

During the war, the city was full of mirages and I was young. But, nowadays, everything is quite peaceful. Shadows fall only as and when they are expected. Because I am so old and famous, they have told me that I must write down all my memories of the Great War, since, after all, I remember everything. So I must gather together all that confusion of experience and arrange it in order, just as it happened, beginning at the beginning. I must unravel my life as if it were so much knitting and pick out from that tangle the single, original thread of my self, the self who was a young man who happened to become a hero and then grew old. First, let me introduce myself.

My name is Desiderio.

I lived in the city when our adversary, the diabolical Dr Hoffman, filled it with mirages in order to drive us all mad. Nothing in the city was what it seemed – nothing at all! Because Dr Hoffman, you see, was waging a massive campaign against human reason itself. Nothing less than that. Oh, the stakes of the war were very high – higher than ever I realized, for I was young and sardonic and did not much like the notion of humanity, anyway, though they told me later, when I became a hero, how I had saved mankind.

But, when I was a young man, I did not want to be a hero. And, when I lived in that bewildering city, in the early days of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so. And so much complexity – a complexity so rich it can hardly be expressed in language – all that complexity… it bored me.

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.

I became a hero only because I survived. I survived because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too sardonic. I was too disaffected.

When I was young, I very much admired the Ancient Egyptians, because they searched for, arrived at and perfected an aesthetically entirely satisfactory pose. When every single one of them had perfected the stance which had been universally approved, profiles one way, torsos another, feet marching away from the observer, navel squarely staring him in the eye, they stayed in it for two thousand years. I was the confidential secretary to the Minister of Determination, who wanted to freeze the entire freak show the city had become back into attitudes of perfect propriety; and I had this in common with him – an admiration for statis. But, unlike the Minister, I did not believe statis was attainable. I believed perfection was, per se, impossible and so the most seductive phantoms could not allure me because I knew they were not true. Although, of course, nothing I saw was identical with itself any more. I saw only reflections in broken mirrors. Which was only natural, because all the mirrors had been broken.

The Minister sent the Determination Police round to break all the mirrors because of the lawless images they were disseminating. Since mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors had all turned into fissures or crannies in the hitherto hard-edged world of here and now and through these fissures came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks. And these spooks were Dr Hoffman’s guerrillas, his soldiers in disguise who, though absolutely unreal, nevertheless, were.

We did our best to keep what was outside, out, and what was inside, in; we built a vast wall of barbed wire round the city, to quarantine the unreality, but soon the wall was stuck all over with the decomposing corpses of those who, when they were refused exit permits by the over-scrupulous Determination Police, proved how real they were by dying on the spikes. But, if the city was in a state of siege, the enemy was inside the barricades, and lived in the minds of each of us.

But I survived it because I knew that some things were necessarily impossible. I did not believe it when I saw the ghost of my dead mother clutching her rosary and whimpering into the folds of the winding sheet issued her by the convent where she died attempting to atone for her sins. I did not believe it when Dr Hoffman’s agents playfully substituted other names than Desiderio on the nameplate outside my door – names such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Andrew Marvell, for they always chose the names of my heroes, who were all men of pristine and exquisite genius. And I knew that they must be joking for anyone could see that I myself was a man like an unmade bed. But, as for my Minister, he was Milton or Lenin, Beethoven or Michelangelo – not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious. I admired him. He reminded me of a string quartet. And he, too, was quite immune to the tinselled fall-out from the Hoffman effect, though for quite other reasons than I.

And I, why was I immune? Because, out of my discontent, I made my own definitions and these definitions happened to correspond to those that happened to be true. And so I made a journey through space and time, up a river, across a mountain, over the sea, through a forest. Until I came to a certain castle. And…

But I must not run ahead of myself. I shall describe the war exactly as it happened. I will begin at the beginning and go on until the end. I must write down all my memories, in spite of the almost insupportable pain I suffer when I think of her, the heroine of my story, the daughter of the magician, the inexpressible woman to whose memory I dedicate these pages… the miraculous Albertina.

If I believed there were anything of the transcendental in this scabbed husk which might survive the death I know will come to me in a few months, I should be happy, then, for I could delude myself I would rejoin my lover. And if Albertina has become for me, now, such a woman as only memory and imagination could devise, well, such is always at least partially the case with the beloved. I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire. Oh, she was her father’s daughter, no doubt about that! So I must consecrate this account of the war against her father to the memory of the daughter.

She closed those eyes that were to me the inexhaustible well-springs of passion fifty years ago this very day and so I take up my pen on the golden anniversary of her death, as I always intended to do. After all these years, the clothes of my spirit are in tatters and half of them have been blown away by the winds of fortune that made a politician of me. And, sometimes, when I think of my journey, not only does everything seem to have happened all at once, in a kind of fugue of experience, just as her father would have devised it, but everything in my life seems to have been of equal value, so that the rose which shook off its petals as if shuddering in ecstasy to hear her voice throws as long a shadow of significance as the extraordinary words she uttered.